Why I love Israel

I started liking Israel because of its name.

Is-Ra-El – He who fights or argues with God.

In my mind, any country that takes its name from a people who is used to debating God, is good in my book. It must be something in my DNA that makes me not take anything for granted, good or bad.

If someone tells me something, I tend to disagree. But if different people tell me more or less the same story, without having the physical possibility of conspiring against me, that is how I know they are all legit in that circumstance. That is when I allow myself to be convinced. But I digress.

Moreover, every time the Israeli ignored the etymology of their country’s name, disaster was sure to follow.

It is said that in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that Israel almost lost, along its statehood, it was decided that even if nine out of ten intelligence officers concurred about any security threat, it was the job of the tenth man to be the dissenting opinion. His job would be to provide the moral counterweight to nefarious unanimity, which had so many times before proved the undoing of so many of the mighty.

That is why I enjoy playing the role of devil’s advocate, which is my favorite pastime.

The same thing goes for Israel and its people. I like Israel because Jews do not agree with anyone for the sake of the argument. They disagree with them for the heck of it. That marks them as my chosen people in my own small book.

That and their Resilience, which is measured on the scale of millennia. Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greek, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks of all stripes, Mongols, Mamelukes, Ottomans, British, Palestinians, they all came and did their worst in the land of Judaea, Samaria, Holy Land, Palestine, Israel. And yet, Jews survived, thrived, endured.

Throughout their 1,878 year-long diaspora, thrown against the four corners of the world, the Jewish people again lived on in spite of pogroms, genocide, prejudice, blood libels, religious zealotry, murder, rape, and outright theft.

And then the Nazi came, and outdid the Russian Empire, by murdering six million Jews, along many other people of all denominations and sorts.

While there had been genocides before and even though these continue to plague our species, the Jewish genocide was special. And that is coming from an Armenian whose people were murdered by the Ottomans to the tune of 1.5 million in 1915. Weird how mass murder always rhymes somehow, 1.5 with 19-15 and 6 million with the 6 years of war in WW2, eh!

You see this was unprecedented. For never before had an unestablished people, a nationless group of gents, sharing a religious tradition and a common blood, been exsanguinated so much without being extinguished, purged from the face of the Earth. You will perhaps say that I must be exaggerating. After all, 30 million Russians were killed by the Nazi in 4 years of total war. And I would tend to agree with the figures of this Hecatomb. But that would be the extent of my agreement.

For one must consider the facts. And facts are that the Jews did not have any country to escape to before or during WW2. They could see the slaughter coming at them, and most of them could do nothing to escape. Nobody would take them in. Not in sufficient numbers to escape the Holocaust. They had no country to call their own. The world was content to leave them at the mercy, well at the whim of the 3^rd Reich, for mercy cannot be used in the same sentence with the Nazi regime.

The Russians, however, did die in the millions while fighting a losing fight at first, then winning the war and freeing their own country from the clutches of the Nazi.

Two entirely different things.

The biggest losers of WW2 were the individual Jews who were poisoned with Zyklon B in hermetically sealed underground halls. The big winners of the war were the Americans who assumed the financial hegemony of half the postbellum world, and the Russians who managed to recoup their horrendous population losses and extend their grip over the other half of the globe.

But the Jewish people learned their lesson of survival. Namely, that in order to survive the next genocide that was sure to come if the world was given enough time and opportunity, they had to become a nation. In short, they needed to find a place to call

בַּיִת

The Jews needed a place to call Home (bayit). Funny thing, and History is choke full of irony, which is seemingly one of its building blocks, but there already was such a land: Eretz Israel.

In the land of the Israelites, the word Home means something more than it means for the rest of the world. It is something countless generations died without having a chance at One. Home is sacred for the Jews. They have died, they continue to die, and they will always sacrifice their lives for the sake of their Home(s).

This is why I love Israel. Because nobody and nothing comes between a Jew and his/her homeland.

Eretz Israel is why the survivors of Jewish tribes started flocking back home after 1945. And as history shows us survivors breed winners. Since they knew the alternative (total annihilation), the Jews had to win. And win they did. Israel won all its wars, since 1948. And that, my friends, is why I love Israel. Because they are consummate survivors. The Israeli do not give two bucks on what other people feel or think about them. They make sure to have a strong enough stick to keep the rabid dogs of the world at bay. For without the stick firmly in their hands, the world would have surely taken them apart by now.

‘tis, unfortunately, a dog eat dog out there. And don’t you ever believe anybody who tries to tell you any different.

Epilogue

What happened on October 7 is lo tov or not good!

The problem with moral equivalency is that it allows people to come up with insane amoral mathematics that equate X number of Muslim casualties with Y number of Jewish casualties.

This ignores premeditation. Any district attorney or prosecutor worth their salt would be able to tell you that mens rea or criminal intent can decide a person’s fate.

Criminal intent – let me rephrase that, proving criminal intent is what separates those proven guilty and allowed to live, from those who are executed.

Now I don’t believe in capital punishment because judicial errors exist.

But when I hear people say that Israel has willingly killed innocent people and that that is what caused the murder, premeditated murder of 1,000+ Israeli civilians, that is where I draw the line.