Sunrise, Sunset, Sunrise Sunset–Swiftly Fly The Years…Happy 70th, Israel! by Gerald A. Honigman
http://q4j-middle-east.com
With the risk of sounding like Fiddler On The Roof’s Tevya…where did the time go?
Paraphrasing my late father, of blessed memory, whom I visited decades ago at Deborah Heart and Lung Hospital, “I was just a young man…how did this happen and how did I get here so fast?”
Edward Honigman, of blessed memory, returned home after spending four years as a gunner in the high casualty U.S. Navy Armed Guard in World War II, met my amazing mother, Sylvia Serota—or whom we are about to celebrate, thank G_d, her 90th birthday–and sired one of those baby boomers…me. While their timing wasn’t perfect, it was close enough.
I guess you could say that modern Israel and I have grown up together.
I made my debut on May 8, 1948, Harry Truman’s birthday. He was the President who fought his own Arabist-dominated, ARAMCO Big Oil-greased State Department, by recognizing the rebirth of Israel on May 14th on the Western calendar. Thirteen years later, I would become a Bar Mitzvah on that same date. And now, thanks to President Trump, Israel and I will both receive quite a 70th birthday present this coming May 14th…the recognition and opening of the American embassy in at least part of the city that put Zion in Zionism, Jerusalem. I’m still a bit nervous about what will become of the other part.
Seventy years ago, Israel arose from the ashes of the Holocaust and the subjugated, frightened Jewish quarters of the so-called “Arab” world (where one half of Israeli Jews originated from)–the risen phoenix of a millennially persecuted people.
It did so on a minuscule portion of the world’s real estate, less than one half of one percent of the Middle East and North Africa, where Jews have 4,000 years of history. Find it on a globe of the world without a magnifying glass, I dare you.
In this time, Jews produced one of the most vibrant, advanced societies on Earth–something which only makes assorted anti-Semites (including those now frequently masked as anti-Zionists) hate Israel even more.
While humanly imperfect (which nation can claim perfection?), compared to the largely oppressive mess which surrounds it, Israel is indeed a light unto the nations, true to its Biblical mission of “chosenness.”
While Arabs deliberately target Jewish innocents, Israeli hospitals fly in Arabs from elsewhere for life-saving treatment–including family members of Hamas. Arabs who side with the latter’s Jew-hating charter serve in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Arabic is the second official language of the nation, while scores of millions of pre-Arab conquest, native non-Arab peoples’ own languages and cultures–Kurds’, Imazighen/”Berbers,” etc.–have been periodically outlawed in a region Arabs simply refer to as “purely Arab patrimony”…the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell. When is the last time your typical university professor, mainstream media editor, or the United Nations discussed any of this? If the alleged transgression isn’t Hebraic, too often they’re all deaf, dumb, and blind to it.
Looking back, recall that when, around the turn of the 20th century, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, approached Pope Pius X for support of an independent Jewish state after covering France’s earlier infamous Dreyfus Affair, he was told this would be impossible since Jews–the doomed Deicide People–were condemned as perpetual wanderers since they rejected the divinity of Jesus. Herzl was later quoted saying that, in retrospect, maybe his refusal to kiss the Pope’s ring didn’t help matters either.
That episode, while speaking volumes (including in today’s world), was no surprise, however. The road to Auschwitz was paved by many of such “sacred” teachings over the millennia, including those of the Vatican’s nemesis, Martin Luther, and, even earlier, the Christian New Testament itself.
The Gospel of John calls Jews–not just Pharisees–children of the Devil, not to mention similar problems in the later anti-Jewish suras of the Muslims’ Qur’an (the ones that are now mostly used as a guide). It’s no accident that the first picture of a Jew in England is titled, “Aaron, Son of the Devil.”
Add to this (among lots of other nastiness) the homilies of the Church Father, “St.” John Chrysostom, which are filled with some real eye-openers that, together with Luther’s Second Treatise on the Jews, could have provided the very recipe for Hitler’s Final Solution, and then ponder the necessity of Israel’s resurrection.
Despite this religious-inspired hatred, if ever a sacred teaching could send positive chills up one’s spine, certainly the Hebrew Bible’s Ezekiel 37’s prophesy (“The Valley of the Dry Bones”) rang true soon after the slaughter of one third of all world Jewry.
Some excerpts:
“…The hand of the Lord was upon me… set me down in the midst of the valley full of bones…and they were very dry. And He said unto me, ’Son of man, can these bones live?’
So I prophesied…there was a noise…a shaking…bones came together, bone to bone… sinews and flesh came up upon them…skin covered them above–but there was no breath in them. Then said He unto me, ‘Prophesy unto the wind, Son of man, and say to the wind, ‘Thus saith the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”
So I prophesied…the breath came into them, they lived, and stood up…Then He said unto me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost….’
“Therefore prophesy and say, ‘Thus saith the Lord God; “Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come…and bring you (back) into the land of Israel….”‘
Wow !
How’s that for Zionist propaganda (from some 2,600 years ago), you Arafatians, Islamic Jihadis, Hamasniks, and their “Progressive” useful idiots?
Within a few years of Auschwitz, besides remnants from the Christian West, more Jews would flee as refugees from Arab/Muslim lands in the East and come to Israel than Arabs who fled in the reverse direction due to the Arab invasion of the sole resurrected Jewish State in May 1948. The latter emerged on some 12% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine. Compare that to the standard Arab line that Jews got almost the whole shebang.
Since 1922’s gift from Colonial Secretary Churchill and Great Britain, Arab Jordan sits on the lions’ share of the original land area–one of almost two dozen states Arabs acquired due mostly to their conquest of other, non-Arab peoples’ lands on some six million square miles of territory. Perhaps the Sudan’s ex-President Nimeiry summed this up best when he stated…
The Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into… black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission (“Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics,”Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1973, pp. 177-78).
Thus, the West’s colonialist, imperialist apologist Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” is a problem, but the colonialist, imperialist “Arab Man’s Burden” is a blessing…I understand (yeh, right). Just ask Louis Farakhan to explain.
Let’s see how some of the more courageous, true natives responded to this forced Arabization themselves. Here’s a Special Dispatch of MEMRI (M.E. Media Research Institute) from May 3, 2007, written by Belkacem Lounes of the World Amazigh Congress, who responded to Libya’s late Muammar Gaddafi and Arab subjugation in North Africa this way…
“The people of whom you speak…speak their own Amazigh language…live their Amazigh identity…What worse offense to elementary rights is there than denying the very existence of a people…30 million in North Africa? You menace the Amazigh, warning that whosoever asserts his identity will be a traitor…There is no worse colonialism than internal colonialism–that of the Pan-Arabist claim that seeks to dominate our people. It is surely Arabism–an imperialist ideology that refuses diversity–that constitutes an offense to history and truth…”
This year, like all others in recent and not-so-recent memory, the day after Israel celebrates on May 14th, Arabs will cry to the world about theirNakba –the “catastrophe” of Israel’s rebirth. So what that they could have had their 22nd state repeatedly if they just didn’t demand that it arise via the destruction of the Jews’ lonely one. A catastrophe, yes–but largely of the Arabs’ self-centered own making.
But this also begs (or should) the question…Given the above, when do the Amazigh/Kabyle people (“Berbers”) get to have their Nakba Day? How about 35-40 million truly stateless Kurds? And so forth.
I’ve watched as Israel–constantly in the spotlight’s glare and perpetually under the high power lens of scrutiny–has been subjected to nauseatingly hypocritical double standards. I had to deal with this firsthand, unfortunately, while trying to complete my own doctoral work in Middle Eastern Studies in this hostile milieu.
Any really objective assessment over the past seven decades (and before) would show that on the balance sheet–besides some mistakes, due largely to nasty circumstances and choices it was confronted with and forced to make–Israel has struggled as hard as humanly possible to honor the moral imperatives of its Hebraic traditions. And this despite having to perpetually fight enemies who delight in disemboweling Jewish children and turning their own offspring into shahids–followed by financially rewarding Arab families which so indulge…Sick, sick, sick.
Finally, while coming within a few weeks of the miracle of Israel’s 70th re-birthday, a very brief summary of what life was like for the Jew prior to this is in order…
Forced conversions, being branded the “Deicide people” (and treated accordingly), Inquisitions, autos-da-fe, demonization, ghettoization, dhimmitude, blood libels, massacres, expulsions, the Holocaust, and perpetual existence as strangers in someone else’s land became the plight of the Wandering Jew. He even got a plant named after him. Estimates have placed Jews murdered prior to the Holocaust, in both the Christian West and in the Muslim East, in the millions…and this was before the age of Zyklon B gas.
With all the real and potential sins of nationalism (only those of “religion” are probably more), if ever a people needed their own state for just their very survival and dignity, the Jews certainly are it. Even General Ulysses S. Grant (future US President) issued expulsion orders to the Jews of the American South during the Civil War.
As we approach both of our 70th birthdays, my wish for Israel is that it will always have leaders who will strive for it to be a compassionate light unto the nations, as G_d instructed it to be (another part of “chosenness”), but not at the sacrifice of its own essential interests…no matter who is tightening the screws from abroad. The dreams and prayers of countless Jews over the ages are riding on it.
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