Survival, Endurance of a Nation
"Geography has never been in Israel's favour. Not only are we surrounded by enemies, we are also a small country, over half of which is a desert, with few natural resources and no regional trading partners."
"This unique experience, as our region's only democratic country living in a state of perpetual threat, has fostered one of the world's most resilient and surprisingly optimistic people, who always have an eye to a better future."
Rafael Barak, Israeli Ambassador, Ottawa, Canada
 |
| This beautiful image is of a group of Holocaust survivors who were being held at the Atlit detention center south of Haifa. Atlit existed in the 30’s as a way to prevent Jewish refugees from entering Palestine. By the 40s most of its inhabitants were Holocaust survivors. It was subject to raids and escape attempts throughout its existence, and once Israel was created, the prisoners were finally let free. PopChassid |
Where once Israel faced threats from combined Arab armies which attempted time and again to destroy the Jewish state, now only one, non-Arab, Muslim state in the region continues to state loudly and in defiance of the United Nations' agenda of world peace its intent. Iran is a UN member-state in good standing, elevated to represent itself in various human-rights UN groups. But at no time has Iran faced censure for its violent threats to annihilate Israel and its people.
Iran, as the region's most dedicated supporter of terrorism, has with its Lebanese militia Hezbollah -- trained by the Iranian Republican Guard Corps as a proxy for the Republic's shared interests in destroying Israel -- been instrumental in aiding Syria's Bashar al-Assad in destroying the lives of tens of thousands of Sunni Syrian citizens viewed by Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian regime as inferior and expendable in a Shiite Muslim world of exceptionalism and conquest.
Yet another top military commander of Hezbollah has gone the way of all -- but not enough -- fanatical Islamist jihadists, torn from life in an explosion sending all his body parts straight to Hell. Mustafa Badreddine had inherited his position once the man who had trained him in terrorism -- a man who coincidentally had married into Badreddine's family -- had been dispatched earlier to Hell by a deliberate targeting by Israel.
Both had been responsible for the deaths of countless non-Muslims whom they considered to be threats to Islamist commanding heights on the world stage. Although the news media associated with Hezbollah originally designated Israel as the bringer-of-death, it has now been established, it seems, that Syrian Sunni rebels were the source of the explosive device that took the life of this man who had succeeded for far too long in committing atrocities.
Israel, like the Jews for whom the dream of return to Jerusalem had no expiration date for the thousands of years of yearning to return, has been resilient, indomitable in its need and its resolution to endure. And endure it must. Just as Jews have done over the ages. Managing beyond all expectations of those whose pathology of hate could never understand, but which Jews well understood, to make a life for themselves beyond the fear of incessant pogroms and efforts at genocidal extermination.
And so this people among whom theoretical thought and creative imagination runs rampant, were able to make a reality of their dreams of return. A reluctant world incapable of stopping its disparate parts from their never-ending assaults against an ethnic group and a religious order that appeared to define a defiant, resolute people capable of ascending to great heights of creative discovery in science and the arts, in the process endowing humankind with great advances in the humanities, in agriculture, in the philosophy of life and nature, finally agreed to permit a Jewish state into existence.
The physical survival of a people despite the most heinous, barbaric attempts to annihilate them and rid the world of their pestilential presence as a light unto the world, is itself a miracle of endurance and persistence in facing limitless obstacles to survival. But survive it has, despite the ongoing threats and obstacles, the violence and the perpetration and perpetuation of betrayals by those who had supported the nascent state only to find a new source in which to place their compassion.
 |
| “A Holy Land Arab soldier (left) who joined Jewish Forces when the fighting began waits patiently with his rifle for a shot at an Arab Spitfire during an Air Raid on a Jewish settlement in Northern Palestine." PopChassid |
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Conflict, Human Rights, Israel, Jews
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 14, 2016
<< Home