I don’t always agree with Richard Cohen, but when he’s on, he can be excellent. Today, with What Helen Thomas Missed he was excellent. (or at RCP.)
Cohen points out that Jews, in the past, have wanted to go back to the lands where they came from, but they weren’t always welcome.
In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 — more than a year after the end of the war — rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not “go home.” When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.
The best paragraph, though, is a quote from a European Jewish refugee:
“I want to go to Palestine,” Kalk told members of a U.N. investigating committee. “I know the conditions there. But where in the world is it good for the Jew? Sooner or later he is made to suffer. In Palestine, at least, the Jews fight together for their life and their country.”
If history has shown anything, it’s that the Jews can’t trust many of their hosts. It wasn’t just the Holocaust. Before that there were pogroms. And the Jews in Arab lands found themselves ethnically cleansed when the state of Israel was founded.
If Jews are to survive, they need their own country. When people say “we don’t want Jews in the Middle East,” they really are saying, “we don’t Jews.”
The last refuge of the Jews, is Israel.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Though I left the faith-born Jewish, then Protestant, now Catholic-what’s going on now reminds me what I will always be.
My patron saint-Edith Stein-was a Carmelite nun-but that’s not whom the Nazi’s saw-THEY saw a Jew and she was martyred at Auschwitz in 1942. Methinks that the Nazi’s wannabe successors in the muslim world would take the same attitude toward me and those like me. They would also murder my half-Jewish son, and my Christian husband and ex-husband…because they associate with me.
THAT’S why I support Israel. Well that and the fact that it’s the only democracy in the middle east.
Do you remember the slogan of ‘Operation Exodus’?
Never Again is NOW!
My mother was born in what was then the Russian Empire, now Poland, and left when she was seven. I asked her once if she had any good memories of the old country. She thought for quite a while and then said when she was about four a gentile woman in the market place patted her head and said she was a nice child. “Any others?” I asked. Again she thought for a while and then shook her head. The town where she was born had a few thousand Jews when she lived there and by 1945 had none.
Thanks, Ms. Thomas, but I don’t want to go back and they wouldn’t be all that eager to have me.
Besides, as it needs to be said more often, Israel took in not only Europe’s victims but those of the Arab world. Oh, yes, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony until those Zionist agitators came around. I guess it depends on what you mean by “harmony.”
Israelis are Israeli. That is where they belong. None of my Grandparents were born in the US. Am I to move back to Bialystock or Belarus, Turin or Ireland?
Israelis are from Israel. None of my grandparents were born in the US. Should I be compelled to move back to Bialystock, Belarus, Turin or Ireland?
A very interesting comment from the Dutch politician Geert Wilders in the Jerusalem Post.
He [Wilders] added: “I always say that parents everywhere in the West sleep well at night because parents in Israel lie awake at night – because their children are fighting the jihad. You’re fighting our fight, and after Israel, we are next.â€
I’m sure it is not surprising that millions of American parents feel the same way.