Love of the Land: How Does Israel Survive?

How Does Israel Survive?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
22 February '10

When others, from the safety of distant shores, contemplate what risks Israel should incur on behalf of innocents, or when others tut-tut the assassination of a terrorist, there is a tendency to dance around the central dilemma for the Jewish state—namely, that it is fighting against a “cult of death”:

How are the citizens of the Jewish State—for whom, as for all Jews, the essential (if difficult to fulfill) demand from God is Choose Life And Be Grateful For It; who’d desperately love to be sending their children off to grapple with literature, or physics, or even macramé after high school, but must send them off to grapple instead with an adversary that hides in hospitals and mosques and uses women and children as shields; who mourn as a nation every child of Israel killed in action; who cherish every drop of shed Jewish blood as if it were the living breathing person; whose enemies slosh through the blood of their own fallen brothers as if it were so much rain water—how are Israelis ever going to make peace with people whose death-worship is so wide and so deep that they’ve turned mothers—who’ve felt unborn life fluttering, hiccuping, kicking; and later the indescribable pleasure of the scent and feel of their babies heavy with sleep in their arms; the first enthralling toothless smiles; the first glorious infant belly laughs; heard the أمي, “Ommy!” for the first thrilling time; wiped away the first tears of hurt—into zombies who seek and celebrate the deaths of their own children?

When that asymmetry is resolved, there will be plenty of peace to process. Not before.

Love of the Land: How Does Israel Survive?