Interestingly Charles Krauthammer starts his column about Israel’s 60th birthday (or here) on May 14th (well the English date anyway) by recalling an event that preceded the Lewis and Clark expedition that started May 14, 1804.
Before sending Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Dr. Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition to answer. Among them, writes Stephen Ambrose: “What Affinity between their (the Indians’) religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?” Jefferson and Lewis, like many of their day and ours, were fascinated by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and thought they might be out there on the Great Plains.
The point is to illustrate a rule …
They weren’t. They aren’t anywhere. Their disappearance into the mists of history since their exile from Israel in 722 B.C. is no mystery. It is the norm, the rule for every ancient people defeated, destroyed, scattered and exiled.
and its exception
With one exception, a miraculous story of redemption and return, after not a century or two, but 2,000 years. Remarkably, that miracle occurred in our time. This week marks its 60th anniversary: the return and restoration of the remaining two tribes of Israel — Judah and Benjamin, later known as the Jews — to their ancient homeland.
He also nicely demolishes the narrative of today’s “nuanced” foreign policy sophisticates.
During its early years, Israel was often spoken of in such romantic terms. Today, such talk is considered naive, anachronistic, even insensitive, nothing more than Zionist myth designed to hide the true story, i.e., the Palestinian narrative of dispossession.
(LGF has been cataloging the many nakba celebrations going on this week. For a term that didn’t come into wide usage until about a decade ago, it’s getting quite a workout.)
Finally Krauthammer shows how the new “history” of Israel’s founding is matched by tendentious reporting today:
Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost — not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life.You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948-49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.
However, Krauthammer didn’t mention the dispossession of Jews from Arab countries that affected a similar number of people.
Finally though, Krauthammer gets to the point of it all.
One constantly hears about the disabling complexity of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Complex it is, but the root cause is not. Israel’s crime is not its policies but its insistence on living.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
