Posted on 05/11/2008 5:43:57 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Israel’s doom would be bad news for Europe.
Almost everywhere I went last week — TV, radio, speeches — I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don’t recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which as a general rule is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity. Assuming President Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic fancies don’t come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don’t fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic Monthly cover story: “Is Israel Finished?” Also the cover story in Canada’s leading news magazine, Maclean’s, which dispenses with the question mark: “Why Israel Can’t Survive.”
Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map-makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years — Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet prove a second) and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who otherwise infest the region. On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just shy of $30,000 — and within striking distance of the European Union average. If you object that that’s because it’s uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: Their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohammed Atta coming at you through the office window.
Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. “Aaron Lazarus the Jew,” wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to The Prisoner Of Zenda, “had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but” — and for Jews there’s always a ‘but’ — “since Jews then might hold no property…”
Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe who were tolerated as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into Arabic, and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews’ enemies acknowledging Israel’s “right to exist.” Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis?
Since Israel marked its half-century, the “right to exist” is now routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region’s presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college campus. During the Lebanese incursion of 2006, Matthew Parris wrote in the Times of London: “The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion - held not passionately but with little personal doubt — is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was” — which lets you know how he would argue it if minded to. Richard Cohen in The Washington Post was more straightforward: “Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.” Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad: Israel should not be where it is. Whether it’s a “stain of shame” or just a “mistake” is the merest detail.
Aaron Lazarus and every other “European Jew” of his time would have had a mirthless chuckle over Cohen’s designation. The Jews lived in Europe for centuries, but without ever being accepted as “European”: To enjoy their belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the Middle East. Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless cosmopolitans with no conventional national allegiance, they built a conventional nation state, and now they’re reviled for that, too. The “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.
The Western intellectuals who promote “Israeli Apartheid Week” at this time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist delegitimization. The talk of a “two-state solution” will fade. In the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a majority. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The median age is 15.8 years. Its population is not just literally exploding, at Israeli checkpoints, but also doing so in the less incendiary but demographically decisive sense.
Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state — Jews and Muslims — from Jordan to the sea. And even those who understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they’ll be unable to argue against it. Contemporary Europeans are not exactly known for their moral courage: The reports one hears of schools quietly dropping the Holocaust from their classrooms because it offends their growing numbers of Muslim students suggest that even the pretense of “evenhandedness” in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will be long gone a decade hence.
The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic challenge, still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European average. All the reasons for Israel’s doom apply to Europe with bells on. And, unlike much of the rest of the west, Israel has the advantage of living on the front line of the existential challenge. “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” wrote Eric Hoffer, America’s great longshoreman philosopher, after the ’67 war. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.”
Indeed. So happy 60th birthday. And here’s to many more.
Ping - A - Roo!!!!
steyn ping
Israel as a nation, where it is, will NEVER be taken from it! God will not allow it. You might as well get used to it. This land belongs to the Jews. It belonged to the Jews BEFORE the Palestinians laid claim to it. It will forever remain with the Jews. The whole world will stand and see the salvation of Israel and be amazed. Those nations who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. You don’t have to like it, but you will NOT change it. Those of us who are Christian know exactly what I’m talking about. Read that old antiquated Bible that gathers dust on your table at home. It’s as current as today’s news.
So true. Sad, but true.
Thought you should see this.
They’re not all asshats.
Bump for Israel.
“Israel as a nation, where it is, will NEVER be taken from it! God will not allow it. You might as well get used to it. This land belongs to the Jews. It belonged to the Jews BEFORE the Palestinians laid claim to it. It will forever remain with the Jews. The whole world will stand and see the salvation of Israel and be amazed. Those nations who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. You don’t have to like it, but you will NOT change it. Those of us who are Christian know exactly what I’m talking about. Read that old antiquated Bible that gathers dust on your table at home. It’s as current as today’s news.”
I believe what you posted to be true. My hope is that Netanyahu comes back into power in order for Israel to defend itself.
Netanyahu bump
Isreal needs to make it clear that peace is not the goal.
The continued existence and survival of Israel is the goal.
Peace is an acceptable by-product, but not a requirement.
Correct. But, nowadays, prophecies are taken very very lightly unless a pastor is trying to have a building fund started!! One has to realize that no Arab peoples from before WWII has ever been a trustworthy ally. They underhandedly conspired with the Nazis in N. Africa. They always had a bribe ready or took one for leasing, military materiale et al. Israel has been our only ally in the ME and it is not oil but values. OPEC today with its sheiks and Venz. Chavez grinning over our prices stateside, will never be valued as people who want democracy, liberty, and freedom. Let’s join with Israel to take out Iran’s nukes and put Assad in his place too!! We won’t of course. John Mc said he did not want another Holocaust but wasn’t very forward in saying he would go get the Islamofascist thugs that would over-run the. Then too, Obama would sit down with the Muslims and have a cup of tea.
The Jewish settlers of the early 20th century drew in Palestinians to perform cheap labor. It's a common story repeated here and there.
“As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.”
Amen to that!
Poor guys finally became European at exactly the time it was becoming a terribly unpopular thing to be European.
And it belonged to the Cannanites before the Jews laid claim to it and conquerored it, and to the Assyrians and the Persians until the latter gave it back to the Jews, and to the Selucids before the Maccabean revolt, and to the Romans when the Jews were driven out, and to the Ottomans when they conquerored it from the Romans, and to the British (sort of) when the Ottomans collapsed, and to the Jews in part when they conquerored part of it, and to the Arabs who lived in the other parts when the British gave up on it.
So?
Sorry, but God got out of the real estate business with the coming of Christ and His rejection by His people Israel.
The modern state of Israel has a right to exist for the same reason as the United States, or Great Britain, or Argentina: right of conquest. Whatever state can hold its land by force of arms, or implied force of arms backing a treaty has a right to exist.
They are our allies against the scourge of Islam, and for that reason I support Israel. I would support them more enthusiastically if they gave better treatment to my coreligionists in areas under their control. Sure the Muslims treat us worse, but having soldiers rough up my fellow Orthodox Christians on their way home form Pascha Liturgy and desecrate the Holy Fire does not endear the Israelis to me.
I was merely pointing out that drawing in cheap labor of people that may later lay claim to your land is a problem that pops up now and then.
I need to thoroughly read “From Time Immemorial: ... “ by Joan Peters which includes Mark Twain’s observations of his visit to the Holy Lands.
Would it be possible (probably unlikely) that a Military coup against the current government (olmert) goes through???
Or is this New corruption against Olmert the equivalent although much slower???
A gentle correction is in order here. Give Isreal A LOT OF CREDIT in that it permits Christians to make pilgramage to the major Christian shrines. Thank Isreal and the Isreali armed forces for making that possible. Plus is it true that there was a fight among the Orthodox Christians about the Easter new fire? It could be posible that because of that fighting among the Orthodox Christians and the need for the Isreali security to keep the peace that is why there was some roughing up.
“Sorry, but God got out of the real estate business with the coming of Christ and His rejection by His people Israel.”
Another gentle correction is in order here. Would it suprise you that God is still with His chosen people? I look at this “miracle” of Isreal coming back to life as a nation 60 years ago is God working to bring His people back to the land that He gaved His people via both the British and later on the UN. God works in His mysterous ways via people, just like Cyrus of ancient Persia did many centuries ago letting the Jewish people go home. Proves that God works via actions of human leaders to come home to their land. This is NOT a conquest BUT THE JEWISH PEOPLE, still God’s chosen people, HOME to their land. Noticed that the other peoples did not stay in the land of Isreal? It is because that land knows whose people the land belongs to.
Also despite what is claimed in the sentence with the quotes, with the coming of Christ God’s offer of salvation has been extended to include non-Jews in the rest of the world to be able to come into spiritual relationship with God. Romans Chapters 9-11 shows of Paul’s hope for the salvation of his Jewish coreligionists. Those chapters are an eye opener.
Happy 60th aniversary Isreal!
Thank-you Isreal for being an oasis of stability and freedom in a very dangerous neighborhood and at the same time contributing to the world goods and services to the world ecconomy.
Be Careful What You Wish For ... Mark Steyn
National Review Online ^ | 10 MAY 2008 | Mark Steyn
Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:43:57 AM by Rummyfan
Israel’s doom would be bad news for Europe.
Almost everywhere I went last week — TV, radio, speeches — I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don’t recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which as a general rule is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity. Assuming President Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic fancies don’t come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don’t fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic Monthly cover story: “Is Israel Finished?” Also the cover story in Canada’s leading news magazine, Maclean’s, which dispenses with the question mark: “Why Israel Can’t Survive.”
Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map-makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years — Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet prove a second) and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who otherwise infest the region. On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just shy of $30,000 — and within striking distance of the European Union average. If you object that that’s because it’s uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: Their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohammed Atta coming at you through the office window.
Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. “Aaron Lazarus the Jew,” wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to The Prisoner Of Zenda, “had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but” — and for Jews there’s always a ‘but’ — “since Jews then might hold no property…”
Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe who were tolerated as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into Arabic, and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews’ enemies acknowledging Israel’s “right to exist.” Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis?
Since Israel marked its half-century, the “right to exist” is now routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region’s presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college campus. During the Lebanese incursion of 2006, Matthew Parris wrote in the Times of London: “The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion - held not passionately but with little personal doubt — is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was” — which lets you know how he would argue it if minded to. Richard Cohen in The Washington Post was more straightforward: “Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.” Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad: Israel should not be where it is. Whether it’s a “stain of shame” or just a “mistake” is the merest detail.
Aaron Lazarus and every other “European Jew” of his time would have had a mirthless chuckle over Cohen’s designation. The Jews lived in Europe for centuries, but without ever being accepted as “European”: To enjoy their belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the Middle East. Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless cosmopolitans with no conventional national allegiance, they built a conventional nation state, and now they’re reviled for that, too. The “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.
The Western intellectuals who promote “Israeli Apartheid Week” at this time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist delegitimization. The talk of a “two-state solution” will fade. In the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a majority. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The median age is 15.8 years. Its population is not just literally exploding, at Israeli checkpoints, but also doing so in the less incendiary but demographically decisive sense.
Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state — Jews and Muslims — from Jordan to the sea. And even those who understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they’ll be unable to argue against it. Contemporary Europeans are not exactly known for their moral courage: The reports one hears of schools quietly dropping the Holocaust from their classrooms because it offends their growing numbers of Muslim students suggest that even the pretense of “evenhandedness” in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will be long gone a decade hence.
The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic challenge, still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European average. All the reasons for Israel’s doom apply to Europe with bells on. And, unlike much of the rest of the west, Israel has the advantage of living on the front line of the existential challenge. “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” wrote Eric Hoffer, America’s great longshoreman philosopher, after the ’67 war. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.”
Indeed. So happy 60th birthday. And here’s to many more.
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]
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I need to thoroughly read “From Time Immemorial: ... “ by Joan Peters which includes Mark Twain’s observations of his visit to the Holy Lands.
So do I. Also worthy of note is the fact that British archives (at least some of them) dealing with the British Mandate in Palestine (1922-1948) are being declassified, which will effect some illumination on various contentious issues that have popped up over the years.
For example, Efraim Karsh in the latest issue of “Commentary” writes about the “Palestinian refugee” issue of 1948 using newly released material.
es
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