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Indeed, every few years
you seem to become upset over us. Today,
it is the brutal repression of the
Palestinians; yesterday, it was Lebanon;
before that it was the bombing of the
nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom
Kippur War campaign. It appears that
Jews who triumph and who, therefore,
live, upset you most extraordinarily. Of
course, dear world, long before there
was an Israel, we, the Jewish people -
upset you. We upset a German people who
elected a Hitler 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, Romanians.
And we go back a
long, long way in the history of world
upset. We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of
thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the
Crusaders who, on their way to liberate
the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews
that they slaughtered untold numbers of
us. We upset, for centuries, a Roman
Catholic Church that did its best to
define our relationship through
Inquisitions. And we upset the
arch-enemy of the Church, Martin Luther,
who, in his call to burn the synagogues
and the Jews within them, showed an
admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
It is because we became so upset over
upsetting you, dear world, that we
decided to leave you - in a manner of
speaking - and establish a Jewish State.
The reasoning was that living in close
contact with you, as resident-strangers
in the various countries that comprise
you, we upset you, irritate you, disturb
you. What better notion, then, than to
leave you and thus love you - and have
you love us? And so we decided to come
home - to the same homeland from which
we were driven out 1,900 years earlier
by a Roman world that, apparently, we
also upset. 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 general world to
live alone in our own little state - we
continue to upset you.
You are upset that we repress the poor
Palestinians. You are deeply angered
over the fact that we do not give up the
lands of 1967, which are clearly the
obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
Moscow is upset and Washington is upset.
The Arabs are upset and the gentle
Egyptian moderates are upset. Well, dear
world, consider the reaction of a normal
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.
Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day
in Hebron - in 1929. Dear world, why did
the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre
67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it
have been their anger over Israeli
aggression in 1967?
And why were 510 Jewish men, women and
children slaughtered in Arab riots in
1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset
over 1967? And when you, World, proposed
a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would
have created a Palestinian State
alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs
cried and went to war and killed 6,000
Jews - was that upset stomach caused by
the aggression of 1967? And, by the way,
dear world, why did we not hear your cry
of upset, then?
The poor 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
- attempted to drive the Jewish State
into the sea. The same twisted faces,
the same hate, the same cry of "idbah-al-yahud"
- "Slaughter the Jews!" that we hear and
see today, were seen and heard then. The
same people, the same dream - destroy
Israel. What they failed to do
yesterday, they dream of today - but we
should not "repress" them..............
Dear world, you stood by the Holocaust
and you stood by in 1948 as seven states
launched a war that the Arab League
proudly compared to the Mongol
massacres. You stood by in 1967 as
Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in
every Arab capital in the world, vowed
to drive the Jews into the sea. And you
would stand by tomorrow if Israel were
facing extinction. And since we know
that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream
of that extinction, we will do
everything possible to remain alive in
our own land. If that bothers you, dear
world, well - think of how many times in
the past you bothered us. In any event,
dear world, if you are bothered by us,
here is one Jew in Israel who could not
care less. |
