Anti-Semites in Israel

Bibi Netanyahu told electorates the day before the March election that there isn’t going to be a separate Palestinian state under his watch. He made friends with the yamulka-wearing curly-long-haired-yeshiva-black-attired crowd; he raised eyebrows in many Foreign Affairs offices save the American conservative Jews that fuels Bibi’s support base in the U.S. Obama’s WH is not a conciliatory force to Jewish interests.

Netanyahu chose an internationally unpopular stance, though, the sentiments of the U.S. and Israeli electorates are a microcosm of a worldwide trend he represents. Along with Shinzo Abe of Japan, popular conservative positions dominate their country’s political equations.

Bibi exudes admirable confidence. A 120-member Knesset allows Bibi’s 30 elected party members to form a government. The orthodox factions lament global anti-Semitism, highlights the experience of Europe’s Holocaust in wails at the nation’s historic Memorial Wall, but counter those who maintain peace in the Abrahamic tradition of the Torah, the Gospels, the Koran, and the Baha’i. Bibi falls into orthodoxy’s groom’s man category.

At partition, Islamic Arabs opposed the geographical divide that got disparate Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and the West Bank to be a single political unit against the one terrain of Israel, a basic nightmare. With more than 100-million Arabs breathing down the neck of three million Jews, the Israelis took on the role of David vs. Goliath with homegrown confidence supported by U.S. armaments.

Zion’s resolve got popular nod until moral suasion gave way to ethnic prejudice, and heavily armed David turned from the oppressed to the oppressor, a reversal of roles.

Anti-Semitic sentiments are on the rise again in Eretz Yisrael, the emotionally loaded traditional name of the “Land of Israel.” Its geographic boundaries were established during King David’s reign, affirmed by Solomon, and adhered to by the UN Partition of Palestine. Bibi dismisses suggestions of a Palestinian state within Israel’s bounds.

Tel Aviv is the primal city of Israel. The UN has Jerusalem on paper. Jewish rule manages the city—the Wailing Wall, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Sepulcher. The unicameral Knesset (Parliament) sits at the center of Jerusalem.

Rothschild in Austria’s royalty hardened outlook on well-off Jewish families in Europe. The Jewish labor class lives in ghettoes, the butt of racial discrimination, from Russia west of the Urals to Rome. The clash of perception between kibbutz crusaders who birthed post-WWII Zion, and the profit-mad Jewish businessmen of the global economy, compete for allegiance in Eretz Yisra’el. Anti-Semitism faces national arrogance in Jerusalem. In the Earthrise, we might be cautioned not to hold on too firmly to racial and national biases! We only got one Earth!

© 2015 Saipan Tribune