Is it not self-evident? / OR, as they say, Apples Don't Fall Far from Trees

When David finished speaking, Saul said, "Is this your voice, my son David?" And Saul lifted up his voice and wept. And he said, "you are more righteous than I, for you have rewarded me with good, whereas I have rewarded you with evil" And Saul went home. But David and his men returned to the stronghold.

 

 

Jeff Jacoby's column, Jerusalem - one city, undivided, is probably one of the strongest we will see in the mainstream.

LATE LAST WEEK, the Obama administration demanded that the Israeli government pull the plug on a planned housing development near the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. The project, a 20-unit apartment complex, is indisputably legal. The property to be developed - a defunct hotel - was purchased in 1985, and the developer has obtained all the necessary municipal permits.

Why, then, does the administration want the development killed? Because Sheikh Jarrah is in a largely Arab section of Jerusalem, and the developers of the planned apartments are Jews. Think about that for a moment. Six months after Barack Obama became the first black man to move into the previously all-white residential facility at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, he is fighting to prevent integration in Jerusalem.

It is impossible to imagine the opposite scenario: The administration would never demand that Israel prevent Arabs from moving into a Jewish neighborhood. And the Obama Justice Department would unleash seven kinds of hell on anyone who tried to impose racial, ethnic, or religious redlining in an American city. In the 21st century, segregation is unthinkable - except, it seems, when it comes to housing Jews in Jerusalem.

It is not easy for Israel’s government to refuse any demand from the United States, which is the Jewish state’s foremost ally. To their credit, Israeli leaders spoke truth to power, and said no. “Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments anywhere in the city,’’ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. “There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the city’s east. This is the policy of an open city.’’

Jacoby goes on to explain the history and the reasoning leading up to his conclusion that

The great obstacle to Middle East peace is not that Jews insist on living among Arabs. It is that Arabs insist that Jews not live among them. If Obama doesn’t grasp that, he has a lot to learn.

 

Make no mistake, I am very grateful for Jacoby's solid and well written plea for understanding, but it is a plea.  He explains why it's really okay for Jews to undertake construction in their capital city, as if any rational person would become convinced if only he or she knew the facts.

What other people in the world could or would sit down with pen and paper (or keyboard) and set out such a defense?  This is why it's okay for us to build houses. This is why it's okay for us to have a little tiny country in the birthplace of our civilization. This is why it's okay for us to be, and to be here.

This is why Jews sucking in air shouldn't really be considered so offensive to your sensibilities. You see, we have the "right" to exist.  Just look at the evidence. Let me explain it to you so that you can understand.

 

The truth is that Jews are honorable to a fault.

 

                                                                     Rabbi Yitzchak Hengerman HY"D, murdered in 1942, probably in Majdanek.

 

We - perhaps alone among the peoples of the world - believe in and practice reason.  We are merciful to our ungodly enemies.  Our kindness knows no bounds (who else sends jam and coffee to the murderers of their children?).  We contribute goodness and light to the world far and away beyond what our numbers would predict.  It was Jewish civilization that gave this heathen world its first tastes of ethics, law and freedom.

The sad truth is that the nations of this world are for the most part still as base and heathen as ever, unworthy of the gifts we have so freely and consistently offered them.  And the more we have assimilated into these nations, the more of our heritage of holy wisdom* has been lost to us, and all the more they have resented our presence ... to the point of serial attempts at our genocide.

My dearest Yidden, my brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, asleep or awake, why do you bother to explain how it is that you too may live and breathe, have children and build houses?  It is beneath our dignity. We have been explaining ourselves since time immemorial; if they cared to hear our arguments they would have listened - and learned - years ago. 

We have nothing to be ashamed of.  And when ... if ... we come to understand that, we will be able to resist and to save ourselves. Without the need to explain why we do so.

 

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* No thanks, Mr. Gandhi

In a 1938 essay, Mohandas ("Mahatma") Gandhi, the spiritual and political leader of the Indian independence movement, counseled Jews in Nazi Germany to neither flee nor resist but rather offer themselves up to be killed by their enemies, since their "suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy."

When all hope is lost, a Jew about to be killed "al Kiddush Hashem" -- as a Jewish martyr -- is indeed to reach for serenity, even happiness, at the opportunity to give up his life because of who he is. When Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman, the great Lithuanian Jewish religious leader and scholar, was murdered by Hitler's henchmen in 1941, he reportedly told the students about to be killed with him that "In Heaven it appears that they deem us to be righteous because our bodies have been chosen to atone for the Jewish people… In this way we will save the lives of our brethren overseas… We are now fulfilling the greatest commandment… The very fire that consumes our bodies will one day rebuild the Jewish people."

But Jewish martyrdom is not something to be courted. And so Mr. Gandhi's advice for Jews during the Holocaust was, even if consonant with his personal beliefs, from Judaism's point of view profoundly wrong.

And Gandhi's advice was even more disturbing in light of his admission, in that same essay, that the "cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me." Jews, he said, should "make… their home where they are born."

It is, moreover, he went on, "inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs."

Apples, they say, don't fall far from trees. A rotten one fell with a loud splat recently over at The Washington Post. On a weblog -- "On Faith" -- sponsored by that paper in conjunction with Newsweek Magazine, Arun Gandhi, a grandson of Mohandas and co-founder of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester, opined that "the Jews today" are intent on making Germans feel guilty for the Holocaust (which he chose to spell with a lower-case "h") and that they insist that "the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews."

"The world did feel sorry," he reminded his readers, "for the episode." But "when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger."

Ah, yes, that unpleasant "episode," more than 60 years ago. And those Jews still can't bring themselves to forgive the Nazis....

Comments

[J. Lichty]

Great post - if you dare - read the comments to the Jacoby post - a fever swamp of Buchanite hysteria from the right and leftist drivel of colonialism - very few pro-Israel voices. The jew-haters are feeling more and more bold - let's see them out in the open so we know who our enemies are.

[Yael]

JL, where do they get the time? Are they all on public assistance already? There is not enough time in the day for regular folks to go to their jobs, their religious functions, their family functions, and then fight for Israel and stop capntrade, "healthcare," and other Obamanations in their spare time. If The Won intended to paralyze us by keeping us dizzy, it's working.