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GAZA VERSUS BERLIN

by Ben-Zion Krasnianski

Why should 8500 Jews insist on living amongst 1.4 million Arabs? This is the question prompting the evacuation of all Jews from Gaza beginning on August 15th.

From all arguments this one by far is the most objectionable. It proves the power of propaganda how people will parrot nonsense without realizing the foolishness of the argument. There are 20,000 Jews living in Berlin amongst 3.6 million Germans. No one would dare suggest that we should expel the Jews from Berlin because they may be a provocation to 3.6 million Germans. So let's get this straight. A Jew is allowed to live in Berlin, a Jew is allowed in Moscow, in Melbourne and in Shanghai. The only place in the world a Jew is not allowed to live, is in Israel! Why? Because Arabs living in Gaza don't want to see a single Jew before their eyes.

Israel is planning to evacuate the dead as well as the living, because Arab savages barbarically burned the grave of the Biblical figure of Joseph, so Israel doesn't trust that they will not desecrate the dead buried in Gaza. It is unconscionable that Israel is going to accommodate this Nazi-like hate and sadism!

People drip with disdain when referring to the 'settlers' as if it's a dirty word. What exactly is their crime? That they settled on their own land, insisting on a Jews right to live anywhere in the world especially in Israel! Let us state the facts: The Jews living in Gaza did not steal Palestinian land. The 'settlers' of Gush Katif took sand dunes that were never inhabited by the Arabs and through the sweat of their brow turned them into a paradise and a financial powerhouse. Every moral person must be appalled by the immoral act of racism and apartheid of forcing Jews out of their homes to accommodate the murderous tendencies of Jew haters. One searches in vain through the annals of human history to find a single example where a nation shamefully exiled itself from its own land and so shamelessly capitulated to terrorism.

By this logic, Israel should close up shop entirely. Is it practical to have 5 Million Jews in a sea of hundreds of millions of Arabs and billions of Moslems? Or maybe we should disappear from the world completely: Does it make sense that 14 million Jews live among 5 billion gentiles?

Twenty Jewish communities, fifty synagogues, tens of schools will be destroyed because Arabs living around the settlements of Gush Katif wish to see the settlers dead. Does this make sense? Let the terrorists be expelled, why innocent Jews?

Nor will the rest of Israel become a safer place as a result. Terrorism is like a cancer, and you never make peace with cancer. Certain battles you don't have the luxury to grow tired of. If you play nice with cancer it will kill you. Show mercy to a tumor and it will metastasize and mercilessly kill you and kill itself in the process. The only merciful thing to do is to eradicate, destroy and pulverize the tumor into oblivion.

Tragically, Israel who was always on the forefront in the war against terrorism is about to deliver on a silver platter the greatest reward to terrorists. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, concentration of terrorists today live in and around Israel. Instead of defeating them completely, Israel is about to get out of the way of the terrorist so that Hamas, Hizbollah, Fatah and Al Qeida as well, will have a safe haven to train and develop thousands of new terrorists in total freedom, right at Israel's doorstep, in Gaza.

How can we double guess the decision of the democratically elected government of Israel to evacuate Gaza?

In the democratically elected government of America in the 1950's it was legal to racially discriminate against blacks. It doesn't mean that it was moral or just. Good people refused to accept the inherently evil notion of judging a person by his skin color. The expulsion of Jews is inherently an immoral act and even if it were a democratic and majority decision it wouldn't make it right or just.

In the last Israeli elections the choice couldn't have been clearer. Amram Mitzna leading the left Avodah party was for the expulsion, and Ariel Sharon leading the right Likkud party, vehemently opposed. Sharon stated then that "The fate of Netzarin [a Jewish town in Gaza] is the fate of Tel Aviv." Sharon won in the biggest landslide in Israeli history! When he came to power, and abruptly had a 180% about face, Sharon promised that he would abide by his party's vote. When he lost the Likkud vote, he promptly proceeded to ignore that vote and promised to abide by his cabinet's vote. When he was about to lose the cabinet vote as well, he used a very "democratic" ploy by taking the unprecedented step of firing two ministers to create an artificial majority. When he was urged to allow the people to vote in a referendum he refused, fearing that he might lose the referendum.

The only excuse for liberal democracy, why individuals agree to give up their inalienable G-d given rights to liberty, is because of the government promise to protect them. Democracy is a trade off: Freedom for security. A government that for political expediency places its own citizen's lives in harms way, placing 144 Jewish communities on the firing lines of Kasam rockets and worse, loses its legitimacy. It becomes a mafia with guns who will use brute force to force people out of their homes and beat them into submission.

To the great merit of the Jewish people, history will record, that every time Oslo was put to a vote they overwhelmingly voted against it. Even today if you count out the Arab vote in the Knesset and the abstainers, Sharon does not have a majority of Jewish votes in favor of the expulsion.

The real question is how do we dare not get involved. The imminent expulsion of Jews from Gaza is a clear and present danger to our safety and security and to the safety and well being of our wives and children, indeed, to the safety of all Americans.

Ideas have consequences. This mindless surrender to terrorism has exploded in our face. Today London, tomorrow... The cancer of terrorism has now metastasized out of control. If the expulsion will go through in Gaza it will guarantee the next 9/11 and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

At the present moment in the President's war against terrorism we are in full retreat. The President's proclaimed support for a Palestinian State, was the first major victory for the terrorists. America spent 300 Billion dollars taking out one terrorist state in the Middle East in order to establish another one. The disengagement is another major, huge victory for the terrorist and will only serve the purpose of emboldening terrorism international. The expulsion means that three hundred billion dollars spent in Iraq was for naught and it will turn the heroic sacrifice of our young soldiers and render them in vain.

The Holy Land is the heart of the world. When the heart is healthy the whole organism is healthy. When the heart is ill and loses its vigor, the whole organism becomes critically ill. The world is a global village and what happens in Israel today will happen to the rest of the world tomorrow. At the end of the day, the fate of Gush Katif is the fate of New York.

In the millennium long struggle between good and evil, for the first time ever, evil is on the run. We have personally experienced and witnessed the miraculous collapse of communism and despotism throughout the world and the consequent freeing of billions of people.

In G-d's world everything needs a spark of truth and goodness in order to survive. Pure, absolute and undiluted evil self destructs. Witness the generation of the flood or Hitler's thousand years Reich, which self destructed. Today we are facing new strata of evil, a brash declaration of war against life itself and against G-d's desire for existence by terrorist who are plumbing new depths of depravity. Even the Nazis didn't kill themselves.

The good news is, if this is evil's best shot: total nihilism, absolute destruction for destruction sake, then evil must be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Apparently it's all over and "evil" knows it. This is evil's last act of desperado, its last hurrah. It's suicidal in every sense of the word. One could even detect an ever so slight backlash developing even amongst Muslims against the mindless, blood curling, head sawing and random evil being perpetrated against Arab civilians and children.

How tragic that at this critical moment, with the smell of victory in the air, Jews who have courageously led the battle against evil for 3800 years have totally abandoned the good fight and have deserted the front lines. It's surreal; while Americans are fighting, Jews are surrendering! The Jew courageously led the world in the battle against terrorism in 1967, in Entebbe in 1976, and in 1981 when Israel took out Iraq's Atomic reactor in 1981. For the first time in Jewish history, however, Jews are running for the hills.

In an astounding feat, beginning with Oslo and continuing with the Jewish expulsion from Gaza, Israel has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Instead of holding out for genuine peace with democracies founded on righteousness, human dignity and respect for human life, Israel has surrendered to the status quo of war. Why Israel has chosen a moment of triumph to send a defeatist message projecting weakness, while our wildest dreams are materializing before our very eyes, is truly puzzling.

During the Warsaw Ghetto uprising a thousand Jews, fighting practically with their bare hands, managed to hold off the Germans for close to a month, while Israel, boasting one of the mightiest military machines in the world, can't deal with a few thousand murderers. Israel has just called up its reserves in the largest peacetime mobilization ever, not to fight against the daily rocket assaults and terror attacks, but to fight the settlers and their supporters.

A wise man once quipped: While it's easy to take the Jew out of exile, it's difficult to take the exile out of the Jew. Instead of exiling themselves from Gaza, it's high time that the Jewish people removed the deep, dark and corrosive exile from within.

Peace through strength holds out the only hope for that troubled region. By standing firm, Israel could deliver the coup de grace to terrorism around the world. By helping to hasten the inevitable collapse of dictatorship and totalitarianism in the Middle East, instead of being part of the problem, Israel could become part of the solution and earn its honorable place in history.

Ben-Zion Krasnianski is Executive Director of Chabad Lubavitch of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Contact him by email at chabadues@aol.com