Dror Eydar
Israel Hayom, Mar. 29, 2024
“We will never belong to the family of nations, even if our contribution to humanity is priceless.”
Israel has always stood on its own. In our long history, we have encountered good people and nations who helped us for a while, a century or two, until they disappeared and we moved on. We never got anything for nothing, we always contributed to those nations – in religion and morality, in law and philosophy, in economics and science, in security and politics. For the most part, nobody thanked us. In fact, the opposite is true: In places where Jews were well integrated, antisemitism skyrocketed to lethal levels.
The pogroms that we were subjected to on a regular basis in the Middle Ages stemmed from religious incitement, the pagan belief that we murdered God (think about that sentence for a moment and see the absurd inherent in that claim). In the modern era, the pogroms were caused by nationalist incitement – “the Jews are a people within a people.”
On Purim we read about both these forms of incitement as expressed by one of our greatest enemies in his prelude to a call for a final solution to the Jewish problem: “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws” (Esther 3:8). Fast forward 2500 years to the cover of the Economist depicting Israel on its own – it is as if nothing has changed.
Hundreds of years earlier, our people left the house of bondage in Egypt to receive the eternal constitution and return to the land of our forefathers. After wandering in the desert, the People of Israel approached their destination. Standing in their way on the route to the Promised Land stood peoples who were afraid of this strange phenomenon – a national collective that is not part of the known religious system and which seeks to conquer Canaan on the grounds that the land was promised to it by God. To stop them, King Balak of Moab hired the greatest prophet of the time, Balaam Son of Beor, whose prophecy was compared by our sages to none other than Moses!