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On the Future of the Jews

(National Review) Barbara Lerner - Secular Europeans see Jews as a foreign element, always and everywhere - a landless foreign people. So if they're on land, it must belong to someone else, to the "natives" - Arabs who migrated to Israel in the 1940s and decided, in 1964, to usurp the old Roman name for the Jews and call themselves "Palestinians" in order to lay claim to the 24% of the Palestine Mandate that was left after Great Britain gave 76% to the Arabs to create the new state of Jordan. In postmodern secular American circles, outright demonization of Israel is often restricted to everybody's favorite whipping boys - "the settlers" - but the essential view of Israel and the Jews is the same. The biblical claim to the Holy Land is the great unmentionable in American foreign policy. Secular Americans and Europeans, the UN, and the Arab League insist with lockstep unanimity that religious claims have no legitimate place in our Middle East policy. But to see what a perfectly senseless double standard this is, try applying it equally to Muslim Holy Lands, arguing that religious claims should play no role in determining who rules Mecca and Medina. No Christian or Jew would dare suggest such a thing, and no self-respecting Muslim would stand for it. Even the tolerant Hanafi Muslim Turks, proud citizens of a republic as secular as our own, while they might prefer the stewardship of a sect less fanatic than the Wahhabis, would be up in arms at the thought of non-Muslim rule in Saudi Arabia. Could they ever accept Jewish sovereignty over the whole of Israel as we accept Muslim sovereignty over the whole of Saudi Arabia?
2005-05-06 00:00:00
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