Dear World,

It appears that you are hard to please.

I understand that you are upset over us, here in
Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite
upset, even angry and outraged? Indeed, every few
years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it
is the brutal repression of the Palestinians;
yesterday, it was Lebanon; before that it was the
bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the
Yom Kippur War campaign. It appears that Jews who
triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most
extraordinarily. Of course, dear world, long
before there was an Israel, we, the Jewish people
- upset you. We upset a German people who elected
a Hitler and we upset an Austrian people who
cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole
slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks,
Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians,
Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the
history of world upset. We upset the Cossacks of
Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us
in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their
way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at
Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.
We upset, for centuries, a Roman Catholic Church
that did its best to define our relationship
through Inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy
of the Church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to
burn the synagogues and the Jews within them,
showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

It is because we became so upset over upsetting
you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in
a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish
State.

The reasoning was that living in close contact
with you, as resident-strangers in the various
countries that comprise you, we upset you,
irritate you, disturb you. What better notion,
then, than to leave you and thus love you - and
have you love us? And so we decided to come home -
to the same homeland from which we were driven out
1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that,
apparently, we also upset. Alas, dear world, it
appears that you are hard to please. Having left
you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades
and Holocausts, having taken our leave of the
general world to live alone in our own little
state - we continue to upset you.

You are upset that we repress the poor
Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact
that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which
are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle
East. Moscow is upset and Washington is upset.

The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian
moderates are upset. Well, dear world, consider
the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920,
1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967
to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed,
there was no Jewish State to upset anybody.
Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed
Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in
Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67
Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron - in 1929.
Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians -
massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have
been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967?

And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children
slaughtered in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it
because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you,
World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that
would have created a Palestinian State alongside a
tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war
and killed 6,000 Jews - was that upset stomach
caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way,
dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset,
then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with
explosives and firebombs and stones are part of
the same people who - when they had all the
territories they now demand be given them for
their state - attempted to drive the Jewish State
into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same
hate, the same cry of "idbah-al-yahud" -
"Slaughter the Jews!" that we hear and see today,
were seen and heard then. The same people, the
same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to
do yesterday, they dream of today - but we should
not "repress" them...

Dear world, you stood by the Holocaust and you
stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war
that the Arab League proudly compared to the
Mongol massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser,
wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital
in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the
sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel
were facing extinction. And since we know that the
Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction,
we will do everything possible to remain alive in
our own land. If that bothers you, dear world,
well - think of how many times in the past you
bothered us. In any event, dear world, if you are
bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who
could not care less.