By Reuven Koret
September 1, 2005
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| Dressed to kill: Masked Palestinians strapped -- with fake explosives -- in Jenin (AP) |
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It is humbling to witness the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. Words fail to encompassing the scope of the losses of New Orleans along with the rest of the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. A million plus homeless, thousands dead. A great nation rendered helpless.
Some believers say that what Katrina has done in the Gulf is punishment for America's support for the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif and northern Samaria. Drawing on God's promise to bless those that bless the children of Israel and curse those that curse them, they point to the fact that the Hurricane started immediately after the Israeli expulsion, and left in its wake the same primary effects: homelessness, destruction, evacuation.
Looking back now on that intensely emotion and heartbreaking week of forcible deportation of Israel's citizens in Gaza, one is struck by the "orderliness" of that expulsion and subsequent bulldozing of communities. Police and army followed their orders, patiently and methodically expelling Jewish residents. Israel now has thousands of evacuees, but all of them are entitled to significant compensation, and all of them will be found homes. We can be confident that, with the compassion of their fellow citizens, their affairs will be sorted out in weeks or months, not years.
Not so the situation in America's Gulf Coast. Our hearts go out to our American cousins, our allies and friends. Israel has offered its assistance, but the United States has not asked for any particular help. The Jewish State has no experience with floods, although perhaps our painfully gained experience in collapsed buildings and medical expertise in trauma can be put to some good use. How strange and saddening to see America in such pain! But as an American native, I am confident that this great nation, too, will rally together and take care of its own in this time of need and tragedy.
Tragic, too, is the calamity that befell the Muslims of Baghdad yesterday. More than one thousand were killed during a crowded religious celebration, when the false rumor of a suicide bomber in their midst caused people to stampede, trampling one another and plunging from a bridge to their deaths.
The loss of innocent life is always tragic, but there is a bitter irony in the fact that "suicide bombing" -- revised as a warfare technique in our age by Palestinians trying to kill Israeli Jews has now been "mainstreamed" and responsible for the deaths of thousands of Muslims, not to mention Americans, Europeans and Africans. The same thing is true of airplane hijackings. The terror technique pioneered by Arafat's minions and brought to its apotheosis in the 9/11 attacks has transformed the daily lives of all of us.
Who said the Palestinians have never made lasting contributions to society? This morning we read that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas says that he wished Yasser Arafat were alive to see this day, as his dream of driving Jews from their homes will be realized. At the same time, he threatens to chop off the arm of anyone who will dare seize the land of the Jews deported from their homes by the Israeli army. Those spoils are his alone.
I think it is safe to say that we will yet see more man-made disasters among the Palestinians as their masses, frenzied at the thought of Jewish communities being emptied and destroy, emboldens them to dream of greater expulsions and conquests. But so too that bloodlust can be expected to spill over into internecine killings that may result in civil war and death tolls that far exceed those to which they are incapable of inflicting on us, however much they would love to do so.
Our enemies -- as well as some, treacherously, in our midst and among our allies -- see the expulsions from Gush Katif and northern West Bank as just the first installment on a plan of mass expulsion of Jews from our Biblical homeland. They want to turn the 10,000 deportees into 500,000 -- the population of Jews living over the "green line" in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. And that, too, they see as just an intermediate expulsion enroute to the eradication of six million Jewish people from what they -- a billion Moslems -- see as "occupied Palestine."
As our hearts go out to the countless victims of America's natural disaster, we find it harder to commiserate with the losses of our Islamic neighbors, who sow the wind with hatred and fanaticism and now reap the whirlwind. Looking upon their young people, forced from birth to hate, to admire and emulate killers of innocents, one can only think: this too is a kind of natural disaster, because hatred and murder appears to be in their nature and their cultural inheritance.
America will recover, because it is at heart a great nation with high values and respect for human life and dignity.
Can we say the same for the warring and fanatical nation of Jihadist Islam in general, and the Palestinian nation in particular, striving to conquer the world, starting with the eradication of Israel, at the expense of its own people's misery?
As an Israeli, looking at the daily photos of masked terorrists -- or exploded ones, post-attack -- men, women and children, with their weapons brandished, desire for death in their eyes, expressing their desire to massacre and conquer our small country and the West at large, the natural response is: build artificial barriers high enough and strong enough to keep them out, forever.
Will our levees withstand the pressure of this natural disaster or, horribly, have we already allowed them to be breached?
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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