Israel to world: let us exist!

Meryl cites a Ma’ariv article about the victims of terrorism and the reasons for the security fence, and discusses how the world of terrorism is a small one:

It’s a small world, the world of terrorism. My sister-in-law’s cousin died in the World Trade Center. Everyone in my area knew someone who lost someone, or knew someone who knew someone. Even in a metropolitan area of what, 10-12 million?

Israel has about 5.4 million Jews. More than 7,000 Israelis have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks since September of 2000. You do the math. I’m not up to figuring how many September Elevenths that works out to. But I know that per capita, it’s far more than we lost.

The math has been done a number of ways. I’ve picked one. If we round the number of people killed and injured on 9/11 off to 10,000, in a country with approximately 250 million people, then on a per capita basis, the terrorism Israel has faced since September 2000 works out to about 30 September Elevenths.

30 times.

The actual number isn’t important. What is important is recognizing that Israel is about out of options. There is nothing the world will let Israel do to defend its citizens. It can’t counter-attack. It can’t use “excessive” (read: any) force. It can’t even build a fence. Could you imagine the world trying to tell the United States, after 30 September Elevenths in a row, that it has no right to go after Osama Bin Laden? And yet, that’s what happens with Israel’s polities of targeted assassinations against terrorists, or its house-to-house searches or bulldozing of the homes of suicide bombers.

I remember having, a few years ago, a discussion about the various forms of antisemitism that have evolved throughout Jewish history. Someone made the observation that one of the reasons the Holocaust was so much worse than, say, the Spanish Inquisition, is that the Inquisition allowed Jews to live if they converted to Christianity (or, in most cases, pretended to and didn’t get caught), while Hitler and the Nazis killed all Jews, converts, children of converts, or even those with a Jewish grandparent. Jewish law permits breaking just about any rule in order to save a life. But in the case of the Holocaust, there was no action that would allow a Jewish person to save his own life. There was nothing that anyone could say, or do, or renounce even, that would satisfy the murderers. They were targeted not for what they did but by the mere fact that they existed.

To borrow an analogy, Israel too is targeted not by what it does but merely because it exists.

Israel’s enemies won’t be satisfied with a pullout from the territories, or with a peace negotiation, or with granting Palestinian statehood, or with a rewriting of state laws, or with any action that Israel could possibly take, short of wiping itself off the map. Hamas doesn’t want Ramallah; they want Tel Aviv. It’s written in their charter, in black and white.

Israel’s enemies that won’t let it exist and its friends won’t let it defend itself. What does that leave us with? Israel has a right to exist, and to defend that existence. If a fence is needed to prevent more terror attacks and defend that existence, then Israel is within its rights to build it.