Turmoil, hatred and violence erupted against Jews in the aftermath of the barbaric Hamas massacre against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. This perverse response reveals something of the moral crisis in the West.
It’s also a moment for reiterating the essence of Jewish peoplehood and modern Jewish nationalism, recalling the basics of the Muslim-Jewish conflict and reaffirming resolve in standing by Israel.
Thus, it’s imperative to avoid the pitfalls of leftist indoctrination, historical falsification, antisemitism, Zionist demonization and Islamic dhimmi subjugation. Here are reasons to clarify and justify your stand.
WHO ARE THE JEWISH PEOPLE?
1. The ancient four millennia story of the Jewish people encompasses Torah truth and faith, a vast legal, ethical, scientific, and prophetic heritage, crowned with the Hebrew language and the covenant with the Land of Israel, all of unique longevity as a Jewish treasure bequeathed to the human race.
WHAT DEFINES THE JEWISH PEOPLE?
2. The Jewish ethos uniquely combines a national identity with a universal mission, drawing upon the model of Abraham who in his person and profile was the biblical father of the Hebrews and the teacher of love and responsibility for all people. This is the inherited Jewish spirit and inspiration until today.
WHAT DID THE JEWISH PEOPLE ENDURE?
3. Despite Jewish suffering over the ages — from the Italian ghetto, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian/Ukrainian pogroms, Muslim massacres, the German-afflicted Holocaust, and Palestinian barbarism — Jewish survival demonstrated resilience, pride, and hope for the eternity of Jewish peoplehood.
WHAT IS THE ZIONIST NARRATIVE?
4. After the long exile from their homeland, dispersed and powerless but forged with memory and determination, Jews under the banner of Zionism organized and mobilized for the return home and miraculously reestablished the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.
DID THE WORLD ACCEPT THE JEWISH STATE?
5. The modern Jewish national liberation movement earned recognition from the international community — the League of Nations in 1920 and the United Nations in 1947 — legitimating Israel’s unqualified political sovereignty in the eyes of the powers and nations of the world.
WHAT WAS THE ARAB RESPONSE TO ISRAEL?
6. Arab and Muslim countries violated Israel’s sovereignty and flouted the United Nations Charter by scandalously denigrating the Jewish state, carrying out aggressive assaults over the decades, infiltrating Israel’s borders, and murdering its people, terrorizing its society and threatening to overrun, conquer, and destroy Israel with the purpose to annihilate the Jews and their state. In recent years, Israel was contending with missiles fired from Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen against its civilian population; terrorism in Judea and Samaria, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; and threats against Israelis and Israeli installations around the world.
WHAT IS ISRAEL’S GEO-STRATEGIC SITUATION?
7. The width of the state of Israel in its pre-1967 borders was a mere 9 miles from the Mediterranean Sea (Netanya) eastward to Bat Hefer. It is to these “Auschwitz borders,” in the words of Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban, that countries demand Israel return to for peacemaking and a so-called two-state solution. The conquest of Judea and Samaria [West Bank] after the Six Day War now provides Israel from the sea to the Jordan River with just an implausible 50 miles in width.
HOW DO ARABS IN ISRAEL RELATE TO THE STATE?
8. Arab citizens in Israel, enjoying rights and opportunities along with Jewish citizens, overwhelmingly reject in principle the state’s Jewish identity, refrain from military service, show solidarity with Israel’s enemies, and participate far beyond their proportion in the population in criminal and illegal activities.
WHAT IS ISLAM’S POSITION TOWARD ISRAEL?
9. The religion of Islam from its founding dedicates itself to holy war (jihad) as a permanent campaign to convert, expel, or destroy the Jews, commanding Muslims to uproot the Israelis from so-called Palestine and assure the superiority and rule of Islam by enforcing Sharia Law as the will of Allah.
WHAT DO ISRAEL AND MINORITY PEOPLES SHARE?
10. Israel is the bastion of inspiration and assistance for minority peoples in the Middle East, such as Kurds, Druze, Kabyle, and Christians. Their common challenge is in facing Islam and Arab peoples as hegemonic forces that smother pluralism and diversity on the ethno-religious regional map. Israel beams a light in their dark skies.
COMMENTARY
Mark Twain (1835-1910) celebrated the immortality of the Jew “exhibiting no decadence and no slowing of his energies.” Winston Churchill (1874-1965) considered the Jews “the most formidable and remarkable race.” These accolades, which characterize the start-up nation in science and technology, medicine, and agriculture, are jarringly divorced from the harsh realities that afflicted Jews and the existential threats and dangers Israel faces.
An especially insightful comment regarding the menace and its ramifications came in a 1968 essay from author Eric Hoffer (1902-83) after Israel successfully extricated itself from the traumatic peril prior to the June 1967 war: “I have a premonition … as it goes with Israel so it will go for all of us. Should Israel perish the Holocaust will be upon us.” These words should resonate thunderously in the West in 2025.
In 1979, Hoffer again linked the past while prophetically peering toward the future:
“A world which did not lift a finger when [Adolf] Hitler was wiping out six million Jewish, men, women and children is now saying that the Jewish state of Israel will not survive if it does not come to terms with the Arabs [and Muslims].
“My feeling is that no one in this universe has the right and the competence to tell Israel what it has to do in order to survive. … It is Israel that can tell us what to do.
“It can tell us [the West] that we shall not survive if we do not cultivate and celebrate courage [and not] bargain with terrorists, court enemies and scorn friends. … The world feels no shame when it betrays Jews. It is as if fate has placed the Jews outside the comity of mankind.”
Europeans and others, in a new political constellation that recalls an earlier one, now set the scene for the murder of the Jewish state by recognizing and establishing a Palestinian state, which is code language and battle plan to bring the Jews to their knees, break their back, and annihilate stage by stage the indefensible shriveled Jewish state.
A De-Christianized Europe would offer the sacrificial Israeli lamb on the altar of pagan enlightenment. Symbolically, Rome succumbing to Mecca will abandon Jerusalem without an ounce of remorse.
LAST WORD
Whatever spurious and acquisitive ambition motivated colonialist Spain to go to Mexico, Portugal to Mozambique, Britain to Kenya, France to Algeria, and the Netherlands to Java — it is not a mystery why the Jews set out and returned to the Land of Israel. They bonded with the land of their ancestors after wandering the globe.
The indigenous sons and daughters of the Land of Israel are not foreigners in a strange land — unlike those mentioned above — but the descendants of the native Hebrew-Israelite-Jewish inhabitants from time immemorial.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan taught Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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