"We Sanctify Life, Not Death"
The State of Israel has persevered, her people have prospered, they have made the desert bloom, and the darkness lift to emit light in the memory pool of the sheltered within their midst. Well, all right, that kind of elevated rhetoric does reflect the general mode of expression of the region, and while there's ample truth in it, there's also the other side. There is poverty and fear and emotional dislocation and disappointment and social crime in the State of Israel, just as there exists all those human realities in any other state.What makes Israel different is her determination to surmount the existential threat she has lived with for her entire existence. Sixty years of simultaneously building a country and defending itself from war threats, attempted invasion and conquest, and stealthy sometimes-successful terrorist assaults on the population. Israel, once the puny orphan of the world community, managed to lift herself into national prosperity through the capital of her largest asset, her Jewish population.
Succeeding in agriculture, science, academics, culture, philosophy, medicine, technology, that once-impoverished state is now a thriving economic mini-behemoth. Even while too much of her treasury is being expended on national security to the detriment of the poor in her society, the country surges ahead of most other countries with populations far outstripping Israel's, with natural resources other than their peoples' fundamental determination and intelligence. But always looking back over her shoulder, sheltering Jews and defending against assaults.
As Israel continues to prosper, the regard in which she is held has been plummeting throughout the world. Her economic success and her military prowess in protecting the life-interests of her people has cost her universal regard. The liberal left in Europe and North America has abandoned her, and taken up the cause of the Palestinians, as victims of Israeli imperialism. Charges of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, Apartheid have been flung at Israel. The very real plight of the Palestinians a blot on her reputation.
But it isn't Israel in whom a significant proportion of the population professes now to agree that the adversary would be better off dead. It is not Israel who embraces the necessity of blind violence to obtain an end. Israel does not deliberately seek out civilians to make the point that all Arabs are hostile to their existence and deserving of death, as the "enemy". It is the terror militias of Islamic Jihad, the Martyrs Brigade, Fatah milias, Hamas terrorists and others who seek to destroy the Jewish state, Jew by Jew by Jew.
On the occasion of remembrance ceremonies for the Jews who perished in past wars defending the country from a series of massed onslaughts of its neighbouring Arab states, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "We sanctify life, not death. I cannot help but think of how deep the moral gap is between us and our enemies. We make every possible effort to limit and focus our attacks on the terrorists and we never intentionally harm the innocent. We don't have jihadists ... or mothers who joyfully send their children with bomb belts to blow themselves up in packed buses or busy malls."
Israel is comprised today of 5.5-million Jews who celebrate the re-birth of their ancestral homeland as a nation of support and safety for Jews wherever they exist. The total number of Israeli Jews still does not equal the total number of Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The irony cannot be lost on anyone that the very nation created to offer succour to world Jewry spends an inordinate amount of its energy in desperately attempting to secure its collective security.
That tiny state, adrift in a sea of Arab nations, is home to 1.4-million citizens who identify as Palestinians. While Israeli Jews celebrate the miracle of the re-creation of their traditional, biblical-era homeland, the millions of Israeli Palestinians, those of the West Bank and Gaza mourn the event as catastrophic. While Jewish drivers stopped their vehicles and exited briefly to give homage to the memory of their war dead, their Palestinian counterparts dourly drove their way through and around the parked cars.
For a country accused of ethnic cleansing, the reality is that in 1949, the Muslim citizens of Israel were 111,000 in number, representing 9% of Israel's population. They have since multiplied in number to 1,141,000, representing 16% of the population. From an originally mute demographic they have evolved, under the freedoms offered them in Israel's democracy to a loudly assertive demographic, condemning of the state that offers them freedoms available nowhere else in the geography.
Israel remains a free and functioning democratic country in a region where hostilities between countries remains the order of the day, to this very day. Lebanon, still under Syrian control, faces the demon of civil war erupting at any time, through the auspices of Hezbollah, the Iranian-Syrian counterpart of Hamas. Iran still nurses aspirations to absorbing the Gulf States. Libya's Moamar Gaddafi is beside himself with fury over the cut-throat relations between the Arab states.
Left to her own devices, no longer under attack, Israel would represent as an oasis in a dessicated geography ruled by autocratic theists and rigid dictators, within whose countries and between whose nations social violence and radical Islamist jihadists prosper. The Arab nations are dreadfully fond of blaming Israel for all the upheaval, traditional and ongoing, in the Middle East. But it isn't Israel that has them at each other's throats, it is their own inability to live together in anything peace.
Primal tribal antagonism lives triumphant. Were the Israel-Palestinian problem to be resolved, this eventual peace, should it happen, would do nothing to solve the constant irritations and strife between the Arab countries. Their militant belligerence toward one another, their jealousies, their religious fractionating heresies would continue apace. Perhaps the problem really is that Arabs have not been capable of rising above bloody tribal threats, grievances, warfare.
Until such time as the Arab states become sufficiently civilized and content and accepting of their differences they won't become capable of living together in anything remotely resembling harmony. This is their burden to solve, not Israel's.
Labels: Israel, Middle East, Traditions, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 08, 2008
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