RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’ve been writing for Emunah Magazine for years. Emunah runs a network of residential homes and educational facilities for disadvantaged kids that change lives.

Dafna Meir, the mother of 6 murdered earlier this week by a 15 year-old Arab terror-teen, came from a difficult home background and was raised in Emunah’s Achuzat Sara Children’s Home in Bnei Brak.

Achuzat Sara is an oasis of order and stability in a rundown neighborhood peopled almost exclusively by poor, ultra-orthodox families. What’s most striking about Achuzat Sara is not its fancy building–it was built in the early 1960s–but the quiet dedication of its leadership and staff. Shmuel Ron, director of the home, moved his wife Ita and their four kids into the grounds when he started working there, back in the 1980s.

I interviewed Shmuel several years ago, and he told me, “My first job is to make the children feel comfortable here, to be a better place than the homes they came from. We give them a home that looks a lot like a house, not an institution,” he explained as he proudly showed me around the tidy, cluster-style accommodations, each headed by a Torah observant young couple.

“Our next goal is to take them as they are, and to help them go as far as possible,” Shmuel added.

Like a growing number of American expats living in Israel, I have spent the last few years contemplating renouncing my U.S. citizenship.

Contrary to popular belief among those familiar with my concern about where the country of my birth is headed, the dilemma with which I have been grappling has nothing to do with the fact that President Barack Obama was the people’s choice not only once, but twice.

No, I do not hold the view that if your candidate or party loses an election, the best response is to turn on your country. Nor did my leaving the shores nearly four decades ago of what used to be legitimately called the “land of the free and home of the brave” constitute emigration. It was, rather, an act of immigration — to my Jewish homeland. Possessing two passports never seemed problematic. The only disadvantage to it would turn out to be a financial one.

Initially, when all U.S. citizens residing abroad were informed in around the late 1980s that we had to file tax returns, even this was less of problem than a nuisance for American Israelis like me, who came to the Jewish state with no money, and proceeded to earn even less. This meant that the only real expense involved was the fee to an accountant who understood how to fill out the incomprehensible forms. It was a small price, literally and figuratively, to have to pay for the privilege of casting an absentee ballot in U.S. elections and of being able to sail through the citizens’ line when arriving at an American airport after a 12-hour flight. The other advantage was not having to obtain a visa to enter the United States, which Israelis are forced to do.

US Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro believes in “Land for Peace” and echoes the US Administration pressure on Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines: an 8-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, towered over by the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria. Thus, the US Administration – unlike the US public and Congress – ignores the centrality of Judea & Samaria in Jewish history, religion, culture and nationalism, and provides another victory to wishful-thinking over the 1,400-year-old reality of inherent Mideast/Arab violence, unpredictability, tyranny, doublespeak and hate-education.

If Israel would have caved under US pressure to retreat from the Golan Heights – a site of Jewish battles against the Roman Empire – ISIS and other terrorists would be there, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, traumatizing northern Israel and beyond.

Israel’s former, dovish, Foreign Minister, Abba Eban stated (Der Spiegel, Nov. 5, 1969): “The map will never be the same as on June 4, 1967… [which is] for us something of a memory of Auschwitz….”

Mideast peace agreements are as durable as are Arab regimes, policies and accords, which have been – since the 7th century – the globe’s most shifty, intolerant, violent, volatile and treacherous, as currently reflected by the Arab Tsunami (gullibly known as the Arab Spring). The latter yielded abrupt power and ideological shifts in Egypt and Tunisia, transformed Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen into chaotic terror platforms, and lethally threatens all moderate Arab regimes. A regime change in Jordan would transform Israel’s most peaceful – to the most threatening – border.

“I’m proud of him.”

That’s what the father of Dafna Meir’s murderer said when the Palestinian media asked him what he thinks of his cold-blooded son Murad Adais.

On Sunday afternoon, Adais butchered Meir in her home, in front of her children.

Whether Adais Sr. is really happy that his son will rot in prison is less important than the fact that he said what he said to his home crowd.

He knows that his audience thinks his son is a hero. And so he played to his audience.

Since last September when the Palestinians began their current terrorist onslaught, killers like Adais have been characterized as lone wolves. But a study published last November in Mosaic online journal by Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar shows that this characterization is both wrong and unhelpful.

Polisar studied Palestinian public opinion data from surveys conducted by four independent research groups over the past 25 years. His data exposed three key aspects to Palestinian positions about Israel that all bear directly on the current Palestinian terrorist offensive.

His first finding is that throughout most of the past quarter-century a solid majority of Palestinians have supported terrorism against Israelis.

Thirty years ago, following the large-scale evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in Operation Moses, Menachem Begin launched a follow-up operation to rescue hundreds more languishing in Sudanese refugee camps. A BBC documentary tells the story. (Video, 24 minutes.)

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/01/saving-ethiopian-jews/