The truth, and the truth alone, will set the Palestinian people free, for they are imprisoned not by Israel's just defense of its right to exist and defend its people, but by the self-imposed hatred that poisons the soul, and withers the future. Israel is today, as Israel has always been, a sign of hope that God's children can seek to be pleasing in His sight. Israel is today, as Israel has always been, hateful in the eyes of those whose neck is stiff, and whose heart is filled with hate and falsehood. Until it shall please God to make the land of His special favor a pleasing sight to all the nations, may it please Him to continue to give all Americans the eyes to see in Israel, as is truly the case, a beacon of justice, courage, and truth.

My prayers, my heart, are with the brave people of Israel.

                      -- Alan Keyes

Israel: An End of the Line Perspective

William Mehlman

JERUSALEM - Judgements on the state of affairs recently handed down by two of the deeper thinkers among the local journalistic fraternity have set me to thinking anew about why I came here and why, amidst the almost daily ration of violence and tragedy visited upon my fellow residents, I have chosen to remain here.

What struck me most vividly about the observations of this pair was the transfiguration generated in their respective psyches by close to two years of murder by religious contract of 500 of their countrymen and the ceaseless global antipathy directed against their postage stamp-sized state.

Observer No. 1, a former charter member of the "Oslo-Peace in Our Time" dovecoterie, executed the sharpest 180 degree political turn I've witnessed in my close to four years in Israel. Responding to a particularly horrific suicide bombing just minutes away from fashionable north Tel Aviv, he averred that the only effective answer to the depredations visited on Israel since September 2000 was the total unleashing of the might of the Israel Defense Forces, not excluding the carpet-bombing of the Palestinian towns and refugee camps that provided the breeding grounds for these monsters.

Observer No. 2, once prepared to embrace any nostrum that would put an end to Israel's terrorist nightmare, performed on the same day an ideological pirouette as impressive as that of his formerly liberal colleague. All the physical force we can exert against Arafat and his Hamas and Islamic Jihad partners, he declared, will no more avail us than a bottle of aspirin against the bubonic plague. Our only hope for survival lies in a miracle--and no less a miracle than the coming of the Messiah. So, let's stop worshipping our firepower, he said, and focus on persuading 13 million Jews (or at least the five million in Israel) to strictly observe three consecutive Sabbaths--the Talmudic prerequisite for the Messiah's immediate arrival.

Carpet-bombing? The Messiah? If the hint of hysteria in the voices of these once cool observers triggered a re-examination of my motives for emigrating to Israel and for remaining here, I suppose the thought must have been in the back of my mind for some time.

I used to believe my coming to Israel, however late in the day, was entirely the function of a lifelong commitment to the Zionist ideal--the process, so to speak, of finally putting my money where my mouth was. I now realize that was only part of the truth. The other, perhaps more essential part, it has recently dawned on me, involved a somewhat less noble sense of my unrequited personal place in history. The most exciting Jewish drama in 2,000 years was being played out in Israel and I was determined to be on the stage rather than in the audience.

Never have I felt the pull of this personal sense of destiny more keenly than when I entered a polling station in Jerusalem last year to vote for prime minister of Israel. In the process of fulfilling this otherwise mundane civic obligation, I was suddenly gripped by the realization that I was executing a decision that 70 generations of my ancestors could not -- in their wildest collective imagination -- have conceived of. There I stood, the first scion of that multi-familial menage in two millennia, casting my ballot as the citizen of a sovereign Jewish state for a sovereign Jewish head of state. Talk about "choseness"! I will never know why that breathtaking privilege fell to me, but I had the uncanny feeling that a million pair of eyes were peering over my shoulder in witness to the act.

More than anything else, it's my sense of the continued presence of those witnesses in my midst that keeps me in Israel in the face of the homicidal horror that has become an almost daily feature of life here since September 2000. I didn't reckon on the potential mortal danger of getting on a bus or sitting down at a cafe when I decided to make aliyah in 1998. I didn't expect to join a funeral in progress every time I turned on my television to watch the evening news. I knew Israel was no bed of roses, but frankly I never expected to see the seemingly endless spilling of Jewish blood -- most of it young Jew-

July-August 2002               - 7 -               Outpost