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[We received this by email with a note, "apparently
written by a Jewish university student." Not correct. Can you identify
who wrote this and when?]
Dear World,
It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that
you are upset over us, here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are
quite upset, even angry and outraged? 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 archenemy 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,
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 upset that we repress the 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 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.
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