Israel, the border state
Israel, the border state

Hezbollah and Iran on the Lebanese border. Jabhat al-Nusra and al Qaeda on the Syrian border. Islamic State in Sinai. Hamas in Gaza. And Judea and Samaria are different just because of the brave and legitimate presence of hundreds of thousands of Jews, whom the world wrongly calls “the settlers.” 

Islamist forces are pressing at Israel’s borders and this is a metaphor of what would happen if Israel would not exist at all: those dark forces would be flowing unhampered into the West.

The Jewish State is the most important border between Islamists and the free world and civilization.

Tel Aviv has taken on the appearance of a French Riviera with its picturesque and laughing crowds that swarm on the evening promenades and among the cafes of Dizengoff Street, just hit by terror. Yet it is an illusion, because Jews there confront - every day and every night - the simple and basic issue of survival.

Israel has never formally become a Republic: it is a “State”, as if it would unwittingly wish to reflect the temporary nature of the tragic fate of a troubled democracy and state-building country unique in the world, living on against the laws of logic, history and power.

Where has this new anti-Semitism come from? How did international public opinion begin to see Israel as the source of all evil?

I am personally convinced that the hardy plant called Israel in the Middle East will prevail over the forces of Arab-Islamic rejection.
A lie repeated many times, eventually becomes truth. This statement, attributed to the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, has never been as true as it is today.

You cannot look without great pain at the Palestinian Arab child victims of the war, but our empathy should also crash against the monstrosity that makes use of their lives in the war against Israel, how they are sent to die, how they are taught to hate, how their moms say they are proud of their “martyrs”. If that empathy is not felt, the European countries should stop bombing Raqqa and welcome the Islamic State into the family of nations.

The Jewish state deserves the unreserved admiration of all civilized people. Instead, its enemies today are stronger and friends are increasingly stingy with friendship. Israel is abandoned to its fate, alone against all its foes. And time is working against it.

I am personally convinced that the hardy plant called Israel in the Middle East will prevail over the forces of Arab-Islamic rejection; and perhaps only then, with a new and young heart, the Arab world will be able to get out from the backwardness in which it was forced to drag its feet because of the hypnosis of war against the Jews.

But we don’t have to be fools: today most of people in Europe feel more anti-imperialist by railing against Zionism, in total ignorance of what really was and what really is. Hate for Israel is the new “socialism of idiots”, as August Bebel said to define anti-Semitism.

It would be a grave mistake to take the words of the enemies of Israel as simple outbursts of demagogic hysteria. We made that same mistake with Hitler and Stalin, who confiscated the freedom and independence of a half-dozen European nations. Today the dream of seeing Israel sinking is constantly being told, but it is a shortsighted dream.

Because if that border falls, we in the West will follow shortly. Nobody would then stop the storm.