Posted on 09/08/2003 5:54:46 AM PDT by SJackson
At the end of a century of unthinkably cruel and ultimately empty revolutions — Nazism, communism — Israel stands virtually alone in the right to assert that, after the crackup of empires and rage for popular sovereignties, it is a success, and a decent one at that.
Now envision Israel in its actual neighborhood — the tyrannical societies of the Middle East made even more twisted by corrupting and unproductive oil wealth — and you have a standing reproach to the Arab hubris that lies to itself.
From the western Sahara to the deserts abutting the Persian Gulf, not a single regime beyond Israel has so much as even embarked, or allowed its entrepreneurs to embark, on the exacting beginnings of industrial advance. This wide swath of terrain on which a quarter of a billion people live produces with all its hands and brains just about what little Finland or Spain does. Remind yourself also that not one ruler across the region governs by consent of the ruled. Evoke the phantoms of lost grandeur put in the heads of miserable boys and girls by dogma and dogmatics.
Mesh all this together and you have some sense of why the West is resented on the Arab street and why, moreover, Israel has not been able to reach, for all its accomplishments, the one quintessential and existential goal articulated by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, that "the Jew be able to die peacefully in his own bed." And maybe he never will.
It may be that Israel is doomed to live dangerously, even if a shooting, a stabbing, even a bombing on a bus or in a mall occurs only every few years. Maybe there is no enforceable peace treaty that can truly guarantee against crackpots and random fanatics.
Israel's longtime enemy, and its enemy today, is of the very same terror that was launched on us on Sept. 11, but, if less confounding, more routine and more tolerated. It is the world's acceptance of the routinization of this killing of Jews that has so affronted Israel and its allies.
One of the fundamental and actionable principles of Zionism is that Jewish blood is no longer cheap. It follows that the shedding of Jewish blood will not pass without an accounting, without being avenged. And not just for vengeance's sake. But to bring about the elimination of the organized blood sport in Jewish lives.
The fact is that Israel has for years vacillated between responding to terror with exquisitely calibrated force and pacifying terrorists by giving them some of what they want — for example, the release of prisoners. The latter option is, of course, always the preferred path of the peace process interlocutors, even the American ones.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
In case you're wondering !
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