From up here where I am for a few days, in the Dolomites, Europe’s most fascinating mountains, it is strange to read and think of the news that comes from Israel for the new Gregorian year.
The Jewish State enters in 2019 with almost 9 million inhabitants. A real miracle. 185,000 new children were born in a year, half of those born in Italy which has 60 million inhabitants. 40,000 people moved to Israel in the last year.
It has the politics of a normal Western country, divisive, litigious, like any other democracy, like Italy.
A country last year sentenced at the UN 21 times more than North Korea which is an immense arid Gulag.
A country that holds 1 percent of the population and 2 percent of the land of the entire Middle East, but that everyone seems to want to delete from the map.
A country that the Vatican recognized only twenty years ago, but which has the only Christian population that grows every year throughout the Middle East.
There are many things we can discover by reading the most precise, detailed and important "black list" of the 50 states in the world that persecute Christians and has just been released by Open Doors. It turns out, for example, that among the top ten countries, with the exception of the communist cesspit which is North Korea and which should enter the history books as such, they are all Islamic countries.
Strange, is it not? Since the Vatican, which represents one billion Christians, not only refuses to name them, these persecutors of Christians, but also incenses them. It also turns out that, among these fifty countries, the country where Christianity was created does not appear, and that for 70 years it is in the firm and wise hands of the Jewish people: Israel.
Isn't it strange? Since it is a state that the Vatican formally recognized only twenty-five years ago, and still refuses to call by name, but quotes it as the “holy land” and regarding which many churches in the world, especially progressive ones, are taking the side of its enemies.
A country accused of militarism, but whose most read, famous and recently deceased writer, Amos Oz, was a naif supporter of peace at any cost, even at the expense of Israeli lives.
A country 15 times smaller than Norway, but everyone in the world would like to make it smaller and smaller.
From up here where I am now, Israel really looks like the Dolomites of the Middle East.