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‘The annihilation of the Jews is one of the most splendid blessings’
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The Islamic preacher, a leader of Hamas, actually declared: “The annihilation of the Jews in Palestine is one of the most splendid blessings.” He prefaced this statement, made recently, with the following invocation: "The blessing of Palestine is dependent upon the annihilation of the pit of global corruption in it. When the head of the serpent of corruption is cut off here in Palestine, and its octopus tentacles are severed throughout the world, the real blessing will come.”
That “serpent,” as it were, is the successful presence of seven million Israelis thriving in a democracy for some 60 years and achieving egalitarian milestones, from a contained, disciplined people’s army to the Middle East’s own rendition of Silicon Valley. The Arabs refined suicide bombing, the Israelis pioneered the cellular phone, desalination, and voice Internet.
Tel Aviv went from a sand dune to a world-class cosmopolitan center of culture and technology; Beirut, once so glamorous and trendy, is defaced and scarred by internecine Arab violence and is run not by the Lebanese government but by the Hezbollah international terror syndicate. Woe unto the children of both sides—especially when clergymen invoke murder.
How do Israeli families—Rachel the teacher, Joseph the plumber, Debbie the schoolteacher, David the kindergartener—cope with this unrelenting genocidal contempt? It spawns not from the mainstream Palestinian community, the moms and dads trying also to keep their families fed and educated, safe and content, under the same century-long siege of hate, but from the men who are actually ordained as God’s preachers and teachers.
Let me say, as a native of Israel, with some four generations in the land, and a wide spectrum of political beliefs (some of it unacceptably contemptuous of Arab life), that I have heard—and been pained—by pejorative talk and behavior directed against the indigenous Palestinian Arab community. But my native connections in the land compel me to inform the concerned reader that the vast majority of Israelis, exhausted and jaded by all this war-making and terrorism, want peace.
All you have to do is listen to contemporary Israeli pop music, read Israeli newspapers, marvel at Israeli medical and cultural creativity, and know that the people of Israel—the mailmen, the CEOs, the nurses, the street-pavers, and the disc jockeys, the army reservists who fill the Peace Now rallies—and you will know the heart of this moxie-state is in education, not propaganda; in movies, not militia; in outreach, not genocide.
It’s hard to be so hated, especially when you just want your kids to walk safely to school, enjoy summer camp, and travel abroad without being pariahs with passports. And what have the extremist clerics of Islam—who did more killing on 9/11 in the US than in 60 years of aggregate terror against Israelis—really accomplished for Palestinian kids?
A child taught to hate without limits will never have a country with borders.
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