Grandma's army

  Last week I was a patient in one of the two Hadassah hospitals in Jerusalem. I was placed in a room with two beds in the senior citizen’s   cardiology department. The other bed was occupied by an Arab Christian woman from Bethlehem who was accompanied by her approximately 50 year old son. He slept next to her in a couch by her bed, and used the same facilities. There is a Palestinian hospital in Bethlehem but they preferred an Israeli hospital even though they had to pay privately. They were once part of a predominantly Christian Arab population.   Today, Bethlehem is almost devoid of Christians, as the result of persecution by their Muslim brothers – and not only in Bethlehem. Israel’s public healthcare system is a model of genuine commonality between Arabs and Jews. I n the government healthcare system, Arabs fill 12.4% of jobs; in nursing studies 42% of students are Arab; pharmaceuticals has become identified with the Arab community – 38% of druggists are Arab; at Superpharm,

Like the corona virus, the new anti-Semitism has mutated so that practitioners of it can deny that they are anti-Semites. “After all”, they’ll say, “I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel”. But in a world of 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, which constitutes one-quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Middle East! Israel is the only one of the 193 member nations of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged, with one state, Iran, and other groups, committed to its destruction. How come the Jews have been  “chosen” for thousands of years as the world’s scapegoats whenever a crisis emerges? At the time of Jesus, Jews were hated because of their religion. At the time of Hitler they were hated because of their race. Today, since the leading source of authority worldwide is “human rights” Israel is regularly accused of crimes against humanity: rac