Love of the Land: Tractors?

Tractors?

Michael Zebulon
American Thinker
13 December 09

In unmistakably peace-loving Tehran, Western observers have beheld street processions of missiles - conspicuously emblazoned with clearly stenciled words evoking all the charm and grace of a greeting card: "To Jerusalem."

Late in the 1960s, shortly after Israel's spectacular military victory in the Six-Day War, its then-newly elected Prime Minister: the Russian-born, Milwaukee-raised and Denver-educated, former U.S. citizen, Golda Meir -- was asked if she were not afraid that, because of Israel's need for defense, the country might become "militaristic." "I can only answer," replied the lady, "that I don't want a fine, liberal, anticolonial, antimilitaristic, dead Jewish People."

Those words were spoken some 41 years back. Here's my "report," as it were, in the matter-- four decades hence:

I was in the city of Jerusalem a couple of years ago for "Yom Yerushalayim," that's Jerusalem Day, May 22 this year, which, on the Jewish (lunar) calendar, annually commemorates Israel's responsive and successful unification of the City when the aforesaid Six-Day War was forced upon her in June of 1967. On second thought, let me tinker just ever-so-slightly with the first part of that statement: I wasn't actually in the city "for" Jerusalem Day -- but I was, as fate would have it, in the city on Jerusalem Day. Yes, that's better.

As a matter of fact, I had spent quite a bit of the merry month of May in Israel that year. It was the occasion of my niece's wedding - and then, having completed a rigorous four-year course of study there, she graduated from medical school in Israel, as well, the following week. But this particular narrative isn't about family stuff. Not as such.

Love of the Land: Tractors?