Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 55, No. 35, Ed. 1 Thursday, August 30, 2001 Page: 9 of 24
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IN OUR 55TH YEARI — DALLAS, THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2001, TEXAS JEWISH POST
Gary Rosenblatt
Dear Children: Israel Is Burning!
■" unng World War II, my maternal
I B grandparents in Baltimore often
I W hosted rabbis, colleagues and
B fnends who worked tirelessly for
the Vaad Hatzalah, the effort to rescue Euro-
pean yeshiva leaders and students
From all the stories I grew up hear-
ing about this tragic period, one Yid-
dish phrase stands out for its poignant
sense of despair and urgency:
"Kinderlacli, es brent. ” one rabbi
who had visited Europe would tear-
fully report to my grandparents,
roughly translated as, “My children,
it’s burning.”
To me the words suggested the fire of the
Holocaust — from the burning anti-Semitism
of the Nazis to the ovens of Auschwitz — was
all-consuming, and those who tned to spread
the message of the ongoing tragedy were met
in the Jewish community by a disbelief that
gradually gave way to utter powerlessness.
Partly in response, my generation grew up
along with the nascent Jewish state, convinced
that the combination of proud Israeli self-suf-
ficiency, based on moral and military strength,
and the tragic lesson learned by the world af-
ter Hitler’s defeat, that racist hatred must not
be tolerated, would forever prevent heart-
breaking acts of mass cruelty against Jews in
the future.
The shocking realization today, in the 11 th
month of a Palestinian mini-war against the
right of Jews to a state of their own in the
Midcast, is that for all that has changed these
last five decades, and so much has, a very dif-
ferent but just as real sense of disbelief and
powcrlessness still defines our reaction to the
violence of the intifada.
Unlike the Holocaust period, of
course, there is a Jewish state, a
haven for the oppressed, and Israel’s
army is among the most powerful
in the world. And while reports of
death camps and mass murder trick-
led into the world consciousness all
too slowly during the Holocaust
years, woefully under-reported in
the press, the killings of Jews in Israel today
are filmed and written about almost instantly
and transmitted globally.
No one can say now he doesn’t know what
is happening. But many of us can say we can’t
believe what is happening. Almost eight years
after the Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White
House lawn, heralding (we thought) an end to
Aruh-Jewish violence, we have been forced to
acknowledge that the level of Arab enmity is
worse than imagined, aimed not only politi-
cally at “the Zionist oppressors’’ but religiously
at all of us — “kill the Jews” is the weekly
command from the mosques, encouraged by
the political leadership The Palestinian target
is not just the settlements as contested territory
but all of Israel, even Tel Aviv discos and
downtown Jerusalem pizza parlors. What’s
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more, the Palestinian denial of Jewish history
and the connection of Jew s to the Holy Land
underscores the continuing Arab refusal to rec-
ognize the legitimacy of a Jewish slate, how-
ever narrow its borders, in the region.
The powerlessness we feel today is the an-
tithesis of that experienced during the Holo-
caust It is not that Jews do not have the military
clout to protect and defend themselves. On the
contrary, they have the power to destroy their
neighbors but are unwilling to use that mus-
cle out of loathing for unnecessary violence
and fear that it could either unleash a wide-
spread and even deadlier regional war, perhaps
introducing weapons of mass destruction from
Iran or Iraq, or that it will result in the further
isolation of Israel in the international com-
munity.
Jewish powerlessness today is self-imposed,
the result of a sobering realization that for all
of Israel’s strength, there may not be a mili-
tary solution to the Palestinian problem And
yet there can be no political or diplomatic so-
lution, either, if the true intention of the Arabs
is to eradicate a Jewish state from the Holy
Land by weakening its morale, undermining
its legitimacy and/or seeking to overturn its
Jewish majority and character by allowing mil-
lions of Palestinian refugees into Israel.
As Israel seeks to defend itself, even its most
supportive ally, the U S , grows impatient, lash-
ing out from time to time against the army’s
use of “excessive force” in sinking hack against
the perpetrators and decrying the "immoral-
ity" of going after the masterminds of murder
How would the U S. have Israel respond to
those who view every Jew as a legitimate tar-
get and who plan their destruction7 Better yet,
how would the U S. defend its own citizens
under violent threat from a self-defined enemy
committed to violence?
Most depressing, as Washington’s empa-
thy erodes, is that Israel today is without hope
of a resolution of its most intractable problem,
Arab hostility. Israelis no longer feel smugly
self-confident about their ability to ignore or
withstand the hatred of their Mideast neigh-
bors, nor do they believe those neighbors want
anything resembling a real peace The prospect,
instead, is for a long-term intifada, grinding
on each day with terrorism lurking around
every street comer, until the Palestinian street
grows weary or comes to its senses, perhaps
only after Yasir Arafat has left the scene
In the meantime we must not become so
inured to the reality of daily deaths and attacks
on Israeli citizens going about their normal
lives that we take such outrages for granted.
We must speak out and rally our neighbors —
and at least ourselves — in support of our
brothers and sisters under siege, recalling a cry
from decades past:
“Kinderlach. es brent.”
Gary Rosenblatt is publish-
er/editor of The Jewish Weeh
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 55, No. 35, Ed. 1 Thursday, August 30, 2001, newspaper, August 30, 2001; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth754339/m1/9/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .