Grandma's army

How can anyone in the world, politically astute, who looks at the map and the demographics and says it’s within the power of the Jewish people to bring peace? There is a chorus around the world which accompanies our peace process which states: “Go on with this peace process. It is good for you. It is the only way. You are morally obliged to continue”. We hear it from everywhere in the whole of enlightened Europe. “The number of Jews killed in terrorist attacks is small, and you are accustomed to death. You have been hounded for generations, and lost six million only three generations ago. With one and a half million children among   those millions, what matters it in the grand scheme of things if another teenager is murdered.” A nation worn and grief-stricken from the devastation of the Holocaust believed that its victory in war, the final arbiter of international politics, would ensure its ultimate acceptance in the region. Yet the Arabs refus...

Golda Meir once stated: “The only time we will have peace with the Arabs is when they start to love their own children more than they hate ours.”  There are plenty of Arabs, including the mothers, who would willingly sacrifice their children’s lives in the cause of Islam. One blatant example is the case of the baby from Gaza whose life was saved in a hospital in Israel which treats   Arab children with heart problems. When he was released from hospital and his mother was asked what she would like her baby to become she replied “a Jihad warrior”! Quite a few of the suicide terrorists are mere teenagers. This is not surprising since they are brainwashed from infancy to consider it a good deed to kill Jews. Talking of teenagers, Nachshon Wachsman was brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists in 1994, after being kidnapped and held hostage for six terrible days. His mother, Esther Wachsman, who was the mother of seven sons, wrote a moving article in the Jerusalem Post in th...

Last week the subject was the Six Day war. A far different war was inflicted upon us six years later. The Yom Kippur war caught Israel completely by surprise since our enemies chose the most holy day in the Jewish calendar to attack us. The then Prime Minister, Golda Meir, visited the worn- out and filthy soldiers in the front line. One exhausted member of a tank crew asked Golda: “My father was killed in the 1948 war, and we won. Last week I lost my best friend and we’re now winning. But is all our sacrifice worthwhile, Golda? What’s the use of our military power if we can’t win the peace? After expressing her understanding of his question and her condolences,   Golda Meir added: In 1948, in this season of the year, I arrived in Moscow as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. The State of Israel was brand new. Stalinism was at its height. Jews, as Jews, had no rights. They had been cut off from their fellow Jews for 30 years. Since the Communist revolu...

                                          Ephraim Kishon (1924-2005), deserves a blog of his own. He was Israel’s premier satirist, whose biting wit shaped the national agenda of the formative years of the Jewish state, and kept people laughing at the same time. Mr. Kishon’s influence went beyond the large number of people who read his books and newspaper column or watched the skits, plays and movies he wrote. He was one of the most popular satirists worldwide, selling more than 40 million books in his half-century of writing.  Efraim Kishon’s quotes: Israel is a country so tiny that there is no room to write its name on the world map. It is a country of boundless boundaries. It is a country where mothers learn the mother tongue from their sons. It is a country wh...

JEW BASHERS Einstein on this very subject: "If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew". The Jews are the only people in the world who have found hostility in every country in which they settled in any numbers. Throughout history people have accused the Jews of the most outrageous, unbelievable things – from causing the plague and other scourges, to present day Holocaust deniers.   In spite of the fact that the Holocaust was the best documented account of genocide in the world ever written. Deborah Lipstadt a history professor was asked to write a book on Holocaust deniers. She maintains that for deniers to be right all “others” have to be wrong . The “others” are the victims, the survivors; bystanders, such as the   Poles who lived around the death camps and wat...

My purpose in writing these blogs is in response to negative, orchestrated, and biased media propaganda against Israel. I am not interested in politics per se and am not trying to promote any particular political party. I simply insist that our Jewish voices be heard. It is an uphill job trying to combat the disturbingly slanted press and TV coverage of the horrors happening inside Israel, together with acts of anti-Semitism which have surfaced worldwide – often hidden from the public or trivialized. The Jews have a long overdue reckoning with the world. We hoped that with a country of our own we will have a world in which the Jews do not live subject to the whims of their host countries. No more 1290, when England decided to evict all its Jews. Or Spain, in 1492, when the Jews were given the choice to leave, convert or burn at the stake. No more 1930’s, when Germany turned from a land of seemingly endless possibilities for the Jews, to the beginning of a satanic plan to eradicate ...

For a country that has to spend such a huge, disproportionate   slice of the national   budget    on defense needs in order to exist, Israel can still be considered as the People of the Book. A fledgling state which resolved to make the most of the only resource it had – human intellectual capital – with results far exceeding what anyone could have imagined. Abba Eban once wrote that the Jews gave humanity the notion of “civilization. “ For 3,000 years, the creative tension between the People and the Book generated philosophy and law, offered models of piety and morality and defined a discipline leading to personal commitment and communal compassion.” In the words of Ben Gurion : "In Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] arose the Jewish people, in which was formed its spiritual, religious and national image, in which it created national and universal cultural treasures and bequeathed to the world entire the eternal Book of Books…" Ben Gurion also wrote: “Anyon...