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Let My People Go |
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Right now the odds look grim,
so maybe a new homeland?
of TheColumnists.com
You know what I'd do if I were an Israeli? I'll tell you. I'd get the heck out of the place.
Is that controversial? Cowardly? The wrong attitude?
It's beginning to look like Holocaust II over there and the bad news may just be coming. Oh, for a while some years back, during a period of time when I happened to visit, Israel seemed like a success story. They had made the desert flower. Even Arabs from the West Bank who were day workers in Israel were remarkably affluent for that part of the world. The Israelis had a wine industry, a tech industry, green farms and sprouting housing developments. And, oh, the travel industry. The West had come to the Middle East and shown everyone how.
Yeah, sure. Today, it is a place where you don't dare go to restaurants, ride a bus or even go to the beach. You gather your family and keep them indoors, under the bed perhaps. All the one-time fun places are now potential death places. You can't go there.
Maybe it will stop one day. I suppose everyone will weary of the horror and calm down for a while. But the long-term prospects are dim. Israel is a land of more than 5 million people, about 20 per cent of whom are Arab and a similar number, Jewish Orthodox. That means that only about 60 per cent of the population stands ready to fight for Israel's survival. And in that half are all sorts of non-supportive elements, discordant political positions, plus a rising tide of soldiers who concientiously don't want to fight in the West Bank.
Israel seems to have only one ally in the world, the U.S., and right now we have other paramount concerns. If we are going to get some of these Arab states to support a war against Iraq, we will have to cool our ardor for the Israelis. That may come as a surprise to Israel which thought that it, like the U.S., was fighting terrorists and would therefore become an even closer ally of the Americans. Not so. The terrorists that we are worried about are the Al Quaida type that want to blow up America. Palestinians only want to blow up Israel.
So while there are almost daily suicide bombs in Israel, killing a dozen Israelis or so at a time, it doesn't cause much distress on this side of the Atlantic. Nor do we want the Israelis screwing up things by fighting back too arduously. Knock down a few buildings if you must, but don't go sending your army and air force into action. That's an American retort for Americans.
So what's Israel to do? Beats me. Oh, yes, how about talking peace with Arafat? Or how about buying the Brooklyn Bridge?
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Let's pack up all our guns and ammo and move to California." |
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It is unlikely that Arafat can or will stop all the terror groups huddled around the campfires in Gaza and the West Bank. And if Israel goes along with everyone's plan to return the West Bank, half of Jerusalem and all of Gaza to the Palestinians, well, you're back at the starting line of 1948, when the Arabs first made war from those boundaries. At that time, and in subsequent wars after, the territory the Arabs were fighting for was Israel itself. There seems little question that Israel will have to defend itself from whichever boundary a peace agreement determines.
Well, this is getting to be just plain unworkable. The Zionists may have thought a Jewish homeland was vital back in the days of Russian pogroms or, later, the Nazis. And maybe a Jewish homeland might have made it in some other part of the world, but then, the Jews had no talking points for another homeland, not even a hunk of Poland where they once owned a lot of real estate.
Right now, the Israelis are in a no-man's land of their own making, surrounding by tens of millions of Arabs who hate them with a passion, disliked in the UN, dependent on American aid, but aid that is forthcoming if the Israelis don't mess up American foreign policy.
Look, what's so great about a homeland? The Irish have one and they have been killing each other in the northern quarter for decades. The Irish get along fine with each other everywhere else. The Germans and the Poles have homelands, but then they had to kill all the Jews therein for some reason that is still not quite certain.
Few African Americans want to go be African Africans. Things look a lot better here.
The Israelis, even if they ever get the Arabs to accept them for a while, have an Orthodox minority that will one day become a majority and then heaven help the secularists. And can you have a nation where so large a proportion of the population is on welfare because God's work--studying the Torah-- replaces other work?
And if Israel is supposed to be a democracy, what happens when the fast-growing Israeli-Arab population outnumbers the Jews? Whose homeland will it be then?
Jimmy Carter once had the bright idea of bringing millions of Cubans to Florida so that now South Florida is North Cuba. Perhaps we could bring a few million Israelis to some available corner of America, or split them up and let a million or so go to Australia. Maybe create a state in Poland, though undoubtedly few Jews will want to settle there.
What I am saying is that this Middle East muddle is not going to end with a "Can't We all Get Along?" theme. Certainly not after the current bloodshed.
I don't think it is shameful to just admit that the idea didn't work. It would be a shame to see Israel's cities and farms return to their earlier impoverished Palestinian state, but well, you can't mix Western thought with Middle Eastern religion. It was never tried until now and look what happened.
It's kind of sad that the idealism of Israel's founders failed to survive the realities of the Middle East. But there it is.
Am I a gutless, defeatist, hopeless loser? Maybe. But who wants to put their kids on an Israeli bus?
The Arabs won this argument. And frankly their homelands don't look too attractive, either.
©
2002 by Murry Frymer. The
Frymer caricature is © 2000 by Jim Hummel. It has been placed
in a drawing of Moses from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The other
cartoon is also from the IMSI collection.
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