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No Country for Jews?

(New York Daily News) Daniel Gordis - We have a young language instructor at Shalem College in Jerusalem. She's a religious Muslim who wears a hijab, lives in an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem and is a graduate student at Hebrew University. She's fun and warm, and a great teacher - the students like her a lot. Last spring, when things in Israel were quiet, some of the students asked her how she thought we would one day settle the conflict. "It's our land," she replied. "You're just here for now." There are many Palestinians who believe that. What upset the students was that she - an educated woman, getting a graduate degree (which would never happen in a Muslim country) at a world class university and working at a college filled with Jews who admire her, like her and treat her as they would any other colleague - still believes that when it's all over, the situation will get resolved by our being tossed out of here once again. This latest round of violence is simply the newest battle in the War of Independence that Israel has been fighting for 68 years now. The basic goal of Israel's enemies remains the destruction of the Jewish state. While for us this is a conflict that can be settled by adjusting borders and guaranteeing security for both sides, for our enemies this is an all-or-nothing battle in which the only end would be for Israel to disappear. When Secretary of State John Kerry said that he would not "point fingers from afar" at who was responsible for the violence, and called the latest attacks part of a "revolving cycle that damages the future for everybody," he convinced Israelis once again that the present American administration has abandoned any ability to distinguish right from wrong, just from unjust, wise from destructive. For our enemies, this is a conflict not about borders but about our very right to be here. We know that, overwhelmingly, the Arab world is still committed to driving us out of this land. So we'll stay, and tough it out - whatever the world thinks of the steps we have to take - for as long as it takes. For as Golda Meir put it decades ago, "Israelis have a secret weapon - we have nowhere else to go." The writer is a senior vice president at Shalem College in Jerusalem.
2015-10-19 00:00:00
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