Israel Matzav

A very stubborn people indeed

A Very Stubborn People Indeed

By Ari Bussel

2011 was a very bad year for Israel, and thus, by association, for the Jews. Israel and the Jews are indistinguishable, and anyone with a mistaken notion that being a foreign national might save that person from the fate of Israel – as if the two are separable – may find reality a very rude awakening.

For instance, many American Jews claim they are “Americans first.” Their children are raised far removed from Israel, and a recent poll indicates that Israel’s continued existence is no longer crucial for them, essentially no longer the highest priority.

It is a sad state of affairs, since trying to escape one’s DNA has not worked before and will not work now. In Nazi Germany, the Jews saw themselves as Germans first. They could not believe anything bad would befall them. Many were proud of the great distance between them and their Jewish roots. “We assimilated seven generations ago,” they would boast, yet the Gestapo still sent them to the camps. Imagine the nerve, such a mistake!

In the USA, it has become necessary to “enlarge the communal tent.” Nowadays all are welcome, friends and foes alike. Regrettably, the majority that starts by saying “we are Jewish BUT,” “we are children of Holocaust survivors BUT,” “we are the daughter or the son of an Israeli BUT” or anything similar is the most outspoken against everything Israel does. They claim her very existence is a sin, for Israel is an Occupier, as evil as evil gets.

We have spread out and became tolerant of abusing our most beloved, most sacred and most precious relative. Israel is the mother that made us who we are. She is the embodiment of our hopes, our past and our future. She gave her very essence, every ounce of energy and bone marrow, so that we might have everything.

How are we repaying her sacrifices? By straying, defiling her very existence and maligning her. She is no longer important for we have grown up and are independent, strong and all knowing. She has served her purpose and has outlived her usefulness. It is time for her to go.

At one point we will realize the error of our ways, but by then it will be too late. Just as it was much too late when families were rounded up into ghettos or sent on transports or in cattle cars. They were struck in disbelief as they were standing in lines: First separated right and left, life and death, then marched to the showers of Zyklon B, the chimneys behind spewing ashes, darkening the skies.

The skies today are dark already, but Israel and the Jews ignore the stench. Instead of fighting, they bring wood and other combustible materials to support the fire that is merrily dancing, happily growing bigger and bigger until it cannot be contained.

The day will come, too soon indeed, that Jews will lament not fighting, not realizing, not preparing. Like the exiled Jews on the banks of the Babylon Rivers who lamented Jerusalem, will we be given a second chance to return to Jerusalem, or will this be the third and final Destruction?



2011 was a very bad year for the Jews, but we misinterpret the seeming quiet as success. Israel has succeeded “to contain the assault on Israel’s legitimacy,” claims a Tel Aviv-based think tank, and everyone applauds. Other than misleading the decision makers, this conclusion by the Reut Institute has managed to create a false sense of achievement and comfort, at the worse time for the Jews.


Why is that the case? When a person has persuaded himself he is healthy and well and has ignored a horrible disease that has been spreading inside, moving from one internal organ to the next, the person may find it is too late to fight when all organs are infected. In the military it would be called “dereliction of duty” and the person responsible is court-martialed. In real life, the patient dies for any treatment would be too late. For Israel? It is suicide, plain and simple.

Palestine is not yet a member of the United Nations? The seeds have been planted and the world is full of countries supporting this wonderful notion, an illness metastasizing too quickly to ever be stopped.

It is legitimate to boycott Israel, Israeli products and artists, academics and physicians, because they are from or in Occupied Territories. But then all of Israel is Occupied, thus by extension it is mandatory and acceptable to boycott all of Israeli products, human or otherwise. Ask the head of a department at Ben Gurion University or the President of his university.

Israel’s enemies are burning Israeli products. How long will it take before they celebrate the murder of Jews because they are Israelis? Oh, I forgot, they already are. [Several examples are readily available, but reporters are threatened so they remove the incriminating videos. Who ever saw what really happened inside the camps? The sign at the gate said, “Work is Liberating!”]

Targeting Israeli cities, schools and kindergartens legitimate? How else would David-the-true-Palestinian fight the Goliath-Zionist-Colonialist War Machine that took over a land-not-theirs and occupied it? Launch a few more rockets! Prepare the Missiles! Advance the troops – all those homicide bombers ready to die as Shaiids.

Then again, Israel has allowed the indiscriminate barrage of rockets to continue for over a decade. No normal country would have allowed it to continue more than a few hours or days; definitely not allow it to become the custom, a habit; a tradition. But through Israeli eyes, the equation reflects a very twisted math: Ours is permissible, yours is holy.

Israel’s enemies fire from mosques. They use kindergartens as launching pads. Hospitals and ambulances are used for storage and transport of ammunition and terrorists. Israel would not dare touch any of these places because of their “holy” aura.

Interestingly, the enemy rushes to use them, any holiness aside. The results justify the means - all Infidels, pigs and apes, must die. Herein lies the twisted logic: These “Believers,” so easily willing to defile their own holy places, are protected by Israel’s own stupidity, and the enemy realizes and utilizes this weakness.

But the twisted math continues: One Israeli soldier held in captivity for more than five years is equal to how many terrorists with life sentences? Well, at least a thousand. Explain it any way you like, the enemy knows that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is very profitable.

The downside? None. Enemy “heroes” held in Israeli prisons enjoy numerous benefits, including higher education, Internet and cell phone access, visitation rights, to name just a few of the most absurd “entitlements” Israelis bestow on those who murdered and maimed their children and elderly, men and women only because they are Jewish. These convicted terrorists never stay long enough to even feel remote pangs of contrition.

But Israel needs no enemies, when respected Hebrew-speaking professors (one, for instance, heads a department at UCLA) explain and advocate that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is a legitimate form of “Resistance.”



I remember stories of resistance of the Partisans. It was during World War II and most who survived have since died. Thus, I will try to do the reconciliation through my own mind’s eye. I cannot find any equivalency between heroic acts of the past and kidnapping Israelis to extract a very painful price. But apparently this Israeli-American professor does.

Where are the members of the Israeli academia, known as “Post-Zionists” to sign a petition supporting him too? Well, there is no need when there is no shortage of local American Jews who do just that. Many of them can be found all over the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, especially in the highest echelons of supporters and machers.

Hamas and Fatah are getting closer than ever, united in their “resistance to the Occupation.” There is only one state called “Palestine” and one “eternal capital.” “Two states living side by side?” Neither one is Jewish. To them, Israel must go; it never had any legitimate right in the first place. It stole and misplaced, uprooted and Occupied. It must be destroyed forever.

Let us all march onto Israel, from Jordan and Syria and Lebanon, from the Druze villages of the Golan Heights and the Arab towns of Judea and Samaria. Even from Jerusalem, let us march and overwhelm Israel. Incidentally, those who march for months are the Sudanese and other Africans who flee persecution and strive for a betterment of their lives in – you guessed it – Israel.

All the while, Israelis face a deep and ever-widening abyss dividing them between religious and secular, employed and entitled, those who serve and those who do not, right and left, “peaceniks” and everyone else who does not believe in succumbing to the Enemy.

It is becoming worse by the minute, this ever-widening divide, but Israelis do not see the dangers and refuse to see reality.

Israel, Israelis and Jews are major contributors to the strength of the enemy. It is sad, but trying to explain reality to any bystander who is not familiar with Israel, its geography, history, culture and demography is met with utter bewilderment, complete astonishment and puzzlement: No sane nation in the world would behave even remotely similarly in these circumstances.

For those who say that Israel is “Chosen” and has to behave as a “light unto the nations,” this does not mean Israel should be “crazy” or “stupid.” Thus the suffering that will undoubtedly befall Israel in the very near future is mostly self-made and—regrettably—deserving.

May I be proven wrong in my assumption of doom. Possibly, recent (Reut-imagined) “successes” of Israel fighting the demonization efforts against the Jewish people are so effective an ancient hatred about to surface and explode will be cooled down and contained. I for one do not believe this is possible, or that the future entertains such a hope.

Instead, I see a future where Israel suffers and can complain to no one—neither God nor humans. Israel has been given many paths from which to choose, and the Jewish people have stubbornly chosen to stray from the right one. They knew better, but then again, as Moses realized so long ago, we are a very stubborn, stiff-necked people.


The series “Postcards from America—Postcards from Israel” by Ari Bussel and Norma Zager is a compilation of articles capturing the essence of life in America and Israel during the first two decades of the 21st Century.

The writers invite readers to view and experience an Israel and her politics through their eyes, Israel visitors rarely discover and Israelis often ignore.

This point—and often—counter-point presentation is sprinkled with humor and sadness and attempts to tackle serious and relevant issues of the day. The series began in 2008, appears both in print in the USA and on numerous websites and is followed regularly by readership from around the world.

Zager and Bussel can be heard on live radio in conversation on the program “Conversations Eye to Eye between Norma and Ari.”

© “Postcards from America — Postcards from Israel,” December, 2011

Contact: bussel@me.com

First Published Dec 27, 2011

Labels: anti-Israeli Israelis, Jewish anti-Semitism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:29 PM