Jerusalem is holy to two religions – Islam and Christianity, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad said at the UN-organized interfaith peace conference on Wednesday night. Fayad failed to mention the importance of Israel’s capital to the Jewish people, Israel Radio reported.
I suddenly understand. They are absolutely eaten up with jealousy because they believe that in fact the Jews really do have a covenant with Hashem and they don’t. It just annoys the hell out of Muslims that we got there first. So they build mosques on top of our holy places and then, like Yasser Arafat, argue that there never was a Jewish temple there.
And not just Muslims. How else can you explain the historical anger of Christians when faced with stiff-necked Jews who balk at taking the next ‘logical’ step and accepting the Savior? Doesn’t it just make you want to burn someone at the stake when he punctures your pretenses? You are nothing more than a wannabe, the Jew seems to say.
In fact, this applies to secular anti-Semites too, although they would never admit to a feeling of spiritual inferiority. But what else motivates someone like Shlomo Zand to (incompetently) try to prove that today’s Jews are not descended from the biblical inhabitants of the land of Israel? Face it, Shlomo, you feel inferior, incomplete, so you need to try to take away what the others have and you don’t.
Assimilationists say that Jews would be better off hiding their smug stubbornness. Why make everyone mad by running around claiming to have an exclusive relationship to God? The problem with this approach is that after a while you forget that this relationship exists.
I see this as the key to understanding how the Jewish people will (or will not) survive, and how there can be something that unites Jews of all degrees and kinds of observance.
Those like Fayad are not just trying to take the land of Israel away from the Jews and ‘occupy’ it. They are trying to break the connection between the Jews, God, and the land. If they are successful, the Jewish people will not simply be dispersed yet again, they will disappear.
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