The Jewish nation lives
As “Deborah,” a dual American-Israeli citizen born and raised in Arkansas, leaves to defend the Jewish homeland, I recall the 2005 statement by then-United States Sen. Mike DeWine on Israeli Independence Day. I worked for DeWine at the time. He’s currently the governor of Ohio.
His words could’ve been spoken yesterday:
“Israel [is] the only democracy in the Middle East and the eternal homeland for all Jews around the world. Israel, our enduring friend and everlasting ally, was reborn from its biblical birthright on this day in 1948 …
“Two years ago on the 58th anniversary of the end of World War II … I spoke about how American soldiers successfully fought both the fascism in Europe that spread like a cancer across that continent and Adolf Hitler’s efforts to eradicate the Jewish race. Last week, we honored the souls of those murdered in the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah—the Day of Remembrance. And, today, we celebrate the result of all of this history, which is Israel’s independence.
“My father, Richard DeWine, when he was serving in World War II … visited one of the Nazi concentration camps—Dachau—after it had been liberated …
“[Fellow] K Company member Al Eucare Sr. … also remembers the ovens at Dachau. He said … there were still ashes and skeletal remains inside … He also remembers seeing hooks … that the Nazis would [hang] dead bodies on like cattle to move them more easily.
“He said that they would put the bodies on by hooking them right underneath the jaw. He had heard stories that sometimes live Jews were placed on those hooks and left there until they died …
“My father [was struck] … that there were townspeople there who would never admit that the death camp was out there. They acted as if it just never even existed …”
DeWine is a generation older than me. When the war began, my father was only 9 and lived in Warsaw with his parents and two brothers. Sometime after the Nazis and Soviets (who were allies until Hitler turned on Stalin) invaded Poland, my father’s family escaped to Ukraine. My grandmother perished there of typhus, which became rampant after the war began.
They were forcibly relocated to Siberia because the Soviets didn’t trust Jews so close to the border. After a year in the frozen north, my father’s family went by cattle car to Kazakhstan—a week’s journey—where they stayed until the war ended. Afterwards, the family briefly returned to Lodz, the temporary capital of Poland, because Warsaw had been razed by the Germans—then set off for American-run displaced-persons camps in Germany.
As DeWine recounted: “Mark Steinbuch’s immediate family went to Germany because, as Mark described it, ‘that is where the Americans were, and if you wanted to live, you went to the Americans.’…
“[Later] [u]pon the joyous declaration of [Israeli] independence, seven Arab nations invaded …
“Israel survived its first challenge. It, like the Jewish people after the Holocaust, was still alive. Since then, Israel’s existence has been continuously challenged.
“Israel defended itself from foreign aggression during the Suez Canal Crisis, the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the War in Lebanon, and periods of extreme terrorism known as ‘Intifadas.’ Israel survived it all.
“OPEC blackmailed the world by withholding oil from the West because of the West’s support for Israel. Israel’s Olympic athletes were murdered by terrorists. And the United Nations equated Zionism with fascism. Israel survived it all and much more.
“Israel is a survivor, but it is also so much more. The people of Israel have forested the desert, revived their language, built cities, and established a vigorous and ever-growing community.
“We support Israel because it is a democracy, because it shares our values and ideals, because it has been willing to suffer attacks at our request, and because, simply, it is our friend …
“America is a nation of justice, fairness, and principles. So is Israel.”
Two decades later, the Jewish homeland still faces Palestinian terrorists’ savagery. Like Dachau’s townspeople’s denials of the death camp in their midst, so too many ignore Palestinian ongoing terror in ours. Even after recent horrors, including the abductions of women and children and butchering of babies in their bedrooms, some still dismiss the obvious.
My father’s words—said in the 1980s about events from the 1940s and quoted in Congress in 2005— that America, the greatest country in history, values life, liberty, and freedom, are truer today than ever. And thankfully, the shining city on the hill that is our Zion doesn’t live under the constant terror that Israel faces.
Yet, as even Eden had its serpent, I’ve confronted the venomous fangs of antisemitism in our otherwise overwhelmingly welcoming homeland, most recently from “educated” leftists peacocking their public service as cover for their despicable discrimination.
This contemptible behavior reflects the defining intersectionality of higher education today: sanctimony-preening progressives propagating statements of selective outrage that invoke historical persecution while conspicuously ignoring Jews’ plight and affirmatively ostracizing their presence. Hypocrites.
Now that Palestinian terrorists have slaughtered at least 1,400 Israelis, Americans and others, these same incessant-virtue-signaling socalled scholars largely stand dumb in every sense of the word. Where are the formal communiqués of sympathy for Jews and disgust of terrorists from Arkansas’ academia? Am I alone amongst our falsely labeled “intellectual class”?
I’ve previously brushed aside some of these acts of antisemitism. Never again. My future responses will be swift, in person, in court, and on these pages.
The days of Jews going quietly into the night have passed. Like Deborah, Jews everywhere must fight every day to defend our biblical identity and birthright from assaults, be they immediate bullets from butchers in black or insidious insults and deafening silence born from ignorance and indifference. They all must be extinguished. Am Yisrael Chai.
This is your right to know.
Yet, as even Eden had its serpent, I’ve confronted the venomous fangs of antisemitism in our otherwise overwhelmingly welcoming homeland, most recently from “educated” leftists peacocking their public service as cover for their despicable discrimination.