Daily Alert Archives

The Miracle, at 60

[Washington Post] Charles Krauthammer - This week marks the 60th anniversary of the return and restoration of the remaining two tribes of Israel - Judah and Benjamin, later known as the Jews - to their ancient homeland. Besides restoring Jewish sovereignty, the establishment of the State of Israel embodied many subsidiary miracles, from the creation of the first Jewish army since Roman times to the only recorded instance of the resurrection of a dead language - Hebrew, now the daily tongue of a vibrant nation of 7 million. As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is "the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago." Palestinian suffering is, of course, real and heart-wrenching, but what the Arab narrative deliberately distorts is the cause of its own tragedy: the folly of its own fanatical leadership - from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (Nazi collaborator, who spent World War II in Berlin), to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser to Yasser Arafat to Hamas of today - that repeatedly chose war rather than compromise and conciliation. Palestinian dispossession is a direct result of the Arab rejection, then and now, of a Jewish state of any size on any part of the vast lands the Arabs claim as their exclusive patrimony. Israeli losses during its War of Independence were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. Yet you rarely hear about Israel's terrible suffering in that 1948-49 war. Israel's crime is not its policies but its insistence on living. On the day the Arabs - and the Palestinians in particular - make a collective decision to accept the Jewish state, there will be peace, as Israel proved with its treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Until that day, every "peace process," however well meaning, will come to nothing.
2008-05-16 01:00:00
Full Article