Were it not for irony, the lives of Jews likely would be indistinguishable from the lives of others.
For Jews across the world, yesterday was Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. It celebrates the reunification of Jerusalem 49 years ago at the climax of the Six Day War –restoring East Jerusalem, which the Arabs captured in the 1948 war.
Last evening at the Pacific Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue on Venice Beach, there was a moving scene that was repeated in other Jewish settings throughout the world..
Yosef Beit Halahmi, a soldier in the Six Day War, the briefest in history, colorfully recounted the almost 4000-year history of Jerusalem, from pre-King David days down to his multiple roles in the lopsided Six Day War.
Yom Yerushalayim marks the annual birth of a happy confluence of events for Jews. It occurs every year on the Jewish calendar precisely one week before religious Jews celebrate Moses’ acceptance of the 10 Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai, arguably the most important event in Jewish life.
Here is where irony and Jews marry:
With flawless predictability yesterday at the very moment of jubilation in Jewish communities, Secretary of State John Kerry and the peace-chasing-elsewhere French government desperately were trying to convene yet another peace conference – perhaps the 500th in Israel’s 68 years of statehood.
Here the math is easy. The Arabs have rejected outright all 499 previously tendered solutions offered by Israel.
Again, at the very moment of jubilation in Jewish communities across the world yesterday, 150 significant clashes were happening around the globe. Not including the horrific weekly crime count in Chicago, these international wars kill crowds of innocents, starve families and displace whole communities at a time.
Amidst this unbroken symphony of destruction, only one clash obsesses the minds of non-Jewish world leaders: The Middle East dispute, Israel vs. the neighboring “Palestinians.”
Innocents die by the hundreds and thousands elsewhere on the planet. But the single laser focus of world leaders is the lack of comity, the absence of formal, overt peace between Israel and a warring group of Arabs who, with a strategic nudge from Egyptian-born terrorist Yasser Arafat just over 50 years ago, not accidentally began to call themselves “Palestinians.”
This shrewdly adopted appellation was intended to give a world population that doesn’t pay attention to detail the idea that these star-crossed wretches were the unluckiest Arabs ever born.
The propaganda line then and now was succinct, uncomplicated, unchanging: – they obviously (?) were an ancient people because look at their name, and second, these unfortunate wretches were eternal victims of the Jewish people who refuse to cede crucial parts of the Land of Israel to them. In the days before Israel became a state, recognized by the United Nations, in 1948, the entire country was known as Palestine.
Jews adopted the historic name of Israel upon statehood, May 1948. At the exact moment statehood was being proclaimed by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, a variety of Arab armies began invading the country they are supposed to love more than any other.
Sixty-eight years and a month later, they have maintained their perfect record of shooting at Jews every day without relief.
