Soccer Dad

The last refuge

I don't always agree with Richard Cohen, but when he's on, he can be excellent. Today, with What Helen Thomas Missed he was excellent. (or at RCP.)

Cohen points out that Jews, in the past, have wanted to go back to the lands where they came from, but they weren't always welcome.

In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 -- more than a year after the end of the war -- rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not "go home." When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.

The best paragraph, though, is a quote from a European Jewish refugee:

"I want to go to Palestine," Kalk told members of a U.N. investigating committee. "I know the conditions there. But where in the world is it good for the Jew? Sooner or later he is made to suffer. In Palestine, at least, the Jews fight together for their life and their country."

If history has shown anything, it's that the Jews can't trust many of their hosts. It wasn't just the Holocaust. Before that there were pogroms. And the Jews in Arab lands found themselves ethnically cleansed when the state of Israel was founded.

If Jews are to survive, they need their own country. When people say "we don't want Jews in the Middle East," they really are saying, "we don't Jews."

The last refuge of the Jews, is Israel.

Crossposted on Yourish.