Grandma's army

  THE GIVING TREE There's a well-known children's book by Shel Silverstein about a boy and a tree. The boy keeps taking from the tree. The tree keeps giving. The boy never says "thank you" the tree never says "no". Until the stump of the tree is all that's left. This is similar to the story of Israel and the "Palestinians": Israel is the tree. The "Palestinians" are the "boy". Ungrateful, entitled, and permanently dissatisfied. In addition, the "boy" is invariably hostile. Baum/Boim (tree in Yiddish), is a common Jewish surname: applebaum (apple tree), birnbaum (pear tree), kirschbaum (cherry tree), nussbaum (nut tree), feigelbaum (fig tree), mandelbaum (almond tree). Here are a just a few examples of THE GIVING BAUM: Rescue from neglect and poverty: From 1948 until 1967, the "West Bank" of the Jordan river was controlled by Jordan. Jordan treated it as far less important than the "East B...

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land; bears the same name; speaks the same language; and worships the same God that it did thousands of years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from the time of King David; coins from the time of Bar Kochba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script almost identical to the one spoken today. Israel is constantly being rediscovered by ongoing archeological evidence.   The vast majority of the so-called “Palestinians” were originally immigrants who streamed in from all over the Muslim world from the 1830’s to 1947. They have a non-existent history: There has never been a land known as  Palestine  governed by  Palestinians;  when was Palestine founded?;  how did it get its name, as the letter “P” doesn’t exist in Arabic; what was the Palestinian currency?; why doesn’t the Koran mention Palestine once/anywhere?   The name Pa...