Dear World,
Rabbi Meir Kahane (1988 )
I understand that you are upset over us, here in Israel. Indeed, it
appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?) Indeed, every
few years you seem to became upset over us. Today, it is the brutal
repression of the Palestinians"; you never even notice OUR innocent
victims of brutal cold-blooded murder, yesterday, it was Lebanon; before
that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom
Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who try to
defend themselves and who, therefore, remain alive, 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 arch- enemy of the
Church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the
Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
And 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, 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 poor Palestinians (who never had it as good).
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 "radical" Arabs are upset
and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.
In 1920 and 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
tens 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 between 1936-39? was it because of Arab upset over1967? And when
you, world, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in1947 that would have
created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs
cried "no" 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 poor 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 in to the sea. The same twisted faces, the same
hate the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud" massacre the Jew! - 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 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, there are still some Jews in Israel who could not care less.
|