Dear World,
I understand that you are upset by us, here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?) Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by 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 (1981) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the Six Days War (1967) and the Sinai Campaign (1956), and our independence (1948). It appears that Jews who take care of themselves and who, therefore, remain alive, upset you most extraordinarily.
Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we the Jewish people upset you.
We upset the German people who elected Hitler and we upset the 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.
And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.
We upset the Cossacks of Chamielnitzki 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.
For centuries, we upset 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.
And 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 and 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 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 Paris is upset. London too is sometimes upset. The radical Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel: In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. In fact, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Sixty seven Jews were slaughtered in one day in Hebron in 1929.
Dear world, why did the Arabs the Palestinians massacre sixty seven Jews in one day in 1929?
Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967?
And why were five hundred and ten Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?
And when you, world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny little Jewish homeland (smaller then Israel BEFORE 1967) the Arabs cried NO and initiated a war in which six thousand Jews were killed (ten percent of the Jewish population at that time). Was that upset caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of being upset then?
The Palestinians today (who kill Jews with explosives and firebombs) are part of the same people who when they HAD all those territories attempted to drive the Jews into the sea.
The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of itbach-al-yahud (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then.
The same people, the same dream to destroy Israel and massacre all the Jews. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today.
Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust when six million Jews men, women and children where slaughtered.
You stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres. One hundred million Arabs against a Jewish population of six hundred thousand people (at that time) and we survived. Not only that, we even won the war.
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 we won again.
You stood by in 1973 when both Egypt and Suriyah enforced by Iraq launched a war in order to destroy Israel. Israel was under an existential threat. And we survived and won once again.
And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction (did anybody ever bothered to ask their spokesmen, what really do they mean by the term occupied territories) we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. Because we have no other safe place on this planet.
If that bothers you, dear world, well, think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
