Israel Matzav

Moving To Israel In a Time Of Crisis

There were lots of stories in the Israeli press this week about the arrival of the first Nefesh b'Nefesh flight since the war started, but this is the first such story I saw in the American mainstream media. Maybe they're trying to make up for publishing that awful Haniyeh puff piece and for Richard Cohen being such a jerk?

Jonathan Klein did something unusual Thursday. After quitting his job as a lung specialist at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, he, his wife and their four boys moved to Israel -- nine days into a two-front war that has claimed 29 Israeli lives and seen about a thousand rockets fired at the Jewish state by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

On Thursday night, the family expects to sleep in their new home in Mitzpe Netofa, a small community in the lower Galilee about eight miles north of Nazareth, where two brothers, ages 3 and 8, died Wednesday in a Hezbollah rocket attack.

"Israel is by nature surrounded by people who don't want us here, and if it wasn't attacked last night, it will be next week or two years from now," Klein said during an airport welcome ceremony for 203 new immigrants from the United States and Canada. "This is the lot of Israel, and until our neighbors learn that we are here to stay and want to make peace with them, and they can make peace with us, it will continue to happen."

...

"If Israel for Jews is Disneyland, then you only come if it is sun and fun," said Shlomo Riskin, chief rabbi of Efrat, a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank between Bethlehem and Hebron that will be home to about 20 of the families that arrived Thursday. "But if it is the motherland, then when mother is not feeling so good, that is when you come."

Read it all and think about that last paragraph.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:24 PM