FW: Letter in today's Ames Tribune

http://www.amestrib.com/articles/2009/03/05/ames_tribune/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/doc49b00364b8fb1468017397.prt

Ames Tribune > Opinion

Israel doesn¹t need to be justified

Published: Thursday, March 5, 2009

Why do Irish, Brazilians, Moroccans or Germans need a homeland? Has a letter in The Tribune ever posed the question ³Why do Irish, Brazilians, Moroccans or Germans need a homeland?² Obviously not! Yet, a letter titled: ³Why do Jews need a homeland?² (R.K. Richards, Feb. 13) singles out the Jewish nation and Israel to justify its existence. Indeed, this very question reveals ignorance, bias, anti-Semitism, or a combination thereof.

History records the endless saga of shifting borders, population movements and the creation of new countries. Of the world¹s 195 countries, 112 were established after 1948, the year of Israel¹s founding. Israel¹s existence is a fact grounded in reality, and it does not need to be justified any more than the existence of Azerbaijan, Chad, Greece or the U.S.

Moreover, it was the Arab and Palestinian rejection in 1947 of U.N. Partition Resolution 181 followed by the attempt in 1948 of five Arab countries to obliterate Israel, which resulted in the flight of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes. Many of those Palestinians were newcomers, recent arrivals from neighboring Arab countries.

In parallel, 850,000 Jews were expelled from, or fled, Arab countries in the wake of bloody pogroms. Most of those Jewish refugees settled in Israel, became productive citizens, and their descendants now comprise half of Israel¹s Jewish population, refuting the depiction of Israel as a European entity. Palestinian leaders and Arab countries, on the other hand, continue to classify the original Palestinian refugees and their descendents as refugees, all the while blaming Israel for this situation. For 60 years, they have refused to dismantle the refugee camps, maintaining them as a constant source of terrorists.

No established country is expected to ³justify² its existence. Nevertheless, replying to Richards¹ seemingly innocent question, why do Jews need their own homeland any more than Baptists, atheists, or left-handed people, serves an educational purpose.

Judaism consists of two major components: nationhood and religion. Judaism emerged 4,000 years ago in the form of the Hebrew nation residing in Canaan.. That new nation introduced a religious/philosophical revolution - ethical monotheism. From 1250 B.C. until 70 A.D., a span of 1320 years, this nation possessed a state in the Land of Israel, rendering the Jewish nation indigenous to that land. Following the Roman Empire¹s destruction of the country in 70 AD, accompanied by the slaying and expulsion of most of its population, Jews found themselves stripped of their homeland and state. Nevertheless, for the next 1,900 years, they continually maintained a community in Israel, while their Diaspora brethren were subjected to endless persecution, pogroms, expulsions, discrimination, forced conversions, and finally genocide - the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were systematically annihilated by Nazi Germany and its many willing European collaborators.  Fortunately, the feverish attempts by the foremost Palestinian leader, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, a Nazi collaborator, to extend the Jewish genocide to Palestine, were foiled by the termination of World War II.

Jews, as a nation, need a homeland for the same reasons that Greeks, French, or Brazilians need one, to protect their physical integrity and to nurture their unique culture. Israel is the only place where Jews can defend themselves without relying on the goodwill of others, which historically rarely existed. In fact, 80 percent of Israeli Jews do not consider themselves religious, but rather members of the Jewish nation and citizens of the State of Israel.

Israel¹s Law of Return is very similar to the present Greek law, which does not require an ancestor who held citizenship, or who was born in the ³homeland², requiring only some evidence of membership in the ethnic and religious community of the ancient Greek Diaspora. Other countries that provide immigration privileges to individuals with a measure of ethnic ties include Ireland, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Chile, and the United Kingdom.

In ³Why the Jews? The reasons for anti-Semitism², Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin write: ³The major difference between anti-Semites throughout Jewish history and today¹s anti-Zionists is only which component of Judaism each found the most intolerable: Medieval Christian anti-Semites found the Jews religious beliefs intolerable; today anti-Zionists loathe the Jews' national commitment.²

Ronata Dermansky

West Des Moines

Palestinian tractor driver shot while rampaging in central Jerusalem

March 5, 2009, 1:46 PM Israel time (GMT+02:00)

The Palestinian tractor hoisted a police van, injuring two police officers, in downtown Jerusalem at the corner of the Begin and Golomb highways in heavy traffic near the Malha shopping mall. As the tractor driver tried to toss the police van with his shovel onto a bus packed with schoolgirls, a passing taxi driver pulled a gun and shot him dead, cutting the rampage short before it claimed more victims on the jampacked highway.

This was the third time a Palestinian terrorist used a tractor to smash vehicles in downtown Jerusalem.