On Monday morning, I met with the editor of a New York newspaper.
"Isn't it hard being
away from Israel right now, with all that's going on?" he asked,
referring to Thursday night's abduction of three teenagers -- Naftali
Frenkel, 16, Gil-ad Shaer, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 -- who were on
their way home for the weekend from yeshivas they attend in Gush Etzion
and Hebron.
"Yes," I said. "But there is always something critical happening there."
Indeed, I have yet to
visit my family in the United States without either leaving behind, or
greeting upon my arrival, a worrisome event that is dominating the news
in Israel. And my first response, like that of all Israeli parents, is
to locate each of my children to make sure they are safe, or to find
out whether they have been called up for reserve duty.
This is not simply a
function of Jewish motherhood, however. It is not due to hysteria over
the ills that might befall our offspring. No, this is not how we
Israelis live at all. If anything, we are experts at compartmentalizing
danger, clucking our tongues at existential crises, while fretting
over grocery shopping and bad-hair days.
Until something
horrific happens to snap us out of our stupor, that is. Like the
kidnapping of "our" boys at the hands of bloodthirsty terrorists. It is
then that we turn off the soccer matches on TV and gather together to
cry with and pray for the victimized families, fully aware that they
could be us, that the only thing differentiating them from us is an
accident of fate.
It is during such moments that reality hits home, yet again: Israel is under enemy attack, as it has been since its inception.
This fact is
continually obfuscated, however, both unwittingly and on purpose. The
former is understandable. Israeli democracy is among the most vibrant
and successful in the world. In spite of glitches that would be called
"growing pains" in any other fledgling state established a mere 66
years ago, it has a viable economy, a passable education system,
reasonable health care, a vigilant legal system, a free press, and
attention to social justice. It absorbs massive amounts of legal
immigrants, and contends, as humanely as possible, with the illegal
ones.
Moreover, it is
acknowledged globally as the "startup nation," and has produced Nobel
Prize winners, international supermodels, beauty queens, movie stars,
artists and filmmakers.
As a result, it does
not have the general feel of an embattled country. And even
well-informed well-wishers, whether citizens or visitors, are capable
of temporarily forgetting that Israel is fighting an ongoing defensive
war for its survival.
For detractors, on the
other hand, the miraculous nature of Israeli society provides a
different kind of opportunity altogether, one that serves to "prove"
that the Jewish state is flourishing at the expense of the Arabs living
under Palestinian Authority rule in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank),
and under Hamas in Gaza.
It is as irrelevant to
these detractors as it is to the Arabs whose propaganda they promote
that their positions have been refuted repeatedly. It is of no interest
to them that the premise on which they base their hostility -- that
the Israeli "occupation" of territories it acquired in the Six-Day War
of 1967 is the source of the Palestinian plight and the cause of
Palestinian terrorism -- is a complete and utter lie.
All one has to do is
peruse the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas charters, view
the content of the PA-controlled newspapers and television and witness
the behavior of what has just become a unity PA-Hamas government to
realize that the express goal of the Palestinian leadership (if not the
majority of the people) is the annihilation of the Jewish state.
This has not prevented
incessant peace overtures on the part of each and every Israeli
government, which have included settlement freezes, territorial
withdrawals, prisoner releases and hefty financial and other forms of
aid, compounded exponentially by the international community.
The most recent of such
endeavors began with American pressure, continued with Israeli
concessions and ended, as always, with Palestinian violence,
culminating in the kidnapping of three innocent boys.
Their poor parents are
forced to endure an unimaginable nightmare: not knowing whether their
sons are dead, yet bemoaning what they must be going through if they are
alive.
PA President Mahmoud
Abbas has no sympathy for the boys or their parents. He is too busy
blaming Israel for arresting suspects and retaliating against ongoing
barrages of missile fire from Gaza.
In a statement released
to the PA news agency WAFA on Monday, Abbas "condemned the latest
escalations in the West Bank, including the kidnapping of three Israeli
settlers and the ongoing series of violations by Israeli soldiers and
settlers against innocent Palestinian civilians and against prisoners
held in Israeli jails."
Abbas' vile words came
four days after the abduction of the teens, but only a single day after
his wife, Amina, was released from her private room at the Assuta
Medical Center in Tel Aviv. It was there that she was sent by her
Israel-hating husband to have knee surgery performed by Israeli
doctors. She was admitted to the hospital on Friday morning, when news
of the previous night's kidnappings broke.
It is this story that
should have made the headlines in New York, alongside reportage of the
Palestinian terrorist abduction of three young Jews. Not that it would
have made any difference to Israel's enemies. But it would serve as a
reminder to Israel's friends that it needs and deserves all the support
-- and love -- it can get.
Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"
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