The creation of the Zionist state was supposed to protect the post-Holocaust Jew forever http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
| May 5, 2006 / 7 Iyar, 5766
When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth
noting. In the year 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put
down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of
thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and
exile. For nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now,
in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews
living in Israel — the successor state to Judea — than in any other place
on Earth.
Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish
population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million
10 years later and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility
rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by
mid-century.
When 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, only two
main centers of Jewish life remained: America and Israel. That binary star
system remains today, but a tipping point has just been reached. With every
year, as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel and decline
in America (and in the rest of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes,
as it was at the time of Jesus, the center of the Jewish world.
An epic restoration, and one of the most improbable. To take just one
of the remarkable achievements of the return: Hebrew is the only "dead"
language in recorded history to have been brought back to daily use as
the living language of a nation. But there is a price and a danger to this
transformation. It radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival.
For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion — protection not
for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred,
but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could
survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople.
They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the
Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive
in the rest of Europe.
Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism
married to modern technology — railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas
chambers that kill with industrial efficiency — could take a scattered
people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.
The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that
had allowed the Holocaust to happen — after Hitler had made his intentions
perfectly clear — that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection
and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first
in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49,
1967 and 1973).
But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration — putting
all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean,
eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish
Hitler's work.
His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention
to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed.
Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly
how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.
Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate
of this gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will
leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam."
The logic is impeccable, the intention clear: A nuclear attack would effectively
destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would
have no major effect on an Islamic civilization of a billion people stretching
from Mauritania to Indonesia.
As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there
is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer. "We have announced
that wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place
we target will be Israel," said Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top Revolutionary
Guards commander. Hitler was only slightly more direct when he announced
seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, "the
result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just
turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first
time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in
the face of the gathering storm — a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared
enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews — the world did nothing.
When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years,
the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?
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