The following paragraph is a preview to Meir Kahane’s classic, timely and prophetic Dear World:
To understand how the typical Israeli feels at the moment to Security Council Resolution 2334 of Friday, December 23, consider how it would feel living anywhere in the United States and being told that through an act of UN eminent domain, the Founding Fathers and the entire history of the United States are invalid and that wherever you live is instantly not your home. Your land is not your land; it belongs to people who’ve been murdering you over the years. That’s how it feels.– Jack Engelhard
Dear World [abridged]
By Rabbi Meir Kahane – Written by him months before his assassination, 1990
It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you are upset over us here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry and outraged. Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it is the “brutal repression” of the Palestinians; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War campaign.
It appears that Jews who triumph, and who therefore live, upset you most extraordinarily.
Dear World: It appears that Jews who triumph, and who therefore live, upset you most extraordinarily.
It is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you – and establish a Jewish State.
And so we decided to come home, to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, was also upset.
Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Holocausts…we continue to upset you…you are deeply angered that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are “clearly an obstacle to peace in the Middle East.”
Moscow is upset and Washington is upset and the Arabs are upset.
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920, 1921 and in 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.
The Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who – when they had all the territories they now demand be given them for a state – attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of “idbah-al-yahud” – Slaughter the Jews!” that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then.
The same people, the same dream – destroy Israel.
What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today – but we should not “repress” them.
Dear World, you stood by the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol Massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by the wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea.
And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.
And since we know that the Arab-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we do everything possible to remain alive in our own land.
If that bothers you, dear world, well – think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.
--- Condensed from the novel “The Bathsheba Deadline.” The full text appears in Chapter 37.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. New from the novelist: “News Anchor Sweetheart,” a novelist’s version of Fox News and Megyn Kelly. Engelhard is the author of the international bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” He is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com