The Jews of Hebron hit it right on the head Wednesday evening, when they sent a letter to the foreign policy chief of the European Union, who had arrived in Israel earlier in the day to level a fusillade of complaints at Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
Javier Solana had demanded to know why the Israeli government had not yet uprooted “illegal” Jewish-built structures from Samaria and Judea. Israel must raze them immediately!
And, he insisted, Israel should do more to help facilitate the quick implementation of the Road Map “peace” plan – which aims to see tens of thousands of Jews uprooted from their biblical homeland in order that a new Arab state can be established in their place.
The arrogance and audacity of Solana his constituency knows no bounds.
But we all know about Europe, a continent that has been saturated for centuries with the worst manifestations of antisemitism ever seen anywhere. Its rotten fruit flourishes, camouflaged but unchecked.
I know this as a gentile student of the last 2000 years of Jewish history.
Jews everywhere, but perhaps most especially those living in Hebron – a center of Jewish existence that continued unbroken for more than 3000 years before the British helped Hebron’s Arabs slaughter its Jews in 1929 – know it first hand.
In their response to Solana, the leaders of Hebron’s Jews, Noam Arnon and David Wilder, drove a two-edged blade of truth and justice deep into his belly.
“As you are a representative from Spain, a country responsible for the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Jews from their homes and country in 1492, we demand that you immediately stop pressuring Israel to implement another expulsion of Jews from their homes and communities in the Land of Israel.”
They showed Solana the door.
“Please leave Israel, return to your own EU business and minority problems, and stop interfering with the internal affairs of the State of Israel.”
Their linking of the Jews’ expulsion from Spain 414 years ago and the threatened expulsion of Jews from Judea-Samaria today is not just a clever-sounding argument.
Just as Spain was rendered judenrein (jew-free) by its Catholic monarchy, so did Israel’s abandoning of the Gaza Strip under international pressure last year leave that piece of the Promised Land judenrein.
And the Quartet’s “two state solution” aims to see the mountainous heartland of Israel rendered judenrein for the Arabs to turn into Palestine.
Solana is leading the European effort to bring this about. For he has chosen to identify the Jewish presence as the root of all evil.
He, and his fellow Europeans, may protest until they are black in the face that their “solution” is not borne out of antisemitism.
But it is.
Last month, an Israeli politician who lives in one of the settlements in Judea told in my hearing of a conversation he had with a British diplomat at the UK’s consulate in Jerusalem.
He had put two questions to her:
1. If every Jew was removed (voluntarily or forcefully) from Judea and Samaria, and the EU and United Nations certified that not a single Israeli soldier or civilian remained in “occupied Arab territory” east of the 1967 border or “Green Line,” could England guarantee that Israel would be left to live in peace?
“Of course not,” was her reply.
2. And if all the Jews in the Middle East were transferred to Europe, and Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen were transplanted into the Middle East in their place, did she believe there would be peace in the region?
Her response: “No.”
They know it, you see, these European leaders who cannot sleep at night for trying to find a “solution” for this intractable war. They know that it is not because of the settlers or the Jews that there is violence and instability in the Middle East.
They know that the fault lies with the Muslim Arabs; that the Arabs are the real obstacle to peace.
This is what makes these western nations’ sin so heinous, their behavior towards the Jewish people so black.
This is how we know that antisemitism spawned and drives the “Road Map” to their latest “final solution” to the “Jewish question.”
In 1938, the European powers of Great Britain and France chose not to stand up to Hitler, even though he was clearly the aggressor and wrongdoer. He was swallowing up parts of Europe, had clearly expressed his hatred of the Jews, and spoke openly of the plans he had in store for them.
Instead of confronting him, they opted to offer up little, indefensible Czechoslovakia to appease the Nazi beast.
Today they have an even easier choice. There is no need to offer up a third country. To mollify the Muslim aggressor they can sacrifice Israel’s land and people in one go. And this is what they are doing.
For years, Israel’s governments and leftists have allowed their countrymen to be dragged into the appeasement process.
But while the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem may be malleable to the point of risking the very existence of their homeland and their nation, Hebron’s Jews – and hundreds of thousands of Bible-believing Israelis like them – stand like a rock.
Closing their letter to Solana, they declared:
“We, the Jewish people, plan on remaining here, in our historic homeland, safely and securely, forever.”
Unfettered by those chains
One western politician whose country is not chained to the oil wells of Arabia nor overly concerned with how much his nation is loved or hated by hordes of keffiyeh-wearers in the Middle East this week took a firm stand with Israel against those bent on destroying her.
When he did so, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper also demonstrated a clear-sighted comprehension of the connection between the efforts to wipe out the Jews today and those practiced by their enemies through the ages.
Explaining why his government had taken an unequivocal stand on Israel’s side during the recent war in southern Lebanon, Harper said:
“The fact is [that] those who attacked Israel and those who sponsor such attacks don’t seek merely to gain some leverage, to alter some boundary or to right some wrong.
“They seek what they and those like them have always sought: the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people. Why? A thousand complicated rationalizations, but only one simple reason: because the Jews are different, because the Jews are not like them. And because Israel is different and alone in a complicated and dangerous part of the world.”
Referring to the Holocaust he warned: “Those who seek to destroy the Jews, who seek to destroy Israel, will for the same reason ultimately seek to destroy us all.”