Israel Matzav

ESPYING THE JEW

Mark Steyn isn't really a Jew except in the minds of those who think that one needs to be a Jew in order to defend Israel. Nevertheless, Mark is not the least bit embarassed by the assumption that he's Jewish.

So, yes, I am a Jew, because, after all, only a Jew could “defend” Israel, right? I don’t really “defend” it on anything but utilitarian grounds: Every country in the region – Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia – dates as a sovereign state from 60-70 years ago. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. So should we have more states like Israel in the region or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer. And the minute people start arguing about going back to the “1967 borders” or the “1948 armistice”, I figure why stop there? Why not go back to the 1922 settlement when the British Mandate of Palestine was created and rethink London’s decision to give 78% of the land to what’s now Jordan? If you propose that, folks think you’re nuts. But why should 40 or 60 year old lines on a map be up for perpetual renegotiation but 80 year old lines be considered inviolable?

Well, because one involves Jews and the other doesn’t. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are – so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they’re hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they’re hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist Entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they’d be hated for that, too. The only difference now is that Jew-hatred is resurgent despite the full knowledge of where it ended up 60 years ago. Today, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad openly urge the destruction of the Jews, and moderate Muslim leaders sit silently alongside them, and European media commentators take the side of the genocide-inciters, and UN bigwigs insist we negotiate with them. In the 1930s, the willingness of Europe not to see the implied end-point in those German citizenship laws left a moral stain on that continent. Seventy years on, it’s not implied, and the moral stain on us will be worse.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:56 PM