En toch lijkt Israël het middelpunt van de aarde te zijn.
In iets meer dan 60 jaar is het de Israëlische/Joodse bevolking gelukt, ondanks de geld verslindende kosten voor defensie in de strijd voor overleving, om haast vanuit het niets het land op te bouwen tot een moderne westerse staat. Kijkend naar de omliggende landen, waar een Arabisch-islamitische cultuur dominant is, is dit een buitengewoon opvallende prestatie. De omliggende landen, met al hun rijkdom aan natuurlijke hulpbronnen, lopen qua ontwikkeling mijlen ver achter bij de Joodse staat Israël.
Recent sprak ik tijdens een bezoek aan de Palestijnse gebieden met een vooraanstaand Palestijnse christen. In het ND Van 22 februari jongstleden heb ik over dit bezoek een opiniestuk geschreven met als titel: Geen landbelofte, geen vrede. http://bit.ly/hlZ93s
In dit stuk wordt ook beschreven hoe deze Palestijn aankijkt tegen de Arabisch-islamitische cultuur en zijn visie op de oorzaak waarom de landen die overheerst worden door deze cultuur, te weinig tot ontwikkeling komen.Onderstaand artikel sluit hier aardig op aan
What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?
Jewish refugees left everything they had in
By WARREN KOZAK
It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens.
Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations?
In 1945, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors living in DP Camps (displaced persons) across
To begin with, the Jews would all still be living in these DP camps, only now the camps would have become squalid ghettos throughout
Associated Press
Golda Meir pondered what would have become of the Jews had they been destroyed by the Arab armies.
Sometime in the early 1960s, the Jewish leadership of these refugee camps, having been trained in Moscow to wreak havoc on the West (as Yasser Arafat was) would have started to employ terrorism to shake down governments. Airplane hijackings in the 1970s would have been followed by passenger killings. There would have been attacks on high-profile targets as well—say, the German or Polish Olympic teams.
By the 1990s, the real mayhem would have begun. Raised on victimhood and used as cannon fodder by corrupt leaders, a generation of younger Jews would be blowing up buses, restaurants and themselves. The billions of dollars extorted from various governments would not have gone to the inhabitants of the camps. The money would be in the Swiss bank accounts of the refugees' famous and flamboyant leaders and their lackies.
So now it's the present, generations past the end of World War II, and the festering Jewish refugee problem throughout Europe has absolutely no end in sight. The worst part of this story would be the wasted lives of millions of human beings in the camps—inventions not invented, illnesses not cured, high-tech startups not started up, symphonies and books not written—a real cultural and spiritual desert.
None of this happened, of course. Instead, the Jewish refugees returned to their ancestral homeland. They left everything they had in Europe and turned their backs on the Continent—no "right of return" requested. They were welcomed by the 650,000 Jewish residents of Israel.
An additional 700,000 Jewish refugees flooded into the new state from Arab lands after they were summarily kicked out. Again losing everything after generations in one place; again welcomed in their new home.
In Israel, they did it all the hard way. They built a new country from scratch with roads, housing and schools. They created agricultural collectives to feed their people. They created a successful economy without domestic oil, and they built one of the world's most vibrant democracies in a region sadly devoid of free thought.
Yes, the Israelis did all this with the financial assistance of Jews around the world and others who helped get them on their feet so they could take care of themselves. These outsiders did not ignore them, or demean them, or use them as pawns in their own political schemes—as the Arab nations have done with the Palestinians.
I imagine the argument will be made that while the Jews may have achieved all this, they did not have their land stolen from them. This is, of course, a canard, another convenient lie. They did lose property all over Europe and the Mideast. And there was never an independent Palestine run by Palestinian Arabs. Ever. Jews and Arabs lived in this area controlled first by the Turks and then by the British. The U.N. offered the two-state solution that we hear so much about in 1947. The problem then, and now, is that it was accepted by only one party, Israel. No doubt, the situation of Arab residents of the Middle East back then may have been difficult, but it is incomprehensible that their lot was worse than that of the Jews at the end of World War II.
We don't hear about any of this because giving human beings hope and purpose doesn't make great copy. Squalor, victimhood and terror are always more exciting. Perhaps in the end, the greatest crime of the Jews was that they quietly created something from nothing. And in the process, they transformed themselves.
Golda Meir is credited with having said that if the Jews had not fought back against the Arab armies and had been destroyed in 1948, they would have received the most beautiful eulogies throughout the world. Instead, they chose to stand their ground and defend themselves. And in winning, they received the world's condemnation. Meir said she would take the condemnation over the eulogies.
Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).
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