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Celebrating an Aborted Birth Now that the mission of the Wandering Jew is completed, he must discard his knapsack and cease to be an accomplice in his own destruction. If not for his own sake, then for that of his children and his children's children." Arthur Koestler, Epilogue, p. 335, Promise and Fulfillment, 1949  Koestler's image of the Jew bearing his or her knapsack comes from Dr. Weizmann's comments to the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (1946): "... I believe the only fundamental cause of anti-Semitism ... is that the Jew exists. We seem to carry anti-Semitism in our knapsacks wherever we go. ..." (333). Koestler's fulfillment of a promise speaks most eloquently and most unnervedly to the Jew of the Diaspora, "The existence of the Hebrew State – that is, a State whose language and culture are Hebrew, not Yiddish, Polish or American – puts every Jew outside Israel before a dilemma which will become increasingly acute. It is the choice between becoming a citizen of the Hebrew nation and renouncing any conscious or implicit claim to separate nationhood."The sacred days of Passover this year follow the 60th anniversary celebration of the birth of the Jewish nation in Palestine, and, as in all prior years, the Passover meal which commemorates the Exodus ends with the prayerful wish "To next year in Jerusalem." For Koestler that is an empty prayer now that Israel exists. "In future, Jews can no longer refer to themselves with the ritual stock phrase of living in the Diaspora, or in exile – unless they mean a self-imposed exile which has nothing to do with religion or tradition." (332). That self-imposed exile becomes even more unnerving when the actions of the Jewish State, most especially today in its wanton and barbarous destruction of Lebanon in the fall of 2006 and in its current unrelenting siege of the defenseless people of Gaza, give rise to renewed anti-Semitism around the world. After sixty years, we celebrate not the rebirth of Judaism in Palestine but the aborted triumph of an amoral Nation that, in its Zionist arrogance, from its conception through its infancy to the present day defies not just the secular codes of International conduct agreed upon by the member states of the United Nations but the very principles, morals and values of Judaism. That is the conundrum the Diaspora Jew must face: to embrace those who rule in Israel by imposing on Jews everywhere defiance of International Law – illegal and inhumane acts of collective punishment, eradication through extrajudicial executions of the principles of a state founded on equality before the law, occupation and theft of another people's land and natural resources, the imposition of daily humiliation of an oppressed people by economic deprivation, harassment, and visible identification based on Arab lineage as Palestinians, acceptance of torture that in effect denies the humanity of its victims, forced imprisonment without charge or due rights, approval of and complicity in a slow but insidious genocide of the Palestinian people by imprisonment behind an inhumane, illegal Wall, and constant military attacks of a disproportionate kind against a virtually defenseless people – or to embrace the moral fiber that nourished the Jews century after century sustaining their humanity as they came selflessly to the aid of others faced with discrimination and racism that often resulted in death for those they protected and themselves. Let's be blunt: the anniversary of the Day of Independence in Israel is a day of death not of birth. Any state conceived in terror, nourished with the blood of massacred civilians in the Nakba, and delivered of a land made empty and barren by forced expulsion of its inhabitants is not and cannot be a child born to the community of nations that seeks the rights, the respect and integrity of all its brothers and sisters. It is rather a deformity, an abnormality, in the words of Jeremiah, "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth!" (15:10) How conceived in terror? "When the Zionist movement started its ethnic cleansing operations in Palestine, in early December 1947 …"; so begins Chapter 3 of Dr. Ilan Pappe's book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, only to offer a passage from "Plan D" of that movement's operations in Chapter 4. "These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state." Plan Dalet, 10 March, 1948 What form did the terror take? Ironically, it mirrored the terror that the current Israeli government protests when undertaken by Palestinians. Virtually nothing the Palestinians have done by way of terror was not done by the Jews to the British Mandate government. The first leg of their terror necessitated ridding Palestine of the British Mandate forces since it was its policies concerning immigration that made the Zionists turn to terror against the very nation that had made possible a large Jewish presence in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. That Declaration had imposed on the British government responsibility for both the indigenous Arab population and the new Jewish immigrants proportionate to their relative size. In keeping with that responsibility, the Palestine Government issued a White Paper in 1939 that limited Jewish immigration to 10,000 per year for five years and an additional 25,000 refugees. That limitation infuriated the Zionists who would tolerate no limits on immigration.
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