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HALF AN ACRE AND A MULE

by Zack Lieberberg

I am a Jew who's been living in your midst for his entire life. Some of you are my closest friends. Some of you are my beloved relatives. Some of you are vicious anti-Semites. You created every language I can speak. You wrote most of the books I enjoyed reading. You painted most of my favorite paintings. You built houses in which I've lived and cars that I've driven. Of all the girls I loved before, most were Christian; and since none of them is much younger than I am, I hope they will appreciate me saying with the utmost sincerity I am capable of, that I remember every single one of them with more tenderness and gratitude than Julio Iglesias could ever hope to sing about.

Many years ago, when I was a young man, confident that the world was built just right and that all people were born equal and shared the same nice dreams, I tried living in a Muslim country. I learned my lesson there. I know now that all people are born equal only before the law and only in the few places where such laws are on the books and are being followed. I know now that some people's dreams are worse that our worst nightmares. And, folks, I have learned to appreciate how much nicer you are than most of the rest of the species. And so, when Christians made my life in the Christian country where I was born unbearable, I went to live in another Christian country. It happened 23 years ago, and I still think that my choice of a country to call home was the second best decision I've ever made in my life. The first was to marry my second wife.

I could go on like this forever and ever, or I could summarize how I feel about you in three simple words: I love you.

But this is not about love. I have a more important issue to discuss. I am writing this to let you know that you owe me and owe me big. You owe me for the two thousand years of torturous persecution I've had and still have to endure at your hands. And before you tell me that not a single one of you has ever personally participated in a pogrom, I will remind you that not a single one of us has ever personally participated in a crucifixion (except for, roughly, 250,000 Jews crucified by the Romans when Christianity was still a Jewish sect), but you have never considered that a valid excuse. So, don't expect me to accept your personal non-participation as a mitigating factor either.

It gets worse. Nothing - I mean absolutely nothing - you have ever accused us of was true. In the last 2,000 years, every single accusation you brought against us was false. Let me repeat this: Every single accusation Christians have ever brought up against the Jews was false. No, we are no angels; we have committed a number of grave offenses, beginning with the infamous golden calf, but that was long before your time. Some of us have committed crimes during the last two millennia. But as a nation, as a community, we have been innocent of absolutely everything you accused us of. I know that many Christians and even some Jews will find this revelation shocking and hard to believe. If you happen to be one of them, please name an instance when we poisoned the wells, spread the plague, caused a tsunami, used human blood in our matzos, wrote the Protocols, inflated the Holocaust statistics, stole vital organs from Arab children, committed an act of aggression, or did anything else that was used as a perfectly reasonable explanation of all your crimes against my people. Or try to prove the validity of the most devastating anti-Semitic libel since the end of World War II, the "Palestinian people". If you manage to prove the collective guilt of the Jews in at least one instance, I solemnly promise to convert to Christianity. But as long as I remain a Jew, my statement stands: We are your innocent victims.

Let me tell you a story that happened 25 years ago in Moscow. I was riding a subway with my wife who was 8 months pregnant at the time. The car was not crowded. All the seats were occupied, but there was only one other straphanger besides us. She was a good-looking, nicely dressed woman in her late twenties or early thirties standing 8 or 10 feet away from us. When someone right in front of us got up, my wife tried to sit down. Suddenly, that woman rushed over and pushed my wife away like a professional hockey player. I am not exaggerating; if I hadn't caught her, she would've fallen. Meanwhile, the woman, with a satisfied smile on her face, was getting comfortable in her seat. When a man attacks a heavily pregnant woman in the presence of her husband, he is liable to get seriously hurt. But what do you do with a woman who attacks your pregnant wife? At first, I thought the woman had not noticed my wife's condition.

The woman responded in a pleasant, clear, educated voice that effortlessly rang from one end of the car to the other. "Too bad Hitler wasn't allowed to finish off all of you, bloodsucking Jews," she said. "Wouldn't it be nice to live on a planet not poisoned by your stench?"

Nobody answered her rhetorical question. Everyone behaved as if they were all blind and deaf. We got off at the next stop and waited for another train.

I have no beef with that woman. I had never seen her before nor, thank God, after. She might have been a Tatar; Tatars are Muslims and hate Jews at least as passionately as Arabs do. Or she might have been simply insane in the most literal, medical sense of the word. What I cannot forget is the sudden deafness and blindness of all the people in the car. There were dozens of passengers. I didn't expect any one of them to begin defending my wife. But I would have felt very differently about the whole episode if at least one of them had done what a minimally decent person should automatically, without thinking, do in a situation like that: offer his seat to the pregnant woman who was assaulted right in front of him. I strongly believe they would have behaved differently had my wife and I been Christians, like the rest of them. But then, had we been Christians, this whole thing would not have happened.

You may be tempted to explain their behavior by the differences between the obscure dogmas of Russian Orthodoxy and the noble teachings of your own church. Don't bother. The Moscow subway episode demonstrated a typical mode of Christian behavior towards Jews. It's not that you hate us - most of you don't. But after 2,000 years of demonizing us, how can you not believe your own lies, at least a little bit? You assure us that some of your best friends are Jewish, and that may be true. And yet, didn't we kill Jesus?

Let's face it, you haven't forgiven us for the crimes you have committed against us, and I don't think you ever will; even though usually you don't hate us enough to get into trouble yourselves. Usually, you don't have to, because, conveniently, there are always people who hate us enough to offer their services. Sixty years ago, it was the Germans. Today, it is the Arabs. Thanks to them, your Christian hands remain perpetually clean, as if there has never been a single drop of Jewish blood on them. When you are done dispensing justice to the executioners of the next Holocaust, someone else will step forward and volunteer to take care of the survivors. Provided there are survivors, of course.

The restoration (you call it creation) of Israel allowed you to express your anti-Semitism in impeccably politically-correct terms. If you disagree with the Israeli government, you have a right to criticize it, don't you? Especially when some of your best friends are Jewish. What's anti-Semitic about it? President Bush recently called Israel "a young nation". Has it occurred to him that if Israel in 1948 was a new nation, then it was a new nation created on someone else's land, whose rightful owner had a right to object? Was it a misstatement? No, it was a policy announcement.

Arabs declared their war against Israel the moment Israel was reestablished on a portion of its ancient homeland. What have the Christian countries ever done to defend Israel from the ongoing Arab aggression? A few of them occasionally sold Israel weapons. The United States often blocked anti-Israeli resolutions in the Security Council. But every time Arabs attacked Israel openly, the United States interfered at the end; forcing Israel to surrender everything it won in each defensive war; thus ensuring that the Arab aggression against Israel continues. And all of them, including the United States, more and more shamelessly support Arabs against Israel and against their own long-term interests.

The 1967 creation of the "ancient Palestinian people" was inspired by the Politburo. Has any Christian country objected to that anti-Semitic libel? Exactly as much as they objected to every other anti-Semitic libel. Today, more world capitals have "Palestinian" embassies than embassies of Israel. Why?

Oil is a very flimsy excuse for supporting Arabs against Israel. Arabs depend on their sales of oil more than oil consumers depend on it. Arabs have to purchase from the outside world everything they need to survive, and since camel dung is not that hot on the international commodity market, oil is their only source of income. Haven't you heard how the ban on oil sales from Iraq killed half a million Iraqi babies? Oil has nothing to do with your choice of sides. Anti-Semitism does.

Your anti-Semitism has blinded you to the distinctions between good and evil. As a result, you allowed evil to come to your homes. While you keep mumbling something politically-correct about "just another Abrahamic faith" and "religion of peace", a formerly Christian Europe has been invaded by Muslims. The United States is not far behind. No, my dear friends, we are not safe in your midst.

I love the country where I live now. I don't think Jews have ever been as integrated in a society anywhere as they are in the United States. Maybe only in Germany, before Kristallnacht. You think Kristallnacht cannot happen here? Don't be so sure. When Muslims in the United States reach a critical mass, even your own safety won't be guaranteed. As much as I love to call this country my home, I see more and more clearly that my future and future of my children is with Israel.

Today, Arabs are openly talking about the complete destruction of Israel. Their "peace plan" offered by the Saudis 2 years ago and recently reiterated in Beirut, gives the Israeli Jews an option to escape extermination. And yet, you keep insisting on a "two state solution". Only the deaf can ignore the Arab threat to Israel. Only the blind cannot see that the "two state solution" will be final in the Hitlerian sense. Why do I suddenly feel the way I did in that subway car 25 years ago?

The area of Israel within the internationally recognized borders is 7,992 square miles. Let's add to it the Golan Heights (approximately, 500 sq mi), Judea and Samaria (2,165 sq mi combined), and Gaza (140 sq mi), which are all historic parts of Israel, whether you wish to accept that truth or not. The total area of Israel is 10,797 square miles.

Before World War II, the Jewish population of the world was 18 million. Today, there are 13 million of us. We have lived among you for 2 thousand years. We have always pulled our own weight, and if you look at the proportion of Jews among Nobel laureates you have to agree that we have contributed at least our fair share.

Not so long ago, your freed slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule. All I am asking for is half an acre - not of your country, but of mine, and you can keep the mule. I think we deserve that much. If you give us half an acre each, we will own 6.5 million acres, or 10,156.25 square miles of Israel. This leaves 640.75 square miles without an owner, but we will need that space to keep the Israeli tradition of planting a tree in honor of every Righteous Gentile.

Zack Lieberberg is a mathematician who works in the computer field. He was born in Russia and now lives in the United States.

This article was translated from the Russian by Yashiko Sagamori. It originally appeared on http://www.middleeastfacts.com/yashiko/

[Editor's note: The response to this article and additional material are in a blog-ed on the April Blog-Ed page.]