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Table of Contents

excerpt: Chapter 3

excerpt: Chapter 2

 

excerpt: Chapter 2  The Triumph of Freedom – A Great Miracle Happened


By the 1920s, Jews began to increase their numbers and to modernize Ha’aretz (The Land)


or Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), building and evolving the civic, educational, cultural, social,


and political institutions that would increasingly serve as the backbone of their society (1). 


Local Arabs preferred to continue a lifestyle established over centuries. Although initially


Jews and Arabs had co-existed peacefully, Arab resentment erupted into increasing attacks,


murderous anti-Jewish riots, and rampages. It was a clash of civilizations that has continued


to the present on a global scale. Jewish hopes for peaceful coexistence began to fade, and the


Jewish community undertook an internal debate (that would continue into the present) about


viable alternatives (2).




Meanwhile, in Europe, the 1930s saw the beginning of a most egregious tyranny ever


perpetrated on the Jewish people. Germans shamelessly cheered Hitler’s Nazis and their


collaborators as they viciously demonized, scapegoated, disenfranchised, and isolated Jews,


gradually amplifying historic anti-Semitism to an unspeakable thunder of evil and


gruesomeness. Some Jews succeeded in fleeing to Jewish Palestine and elsewhere, but


British policy, inconsistent and tending to appease Arabs, barred entry to many more,


dooming them to certain death.




As a mostly indifferent world abandoned European Jews to the growing atrocities of the


racist Nazi state, activist Jews in Palestine formed militant groups like the Etzel and Lehi to


respond to British restriction of Jewish immigration and to increasing Arab violence. By the


first half of the 1940s, Hitler’s murderers refined their slaughter technology enough to finally


accomplish the Nazi dream of a Jew-free world...                    


  


Endnotes


1. For more history of Zionism, see Jewish National Fund, Mideast Web: Zionism


Most Jews settled in coastal cities and towns and in Jerusalem. However, many idealistic

newcomers either established or settled in the interior in kibbutzim, innovative agricultural communes striving to become as self-sufficient economically and defensively as possible.


The early kibbutz nurtured some of the most devoted patriots and leaders of Israel.

Many outstanding IDF officers were kibbutzniks. For example, ‘The three Ehuds of Merhavia’are remembered among the too numerous brave kibbutzniks who fell for Israel.

Golda Meir, the Russian-born American teacher who was one of Israel’s founders and had become Israel’s prime minister, was seasoned in Kibbutz Merhavia.



2. The Arab world too was beginning to wake up and evolve several brands of nationalism and pan-Arabism,  but certainly not mainly in the direction of modernity or open democratic societies. Ancient bloody tribal conflicts between Sunni and Shiite sects would be put aside only to vilify or destroy the Jews. Dictatorships and corrupt monarchies abounded. Radical Islam took hold, flourished, and often hijacked the faith. For example, at this time the militant secretive Sunni Muslim Brotherhood that was formed in Egypt would later nurture the corrupt and violent Yasser Arafat and it would give rise to Hamas, the hard-line Jiahdist (spreading Islam violently in a holy war) terrorist organization, which will become increasingly popular among Palestinian Arabs dedicated to the elimination of the Jewish state. The Brotherhood will assassinate Egyptian President Omar Anwar Saddat for making peace with Israel. Its members will lead anti-western Jihadist terrorist attacks, such as the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing, and will provide inspiration and members to Al Qaeda. Jews and the Jewish state will be the primary target for Jihadists for decades, but radical Islamic terror will become a world-wide menace that aims to establish Muslim theocracies and thrives on differences between Western and traditional  Muslim cultures. Hopefully, moderates can eventually gain sufficient power in Arab nations to chart a course away from archaic corrupt dictatorships on the one and regressive and violent Jihadist ideologies that would establish radical theocracies on the other. Hopefully, middle class  moderates would establish modern Islamic societies with their own humane, stable, democratic government. Offering Muslim societies freedom and democracy as an alternative to the tyrannies of corrupt despots or intolerant Jihadist clerics is one aim of the  American-led efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. A  Muslim site worth seeing is Annaqued: The Critic  and Muslims voices to note are Salman Rushdi (Subir: Salman Rushdie) and Wafa Sultan (Mermi TV).