Jews have survived by fleeing. They were immensely successful in this. After thousands of years of the most atrocious persecutions, pogroms and holocausts, they are still there. Their dispersal over the world furthers this technique. At the slightest danger, they can escape from one country to another.
Jews have not built Taj Mahals or majestic cathedrals. Their treasures are holy texts, literature and music -- things you can store in your head and take with you when you are on the run.
Like some animals in nature, Jews sense the slightest danger from far away. It's like a red light in their head -- it goes on when nobody else yet perceives the menace. (Indeed, I would not be alive today if my father had not perceived the danger of the Nazi regime from the first day and organized our escape, while almost everybody around was scoffing at him.)
Zionism wanted to turn the gazelle into a lion. It said: no more running away. When in danger, we stand and we fight.
No more the cowardly Jew of the anti-Semitic caricature. From now on, the heroic Israeli, upright and proud.
And, as seems to be human nature, we overcompensate for the past. We have become aggressive, militaristic, even brutal. The oppressed have become oppressors. Jews used to say: "If force does not work, try using your brain." Israelis say "if force does not work, try using more force." (I confess that I coined this phrase many years ago as a joke. Alas, a joke no more.)
HOWEVER, LATELY it seems to me that the old Jew has not disappeared. He has only been hiding. Hiding inside the Israeli. He and his little red light are right there.
How did I find out? Just by listening to Binyamin Netanyahu, with or without his kippah.
Netanyahu has invented (or adopted) a peculiar style of ruling: governing by playing on people's fears.
Since coming back to power, he has been treating us to an endless series of fears. Fearmongering is the order of the day -- every day.
At the beginning there was Barack Hussein Obama, who threatened to punish us for not giving up our sacred right to build settlements all over the country God himself promised us. Unfortunately, Obama capitulated right away, so another menace was needed.
No problem. Mahmoud Abbas, yesterday's "plucked chicken," turned into a roaring tiger and applied to the United Nations to accept the State of Palestine as a member. As everybody knows, that was a mortal threat to Israel. It was only averted by Obama's (yes, the same Hussein Obama) promise to use his veto on behalf of Israel. But the Palestinians have nevertheless been accepted by UNESCO, so the terrible danger has not been banished.
Than came the Arab Spring. As Netanyahu realized from the first moment, even before our great and glorious friend Mubarak was sent to the glass cage, that presented a mortal threat. Now it has been eerily confirmed: Islam, deadly Islam, is taking over Egypt.
Islam, as Netanyahu tells us at every opportunity, is a murderous anti-Jewish creed. There are no moderate Islamists -- they are all out to throw us into the sea. Even in our former ally Turkey.
And they are winning, not only in Egypt. These terrible Islamists have already won in Morocco and Tunisia, and are going to win in Libya, Jordan, Yemen, Syria. Our "villa" will be surrounded not just by a jungle, but by a jungle full of deadly Islamist predators. How absolutely terrifying.
Then another frightful danger was exposed just in time: human rights associations are threatening the very existence of Israel. They are part of a world-wide anti-Semitic conspiracy. Fact: they are financed by foreign governments. A new law had to enacted against them in a hurry. Fortunately, such laws were recently enacted in some former Soviet countries. So our Moldavian foreign Minister (or, rather, our foreign minister from Moldavia), Avigdor Lieberman, obtained the text from his great friend, Alexander Lukashenko, that model democrat from Belarus, and the other renowned democrat, Vladimir Putin.
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