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by Gunter David
On November 29 of 1947, more than sixty years ago, the United Nations passed a resolution to partition Palestine between its Arab and Jewish populations. The division was to be among population lines. Two states would be created side by side. Jerusalem would be under international control.
This coming May, Israel will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of its existence. Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish state. Israel’s territory is considerably larger than had been envisioned by the partition plan, due to military victories. It has suffered six wars and is currently in what seems to have become another one.
This war was declared on Wednesday by Dr. Abu Osama Abd al-Moti, the representative of Chamas in Iran. How appropriate! He represents Israel’s enemy in the country whose head has promised to wipe Israel off the earth.
This new war began on Monday, when Chamas bombed the Israeli southern town of Dimona, where its rockets, reportedly sent in a suicide attack, fell on a shopping mall, killing a woman. The rockets this time came not from the Gaza Strip, the usual launching pad, but from the West Bank.
On Tuesday, Chamas fired rockets from the Gaza Strip into the rocket-scarred southern town of Shderot, wounding six civilians and knocking out power in parts of its target.
On Wednesday, Shderot was hit again, sending several residents into shock. On the same day, a Kassam rocket struck a playground in Kibbutz (communal settlement) Be’eri, wounding a two girls, a tike not yet three years old, and a 12-year-old. At the end of the day, Chamas announced it had fired 31 rockets into Israel on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“For more than a year, we stopped (attacks) but the Zionist enemy continued in its aggression and degraded the cease fire on part of the resistance,” Abd al-Moti declared. “The message of the operation in Dimona is that Izz al-Din al-Qassam (Chamas’ military wing) declared the renewal of suicide operations, and the enemy should expect additional operations.”
I wonder what cease fire the man in Iran was referring to. Rockets, many supplied by the country from which he spoke - far and away from where the action is - have been falling almost daily on Shderot and other southern communities, as well as further north of the Strip, on the city of Ashkelon, for many months.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, the father of the teenager, “heard a very loud boom. It was clear to us that this time the Kassam landed in the middle of the kibbutz.” He didn’t know where it had fallen, but “immediately the phones began to ring. Then, my daughter’s teacher called to tell me my child had been injured, she is being treated and I should come. I came and there was my daughter, I saw her with a shrapnel of rocket in her arm.”
Both children were subsequently hospitalized. In a house near where the rocket fell lay an 82-year-old woman in her bed, covered with shards of glass from the windows of her house, which exploded. Miraculously she was not injured.
One of the rockets that fell on Shderot struck a house occupied by a mother and her three children. The four ran to a “safety room” as soon as the alarm went off. Moments later the rocket hit a wall of the house. The family was offered shelter in a hotel in Ashkelon, but they refused to leave their home.
Machmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, chided Chamas on Wednesday. “These rockets that are being fired at Israel must stop. It’s pointless,” he said. At the same time he also told Israel “not to use these rockets as a pretext for collective punishment on Palestinians in Gaza. Israel must allow humanitarian supplies and other needs to be provided to Gaza.”
Considering that the barrage of rockets that started the latest series of attacks came from the West Bank, which is Abbas’ domain, it is clear once again that he cannot be Israel’s “partner for peace.” He simply is not in control.
Will Israel and the Palestinians ever live side-by-side in peace? Naomi Chazan, a former member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, put it this way in a recent column:
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come full circle. The successful completion of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations following Annapolis may, finally, complete the process that began with the adoption of the Partition Plan 60 years ago. Truth be told, no better alternative exists.”
Is anybody listening?
In a single week, we learned the following:
Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, announced that Chezbollah’s rocket arsenal was bigger now than during its 2006 war with Israel. At that time, its arsenal consisted of 10,000 rockets.
At least two Katyusha rockets slammed into the northern Israeli border town of Shlomi, causing damage to several buildings. Israeli security said the rockets likely were fired by Lebanon-based Palestinian terrorists looking to disrupt President Bush’s visit to the region.
Elsewhere, a rocket salvo from South Lebanon jarred Israel. Fortunately there were no casualties. Rockets from the Gaza Strip hit the northern part of the city of Ashkelon, not injuring anyone.
A pretty bleak picture, when you further consider the hopelessness of the future - the Indianapolis conference that has brought no glimmer of hope, Chamas announcing it won’t stop the violence against Israel, and the Palestinian Authority having failed so far to be a partner for peace.
Yet in the most unexpected of places, a hospital bed in Connecticut, I received a completely different, and upbeat, picture of life in Israel.
I had been taken to the hospital by ambulance while on the verge of passing out. Treatment of a bleeding stomach required me to stay there for six days. Among my caretakers was a young Jewish cardiologist, who had recently returned from a wedding in Israel.
“The wedding was in Caesarea,” he said, smiling happily in recollection of the event. “A thousand guests attended. It was in the ancient amphitheater.” Recalling my history, I said the city and amphitheater were built by King Herod (who called himself The Great) nearly two thousand years ago, as a tribute to his Roman rulers.
The doctor and his wife traveled to Israel for a mere four days, which was the most time he could spare from his practice. “If all I could have done was get off the plane and kiss the land of Israel, I would have done it,” he said.
Another day, he and his wife, who are newlyweds, visited Tel Aviv. “It was 3 A.M., but the streets were filled with people,” he said with amazement. “You wouldn’t know they have any problems in Israel.”
They do have problems, of course. You read about them in the newspapers daily, and there is hopelessness to it. The Israelis have no one to talk to who could make decisions that will bring about the existence of two countries side by side, in peace. The PA’s President Abbas recently announced he would never consider Israel a Jewish state. President Bush’s visit to the region seems to have brought no results. Why would anyone in power make commitments to a president at the end of his powers?
Meanwhile, a new generation of Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip is being taught by Chamas television that their highest aspiration should be to become suicide bombers and kill Israelis. The Palestinian Authority’s television broadcasts the same message, but less frequently. It is the same PA that recently received pledges of $7.4 billion in aid from ninety countries, including the American taxpayer.
Here’s hoping the Israelis continue milling in the streets of Tel Aviv at 3 A.M. and attending weddings in Caesarea for years to come.
We packed up and moved recently, from suburban Philadelphia to our own promised land, Connecticut, three minutes by car from our daughter Ronni and her husband and especially her two little girls, ages six and four-and-a-half. In our seventies, we wanted to be near at least one of our three children.
In the process of unpacking I came across some possessions of my late mother, including a few pages from a newspaper published in Tel Aviv during World War II. My parents and I and my father’s mother, brother and sister, were living there at the time. The paper was in German, as my parents, like many Jews who fled Germany with the rise of Hitler to power, clung to their native language, rather than struggle with the difficult Hebrew.
The front page was headlined “The List of the Dead.” There followed the names, ages and addresses of 105 men, women and children who were killed during an air raid on Tel Aviv by Hitler’s Italian allies. Victims ranged in age from sixty, like Aron Hannasch, to one year, like little Amos Germann.
A note at the bottom of the list reported that another twenty-seven people had died, and thirty wounded were in serious condition in various hospitals. It was early in the war, because an article on another page reported an event that made it clear the Soviets had not as yet entered the war on the side of the Allies.
The list brought back memories to me of the frequent bombings we endured during those years. Included in the list were several dead from Sirkin Street 13 and 15. We had lived at number 19, a three-story walk-up apartment house, and had moved to another part of town just a few months before that particular bombing occurred. I must have been about twelve years old at the time. A memory that haunted me for years concerned a bigger neighborhood boy, who used to torment me with words, push and shove me in the street. One day I cursed him and said I hoped God would punish him and he would die.
Mussolini’s pilots dropped bombs on Sirkin Street, and the boy did die. I was convinced that my curse had cost him his life. And then, just the other day, there was his name on the list of bombardment victims that my late mother had brought with her all those years ago, when she and my father came to America on December 14, 1956. I’ll never know why it was still important to her or to my Dad.
And now, sixty-one years later, I was reading these names in suburban Connecticut, where the snow lay on the ground, one of our little granddaughters had spent the day with us, and I was glad to have survived.
Judging by advertisements in newspapers, including the Jewish press with its special pull-out sections featuring gifts for Chanuka, you would think this holiday is a Jewish version of Christmas. The Christmas tree has even been known as the Chanuka bush.
In truth, Chanuka is a Jewish holiday, whose origin has been obscured by the fact that it frequently occurs close to Christmas. Moreover, the Festival of Lights, as it often is called, refers to what believers call the miracle of a single container of oil, which was to burn in the Temple in Jerusalem for just one night, yet lasted for eight.
Chanuka is down-played by Jewish people themselves, who do not consider it a major holiday of the caliber of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, or Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, or Passover, celebrating the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.
In Israel as well as in the US and other places where Jews live, Chanuka is marked by lighting candelabras, gift giving and eating special sweet desert-type foods. In recent years, Israeli youngsters have been participating in a singing contest of holiday songs.
Yet had it not been for the events that the holiday celebrates, it is likely that there would be no Judaism today, and Jesus of Nazareth would have faced a much harder battle in the early days of Christianity.
Chanuka is about religious freedom. Forget the latkes and the other yummies. Religious freedom in the Jewish homeland was won some 2,200 years ago, when a Jewish priest and his sons, joined by another group of worshipers, overthrew the Greek ruler of their little country and declared independence, religious and political.
Alexander the Great expanded the Greek empire by conquering Syria, the province of Palestine, and Egypt. He was a benevolent ruler, who permitted those under his rule to observe their religions without interference from their conquerors. Ironically, Hellenic culture attracted the Jews or Judeans, many of whom adopted its philosophy, language, even Greek fashion. Freedom to worship, as we also have learned in modern times, produces assimilation.
Eventually, Alexander divided the empire among his generals. Decades later, Antiochus IV, who ruled Palestine, adopted a different policy. He forbade Jews to observe their religion. In the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, of which today only the Western Wall remains, he installed a Hellenistic high priest, brought in pigs - a non-kosher animal - to desecrate the temple, and banished the Judean priests.
Jews were forced to observe their religion in hiding. When word came that Greek soldiers were on the way, the Jews would pretend to gamble. This is observed today through the game of spinning the dreidel, a small wooden object, and making bets with chocolate money wrapped in golden paper - a joyous occasion for children.
A Judean priest named Matethias, or Matityahu in Hebrew, Matthew in English, of the Chashmonaim family, rose against the Greeks with the help of his sons, led by his eldest, Juda. In time Juda, or Yehuda in Hebrew, became known as The Maccabee. Yet it was not his family name. It contains the initials of a declaration in Hebrew, the language of the land, stating, “Who is like you among the gods, Jehova?” In all likelihood it was a war cry to arouse the people to fight for their cause of religious freedom and independence.
The small band of Judeans won the war. The Greeks withdrew in defeat. The Judeans cleaned the Temple of the filth and debris left by the conquerors and restored it to its position as the home of their faith. Eventually the Chashmonaim established a dynasty of kings who ruled the land.
But freedom did not last. The Romans conquered the Greek empire, as well as Judea. They destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Judeans to the far corners of the Roman empire.
The Jews had been exiled before by conquerors, such as the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Of the twelve tribes of the Israelites, ten were lost. The Roman exile was the final one. But for a trickle of Jews now and then, they did not return to that little land by the Mediterranean for some 1,800 years.
The holiday of Chanuka and the memory of those it celebrates deserve better than they are getting.
The long road to the Promised Land stretched six thousand miles this weekend, from the shores of the Mediterranean to Annapolis, Md. The travelers were Israelis and Palestinians, delegates from sixteen Arab countries, for a total of fifty emissaries of various backgrounds.
They attended a conference called by the United States on bringing peace between Israel and the Palestinians through the creation of a state of Palestine, side by side with Israel. It was the third conference of its kind, the first two having failed. President George W. Bush had announced his support of a two - state solution, as it has become known. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to the region eight times in preparation for the conference. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Machmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, have been negotiating for months on their own, with American support of back patting and cash to both parties.
The conference took the official form of a single day, Monday, with announcements made today. Regular negotiations between the two parties would begin December 12, to be completed by the end of next year. “There is no path other than the path of peace,” Abbas declared at the end of the day. Barak spoke of “painful compromises for both of us, the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
But even before the conference began, and as it took place, Palestinians demonstrated against it all over the West Bank, clashing with police, calling Abbas a traitor. In the Gaza Strip, where Chamas rules over some 1.5 million, the position was clear: Israel has no right to exist.
On the Israeli side, right wing members of Barak’s coalition have threatened to bolt, bringing his government down. The fact also is that Abbas has been unable to keep his pledge to the Israelis of putting an end to terrorism. He has not cracked down on the rain of rockets fired on Israeli settlements primarily by his Fatach-sponsored El Aksa Martyrs Brigade from the edge of the Gaza Strip. He has no impact on Chamas, which continues its own terroristic activities against the people of Israel.
The issues remain the same as they have been for years: Palestinians want East Jerusalem as their capital. They feel their people have the Right of Return to the homes they left behind during the wars with Israel. And Israel has been expanding its settlements on the West Bank, where now several hundred thousand live.
What has changed? Words, words, words. We heard them then, we hear them now. The fact is that the Jews began returning to Palestine more than one hundred years ago, to what they consider the Promised Land, to what was their homeland beginning with Biblical times. The Palestinians opposed this return almost from the start. They consider the Israelis intruders. They seem unable to accept the Jewish state as a fact. The Israelis on the right hold on to the concept that the Promised Land runs from the river to the sea.
This coming May, Israel will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary. Here’s hoping it will be half way toward change, toward peace.
A major issue in the peace conference between Israel and the Palestinians, to be held in Annapolis, Md., next month, is the so-called Right of Return. The conference is sponsored by the U.S. The Palestinians want negotiations to be based on the Arab League peace plan, the White House vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side, and the internationally approved Road Map.
The Right of Return would permit Palestinians who fled their homes during wars with Israel, and their heirs, to return there, regardless of who is living in these places now. The largest number of Palestinian refugees, several hundred thousand, fled during Israel’s Independence War in 1948. The majority settled in what today is the kingdom of Jordan, while others fled across the Arab world. Many ended up in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, which came under the rule of Egypt, and in Syria and Lebanon.
The refugee camps, funded largely by the United Nations, exist till this day, more than 59 years after they were created. Generations of Palestinians have been living in them, knowing no other way of life.
Yet there is absolutely no way Israel can permit the return of Palestinians to their homes in the Jewish state because it will cease to exist. The number of Palestinians, who have a much higher birth rate than the Israelis, will overwhelm the Jewish population. The Gaza Strip alone is jammed with between 1.5 and two million Palestinians, mostly living in refugee camps.
Palestinians in other Arab countries such as Kuwait were never permitted to become citizens, a condition that kept them as permanent outsiders. Returning home would end that status.
However, the reality is that no such right exists anywhere in the world, where wars have been fought and lost. Israel won its Independence War, having been attacked by the armies of five Arab nations. Since when do winners owe losers the return of their properties?
An example from my own family history illustrates that no such rights exist. My parents were born in the city of Posen, then part of Germany, at the turn of the 19th century. When Germany lost World War I, Posen was returned to Poland, which had become independent. It is now called Poznan. My mother’s parents owned two hotels, a restaurant and a stationery store. My father and his mother, a widow, owned a shoe store.
As the war ended, my parents and their families, like other German citizens, fled Posen. They settled in Berlin. Through the years, the Polish government never offered them the right to return to their homes or reclaim their properties, which were taken over by Poles.
Flash forward to much later wars. The refugees who fled North Korea to the south have not been offered such a right. Nor have all those who fled their homes during the wars that characterized what once was Yugoslavia. Think Serbia, for example, in the 1990s. There currently are an estimated thirty wars going on. Does anyone think they will conclude with refugees entitled to return to their homes?
Look back in history. The Babylonians exiled the ten tribes of Israel to what today is Iraq. It took a Persian king, who conquered Babylon, to encourage the Jews to return to their homeland. By then they had become known as the ten lost tribes. Centuries later the Romans conquered Judea, as the Jewish state was then known, exiling its occupants not to return till modern times.
It is true that Germany, in the years after Hitler, opened its doors to those Jews who wished to return, and offered financial restitution to survivors of the Holocaust. Considering the mammoth crime of genocide, I suppose it was the least the Germans could do.
Interestingly, while the Arabs talk about the right of Palestinians to return to their homes in today’s Israel, they don’t offer a similar right to the many thousands of Jews who fled Arab countries in 1948 to make their homes in the new state of Israel. Those Jews had lived among the Arabs since the dawn of Islam.
The Right of Return, fraught with danger for Israel, appears to be a one-way street.
The Issue of the Right of Return scuttled the Camp David peace conference in 2000, when Yassir Arafat refused to compromise on the issue. Chances are the same will happen again.
In the Days of Awe of the new Jewish year, 5768, the Iranians announce they are one year away from creating an atomic bomb. We all know what this means. They plan to wipe Israel off the map.
In the Gaza strip, Chamas reigns supreme. They and/or their allies steadily bombard nearby Israeli settlements with rockets. The other day, 69 Israeli soldiers were wounded during a rocket attack on a military base. Chamas radio called it “...a victory from God.” The attack was followed by a barrage of rockets launched by the Islamic Jihad and the Resistance Committees. In the north, Chezbollah now is said to possess long-range missiles able to go as far as Tel Aviv.
Recent news is that Chamas has been on the payroll of the Palestinian Authority, which is controlled by the new Palestinian prime minister, whose first name, Salaam, means “peace’ in Arabic.
The Israelis, meanwhile, are considering a policy of shutting down Gaza’s electricity as punishment for shelling, and on Sept. 5 and 6 flew over northern Syria for reasons unexplained. Some commentators speculate that Israel was trying to test an aerial route to Iran for a possible pre-emptive strike at that country’s nuclear facilities.
The new year began last Wednesday, Sept. 12. That day is called Rosh Hashana in Hebrew, which means the head or start of the year. Friday eve on Sept. 21 marks the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, during which Jews the world over examine their actions during the previous year and ask for individual and collective forgiveness from their God. These are called the Days of Awe because Jews believe that their future will be decided during those few days. Will they be written in the Book of Life or not?
On the ground, where Israel’s enemies plot to destroy it, these are the Days of Awe indeed. Will the Jewish state survive or not?
Some time ago a reader asked that I tell more about growing up in Israel. I thought about it yesterday, at the annual reunion of three couples - Noach and his wife Joan, Danny and his wife Selma, and Dalia and I.
We met not in Tel Aviv, where the guys grew up, but in central New Jersey, the home of Noach and Joan. He and I met in fourth grade at Tel Nordau elementary school in Tel Aviv. Danny, a year younger than me, was the son of the woman who taught my class English in fifth grade. He also attended Tel Nordau. Dalia and I and Danny and Selma live in suburban Philadelphia, minutes from each other.
The link among us is the past. When we were growing up, Israel had not as yet been founded. The League of Nations handed control or a Mandate of what was then Palestine to the British, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Danny’s mother had lived in Texas for a number of years, so we considered her an American. She taught us American words like “cute.” She was succeeded by an Englishman, who in sixth grade taught us to say, “My name is Mr. Brown. I open the door. I close the door.” I practiced this phrase at home, opening and closing the door to the room which served as the family dining room by day and the bedroom my grandmother and I shared at night.
Noach’s father was an actor in Habima, the Jewish national theater, who came to the Holy Land with his wife from Russia. My family, of course, came from Germany, which, as readers of this blog know, we fled when Hitler rose to power. Danny was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where his parents lived before moving to Tel Aviv.
The three of us attended Tel Nordau, an elementary school named in honor of Max Nordau, a Zionist leader and author. Yet it was called the Royal School Tel Nordau, since the United Kingdom ruled this little land. Royalty had nothing to do with Zionism. We were an average of forty boys and girls in a class. Controlling such a large bunch of kids was often a difficult task. One day a female teacher broke into tears and fled the classroom.
Elementary school consisted of first through eighth grade. You were graduated at age 14, and many students never received further education. This was because tuition was free in the royal public schools. High schools, however, were privately owned for the most part, and charged tuition. My father, who owned a flourishing ladies shoe salon in Berlin, had become a shoe maker in Palestine. He could not afford to send his only child to high school. With high grades, I managed to receive a scholarship.
Moreover, attending school was not mandatory under the British Mandate. Many children worked to help support their families, instead of getting an education. Consider that thousands of families were refugees from warn-torn Europe, others fled from Yemen, at the bottom of the Arab peninsula. Jews around the world, and especially in the United States, had not as yet begun to come to the aid of their brethren. How ironic that the People of the Book living in the Holy Land pre-Israel often lacked education.
We were recalling, Noach, Danny and I, that there was no crime in the Jewish Palestine. Our families never locked the front door of their apartments. The only thing my family and I worried about were Arab bullets. Early on, we lived in an apartment house in northern Tel Aviv. At night we’d hear shots from a nearby Arab village. By day we kids would trace the bullet marks on the outside walls of the concrete building.
There were no school buses, as there are in the U.S. At first we lived across the street from Tel Nordau, and I would wait for the bell, then run like hell. Later we moved to another part of town, and I walked to school a good half-an-hour each way because I refused to transfer to a closer school. The walk to high school was about twenty minutes each way. I love walking till this day.
Many kids were bi-lingual. I spoke German with my family and Hebrew at school and with my friends. My parents used to say that I have a secret language. Many years later, my children, growing up in America, said the same about Dalia and me. Hebrew was our secret language, which Dalia speaks since she was born in Haifa. Growing up in America, she learned English here.
I doubt that Palestinian Arabs learned Hebrew in their high schools, but we had the option of studying Arabic or French. Since I was always fixated on getting good grades, I chose French, which I was already pretty good at, having lived in Paris for two years after we fled from Berlin. I did study Arabic in the summer of 1942, when my mother and I lived in Jerusalem, where we had gone to get away from severe bombing of Tel Aviv by the Italians. It was, after all, World War II. My father would join us for the Sabbath. I can still count in Arabic, but only till seven, and occasional exchange greetings with a Lebanese working in the local supermarket. Some of the words we exchange laughingly don’t belong in a literary publication...
So what were we three fellows doing in America? Dreams. We all had dreams. I left the Holy Land before Israel became a state because I wanted to live here, the land of plenty, with a car in every garage, the land of jazz, milk shakes, Hollywood and Times Square. Noach and Danny came after the state had been established. All three of us went to college here, met our wives here, and enjoyed fulfilling careers. America has been good to us.
And yet each of us travels frequently to the little place where we grew up. Who said you can’t go home again?
Israel became the focus of our daily lives for a few days last week. Daphne and Moshe, who live in Rishon Le Zion, their country’s fourth largest city, came to visit us. My cousin Uri, who lives in Holland, but was born in Jerusalem, sent me an e-mail. Dalia and I phoned her cousin Izy in a suburb of Tel Aviv. And 26-year-old Doron, Daphne and Moshe’s son, sent me some of his poems and short stories.
Daphne and Moshe are in their fifties. Her mother, Batya, and I played on a one-block street in Tel Aviv when we were ten years old. There was no pavement, no traffic, and I don’t recall anyone having a car on Hagilboa Street. In later years, Batya introduced me to Dalia. We shall soon be married fifty-five years.
Moshe told me, as the ladies were off by themselves, of great concern in Israel that another war will soon erupt in the North. Chezbollah, supported and financed by Syria and Iran, has been rearming, despite the presence of the U.N. Peacekeeping Force. I had read this news in the Israeli press on my computer. But to have Moshe here, in my house in America, tell me in person about his and his fellow countrymen’s worries personalized the situation.
Why, then, were he and his wife in the U.S.? They were on their way to visit their other son, who lives in Canada “We visit him every couple of years, and now and then he visits us,” Moshe said. “Life goes on.”
Uri, who has children and grandchildren living in Jerusalem, reported that Israelis enjoy traveling to Vietnam. “You can stay in a five-star hotel for very little money,” he wrote. “Of course, you have to like their food, and that’s a different story.” Earlier this year I received a similar e-mail from Sara, who also lived on Hagilboa Street as a child. She and her husband, now grandparents living north of Tel Aviv, were heading for a vacation in, yes, Vietnam.
Uri also wrote that his granddaughter had completed her mandatory two-year service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), but was staying voluntarily for another six months.
During our telephone conversation, Izy told us about economic prosperity in Israel. Skyscrapers were under construction. Companies offering technological services and equipment were enjoying a boom. That day I picked up a prescription at my local pharmacy. It was produced by Teva, an Israeli pharmaceutical company and a giant in the field.
Moshe told about mergers and acquisitions, at times financed by foreign money. Unfortunately, Moshe, a computer expert, lost his job in the process, when his company shut down his department in preparation for a merger. He is fifty-seven years old, and now suffers from age discrimination, as often is the case in America. After thirty years with one company, he is unemployed.
And Doron, a computer guy like his dad, sent me, among his writings, a poem about his home-town, Rishon Le Zion. The name means The First In Zion, the last word being another name for Israel. He recalled his childhood, going to the beach with his father, and growing up. Rishon, as it is called for short, was founded in the 1880s, and according to government records, has grown from 11,000 resident in 1948, the year Israel became a state, to 217,500 by the end of 2003.
Between Israel’s Independence Day in 2005 and in 2006, a total for 149,000 babies were born. Immigrants numbering 26,000 arrived in the Jewish home land during the same period.
Danger of another war, travel abroad, economic growth, unemployment, births, immigration. This is Israel today. As Moshe said, “Life goes on.”
While Daphne and Moshe were with us, they called me by my Hebrew name, Yehoyakim, the name I was called while growing up in Tel Aviv. I miss hearing it now.
The long road to the Promised Land, the title of this blog, is particularly fitting when it comes to my family. As my late mother told me the story, the road began in Spain, where her family lived for centuries. The family, whose last name was Lamed, probably arrived after fleeing Judea from the Romans. The name Lamed comes from the Hebrew word to study or to teach. Chances are they were teachers.
The Lameds fled Spain from the Spanish Inquisition at the end of the 15th century, making their way to Holland, and from there to Germany. Perhaps to disguise their origin, they changed their name by reversing it, from Lamed to Demal, which became Themal over time.
In the course of centuries the Themals moved across Germany, eventually settling in Posen, a province the Germans had taken decades earlier from the Poles. It became known as the Polish corridor, south of the free city of Danzig. My mother, Helene, was born in Posen in 1900, and it was there that she met my father.
My Father’s family, the Davids, are descendants of a woman who lived in the town of Hameln, outside of Hamburg, Germany, in the 18th century. Her sons published her memoir, which described the lifestyle of Jewish people in Germany in her time. The book eventually was translated into English under the title of “The Happy Woman of Hameln.”
Over time, the Davids, like the Themals, moved east, settling in Posen. It was there that my father, Martin Mordechai, was born in 1896.
When Germany lost World War I, the two families, along with many other Jews, fled from the Polish conquerors to Berlin, the capital of the Motherland. Posen became Poznan, which it is to this day. My parents were married in Berlin in 1927. I was born two years later.
The irony that German Jews considered themselves fully Germans, participating in the government and in the military, came to the fore with the rise of Hitler to power in 1933.
My parents and I fled to Paris, France, where we lived from 1933 to 1935. That year my parents decided to seek refuge in the Promised Land. I grew up in Tel Aviv. Within two years the rest of the David family arrived in what was then Palestine - my father’s mother and his brother and sister. The wandering of the Davids had ended.
Apart from my mother, the Themals were not as lucky. Her brother and her uncle were trapped in Germany. They spent the World War II years in hiding, often with the help of Christian friends. For a while they shared a room in back of a pet shop in Berlin, owned by these friends, where they worked by day. And they survived.
After the war, my uncle, his wife and her son from a previous marriage - the Nazis had killed her first husband - arrived in the Promised land. So ended the Hagira of a branch of the Themal family, some 450 years after they fled from Spain.
But...my uncle, Rolf Themal, was unable to make a living in the Promised Land. He didn’t know the language and didn’t like living in what was once an Arab village. After a couple of years the Themals returned to Berlin. There, Rolf Themal found a very fulfilling job. He became head of the office which prosecuted Nazis.
The Davids trace their roots to Moses and Aaron, who belonged to the Israelite tribe of Levi. My father’s gravestone carries the inscription, “Mordechai son of Jacob the Levi.” The Levis were the priests who served in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, of which only the Western Wall remains.
For my father, landing on the Mediterranean shores of The Promised Land some 1600 years after the Romans destroyed the Temple where his ancestors served, was surely taking the long road.
The Judeans had fled. Now they are back. To stay.
Could there be TWO Palestinian countries in Israel’s future? One Palestine in the Gaza Strip, dominated by the Chamas terrorists, the other in the West Bank, governed by the Palestinian Authority, whose Fatah party sponsors the terroristic Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade?
As ominous as it sounds, this could be the future, unless the neighboring Arab countries work with Israel to arrive at a solution that will benefit Palestinians and Israelis alike.
A promising move in that direction took place last week in Sharm el-Sheik, the Egyptian resort in Sinai, where three Arab heads-of-state and their Israeli counterpart put their heads together to come up with a solution. They were Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Palestinian Authority President Machmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The setting was symbolic. Located at the point where the Gulf Of Eilat meets the Red Sea, it was a reminder of the peace between Egypt and Israel that has existed for decades, ever since Israel returned Sinai to Egypt as part of the contract.
All participants expressed hope for a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace process, now that Abbas has formed a new government without Chamas. The Arab leaders urged Israel to accelerate talks toward a speedy peace treaty that would result in Israel and Palestine existing peacefully side by side.
Abbas proposed setting a clear time table for negotiations. He expressed confidence that key issues, such as permanent borders, the so called Right of Return of Palestinian refugees to their original homes, including locations in Israel, and the future of Jerusalem, can be resolved over time. His top priority appeared to be the establishment of the Palestinian state.
Olmert, who favors a more gradual approach, tackling problems step-by-step, agreed to meet with Abbas bi-weekly. His preference is for dealing with the key issues before signing a peace agreement.
A most positive note was sounded by the PA’s new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, whose first name, appropriately, means peace in Arabic. In an interview with CNN last Thursday, Fayyad called for an “intensive and active cooperation” with Israel. He urged Palestinians to lay down their arms. “It’s about time we know what works and what doesn’t work,” he said. Armed resistance to Israeli “occupation” has not worked, he added.
“The simple, basic question (is): Are we better off now than we were then?” he asked, referring to the beginning of the intifada, the rebellion in 2000. “Then, the (situation) was not great. But guess what it is today? It’s catastrophic.”
Israeli critics of Abbas have pointed out over the years that he either has not taken steps to disarm Al Aksa, or has not been able to do so. His new prime minister, a political independent, declared, “Guns and arms are exclusively the property of the official agencies of the National (PA) Authority, meaning that no more will guns out of the purview of the authority...be tolerated.”
But what about the 1.2 million residents of the Gaza Strip, now ruled by Chamas? It is unlikely that the PA will be able to dislodge Chamas, which only two weeks ago defeated the government’s Fatah troops and chased them out of this little strip of land. Moreover, will Abbas be able to keep Chamas from spreading into the West Bank? Just yesterday the Israelis picked up a fully armed Chamas terrorist, perhaps the first of many others.
For those gathered at the Sinai conference one thing was clear, reported the Jewish Telegraph Agency. “A vibrant Israeli-Palestinian peace process could help stop the radical, Iranian-backed power that Chamas represents - and which all four leaders fear - from spreading.”
The picture of Olmert and Abbas shaking hands at the conference in Sinai, smiling at each other, expresses a hope for the future. Yet it’s a long road to peace and coexistence between Arab and Jew.
As Arabs kill Arabs in Gaza and shoot rockets into Israel, while Syria reportedly is preparing for another war against its Jewish neighbor, an encouraging note was sounded last month in Petra, Jordan.
King Abdullah II headed a regional conference of environmentalists, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and political leaders from other countries. A major attraction was a group of young people, all in their 20s, from Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon, Morocco and other Arab countries. Sponsors of the event were Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel’s Foundation For Humanity and the king’s Fund for Development. Wiesel, the conference moderator, said his foundation was ready to provide or raise $10 million for a regional science fund proposed by the king. The fund would sponsor environmental projects suggested by groups all over the region.
Among the young Israelis were two people, a Jew and an Arab, who serve as project managers at the Arava Institute, an environmental study and research center in Southern Israel. They mingled freely with the young Arabs at the conference.
The Arava Institute, founded 10 years ago, has about 40 students, including three Palestinians from the West Bank and 10 Jordanians. They study and live together on Kibbutz Ketura, north of Eilat. Living quarters are being expanded to house 100 students.
The students attend a master’s program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Sde Boker. More than 400 students have been graduated from the Institute. Among the graduates is the son of Jordanian Prime Minister Ma’roof Al-Baskeet.
Funding comes from the Jewish National Fund and other American Jewish groups. At last month’s conference, Jordan’s education minister seemed open to the idea of financing his country’s citizens who attend the Institute.
Wiesel, known through his writings on the Holocaust, and the Arab King Abdullah, were in full partnership. The king told the young people at the conference that they were the core of a new organization for youth exchange in the Middle East, and that there will be funding to organize regular meetings.
Wiesel said, “I think the Arab countries are taking scientific cooperation with Israel very seriously. His Majesty the King is a true associate in this endeavor with the young people. He knows and I know that some of them will be the leaders of tomorrow.”
Amen.
Forty years ago tomorrow, Israel’s air force soared in the skies of Egypt, destroying its 11 air bases. It was the opening of the Six-Day War, in which the Jewish state pre-empted the plans of its Arab enemies for its destruction.
Israeli planes attacked Egypt between 7:45 and 8:15 A.M. A few hours later, they zeroed in on bases in Syria, Jordan and Iraq.
Within six days, Israeli troops crossed the Sinai Desert, then part of Egypt, and reached the Suez Canal. They defeated Jordan, which had occupied what today is known as the West Bank and arrived at the Jordan River. They reunited Jerusalem, the historical part of which had been in the hands of the Jordanians, thus preventing the Israelis and Jews across the world from praying at the Western Wall. In the north, the Israelis defeated the Syrians, occupied the Golan Heights and arrived at some 20 miles outside Damascus.
The picture of three Israeli soldiers, their faces in awe as they stand before the holy wall of the Temple destroyed by the Romans, flashed around the world. Commemorative books appeared with titles like Swift Sword and Lightning Out Of Israel.
Throughout the month of May, Israel had sent its diplomats to the capitals of Europe and to Washington, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser mobilized for war. When these efforts failed and Nasser forced United Nations peacekeepers out of Sinai, replacing them with his own troops, Israel struck.
Over time, Israelis have been accused of being “occupiers” of Palestinian lands. Three more wars with its Arab neighbors and several “rebellions” by Palestinians have followed. But the fact of the matter is that Israel in short order expressed willingness to trade land for peace. There was no advantage for the Jewish state to include hundreds of thousands of Arabs within its population. The war was one of defense, not offense.
Israel’s offers fell on deaf ears. The Arab League, the political union of Arab states, announced the “Three Nos.” At a meeting in Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, the League said there would be no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel, and no peace with Israel.
In the passing years, only two Arab countries have reversed their position - Egypt and Jordan. Both made peace with Israel. Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, even addressed the Israeli Parliament in Jerusalem. The Jewish state was thus forced into the position of administrating and policing Palestinian lands. Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and his colleague Shimon Peres brought Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from exile in Tunis with the hope of negotiating a settlement with the Palestinians. Despite peace agreements in Oslo, which brought all three participants the Nobel Peace Prize, the effort failed. Arafat’s ideological heirs now war among themselves, as well as with Israel.
Over time, thousands of Israelis, following their vision of a Greater Israel along Biblical borders, settled in various parts of the West Bank and Gaza, further complicating the situation. These Religious Zionists believe that returning parts of Biblical Israel to the Arabs would delay the coming of the Messiah. For a time, as peace became more elusive, Israeli governments built settlements as strategic outposts.
Last month Israel observed its 59th year of existence. It has fought six wars to defend itself. A seventh may be just around the corner. Israel’s critics today appear to forget how the war began. They seem to forget that Israel had no alternative if it was to survive. Surrounded by enemies bent on its annihilation, Israel had to strike first. It did. And it won.
At the end of the Six-Day War, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said, “The war is over. Now the trouble begins.”
An international conference on whether the Holocaust took place was held some time ago by Machmud Achmadinejad, president of Iran. Holocaust deniers, that is what those people are called, who claim, as the Iranian did, that the deaths of six million Jews and others in the hands of Adolph Hitler and his executioners were sheer fabrication.
I think the best way to counter these denials is to tell the personal story of one family of Hitler’s victims, some of whose members perished and others who survived. Six million is hard to grasp. The story of one family illustrates the fate of them all.
The family is that of my first cousin, Manfred. His mother, my Aunt Lotti, was my father’s sister. Manfred, like myself, was born in Berlin. When he was eight or nine years old, his parents separated and eventually divorced. His father, Georg, moved to The Netherlands with his second wife and her daughter.
On the way, he met in Paris with my father, Martin, his former brother-in-law, who was returning to his family in Berlin from an exploratory trip to what was then Palestine. Georg convinced my father to stay in Paris and send for my mother and me, which my father did. The year was 1933. Hitler had risen to power only a few months earlier. In 1935, after two years in Paris, we moved to Palestine and safety.
Manfred stayed in Berlin with his mother and our grandmother, Leah. But when he was 11 years old, he went to live with his father in The Netherlands, which Georg considered safe, or certainly safer for Jews than Germany. Besides, Manfred wanted to live with his father. Shortly thereafter, my father, having established himself in Palestine, sent for his mother, sister and brother. When Manfred turned 13, his mother traveled from Palestine to attend his Bar Mitzvah.
When World War II broke out in September, 1939, my parents and I and my father’s siblings were living in Tel Aviv, the first Jewish city since the Romans ravaged Judea nearly two thousand years earlier. In May, 1940, the Germans invaded The Netherlands. Georg, Manfred and their fellow Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David to proclaim their identities, their vulnerability, as they walked about the streets of their country.
Freedom in the occupied land under the flag bearing the swastika was not to last. Within a year, Jewish individuals and families were loaded on cattle cars and shipped to concentration camps. Manfred’s family was one of those.
For a while, Manfred, a teenager, and his father, step-mother and step-sister remained in the same camp, but the women were separated from the men. Manfred was often hungry. His biggest treasures were slices of bread, of which he saved one daily from his ration. He kept his treasure of bread in a trunk by his bed. Eventually he became ill and was separated from the others to receive minimal care. Hungry, he asked his best friend, another inmate, to bring him some of his bread. He entrusted the young man with the key to his trunk.
The friend returned a day or two later, empty handed. He confessed, in tears, that overcome by hunger he ate Manfred’s bread.
Eventually Georg would be shipped away. As he stepped into the cattle car, he turned to his son, saying, “See you in Palestine!” He never did. Georg breathed his last in the gas chambers of Bergen Belsen.
World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. Several months later my aunt learned that Manfred, her only child, had survived. So had Georg’s step-daughter, but not his second wife. Mother and son were not reunited until April 23, 1946. Manfred arrived in Palestine by ship, and his mother met him at the port in the city of Haifa. They had been separated for close to 10 years, during many of which Lotti did not know if she would ever see her child again.
In a diary I kept, and which I still have all these years later, I wrote, “Manfred came yesterday. He is a charming fellow and captures your heart from the first moment. I hope we shall be good friends. I shall teach him Hebrew.”
My aunt lived to see her son married and become a father. Today Manfred lives in a suburb of Tel Aviv with his wife, Tirza. They have a daughter and three grandchildren. He still lives with his memories of the Holocaust. He is 83.
In the United States we celebrate the 4th of July. The French observe it on July 14. The world over, countries large and small observe their Independence Day. Last Monday, Israelis celebrated their 59th year.
But Israelis rejoice in more than their independence. They rejoice in having survived.
The United States does not expect to be threatened by Canada and Mexico. The French today do not worry about possible attacks from their once powerful neighbor, Germany, now its ally in the European Union.
Israel has fought six wars in its brief existence. Enemies are on its borders - the Chezbollah and Syria in the north, Chamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Behind them, figuratively and financially, looms Iran, with its relentless pursuit of nuclear arms and long-range missiles, and its funding of Israel’s enemies. Iran’s president has vowed to “wipe Israel off the globe.”
Israel declared its independence in 1948, even as armies of five Arab countries attacked the fledgling Jewish state, the first since Judea was destroyed by the Roman armies nearly two thousand years earlier.
Today, Israelis, whose country is the size of New Jersey, are almost evenly split on whether their nation will last a century, until 2048. According to a poll published by Yediot Achronot, an evening newspaper, 48 percent of Israelis are concerned as to whether their country will even exist on the centenary of its founding. However, 52 percent of Israelis are not.
Moreover, according to a poll conducted by Maariv, the country’s other evening paper, twenty six percent of Israelis, or one of four, reported they had been thinking in the past year of moving abroad. It also is a fact that Israelis having moving to the United states for better opportunities for decades. Many are professionals, such as physicists, chemists and physicians. An estimated 200,000 of them live in the Los Angeles area, and a larger number in New York City and its suburbs. A contingent of Israelis lives in the Philadelphia area and in New Jersey. Many have family in Israel and visit home frequently.
In an ironic development, Israelis in goodly numbers call Germany home, especially in the Frankfurt area. On a trip to Germany years ago, my wife and I heard Israeli music coming out of a cafe.
On the other hand, Israel’s birth rate rose by 1.8 percent in the past 12 month to a record total population of 7.15 million, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. A total of 148,000 babies arrived in the small state. In fact, however, Arab Israelis multiply at a higher rate than Israeli Jews. Massive immigration prior to and shortly after the creation of Israel, followed by more than a million immigrants from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, helped create a base population for the Jewish state. Today, immigration has trickled to a few thousand annually. Some 1,425,000 Arab and Druze citizens comprise 20 percent of the population.
A small land in a sea of enmity, that is Israel today and so it will be tomorrow. It is the first home of the Jewish people after millennia of persecution, being fenced in behind ghetto walls, burned at the stake, gassed by the millions - the first home since the destruction of their country early in history.
Will the western democracies help Israel survive? Will anyone help Israel survive? As Israel enters its 60th year of existence, it seems as if this little country must depend on itself for survival.
“In every generation some have risen against us to annihilate us, but the Most Holy, blessed be He, always delivered us out of their hands.”
Tomorrow evening, depending on their time zone, Jews the world over will repeat this statement as part of the Seder, the family gathering and the retelling of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt that marks the beginning of Passover.
Some scholars think that the Exodus took place about the middle of the 13th century b.c.e (before the common era, or BC), although tradition gives a date two centuries earlier, according to the New Jewish Encyclopedia.
Despite the passage of thousands of years, the threat to annihilate the Jewish people continues. Even as the Holocaust, or the Shoa, the Hebrew word for disaster, as it is referred to in Israel, is barely beginning to recede into the pages of history, a new threat is looming on the Jewish horizon.
It is the threat of Iran, making haste to create nuclear weapons, whose president, Machmud Achmadinejad, has vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.”
Even as the West sat on its collective hands while Hitler systematically slaughtered millions of Jews, today the Quartet, consisting of the U.S., U.N., the European Union and Russia, seems unable to do anything beyond passing resolutions calling for sanctions, which Iran ignores. At stake, of course, is the rise of an extreme Islamic, clergy-controlled state hell bent on overpowering the Christian West. Iran’s plans for Israel are just part of this much larger goal. Will it fall to Israel, little David, which is said to have nuclear weapons, to try and do what the powerful nations of the West have failed to do to the Iranian Goliath so far?
The Haggadah, the book the tells the story of Passover, begins its narrative by stating, “Slaves we were to the Pharaoh in Egypt.” The narrator also tells us that the Jews were “strangers in a strange land.” Today, these historic and embattled people have their own land once more. But with the remarkable exception of the United States, Jews living in other countries continue to be strangers, subject to growing anti-Semitism.
Passover celebrates the theme of liberation from slavery, certainly a much understood one in the United States, where a large portion of the population descends from slaves. But slavery continues in one form or another in various parts of the world.
And so it seems, on the eve of another Passover celebration, that the themes of slavery and freedom, acceptance and annihilation unfortunately are as valid as they have been since Moses led the Israelites out of bondage these many years ago.
While doing research for a short story I was working on, I came across an entry in The New Jewish Encyclopedia. Information in brackets is mine, added for clarification. Under the heading Migration of the Jews it states the following:
“No other people in the world have been exposed to as many migrations as the Jewish people, hence the legend of the “Wandering Jew.” In the course of their long history, Jews have wandered from place to place because of deportations, expulsions, religious persecutions, economic and political limitations, and because of the never forgotten vow to return to Zion.
“Too numerous to mention, only major migrations are listed here:
“ During the 7th and 6th centuries b.c.e (Before the Common Era, or BC) Jews were deported first from Israel to Assyria (modern day Iraq) and then from Judah (part of today’s Israel) to Babylonia, after the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah respectively.
“ In 538 b.c.e., the Judean refugees began to return to Judah by the permissive decree of the benevolent King Cyrus, who had conquered Babylonia.
“During the period of the Roman persecutions in Palestine in the first and second centuries c.e. (Common Era or AD) Jews again migrated to Babylonia.
“In the 7th and 8th centuries, during the conquests of (by) the Moslems, Jews migrated from Babylonia to Egypt, North Africa and Spain.
“In the 14th century, a Jewish migration because of German anti-Semitism and Polish friendliness, proceeded to Poland from previously established Jewish settlements in Germany.
“In the 15th century many Jews migrated from Spain to the Turkish Empire. (They had been expelled by the Spanish monarchy and fled from the Spanish Inquisition, which forced conversion to Catholicism by fire at the stake.)
“In the 16th century, Jews migrated from Spain to Holland.
“As a result of the Russian pogroms (an official massacre of a minority group) in 1881, thousands of Jews migrated to England and hundreds of thousands to the United States.
“After the first and second World Wars Jews migrated to the Americas and especially to the State of Israel, established in 1948. Israel also has become the haven of thousands of uprooted and persecuted Jews of the Arab countries.
“Under the Nazi regime, as many Jews as could save themselves did so.”
The article is accompanied by a picture of the deck of a ship crammed with men, women and children. The caption underneath explains, “Survivors of the Nazi holocaust aboard the ‘Exodus.’ The British Navy intercepted the ship as it attempted to land the immigrants ‘illegally’ in Palestine and deported them all to Hamburg, Germany.”
They were sitting at a table, playing cards and smoking their narghiles, their water pipes. “One of these days, with Allah’s help, we’ll get them and kill them,” said one of the men.
“We’ll defeat them and destroy them,” said another. The rest of the men nodded in agreement.
The site was a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The year was 1969, two years after Israel defeated several Arab armies, including Jordan and Egypt. It conquered what became the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, reuniting the Holy City.
The camp I was visiting as an American newsman was established in 1948 as a temporary shelter for Palestinians who fled their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. At that time, when Israel was established following the partition of Palestine by the United nations, armies of five Arab countries fought the new state and lost. The war resulted in thousands of Palestinians living in camps or leaving for other Arab countries. The 1967 war brought about a new wave of refugees. Altogether, more than a million Palestinians were caught in the two wars.
Nearly sixty years later, the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip continue to exist, supported with millions of dollars by the international community, including the United States. Unemployment is rampant. In all probability, the scene I witness all those years ago is replayed over and over again. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who moved to other Arab countries like Lebanon and Kuwait have not been accorded citizenship. Two generations later they continue to be refugees in their brethren’s lands.
Whether or not the Palestinians living in other countries have the right to return to their homes in what today is Israel continues to be a major stumbling block to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It was a major reason that the Camp David peace talks under then President Clinton collapsed. While the Israelis agreed to withdraw from nearly all the Palestinian territories, Yasser Arafat would not give in on the return issue. Clinton recalls the talks in his memoir, “My Life.”
And so I was thinking the other day about the cruelties of war and the realities that their victims must face. My parents were born and lived in what was then the city of Pozen in Germany. My mother’s family owned a hotel, a restaurant and a stationery store. My father’s family owned a shoe store. When Germany lost World War I, my family fled to Berlin, to the heart of their country. Pozen was conquered by the Poles, becoming part of Poland. As ironic as it sounds today, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, there was a time when German Jews considered themselves Germans. Bottom line: my family lost everything when they fled. Poland never offered them the right to return.
In the years since Israel became a state, hundred of thousands of Jews have fled the Arabic countries, their homes for centuries, and settled in Israel. They were offered no right of return. Chances are they would not go back where they are not wanted.
Israel and the Arabs have fought six wars in sixty years, with another looming on the horizon. Many have died on both sides. If Israel were to permit a million Arabs to return to what once were their homes in what today is the Jewish land, Israelis would become a minority in their own country within a few decades. Israel will have won the battle but lost the war.
Young men shooting at each other, stoning each other, smashing cars, setting them on fire. Buildings burning.
The scene is not Baghdad. It is Beirut, Lebanon, where Chezbollah and its head, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, are trying hard to bring down Lebanon's democratically elected government. Behind Nasrallah is Syria, Lebanon's neighbor, which was forced to give up its domination of the small land on the Mediterranean by the U.N. and the West some time ago. And behind Syria is Iran, whose prime minister has vowed to erase Israel from the map.
The young men battling each other are university students, divided over whether the government should stay or succumb to a Chezbollah takeover. The issue Nasrallah has raised and for which he blames the government is the delay in rebuilding parts of Lebanon severely damaged by the Israelis during the war last summer. Whole families live in tents because reconstruction is slow.
But who started the war last July? Who shot thousands of rockets into Israel, to which the Jewish state responded in kind? And who used residential areas as staging grounds for their rockets, hiding among the civilian population?
The answer is well known. Ironically, the United States has just pledged close to a billion dollars in aid to Lebanon towards the reconstruction. These are American taxpayer dollars that may fall into the hands of Chezbollah. It seems our pockets have no bottom.
Moreover, the war only ended less than five months ago. The Lebanese government has not had much time to rebuild the damage.
Of equal concern are reports that Chezbollah has been rearming, right under the nose of the U.N. peacekeeping forces. The Israelis, as the result of last year's war, have been reorganizing their general staff and have appointed a new chief-of-staff.
It seems as if both sides are preparing for another round. Israel will not be caught by surprise a second time.
At the Gaza Strip the two Palestinian factions, Chamas and Fatah, continue their mini civil war, while Chamas fires rockets into Israel. Then, of course, there is Iraq and there is Pakistan. And the Russians have just sold million of dollars (or rubles) worth of missiles to Iran, the latest nuclear bomb maker.
Has no one learned anything from all the death and dying?
The new year brings with it serious threats to the future of Israel. During conversations with family members in Tel Aviv last week, one of them told me, “You have to be an optimist to live in Israel.†The other said, “You have to have courage.†Both were probably right.
But then, it always has been thus. I was reflecting on my life while growing up in Tel Aviv, from the time my parents and I arrived in 1935, until I left for the United States in January, 1948. Peace always eluded us.
I was about six years old when the Arabs set fire to Jewish houses on the border of Jaffa, the Arabic city, and Tel Aviv, the Jewish city, whose name means the Hill of Spring in Hebrew. Today at age 77, I still recall the flames in the night lighting up the horizon, and men, women and children on a field of red poppies in front of our apartment house - refugees, made homeless by their enemies.
World War II temporarily halted the strife between Jew and Arab, as British troops by the thousands camped in Palestine, then under British rule, while the Germans moved upon us from North Africa. Their Italian allies bombed Tel Aviv many a night. My family would rush down from our third floor walk-up apartment to a room in the ground floor apartment of the landlord. The room was fortified by wooden beams, but I doubt very much that they would have held up in case of a strike nearby, much less during a direct hit. Luckily the Italians were poor shots. Most of the bombs landed in the sea.
The conflict between Arabs and Jews resumed at the end of the war, intensifying as the United Nations voted to partition Palestine between the two. The British, partial to the Arabs, did their best to disarm the Jews. They would declare curfews, forcing residents of Tel Aviv and other places to stay at home, as British soldiers conducted house-to-house searches for weapons.
Travel between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem became filled with danger. I used to visit family in Jerusalem for Passover as a youngster. By 1947, travel in a bus or car no longer was safe. Instead, convoys were formed, protected by armed members of the Hagana, the Jewish underground defense force. In the fall of 1947, the convoy in which I was returning home from Jerusalem was ambushed by Arabs. Luckily no one in my taxi was injured, but as I remember it, one man was killed in another car.
And so it was even in the spring of 1969, two years after Israel's victory during the Six-Day War. I had been in Israel on assignment from my newspaper, the Newark (NJ) Evening News, for several weeks, when my wife, Dalia, a native of Haifa, and our three children were to join me for a visit. A few days before their arrival, a bomb went off two blocks from my apartment. They came anyway.
My eldest son, Peter, would be Bar Mitzvah that year, meaning he was about to celebrate his 13th birthday. My second son, Wally, would be six years old. Our daughter, Ronni Beth, was still a baby. I wanted Peter especially to understand what Israel meant to the Jewish people. The Hebrew words are Kibbutz Galuyot, the in-gathering of the Diaspora.
How would I explain this vital concept to a child?
I found the answer in a most unexpected place, a movie theater. On the screen was a Charlie Chaplin movie I had seen as a child, and thought my children would enjoy it too. The theater was packed with children and mostly mothers. A subtitle appeared in English. Too late I recalled the movie was silent. And Peter turned to me and said out loud, “:Dad! Wally can't read!â€
There, in the dark, voices in many languages read out loud to their children, who had come from many countries. In this Babel, my sons and I were part of it all. Peter, now fifty, remembered it just the other day. I am glad the bomb a few days before their arrival did not deter us from having our children make the visit to the land of Israel. Hopefully they will take their children to visit Israel some day, with courage and optimism.
It has only been hours since the Iraq Study Group has released its recommendations. As a veteran - Korea - and as an American with ties to the Middle East, I fully agree with the Commission's proposals. Iraq has become a monstrous mistake, and we need to get our men and women out of there as soon as possible.
I am puzzled, however, by the Commission's linking the solution to the conflict in Iraq with accelerating peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. There even is a specific recommendation: Israel is to give up the Golan Heights, which it won from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967.
On a spring day in 1968, I spent a morning on the Golan Heights, in the abandoned city of Kuneitra, where a cat lamented among vacant building and signs swinging in the breeze. My Israeli guide, the assistant military governor, pointed to the sprawling Israeli settlements in the valley below. “From high up here they fired at us and bombed us,†he said. “And we had no defense. That was why we had to take the heights away from the Syrians. And it cost us some of our best men.â€
First, there is no connection between the violence in the two regions. Iraq was ruled by a tyrant, who subjugated his people through terror. Ten years before the American invasion of Iraq, Sadam Hussein invaded oil-rich Kuwait. The US and its allies drove him back into his borders, after which they subjugated him to a series of sanctions. Fast forward to some four years ago. Sadam Hussein reportedly possessed weapons of mass destruction and served as a base for terrorists whose goal it is to destroy the West. September 11, 2001 was the turning point. Hussein's die was cast.
I wonder what any of this has to do with Israel. The conflict between Jew and Arab goes back to the return of the Zionists to Palestine toward the end of the 19th century. It has nothing to do with conflicting Muslim sects, as it does in Iraq. It is a struggle over land, with the only possible solution being the creation of two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side.
Unfortunately, despite occasional promises of success, the so called peace process has stalled. Chamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization, was elected by the Palestinians to a majority in their parliament. The prime minister belongs to Chamas. The president of the Palestinian Authority appears powerless. His own party, Fatah, includes a terrorist wing. At times the two groups conduct bloody clashes in Gaza. At this point Israel has no one to negotiate with.
Israel already experienced giving up land unilaterally. Only last year, one of Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon's major actions was the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip. It earned Israel nothing at all. Chamas has been raining rockets into Israel proper daily, killing and wounding innocent civilians. The Israeli withdrawal offered them a much improved launching pad.
In the south, Chamas has been smuggling millions of dollars worth of weapons and explosives through one hundred tunnels dug from Egypt into Gaza. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian government employees have not been paid for months and the economy is in shables.
How do you negotiate with an enemy who wants to drive you into the sea?
As for the Golan Heights, Israel would hardly return them to the country that together with Iran financed and otherwise supported the Chezbollah, which last July began a month-long war against Israel. Israelis spent long nights and days in shelters as Chezbollah's rockets crashed above them. The Golan Heights would have given Israel's enemies a first-rate base for attack.
Gentlemen of the Commission, when was the last time any of you took a trip to the Golan Heights?
This brings me to President Carter's book, “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,†released about a week ago. Surely you are aware, Mr. President, of Israel's efforts at peace, Yassir Arafat's double dealings of yes and no, the failure of Camp David, in which Israel offered him almost everything he wanted.
As a Jew, born in Berlin, whose family found refuge from Hitler in what was then Palestine, I am proud of my link to the Jewish State. I also know the truth, which is that the memory of the Holocaust is receding, and the Jews are once more blamed for one thing or another. Hopefully they won't be made to pay.
The picture on the front page of the Jewish Exponent, the Philadelphia weekly, shows two men armed with tools, smiling into the camera. They are standing amidst ruins. The caption tells us, “Two members of Chamas prepare explosives inside the offices of an old Israeli army leadership building in the former Jewish settlement of Netsarem in the Gaza Strip.â€
It is from there that Ariel Sharon, then prime minister, last year withdrew the Israeli settlers and the military unilaterally, as a gesture of peace toward the Palestinians.
Sharon has been comatose since last January following a stroke. So is the “road map†for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
An Associated Press photographer from Spain was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip by Palestinian gunmen recently. The photographer, Emilio Morenatti, 37, had just left his Gaza City apartment, when he and Majed Hamdan, an Associated Press driver and translator, were approached by four gunmen. The gunmen pressed a gun to Hamdan's head and told him to run away, according to the AP report. They then pushed Morenati into the trunk of a car and sped off.
In the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza have kidnapped more then 20 Westerners, many of them journalists and aid workers. In many cases the kidnappers were seeking jobs or money, and in most cases those captured were released unharmed within a day.
But then there is the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Chamas several months ago. He remains in the hands of his enemies. If he is alive, that is.
Also in their enemies' hands are two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Chezbollah guerrillas last July at the start of the war in Lebanon. If they are alive, that is.
Israel continues the flights of its combat planes over Lebanon despite a United Nations- sponsored cease-fire that went into effect last August 14. The Lebanese government and the UN sponsored peace-keeping force say the Israeli flights violate the cease-fire resolution.
But Israel says the missions are necessary to help ensure that arms are not smuggled into southern Lebanon from Syria to re-supply Chezbollah. “So long as attempts to smuggle arms into Lebanon persist, the legitimacy of Israeli overflights increases,†says Amir Perez, the Israeli defense minister. “We have no intention of stopping the flights.â€
At the same time, Lebanese Prime minister Fuad Saniora has rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's offer to begin peace talks, since, after all, the war between Israel and Chezbollah guerrillas has ended. Olmert said he wanted “to forge peace†between the two countries.
Saniora's office declined the invitation, saying the Lebanese premier “had announced more than once that Lebanon would be the last Arab country†to make peace with the Jewish state.
Back in Israel, towns and settlements are shelled by Chamas, which, in turn, is engaged in mortal combat with Fatah in the streets of Gaza. At the same time, President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority is trying to dispose of the Chamas-controlled Parliament, as Chamas' militia reportedly smuggles millions of dollars worth of arms into the Gaza Strip from Egypt through tunnels.
James Carroll, a columnist on the Boston Globe, recently commenting about the war in Iraq, wrote the following words easily applicable to the conflict between Israel and its neighbors, as well as to more than 30 wars and rebellions taking place around the globe:
“Life is too brief to waste it. And what is more wasteful than war? When we humans are in touch with the common fate that awaits us all, the bond between us becomes unbreakable. Not only that each of us will die, but also that each one knows it.
“That knowledge, once claimed, is the source of our inevitable compassion, and is the ground of the communion that is our species' natural condition. War, therefore, is not the normal state, but the aberration. On that bond of common fate and common knowledge rests every hope for peace.â€
Judaism and Islam. Intertwining faiths. Now is the time to reflect upon this, as holidays coincide, overlap.
Sundown tomorrow, October 1, marks the beginning Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most important Jewish holiday of the year. After an evening meal and attendance at services in the synagogue, man, woman and child beginning at age thirteen fast until the following evening. Much of the day is spent at services, during which they reflect upon their conduct during the year that just passed on the Jewish calendar. They pray for forgiveness for themselves and their brethren under the concept of mutual responsibility.
Today Muslims around the world are completing the first week of Ramadan, the month when the Quran (Koran), the Muslims' holy book, was revealed to their prophet, Muhammad . It is the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, throughout which believers fast daily and concentrate on their faith. It is a time for worship and contemplation. During Ramadan, Muslims go to the masjid (Mosque) and spend several hours praying and studying the Quran.
The Quran tells them to beware of breaking several commandments. Students of the Bible will find that some of these were included in the Ten Commandments which Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai.
Coincidentally, this year the first day of Ramadan fell on Rosh Hashana, the holiday marking the first day of the Jewish year.
With Iran threatening to annihilate Israel, and armed Chezbollah forces lingering in Lebanon, this would be a good time to reflect on what Muslims and Jews have in common rather than on what drives them apart.
One could argue that it is not religion but politics that form the sticking point. But could not what they have in common be a good start?
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his own solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Wipe Israel off the map.â€
He so declared a few months ago. The other evening, in an interview on CNN while attending the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, he expressed some additional thoughts. “The Jews should return to where they came from,†he said. “Palestine is not their homeland.â€
“The Jews came to Palestine from other lands,†he continued. “They have no historical background (there), and now they rule the Palestinians.â€
He further suggested that “Jews, Muslims and Christians†living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, “should vote about creating a single state.†This vote would take place after generations of Palestinian Arab refugees, who fled during wars started by their own people, and now live in other countries, have returned to their former homes in Palestine and Israel. The outcome, of course, would be predictable: The Arab majority would win.
It seems the president of Iran does not know history, including that of his own country, once known as Persia. Or perhaps he just ignores it. The same applies to a major tenet of Islam, as stated in the Koran.
Can he truly believe that that the Jews have no historical background in the Holy Land? Whose holy land was it to begin with?
The Koran states Mohammed was the last in the line of prophets that included Moses and Jesus. Moses, who, the Bible tells us, led the Israelites to what today are Israel, Palestine, Jordan and parts of Syria. And where does the Iranian president think Jesus of Nazareth came from? Jesus, whose Hebrew name was Yeshu, and whose home town to this day is in the Galilee, yes, in the northern part of Israel, where thousands of rockets fired by Chezbollah landed just a few weeks ago.
Moslems also believe that the Archangel Gabriel came to Mohammed with a Divine message. That is the same Gabriel mentioned in the Bible, or in what Christians call the Old Testament, and whose name means Man of God in Hebrew.
And then there is the history of Iran, once known as Persia. In fact, it was only in 1935 that the current name of Iran was universally recognized. Cyrus, who became emperor of Persia in 550 B.C, conquered the Babylonian empire eleven years later. That empire comprised much of the Middle East, including Judea and its capital, Jerusalem. The Babylonians had exiled the Judeans and destroyed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
“On the rivers of Babylon we sat and cried when we remembered Zion,†the Book of Lamentations tells us. The rivers of Babylon are the Euphrates and the Tigris, still flowing after all these years, in modern day Iraq. Zion is the name of a mountain in the heart of Jerusalem.
Shortly after he conquered Babylon, Emperor Cyrus issued a proclamation allowing the Judeans, or Jews, as they became known later, to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple. The Western Wall is what remains of the rebuilt temple after it was destroyed once more, this time by the Romans.
No historical background?
The Arabs came out of their peninsula some 1200 years after the Judeans returned from exile in Babylon. They settled in much of the Middle East, while the Jews, having been exiled by the Romans, were scattered throughout Europe and later across the globe.
And then the Judeans began returning to Zion. That is where they are today, more than five million strong. They no longer sit on any rivers, crying.
With the cease-fire between Israel and Chezbollah more or less in place, attention is focused once more on Israel and the Palestinians: Can they make peace? Can two states of Israel and Palestine co-exist? Could Sheik Nasrallah become obsolete?
The answer to all three questions is one big NO. This became clear in an interview with a key Palestinian figure, published today in Haaretz, the leading Israeli newspaper.
He is Achmed Yusef, the political adviser to the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Yusef is a member of Chamas, the terrorist organization which won the Palestinian parliamentary elections earlier this year. So, of course, is Ismael Haniya, the prime minister.
In the interview, Yusef said the members of Chamas, even the moderate ones, are unwilling to give up “the old dream that Israel will simply disappear.†He tried to explain “in a calm voice,†according to the article, that the fate of the Jews is to be absorbed by the Arab countries. “It is a matter of time,†Yusef said. “You have remained a conquering, foreign body in an Arabic area.â€
“You can live with us in peace under Arabic rule, as it already happened in history,†Yusef continued. “Even in Israel you don’t have it as good as you had it in the Golden Age under Muslim rule.†The reference is to the Arab rule of Spain in the Middle Ages. The Jews flourished under the relative religious freedom accorded to them, and contributed significantly to the economic and cultural development of Spain.
According to Yusef, both sides in the conflict now must agree on a cease-fire, rather than on a complete peace agreement. “We (the Palestinians and Israelis) are not going to solve all the problems now,†Yusef said. “Let’s at least arrive at a partial solution.â€
“Afterwards, there will come wiser men, in 10-15 years, and they will decide what is best for them,†he continued. “Until then, it is possible to reach an agreement that we shall sit quietly and take care of our affairs, while you (Israelis) take care of yours.â€
Would the United States invite Britain to come back and take over Washington? Could the Israelis accept the idea of giving up existence as a state and choose to live under Palestinian rule? Or even consider that as a future option, as Yusef suggests? What other people have been asked to return to a time in history 1300 years ago?
The scary, depressing thing about Achmed Yusef is his important role in the Palestinian hierarchy. If he truly reflects the position of the Chamas-dominated government, peace between Jew and Arab is a long way off.
Some time ago a reader asked me to describe how it was to grow up in Tel Aviv. I recently celebrated my 77th birthday. Considering that I only spent 13 years of my life in what was to become Israel, I reflected on how much this brief period shaped my attitudes toward war and peace.
The period under consideration stretched from 1935 to the start of 1948, turbulent years. Arabs and Jews fighting over this sliver of land. Jewish terrorists - that was what the public called them - fighting the British and the Arabs. World War II and the Italians, allies of the Germans, bombing Tel Aviv. Defacto peace between Arabs and Jews for the duration of that war, and then, the restart of hostilities leading to Israel’s War of Independence.
And yet there was the other side of the picture: The beach, where you enjoyed the clear, blue waters of the Mediterranean from early spring through fall. The Sabbath in the summertime, when my Papa - father in German, my native tongue- wearing a brown, striped bathrobe, led the family two blocks from our apartment to the beach. It was packed with families in folding chairs with little roofs attached. Children built sand castles, adults played ping pong in the air. Saturday afternoon concerts of classical music were conducted in the outdoor cafe of what later became the Dan Hotel.
The beach also was where I spent the summer when I was old enough to meet with 5th or 6th grade classmates by the second lifeguard station. When I visited my elementary school in 2000, everything was the same - the large, white washed two-story building with its older annex, the classroom where I spent eighth grade - except for one thing: There was a guard at the entrance armed with a rifle.
I still remember when we arrived by boat in Jaffa in 1935. Tel Aviv had no harbor then. Ships arriving in Jaffa anchored way off shore because Jaffa had no deep water harbor. Passengers climbed down a ladder made of rope. I remember an Arab picking me up, off the ladder, and placing me in a boat. My parents followed. When the boat was full, he and another man rowed us ashore. I think about it now - two Arabs welcomed a boat load of Jews to Palestine. In light of subsequent events, it remains remarkable, even if they made a living at it.
War and peace. They alternated. And yet the flow of life continued. My mother made my costumes for the holiday of Purim, which celebrates how Jews living in Persia were spared annihilation. Persia is Iran today. Its leader wants to “wipe Israel off the earth.†What’s changed?
For Passover we traveled by bus over the hills of Judea to Jerusalem, where we attended the Seder at the home of a rabbi, a friend of the family. Passover celebrates the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the land God had promised them. “In each generation someone wants to annihilate us, and in each generation God saves us,†the Haggada, the book of Passover, tells us. It was the message I grew up with.
When I was 10 years old we moved to an apartment on Hagilboa Street, unpaved, sandy, and just a block long. For us kids it was like playing in a giant sandbox. Like most apartment houses, ours had no elevator. We lived on the third floor. Running down concrete steps to the bomb shelter during World War II wasn’t easy when sleep was disrupted many a night by air raid alarms. But by day, my father went to work, I walked to school half an hour away, and my mother often went to the outdoor market, which still existed the last time I was there, in 2000.
There only were two traffic lights in all of Tel Aviv, as best I recall, because not many people had cars. But my Dad and his brother sported motorcycles. Like many others, we had no phone. I still remember seeing people standing in line at a public phone in the local pharmacy, out in the open because there was no telephone booth.
Our apartment on Hagilboa Street had three rooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom, of course, with a toilet housed separately, as is the custom in Europe. One of the rooms was occupied by a young couple who rented it directly from the landlord. The women shared the kitchen. The young husband liked to read in the toilet. Sometimes my grandmother, who lived with us, would bang on the toilet door.
My trip to what is now Ben Grunion Airport, on my way to America, was in an armored car. It was January 8, 1948. I heard the sound of bullets hitting metal. I have never been afraid.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah must have read my blog. Somewhat belatedly, perhaps. But just the other day he was quoted as saying that he regretted having provoked Israel into war. He said he didn’t think Israel would react the way she did.
That was exactly what I asked him in my blog of July 28, as Israel’s might exploded over southern Lebanon, destroying residential areas and killing civilians among whom he and his guerrillas, Chezbolla, were dug in. “If I had an opportunity to meet Sheik Hassan Nasrallah...I would ask him what he was trying to accomplish by provoking Israel into war,†I wrote.
Well, okay. Now he is sorry about the death and destruction he caused his fellow Lebanese. But what was he thinking when his “Resistance,†as it is now called, crossed the border into Israel, killed several soldiers and kidnapped another two? Did he think Israel would ignore this assault? This violation of its sovereignty?
The fact is, he had been preparing for The Big One for years. Last Sunday, Israeli troops discovered a huge cavern just across the border from its village of Rosh Hanikrah on the shores of the Mediterranean. The cavern was deep and spacious. It included Chezbollah’s usual rocket launchers found in similar underground installations in the eastern part of Lebanon. Also located were numerous other kinds of weapons and a munitions manufacturing facility. Lest the “Resistance†fighters get dirty while doing their killing, there also were showers.
An Israeli officer whose men discovered this “Siegfried Line†- Hitler’s bunkers along his border with France - said it was so well hidden you had to be within a few meters to discover it.
Sorry?
Nasrallah still holds the two Israeli soldiers. He has said not a word about their future, or even if they are still alive.
There are those in Israel who also regret their country’s swift and massive reaction to the sheik’s provocation. But according to press reports, Israel’s top leaders expected a short war with a big prize: The destruction of Chezbollah.
So much for Israeli intelligence. Shades of the “slam dunk†the U.S. expected in Iraq.
Children caught in war, innocent victims of adult madness. They are the ones that pay the highest price.
The war between Israel and Chezbollah may be over for the moment. Perhaps in limbo is the better term. But the children of Israel and Lebanon have been victims of war for decades.
I visited both sides of the border in June, 1980, as a reporter for the Evening Bulletin. My story began as follows:
Metullah, Israel -- Aviad Belsky is 11 years old. Madelaine deBakey is 10.
Aviad is an Israeli. Madelaine lives across the border, in Marjayoun, Lebanon.
They are separated by three miles of rocky, arid land and rows of barbed wire.
They are children of war.
“The shells don’t scare me,†Aviad says bravely. “A few minutes after the shelling ends, I’m out on my bike looking for shrapnel for my collection.†Then his voice drops. “I do get scared sometimes,†he adds. “The terrorists scare me.â€
Aviad and Madelaine and thousands of children like them on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border are caught in several wars.
There is the war between the Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), now ensconced in Lebanon. There is the war between the PLO (composed mostly of the Suni Moslem sect) and the Christians and Shi’te Moslems in Lebanon. Marjayoun is a Christian village.
Then there are the Syrians, swallowing up much of neighboring Lebanon. And lastly, there is the civil war between the Lebanese Christians and Lebanese Moslems, interrupted by an occasional cease-fire.
“I don’t like war,†says Madelaine, a lovely child with blue eyes and black hair. She sits straight up in a chair in the living room of her parents’ apartment and speaks softly in the quiet of the noon hour while the village rests.
“I still remember when it was peace,†Madelaine says. “It was very nice when it was peace. I was very small then. I played with my friends and I wasn’t afraid.â€
* * *
August, 2006. What has changed? I don’t know whatever happened to Aviad and Madelaine. I hope they managed to reach adulthood. But the Christians long ago were driven out of Marjayoun, where they were replaced by Chezbollah. It was a major battleground in the recent war.
I don’t know if there are any children in Marjayoun, where Chezbollah was dug in. There surely are children in Metullah. What will their fate be?
The international peace-keeping force of 15,000, called for in UN resolution 1701, has yet to be formed. Chezbollah is keeping its arms despite a previous UN resolution calling for its disarmament. Lebanon’s army of 40,000, which is supposed to patrol the Lebanese-Israeli border, reportedly is ill trained and ill equipped. Many of its soldiers are said to be allied with Chezbollah.
Under the circumstances, the Israelis have stopped withdrawing from Lebanon. Occasionally they bomb bridges and routes through which they say Iranian weapons are flowing to Chezbollah to replace those it lost.
A little boy riding home in the family car, back to southern Lebanon, was smiling on CNN the other evening. Then, when he saw the ruins of his house, he broke into tears.
I still remember rushing to the air raid shelter as a child growing up in Tel Aviv during World War II. Till this day I am unnerved by fire crackers on the 4th of July.
It was the last week of the war between Israel and Chezbollah. Israeli troops crossed the border and seized the barracks of the Lebanese army in Marjayoun. While there, they had tea with the Lebanese general.
Enemies met on a human level. Instead of killing each other they socialized. Brigadier General Adnan Daoud even gave the Israelis a personal tour of the barracks. After a day, they parted. The occupiers allowed the general and his 350 troops to leave.
Not a shot was fired. No one was captured. No one was kidnapped or held for future prisoner exchange. It was hello and good-bye.
Too bad the Lebanese government did not see it that way. Last week Gen. Daoud was arrested and held for questioning. He is at risk of being charged with treason.
It is easy to see why the general didn’t resist the Israelis. They arrived with armor. His garrison was only lightly armed. And so, by not resisting in vain, he saved the lives of his men and even gained their release. Having tea with smiling Israeli soldiers demonstrated, as far as I’m concerned, that he did not truly consider them his enemies. After all, it was not his war. It was not Lebanon’s war. It was Chezbollah’s war.
Unfortunately for the general, last Wednesday, on the third day of the cease-fire, a videotape of the Marjayoun tea party aired on Israeli television and was carried by a Lebanese station as well. The war was over, but not for the general. His country signed an armistice with Israel in 1949, as Israel’s war of independence ended. But Lebanon does not recognize Israel, and its laws forbid any dealings with its unwanted neighbor.
The incident is a fair illustration of the hopelessness for peace in the area. Israel ended its occupation of southern Lebanon six years ago. It was an occupation prompted by Yassir Arafat, when he established an operating base there for the PLO. Subsequently, Lebanon was wracked by a 15-year-long civil war, and was under the yoke of its Syrian neighbor for an equally long time. You would think that peace with Israel would be like a breath of fresh air for the Lebanese.
But no. Of course no peace. General Daoud made peace in his own way, over a cup of tea. I hope they remember him when the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.
So Chezbollah won’t disarm despite the conditions of the UN-sponsored cease-fire. Was that a surprise to anybody?
UN Resolution 1701 clearly prohibits the carrying of arms in combat weary South Lebanon, except by the Lebanese Army and the 15,000 member UN Peace Keeping Force, which will replace the Israeli troops as they withdraw. After days of negotiations, during which Chezbollah made it clear it won’t disarm, the Lebanese government and Chezbollah reached a compromise: Chezbollah will be allowed to carry arms, but not in public.
“Of all the Arabs, only the Resistance (Chezbollah) and its weapons have succeeded in standing up to Israel and overcoming her,†said the president of Lebanon. “These weapons no one can take away from the Resistance, and certainly not by force of arms.â€
Clearly, then, armed Chezbollah remains in Southern Lebanon. Israel will be back at its borders. The French defense minister, whose country will contribute troops to the UN force, expressed hope that the new unit will have “real power.†The Italian general in charge of his country’s troops in the UN force, said, “If we look at past experience, we’ll have to admit that UN forces have failed, sometimes ending in a real catastrophe.â€
UN Resolution 1701 is not being fully complied with. So what else is new?
The UN resolution calling for a cease-fire has been violated after being in effect for just a few hours. Chezbollah shot dozens of rockets toward Israel, which was the way it started the war. Ironically, the rockets failed to make it across the border. They landed in Lebanon, instead. Israeli troops in Lebanon killed six Chezbollah fighters who appeared on the attack.
At best this is a tenuous cease fire. There is little question that both sides expect a return match. Israel so far has fought six wars in 58 years to survive. The hatred of Arabs against Israelis worsens with each generation that is taught to hate the Yahud, the Jew. This is particularly true in Palestine, where Jew baiting is part of the school curriculum.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah declared yesterday, when the cease-fire went into effect, “a wonderful day.†He spoke on Chezbollah’s television station. Moments afterwards, celebratory gun shots were heard throughout Beirut. “We have won a strategic and historic history over Israel,†Nasrallah declared. “And that’s no exaggeration.â€
As thousands of Lebanese streamed back home in Southern Lebanon, I wondered how long it would be before another war begun by Chezbollah would once more send them fleeing back north again. As the Israeli government told its population in the north to emerge from their air raid shelters, where just on Sunday, the day before the cease fire went into effect, 260 rockets landed, I wondered how long it would be before their lives are in danger again.
A month? A year? Yesterday, the chairman of the Lebanese Parliament, who represents Chezbollah in the Lebanese government, talked about uniting behind “the Resistance,†as he calls Chezbollah. He talked about “the next phase,†and about standing “shoulder to shoulder with the Resistance and the (Lebanese) nation.â€
Resistance to what? To the existence of Israel, of course. Those critical of Israel’s 18-year occupation of Southern Lebanon will have to admit that it ended six years ago. Israel withdrew its troops as the result of pressure by its own citizens. Four Israeli mothers who lost their sons in Lebanon, spearheaded a movement to bring the boys home. The boys did go home, but not for long.
Two boys are still in the hands of their enemy. They are the soldiers Chezbollah kidnapped that fateful July 12. Their return is not even a full part of the UN resolution, which merely “emphasizes†the need to return them. That language falls short of the two other portions of the resolution, in which the UN “calls for†a cease-fire and for the removal of Chezbollah forces south of the Litani River. The phrase “calls for†carries the weight of international law, and is thus stronger than the word “emphasizes.â€
Family members of the two soldiers met Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, seeking clarification of the soldiers’ status resulting from the UN resolution. “Tomorrow morning, or in a few days, all the Israeli soldiers will leave Lebanon. The only two remaining, unarmed, will be my brother and Udi (the other soldier),†said a family member after the meeting.
I feel for the two mothers. Will their boys ever come home?
“It was only a month ago that I was in the South of Lebanon listening to the radio.. the station was being broadcast from Israel.. they were playing great music from the 80's... I was listening.. enjoying the tranquility.. and thinking about how similar we were.â€
So wrote Zena, my fellow blogger from Beirut, just the other day. I have not met her or talked with her. But I know she is right when she thinks about how similar we are, Jews and Arabs, Arabs and Jews.
We are all human beings, or bnei Adam, sons of Adam – as it is said in Hebrew. Arabs and Jews are Semites, of the same racial origin. We all emerged from the Arab peninsula, although at different times. The Arabs consider the Jewish patriarch Abraham and his son, Ishmael, their forefathers.
In modern times, Jews and Arabs have lived side by side in peace when given the chance. Until the intifada of 2000, thousands of Palestinians crossed into Israel each day to work. I met one of them at a hotel in Tel Aviv, where my wife and I were staying some years ago. He supervised the maintenance crew and served as concierge. He was proud of his job. He probably doesn’t work there anymore.
Perhaps the most dramatic reunion of Arabs and Jews occurred in 1967. A defeat for Jordan, a victory for Israel, it was the unification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War. For 19 years, during which Jordan occupied the West Bank and part of Jerusalem, Arab and Jew were separated by war and barbed wire. Even before the Israeli government declared it safe, thousands of Israelis streamed into what is called the Old City, where the Western Wall of the Second Temple and the Tower of David stand. Simultaneously, Arabs visited the Jewish portion of Jerusalem, moving about freely, renewing friendships and business ties broken off when El Kuds, as the Arabs call Jerusalem, was cut in two.
Soon afterwards, I was in Israel on assignment for my newspaper and interviewed the Arab owner of the St. George, a first class hotel in the Arab sector. “Jewish friends, whom I had not seen since 1948, have come to visit me,†he said. “And you know, there were many friendships amongst ourselves and the Jews in the old days. So these friendships are now being renewed.â€
“At first, we would have debates, which would end in bitter arguments,†he continued. “And then we decided that if we’re going to be friends again, it must be as individuals. We must leave out politics. And that’s what we do.â€
Selma Link, my aunt, now deceased, was among an early throng of Jewish Jerusalemites to visit the Old City. “I just cried,†she recalled, relaxing on the veranda of her apartment in the residential section of Rechavia. “I touched the old stones and the walls. The Western Wall? What can I say? It was like a thirst that drove us all into the Old City, a thirst we had suffered from for 19 years. And you know, I am in the Old City every week. I love to walk the alleys and shop in the Arab bazaars. I don’t care that the shopkeepers are Arabs. This is all part of Jerusalem.â€
Zena writes, “I know our neighbors are in pain too... so I wonder why and how this is all allowed to happen. So absolutely pointless.â€
I totally agree. But by now it is common knowledge that Chezbollah crossed the border into Israel, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and began firing missiles into Galilee. It is also clear that Sheik Nazrallah, head of Hezbollah, has been preparing for this war for a long time.
Could Israelis and Lebanese Arabs live side by side in peace again, as they did just a few weeks ago? As they did when Zena was in Southern Lebanon, listening to an Israeli radio station? I very much hope so. Clearly, if nothing else, they like the same music.
August 11, 2006
An item caught my eye the other day about a different kind of destruction in the Israel - Chezbollah war. It concerned the thousands of acres of forests set on fire by Chezbollah rockets in northern Galilee. A spokesman for the Israeli government estimated it would take 50 years to repair the damage, to plant new trees and bring them to maturity.
It reminded me of a day in 1969, when my two sons and I journeyed to Modiin to plant trees. Dalia, born in Haifa, and I, who grew up in Tel Aviv, were visiting Israel with the boys and our baby daughter to show them the land we had come from. On a warm summer day I took the boys on a trip sponsored by the Jewish National Fund, which had been collecting money for generations and planting trees in a land nature did not bless with them.
We were going on a JNF bus from Tel Aviv to Modiin, where once Matityahu, the zealous head of the Chashmonaim family, signaled a revolt against the Greeks, who ruled the Jewish homeland more than 2,000 years ago. He, his son, Judah the Maccabee, and their followers left as their legacy the holiday of Hanukkah.
My son Peter, who would be Bar Mitzvah that year, said he wished we had gone to the beach instead. His brother, Wally, said, “How am I going to plant a whole tree? I’m only six years old!â€
Desolation surrounded us. This was the place we had come to turn green by paying two dollars apiece for an experience. At least I hoped it would be an experience for my boys.
We climbed a small hill, as part of the long line of men, women and children, young and old, many armed with movie and still cameras. Atop the hill there were scores of holes dug in the ground. A JNF employee handed a seedling of pine to each of us as our turn came. Each planter put the seedling into a hole, then threw dirt on it and watered it with a can of water handed to him by another JNF employee.
Wally sighed with relief when he saw the seedlings. They were not too big for him after all. His and Peter’s turn came at last. I aimed my movie camera at them, as Peter planted his tree and watered it, then helped his brother do the same. Both faces were serious, as the occasion demanded, but I thought Wally looked rather as if he were making a mud pie, as he pounded the soil back in place around the little tree.
We were handed a sheet on which a prayer was printed in English, and which the group read aloud.
“Dear God,
Make deep these roots
And wide their crown,
That they may blossom forth with grace
Among all the roads of Israel
For beauty in Thine face.â€
Peter looked at the two seedlings. “I’d like to come back here fifteen years from now, and see how our trees are doing,†he said softly.
And then the boys ran off to visit a donkey tied to a tree, because they had never seen a donkey in person before. I still have it all on film.
August 9, 2006
With all the death and destruction in Israel and Lebanon, it is easy to forget what is at stake: The creation of a two-state area of Israel and Palestine.
Israel’s acceptance of a proposed Arab political entity on its borders was highlighted by the Oslo (Norway) Accord back in 1993. Its three negotiators, Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin of Israel and Yassir Arafat, then of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), received the Nobel Peace Prize. A picture some time later of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands in front of the White House was seen around the world.
It is hard to believe that 13 years have passed since then, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a right winger who opposed giving up any part of the Promised Land, Arafat died, and only the venerable Peres remains, 80 years old now, serving as deputy prime minister. In the interim, Israel and the Palestinians have been close to an agreement several times. And yet, somehow, they never managed to put their Hebrew and Arabic John Hancocks on a final document. This includes the Palestinian leadership that followed Arafat’s death in 2004.
In 1999, Ehud Barak, then prime minister of Israel, and Arafat, by now president of the Palestine National Authority, the governing body of the Palestinians, signed an agreement to finalize their borders and determine the status of Jerusalem by the following year. Instead, the Intifada or rebellion of the Palestinians broke out in 2000, followed by another one last year. Chamas, declared a terrorist organization by the US, won the Palestinian elections, and has continued shelling Israel despite that country’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip
Yet Israelis and Arabs still were having occasional talks when Chezbollah in Lebanon and Chamas in the Gaza Strip, as if in concert, crossed borders into Israel, kidnapped Israeli soldiers, and shot rockets into the Jewish state.
Under all these circumstances it is hard to believe that if it had not been for Rabin and Peres, there would have been no Palestine National Authority and the Israelis most likely would still be in total control of all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. There most likely would not have been any talk about a state of Palestine.
Does anyone remember that Arafat was languishing in exile in Tunisia, when Rabin and Peres brought him back? Arafat and his supporters had become ensconced in the northern part of Jordan, when King Hussein marshaled his troops and forced Arafat out of his country. Arafat fled to Beirut, where he established PLO headquarters.
Enter Israeli General Ariel Sharon, who, with the blessings of his prime minister, Menachem Begin, invaded Lebanon in 1983 to catch Arafat. Israeli troops had entered Beirut when Arafat and supporters sailed away on a boat to Tunisia. Today, Arafat and Begin are in that other place, maybe even neighbors, while Sharon has been in a hospital bed for some six months, unconscious, unaware of the dramatic events befalling his people.
Originally, the two Israeli leaders and Arafat agreed on limited Palestinian self-rule in Jericho and the Gaza Strip. Jericho began to thrive with tourism and Israeli shoppers. Over time, the concept of a full-fledged Palestinian state developed and was accepted by Israel. But the years went by, and now there is death and destruction in Lebanon, because a new breed of Palestinian nationalists emerged, one that is supported by the ruler of Iran, who has sworn to eliminate the Jewish state from the map of the world.
The Nobel Peace Prize?
No sooner had the ink dried on a draft by the US and France for a UN resolution to help bring an end to the war in Lebanon, when the Lebanese government rejected it. In principal, the draft resolution called for “an immediate cessation of all hostilities.â€
The Lebanese government wants Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon simultaneously with ending its land and air battles. Syria, the sponsor, along with Iran, of Chezbollah, is taking the same position as Lebanon. This has created a real break for Israel, which wants to destroy Chezbollah once and for all. Lebanon and Syria inadvertently are giving their enemy more time to accomplish its military goals.
And so the war continues in full force, with Chezbollah’s rain of rockets into Israel having resulted yesterday in three dead and 100 injured in Haifa, and 11 deaths in Kfar Giladi, one of the early settlements by Jews returning to Palestine after hundreds of years in exile. Israel, in turn, intensified its bombing of south Beirut, where Chezbollah hides its rocket launchers among the civilian population. It also has pushed forward with its battle on the ground, on Lebanese ground, where Chezbollah reportedly has thousands of fighters.
The goal of the proposed UN resolution is the eventual disarmament of Chezbollah, and the creation of a multi-national force, which will patrol the border between Israel and Lebanon. Don’t look for Chezbollah to lay down its arms.
Who, then, is going to disarm Chezbollah? It has been in existence for more than 20 years and receives its weaponry from Iran and Syria. Moreover, recent public opinion polls show that 87 percent of the Lebanese population supports Chezbollah. Members of this terrorist organization sit in the Lebanese parliament. And the Lebanese military, reportedly composed of some 70,000, has never taken on Chezbollah. Bottom line: The legitimate Lebanese government has been unable to prevent the existence of a Chezbollah state within a state.
The sight of hundreds of thousands in Baghdad demonstrating in support of Chezbollah, even as some 100 people die violent deaths in Iraq each day makes me sadly wonder.
It makes me wonder about a culture in which parents encourage their children to become suicide bombers and which promotes using its own civilian population as a shield for its fighters. I was chilled the other day by a CNN interview with a former bodyguard of Bin Laden, who was holding on to his handsome little seven-year-old boy, handsome with big, black eyes, and said he would approve if the child grew up to become a suicide bomber.
Under such circumstances, how can there ever be peace in the Middle East? How can there ever be peace in Iraq? To fanatics, human life surely is cheap.
The other day I telephoned my cousin Manfred, who lives in Givatayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv. I was concerned about threats by Chezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to bomb it.
Manfred just turned 82. He spent his teen years in a Nazi concentration camp. His father was gassed in Bergen Belsen. His last words to his son, as he was herded into the cattle car to take him to his death were, “I’ll see you in Palestine.â€
Ten years ago, during the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein bombed Israel, which was not involved in the conflict in any way. One of the bombs landed a mile from Manfred’s home. At the time, he and his wife, Tirza, were staying with friends in Dorot, a community south of Tel Aviv, deemed out of the Iraqi dictator’s range.
“Maybe you and Tirza should once again visit your friends in Dorot,†I suggested.
“In Dorot they get shelled by Chamas,†Manfred said. Then he returned to his weekly chess game. Tirza, also in her 80s, said she continued to go swimming in a nearby pool daily. They would still get together weekly with their daughter, husband and three children, Tirza said. The youngest grandchild, a little boy, is just two months old.
Today Israel is fighting a war on two fronts. Renewed Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip began when Chamas, the Palestinian terror organization based there, kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Additionally, Chamas continues shelling Israeli settlements and towns even though Israel had long withdrawn unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. Occasionally, Chamas shells fall on Ashkelon, the Biblical city where Manfred’s daughter, his only child, teaches at the university.
Chezbollah’s tactics are the same as those of Chamas. Kidnap Israeli soldiers and shell Israel as far as Chezbollah’s missiles will reach. Yesterday the missiles reached the town of Chedera, the furthest so far. Tel Aviv, with a population of a million in the city and suburbs, is just 25 miles away.
Nazrallah is said to make no empty threats.
After five wars between Arabs and Jews and another one in progress, it is hard to believe that there never has been a country called Palestine.
Once, about 2000 BC, there was the land of Canaan, where, the Bible tells us, there lived the Canaanites. What now is known as the Gaza Strip was called Philistia, inhabited by the Philistines.
The area, historically the trade route between Egypt and what today is called the Middle East, changed hands many times. The Israelites ruled it for more than 600 years. King Solomon’s empire included much of what today are Syria and Jordan. Along came the Assyrians, followed by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, and the Romans. The last uprooted the Israelites and disperse them throughout the Roman Empire.
The Arabs came next, circa 600 AD, followed by the Crusaders and eventually the Ottoman Turks. Only after the Israelites, then known as Jews, after their country, Judea, were exiled for the last time, did the area become known as Palestine. It always was a province, an administrative area, never a country, never a nation, with its own government. Under Turkish rule, ending in 1918, the southern part of the area was known as the district of Jerusalem. The area north of Jerusalem including Lebanon was the district of Beirut.
The Jews kept coming back to the area, first as a trickle, then in larger numbers. Between 1880 and 1914 more then 60,000 Jews, mostly from Russia, Rumania and Poland, returned to what they considered the Promised Land. Victims of persecution and discrimination, they sought a new homeland and new security under Turkish rule. Another 30,000 Jews came from other countries.
Many settled in wasteland, sand dunes and marshes where malaria ruled, and which they drained, irrigated and farmed. The largest swamp was across Lake Chula, today part of northern Israel, upon which Chezbollah is raining rockets. In 1909, nearly a century ago, a group of Jews founded the first entirely Jewish town, Tel Aviv, the Hill of Spring, on the sand hills north of the mostly Arab city of Jaffa. The Jews purchased the land piecemeal, from European, Turkish and principally Arab landowners at extremely high prices.
In 1917, Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, declared, “His majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.†At the time, during what later became known as World War I, the British were fighting the Turks for conquest of the region.
After the war, the League of Nations granted the British a mandate over the area known as Palestine, replacing the defeated Turks. Jewish immigration continued as the Jewish population increased to 600,000 when Israel became a state in 1948.
But what about the Arabs? There were approximately 470,000 of them to some 24,000 Jews in 1880. In 1914 there were an estimated 500,000 Arabs compared to 90,000 Jews. The trouble was, nobody asked them how they felt about the Jewish return. As early as 1891, some Arab notables vainly sent a petition to the Turkish government demanding that Jewish immigration and land purchase be prohibited. Bands of Arabs attacked Jewish settlements as early as 1886.
Yet there were Arabs who welcomed the return of the Jews. The Emir Feisal, soon to become the ruler of what would be the kingdom of Iraq, wrote to a Zionist leader in 1919, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy upon the Zionist movement...We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home. We are working together for a reformed and revised Near East, and our two movements complement one another.†Some years earlier, a single landowner sold the Jews 2,400 acres of potentially fine agricultural land in the heart of what today is known as the West Bank.
Moreover, at the Paris Peace Conference following the end of World War I, leaders of the emerging Arab national movement demanded independence only for Syria and Iraq. Statehood for Palestine was never on the table.
If there ever is to be an Arab state of Palestine, the Arabs must recognize that they are part of a long line of peoples who have called this little land their own across history. While the Canaanites and the Philistines and the Moabites and the Ammonites and the descendants of the German Crusaders came and went, the Israelites returned. At five million strong, they are determined to stay.
The dead and the wounded. Children, women and men, their bodies covered, because life for them has ended. Thousands fleeing from their homes, some even on foot. The pictures from Lebanon flash on our television screens many times a day and into the night.
On the other side of the border are the Israeli casualties, the dead and wounded, and those hiding in shelters from the Chezbollah rockets.
Under pressure from the West and the United States, Israel agreed to a 48-hour cessation of bombing, though not a cease fire, in order to enable Lebanese refugees to find shelter away from the war zone. Not a word has been heard from Chezbollah. For the moment, the fighting continues along the eastern part of the front. Israel’s goal is to destroy, or at least to cripple Chezbollah’s ability to attack the Jewish state. When this mission is accomplished, Israel hopes to make peace.
“You can only make peace when you win.†So said a U.S. Marine officer during a recent discussion on television of the upcoming 23rd anniversary of the Marines killed in Beirut. But Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, has different ideas. “The war with Israel does not depend on cease fires,†he said in a taped message on Arab television. “It is a jihad (a holy war) for the sake of God and will last until (our) religion prevails...from Spain to Iraq. We will attack everywhere.â€
So this war, started by Chezbolla, is not aimed only at the destruction of Israel. It may well be part of a much bigger plan. More war, more dead, more refugees.
“The word ‘refugee’ is drenched in memories which stretch back over too many years and too many landscapes,†Martha Gellhorn, a prominent American journalist, once wrote in Atlantic Monthly. “In Madrid, between artillery bombardments (during the Spanish civil war), children were stuffed into trucks to be taken somewhere, out of that roulette death, while their mothers clung to the tailboards of the trucks and were dragged weeping after the bewildered, weeping children.
“In Germany, at war’s end, the whole country seemed alive with the roaming mad - slave laborers, concentration camp survivors - who spoke the many tongues of Babel, dressed in whatever scraps they had looted, and searched for food in stalled freight cars, though the very rail yards were being bombed....People like these defined the meaning of ‘refugee.’â€
And what about the half million Jews forced to flee from Arabic countries when Israel became a state? When the armies of five Arabic countries swarmed ahead with the goal of destroying the fledgling country and push the Jews into the Mediterranean?
What is it about human beings that prevents them from living in peace with each other? We look different. We have different skin colors. We are short. We are tall. We are men and woman and children. But don’t we all want the same? Don’t we all want to live fulfilling lives? Find someone to love? Most probably raise a family?
And we could. If it weren’t for the ideologues. Those men with their narrow views, which they want to impose on everybody else, with fire and death for those who disagree.
I doubt that things will ever change.
If I had the opportunity to meet Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Chezbollah, I would ask him what he was trying to accomplish by provoking Israel into war.
He surely would say that his goal was to destroy Israel and help the Palestinians create a state on its ruins.
The sheik is a Lebanese, not a Palestinian. So I would ask him how he felt about having precipitated the destruction of portions of his country. I would ask him if he felt for the hundreds of thousands of his own people forced to flee from their homes. I would want to know whether he grieved for the hundreds of his brothers, sisters and the little children who have died and many more who have been wounded in this conflagration.
He surely would blame the Israelis for the death and damage and chalk it up to the price being paid for the independence of his Palestinian brethren.
Yet the fact is that the Palestinians could have had a state as long ago as 1948. Their own Arab brethren, the Egyptians and Jordanians, betrayed them.
On November 30, 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The partition was to be in large measure according to population lines. Much of the lands on which Jews were living had been purchased from Arab owners with money raised by the Jewish National Fund. For decades, wherever Jews lived — except presumably in the Communist block — there were little blue boxes in which children and adults dropped coins with which to buy land in Palestine.
An exception of historical proportions was Jerusalem. It was to be under international control.
Another exception was the city of Haifa, where Arabs and Jews traditionally lived in peace. On a visit to Israel a few years ago, my wife, Dalia, a Haifa native, and I, were guests of her cousins at an Arab restaurant in that city. The owner, who stopped at our table, spoke perfect Hebrew. It is where Chezbollah’s rockets have been falling regularly these days.
Additionally, the Negev desert, considered public land, where Bedouins roamed was to be included in the Jewish state. It was there that Abraham, the Bible tells us, wandered thousands of years ago. Yes, Abraham, whom the Arabs consider their father as well.
Palestine at the time was ruled by the British under a mandate of the League of Nations, the predecessors of the United Nations. When the British departed on May 15, 1948, armies of five Arab nations attacked the newly formed state of Israel. When a cease fire was agreed upon a year later, Israel had gained considerable territory from was to have been the Arab state, including most of the Galilee in the north, upon which Sheik Nasrallah now rains rockets daily.
Jerusalem became the capital of Israel.
And what about the proposed Arab state of Palestine? The narrow Gaza strip, which was to be part of it, was occupied by the Egyptians and annexed to their country. What is known today as the West Bank, meaning the west bank of the river Jordan, was annexed by Emir (prince or chieftain) Abdullah of what was then Trans Jordan. He renamed the new country Jordan and proclaimed himself king of both sides of the river.
As for the Palestinian Arabs, many wound up in refugee camps, particularly in the little strip of land around the Biblical city of Gaza, into which an estimated 1.2 million people are cramped today.
If I had the chance to meet Sheik Nasrallah, I would ask him what he thought about the past. I would ask him if he truly thought he could recreate it and change it. I would ask him if he truly thought he could annihilate a country of some six million Jews. I would remind him that five Arab armies could not defeat the fighters of 600,000 Jews nearly 60 years ago.
Since I don’t think I’ll get to see the sheik, does anyone have his e-mail?
There was a time when Lebanon was considered the Riviera of the Middle East. Many among the Lebanese intelligencia even spoke French. In fact, from 1922 until 1943 France controlled Lebanon, guiding it to independence and helping write its democratic constitution.
Beirut was a major tourist attraction even for those, like my late Aunt Lotti, who lived in Tel Aviv but occasionally vacationed in Lebanon. It also was a center of higher education. My friend David, now a suburban Philadelphia resident, who was born in Jerusalem, attended university in Beirut. The city had its share of Jewish population. My friend Dan, also a local resident, whose mother was my fifth grade English teacher in Tel Aviv, was born in Beirut.
It is sad to watch the destruction of portions of the city and suburbs on television to to see and hear the human cost on both sides. I know what it means to be awakened at night by sirens and to rush into a bomb shelter. The Italians bombed Tel Aviv during World War II. I lived with my parents and grandmother, then in her seventies, on the third floor of an apartment house. Upon hearing the sirens we would run down the stairs, then sit in a room in the landlord’s ground floor apartment fortified with wooden beams. We would hear the whistling of a bomb and hold our breath until it exploded — somewhere else.
The question is, what options do the Israelis have, when Chezbollah, their mortal enemy, has sworn to destroy them. And Chezbollah, as has been reported and well documented, uses Lebanon and Beirut as a staging ground for attacks against Israel. Their missile launchers are hidden among the civilian population.
The havoc and destruction caused by Chezbollah and its Palestinian counterparts, Chamas and Fatah, are perpetrated in the name of God, of Allah. I ask myself, what’s God got to do with it? He is God to the Christians, Jehova to the Jews of Biblical times, Allah to the Moslems whose religion came into being around 600 AD. Would God, for those who believe in Him, want his children to kill and destroy in His name?
And yet the Mullahs, the religious Moslem leaders of Iran, Chezbollah’s backers, and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, religious and political head of Chezbollah, are doing so. They are making war against Israel, and predictably will move against the Christian West. Let’s not forget Al-Qaeda and the terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers.
I don’t know if there is a God. But should He exist, He surely is in mourning these days.
I am glued to CNN. I spend many hours thinking about the conflict between Arabs and Jews, how it originated and where it could lead. My wife Dalia and I have phoned our relatives several times since the outbreak of hostilities. They live in Tel Aviv and its suburbs, watch the news on television and listen to the radio. They go about their business not knowing whether Chezbolla’s rockets will hit them one of these days or nights.
Many people, including newsmen and women who should know better, think that the conflict between Arabs and Jews began after World War II, as large numbers of Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution made their way to what the Jews considered the Promised Land.
In fact, armed conflict took place as early as 1920, when Arabs attacked Jewish settlers in the Upper Galilee, right where Arab rockets are crashing today, 86 years later. Josef Trumpeldor, a veteran of the Tsarist army of Russia, who emigrated to Palestine, organized Jewish settlers in that region to protect themselves against their attackers. He, however, was killed in one of the attacks, and became the first hero of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. As a child in school in Tel Aviv, I learned of his last words. “It is good to die for our country.”
A MEMORY
Tel Aviv. 1936.
My parents and I lived in an apartment in the northern edge of Tel Aviv. One night I awoke from the sound of excited voices and the rushing about of my parents and neighbors. I was about six years old, but I remember the scene I saw through my window: Flames shooting into the sky, as far and wide as I could see. Arabs had set fire to Jewish homes on the border of Jaffa, the Arabic city, and Tel Aviv, the fledgling Jewish one. Refugees populated the large fields of red poppies near our apartment house, whose residents were collecting blankets and food.
It was the beginning of the Meoraot, the Disturbances, which were to last until World War II broke out. Often I heard shots in the night. By day I traced bullet marks on the outside walls of the apartment building.
And yet, Arabs and Jews have been able to live together in peace, as they have in Haifa for many decades. In Tel Aviv, Arab women from neighboring Jaffa would come the day before Passover, calling out “Lachem!” “Bread,” as they collected leftover bread and other baked goods from Jews, whose holiday limited them to eating Matza, unleavened bread.
On the Sabbath, back in those thirties, Arabs provided public transportation by horse and buggy. I can still see those buggies before me, the white fringes of their carriage tops rustling in the breeze.
Even then there were Arabs who lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors. Even then, in the days of the Meoraot. How I would love to be back in Tel Aviv and ride down Ben Yehuda Street and Allenby in an Arab carriage with a fringe on top.
Gunter David
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Born in Berlin, Germany, Gunter fled with his parents to Paris, France, with the ascent of Hitler to power in 1933. The
family migrated to Palestine in 1935. Gunter grew up in Tel Aviv, where he attended elementary and high school. He came
to the US in January, 1948, several months before Israel became a state, to study journalism. He was a reporter on major
city newspapers for 25 years, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by the Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia.
He covered the Yom Kippur War (1973) for the Daily News of Philadelphia. He has been to Israel a dozen times in
the last three decades as a correspondent and on visits to his relatives and friends. He speaks Hebrew perfectly. His wife,
Dalia, is a native of Haifa, Israel. She belongs to the fourth generation of her family to have been born in what was then
Palestine. Both Gunter and Dalia are American citizens.
GUNTER DAVID IN THIS EDITION:
BLOG: The Long Road to the Promised Land
SHORT STORY: The Wanderers
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