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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.