Grandma's army

The late Prime Minister Menachem Begin famously said: "I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid". For decades, we have confronted the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism. We have outlived expulsions, progroms, massacres, and even the Holocaust. Our history may be tragic, but we have reason to be optimistic. We are living in times in which we need to be reminded of how much strength the Jewish people have: Our survival as a people, the gathering in of exiles and the rebuilding of a Jewish state.   To quote Mark Twain: "Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of.  He is as...

At the height of the election campaign in 1977, the Labour Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, visited the first moshav (Netzer Hazani) to be set up in Gush Katif.  In a symbolic gesture, Rabin affixed a mezuzah at the entrance to the home of the Yefet family and declared: “This is a big day for the State and the settlement movement, a day which symbolizes the foundation of our attachment to the region which, since the Six-day War, has become an inseparable part of the State and its security.” Nine years later, when Rabin was Minister of Defense in the National United Government Peres-Shamir, he made a return visit to Netzer Hazani and declared, almost word-for-word, the same speech he had made in 1977. When the Herut party won the 1977 elections for the first time, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, had to uproot close to twenty young settlements in the framework of the Camp David Accords. However he strongly opposed the proposal to return Gaza to Egypt. He promised that the preceden...