Letters from Rungholt

von Salim Mansur, gefunden bei Israellycool.

The 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth is a milestone as was every other such anniversary going back to that defining moment for Jews and non-Jews alike when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed independence of the Jewish state in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.

After nearly two millenniums of wandering in strange lands — following destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by the Romans and forced exile from the land of their prophets — the birth of Israel has offered Jews a secure home where they may prosper without any fear or apology.

Israel’s birth was assisted by Britain, joined by France, which carved Arab states in lands that were provinces of the Ottoman Empire. If Israel had been born 10 years earlier then a great many Jews who perished in Hitler’s death camps likely would have survived and Britain’s eventual withdrawal from the region probably would have been less acrimonious.

For Ben-Gurion’s generation Israel’s birth was a small promise made even smaller by the UN partitioning British-mandated Palestine, and then arriving so terribly late, even as smoke from the ruins of war-devastated Europe hid the full disclosure of the Jewish devastation in the Holocaust.

There is no parallel in modern history to the story of Israel defying the rancour of old and new enemies of Jews.

….

The present world population is over six and a half billion people, and Jews are an insignificant fraction of this number, estimated somewhere around 14 million, or a mere 0.2% of the total.

Yet Jewish contributions in the making of the modern world tower above that of any other people in relative terms and the immense odds of survival as a people given the level of hostility directed at them.

From imagining the fundamentals of monotheism to conceiving the fundamentals of space-time relativity of modern physics, Jews have been an immensely creative people through nearly four millenniums of human history.

Their achievements have earned them admiration, envy and implacable enmity of non-Jews.

….

Of the ancient peoples from the age of Moses only the Egyptians, the Hindus and the Chinese survive, but their culturally dynamic moment as civilizations lie in the past. And of these three people from ancient times, Egyptians became Arabized as most of them converted to Islam and disowned their pre-Islamic culture.

Israel is a tiny sliver of land in a vast tempest-ridden sea of the Arab-Muslim world, and yet it is here the ancient world’s most enduring story is made fresh again by Jews to live God’s covenant with Abraham as told in their sacred literature.

Jewish survival as a people maybe providential, but turning a desert into one of the rich economies of the world few imagined six decades ago is a minor proof of how much more could be achieved if those fighting Jews joined with them instead by turning their swords into plowshares.

Happy anniversary, Israel.

Ich kann gar nicht beschreiben, was ich empfinde, wenn ich einen so freundlichen Gruß lese, von einem Araber geschrieben, der die Geschichte und die Tatsachen sachlich und ohne Verzerrungen ansieht und anerkennt. Oh ja, es ist möglich, den Anderen so anzusehen, und ihm Gutes zu wünschen. Das rührt mich ehrlich gesagt mehr als die guten Wünsche von Freunden (wobei aus Deutschland ja auch wieder passiv-aggressive Glückwünsche kamen, ich habe nur mit Schaudern die Kommentare zu Ilan Mors Artikel in der Süddeutschen gelesen und wußte wieder, wie vermutlich Mehrheit in Deutschland drauf ist).

In meinem persönlichen Universum wiegt so eine Stimme viele, viele Hetzartikel und -sendungen auf. Weil viel mehr Mut dazu gehört, so wie Salim Mansur, wenn man Salim Mansur heißt, als zum Mitschwimmen im Strom der Naqba-Propaganda. (Ich sehe mit Grausen, wie die Naqba-Feiern unseren Yom HaZikraon Zug um Zug imitieren, bis hin zur Sirene. Ei ei ei, legt Euch mal eine Identität zu, die mit Israel nichts zu tun hat! möchte ich ihnen zurufen - in eurem eigenen Interesse, nicht unserem!)

Und ho ho, ich sehe gerade, auch Osama bin Laden schließt sich der Gratulationscour an. Das ist ja reizend von ihm. Vielleicht bringt er uns auch ein Geschenk? Ach, das ist eigentlich nicht nötig!