Proudly, from my dear daughter Leah,
with love,
Michel
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An open letter from an Israeli to his neighbors, near and far.
Dear World:
It appears that you are just too hard to please. I
understand that you are upset with us here in Israel. Indeed, it appears
that you are quite upset, maybe even angry and outraged. As a matter of
fact, every few months or years, recently, you seem to become upset with us
all over again. Today, you are upset because we won't sit down at the table
and negotiate (what? Our own demise?) with our neighbors, our intractable,
uncompromising enemies, even while they continue to attack innocent
civilians--our children, women, and the elderly. Yesterday it was the brutal
'repression' and 'occupation' of the Palestinians (to whom we gave back
control over 96 percent of the Arab population); last week, it was our
security needs in Lebanon; before that, it was the bombing of the nuclear
reactor in Iraq and the conclusion of the Yom Kippur War in which we
successfully defended ourselves against the onslaught of massive enemy
armies on two fronts on the holiest day of the year. In the first few days
of that sneak attack, when the Egyptians and Syrians were killing three
thousand Israeli youths, you were silent. It was only when we were at the
gates of Damascus and the road to Cairo that you got upset again. It appears
that, when Jews triumph and, therefore, live, we upset you extraordinarily.
Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we,
the Jewish people, upset you. We upset the German people, so that they
elected Adolph Hitler, mastermind of the "Final Solution of the Jewish
Problem" and we upset an Austrian people, who cheered his entry into Vienna,
and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations--Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians,
Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, and Romanians, who willingly participated
in his macabre, hideous orgy of brutal genocide.
And we go back a long, long way in the history of world
upset. We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki, so that they just had to
massacre tens of thousands of us in 1648 and 1649; we upset the Crusaders
who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so distressed at the Jews
that they felt compelled to slaughter untold thousands of us in communities
all over Europe. We upset, for centuries, the Roman Catholic Church, to
whom we gave our Scriptures, so that it just had to define our relationship
through persecution, exile, and inquisition. And we upset the archenemy of
the Roman Church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and
the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian loving spirit and
'turning the other cheek.'
We upset every nation in Western Europe to the point that
they expelled us, and when they let us back in, because they needed our
talents, they forced us to live in ghettos, in sub-human conditions and
readily available for repeated riots and blood letting. It is because we
became so distressed and grieved over upsetting you, dear world, that we
decided to leave you, in a manner of speaking, to separate ourselves from
you and establish a Jewish State. The rationale and justification for our
new enterprise of building a nation was that by living in close contact with
you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that all of you inhabit,
we upset you, irritated you, and disturbed you. What better notion, then, we
proposed, than to leave you and thus show you that we really love you,
and--we hoped--have you love us in return.
This is how we reached our decision to come home--to the
same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman
world that we also upset. We knew that our ancient land was made a
wilderness, sparsely inhabited by nomads and poor tenant farmers and made
home to jackals, wild goats and scorpions. The once fertile valley became a
swamp infested by malaria-carrying mosquitoes, the terraced hills were
neglected and swept barren by wind and rain, and the seacoast was devastated
and overtaken by yellow Nile silt-sand. However, we saw the land through the
prism of our Book of Books, and resolved to make it once more a "land of
milk and honey."
Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.
Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and
Holocausts, having taken our leave of the world at large, to PURCHASE our
land acre by acre (at much inflated rates) from those who held title to it,
drain the swamps and defeat the scourge of malaria, drive back the rolling
sands that the sea brought from the Nile to make the Sharon coastal valley
fertile once again, we attempted to live alone in our own little land.
Still, we continue to upset you. You are upset that the 5.5 million of us
expect, and insist that we have a right, to live here unmolested on our tiny
speck of land that was mostly despised desert before we arrived here, when
your planet has room for over 6 billion people.
You claim that we oppress the Palestinians, impede their natural wish to be
a nation among the nations, and that really upsets you. You are deeply
angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands we took in the war of
1967, which, to you, are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
Washington is upset and Moscow is upset. London is upset as is Paris, Rome,
Oslo and even Brussels. Naturally, the Arabs are upset--the despotic rulers
of Syria and Iraq, the more civilized autocrats of Jordan and the Gulf
Emirates and the Egyptian moderates are upset, too, it seems, and counsel
war.
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a Jew from
Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede
peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset
anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians
slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Dear
world, why did these Arabs--the Palestinians--massacre hundreds of Jews in
those years? Could it have been because of their anger over Israeli
occupation of their land? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children
slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936 and 1939? Would you suggest that it
was because of Arab sensitivity to roadblocks at border crossings? And when
you, world, proposed a United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 that would have
created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel, and the Arabs promised
a blood bath and went to war, and killed 6,000 Jews, out of a population of
600,000; was that infraction of international law caused by their extreme
reaction to Jewish expansionism? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not
hear your cry of protest over Jewish victims in all those events?
The Palestinians, who today kill Jews with explosives and
firebombs and stones are part of the same people who, when they had all the
territories they now demand be given them for their state, refused to make
peace and attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted
faces, the same hate, the same cry of "itbakhun-al-yahud" "Slaughter the
Jews!" that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same blood
thirsty mob who lynched two innocent young reservists in Ramallah last year,
proudly waving the blood-soaked hands and arms that committed the atrocity
to the frenzied crowd--and mutilated the bodies of dead martyrs in the Hills
of Hebron in 1948. They are the same people who refused Israel the right to
be born in 1948, and today dream of, and scheme, and design, and connive,
and plan for Israel's destruction. What they failed to do yesterday, they
fantasize of doing today and envision doing tomorrow--but we are told that
we must not "repress" them. They must be given a chance to manifest their
destiny.
Dear world, you stood by and did nothing when millions of
our people died in the Holocaust and you stood by and did nothing in 1948
when seven Arab states launched a war that the Arab League proudly
proclaimed would rival the Mongol invasion and massacres. You stood by and
did nothing in 1967 (in spite of ironclad guarantees given to Israel by
Great Britain, the Europeans, and the U.S. in 1956-57), as Gamal Abdul
Nasser, president of Egypt and leader of the Arab world, wildly cheered by
wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into
the sea.
A few weeks ago my neighbor's two daughters, aged fifteen
and sixteen, were blown to pieces by a misguided, brainwashed young man who
was promised an eternity in an X-rated paradise by wicked religious
teachers, and my American cousin was killed a few days later by another
misguided youth who disrupted lunchtime business at Sbarro Pizzeria in
Jerusalem's down town. Where was world outrage then? Where was the UN with
its resolutions to condemn the perpetrators of violence? Who stood up and
pointed a finger and shouted 'racists' at these perpetrators and those who
trained and guided them? There was no sound, no fury, not even a whimper.
Your repeated silence spoke volumes, to be sure.
And you would stand by and do nothing, again, tomorrow--if
Israel were facing extinction--as it is, each and every day. Only we will
not allow it. Since we know that the Palestinians daily dream of our demise,
we will do everything in our power to remain alive in our own land. If that
aggravates and annoys you, dear world, I sincerely regret it. I am sure that
you think you would be much better off if we could just disappear, evaporate
like a puff of smoke. Just try to see it from our viewpoint: think how many
times in the past you have disappointed us. We have given you so much love,
so much progress, so much wisdom, so much blessing. We gave you our ideals
and our faith, our God and our teaching of mercy and salvation.
Above all, we have taught you the meaning of hope and of
human dignity. We don't know why you are so short sighted that you don't
know from where your blessings come. We suggest that you go back to the
sources. Read the Book. Your Book, which was our Book first. Love God--and
love your neighbors as yourself.
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