Again, the world has gone mad

In a world filled with remarkable bloodshed, the only blood that appears to matter is that taken in self-defense by Jews.

Israeli-Palestinian clashes pale beside ongoing Arab-on-Arab and Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Israel’s rough neighborhood. Elsewhere, 298 passengers on a civilian airliner are extinguished in a heartbeat, “insurgents” slay hundreds at a clip in Nigeria, and so many have died in conflicts in Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in Africa that accurate casualty estimates are impossible. Countries at war and at peace cruelly suppress human rights — ranging from religious and political expression up to the right to life itself — which are freely accorded in the democratic, pluralistic Jewish state of Israel. With all that, it is only plucky Israel’s determination to fight to survive that is under sustained attack.

Israel has been a home to Jews for more than 3,000 years, never abandoned by a people who lamented during exile by the rivers of Babylon, “im eshkachech Yirushalayim, tishkach yemini” (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill”).

Since sovereignty was restored in 1948, Israel’s Sabras have been joined in reclaiming their arid land by Jews forced from their homes by Arab and Muslim rulers (with no compensation and no right of return), by Jews fleeing oppression from behind the Iron Curtain and wherever being a Jew meant being a target, and by Jews who happily surrendered lives of prosperity in America to return home.

Israel, pained both by the deaths of its children and those of the children of Gaza, has gone to exceptional and perhaps unprecedented lengths to minimize collateral damage, while the enemy uses its people as shields, storing their vehicles of death and hiding their commanders in schools, hospitals and mosques.

As the carnage continues, we know — and we must tell the world, starting with our colleagues and acquaintances who may not understand — that the fault lies not with Israel but with Gaza’s rulers. When Israel pulled out of the strip in 2005, it left behind valuable infrastructure of housing and commerce and the promise of a good neighbor and international support, building blocks of peaceful prosperity. But the Gazan gangsters demolished what the Jews had created and replaced it with military encampments, rocket-launch sites, terror tunnels and poverty.

Israel, as “the neighborhood bully” of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, is “outnumbered about a million to one … criticized and condemned for being alive … he’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.”

Well, no more.

Dylan continued, “the chances are against it and the odds are slim; That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him; ’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back; And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.”

Only when missiles are no longer launched from Gaza, when tunnels providing passage to assassins are eliminated, and when the powers in Gaza acknowledge Israel’s right to exist — only then will there be lasting peace and, likely, prosperity, too.

The world did not bow its collective head after the Crusades and the Inquisition and the pogroms and the myriad exiles forced upon Jews through the ages, but it appeared to finally acknowledge its shame after the Holocaust. Now the war against the Jews has been renewed, not just on Israel’s borders but in Paris and London and, again, even in Berlin.

In this era of 140-character instant analysis, when memory is fleeting, when the concept of “15 minutes of fame” is a quaint relic of a much slower century, the crime against humanity perpetrated on Jews by an enlightened Europe is revisited even as an earlier chapter is forgotten and denied.

As a people of the book, connected irrevocably to history, we dare not fall victim to the world’s collective amnesia. We must assert without apology our G-d-given right to live as free men and free women under G-d, in the land that G-d has given us, the land of Israel, our home.