Of Jews And Fences

The International Court of Justice has stated that, in its considered opinion, Israel’s anti-terrorism fence is a violation of international law and must be torn down, and that Israel must compensate Arab residents for the damage done.

I actually applauded the ludicrous ruling. I applauded loudly – not for the ‘justice’ of the decision, but because had these august judges decided otherwise, my assumption about their predetermined, anti-Semitic stance would have been wrong. I applauded the news that my assumption turned out to be right. Bravo!

Now that the niceties have been dispensed with, let me get down to the root of the world’s hatred of the fence we are building in our liberated territories. That fence has proven its worth in gold simply by the indisputable fact that terrorism has been curtailed in most of the areas where it’s been completed. But that indisputable fact is of no importance to the hypocrites who want Israel to tear the fence down.

It’s all so understandable. The fences the world chose to ignore – and even in some cases to justify – were those erected in Dachau, in Auschwitz, in Treblinka. Yes, those fences the judges of that day chose to ignore.

What passed for enlightened opinion in the 1940’s was generally unconcerned with the electrified, barbed-wire fences designed to keep Jews naked, starved, beaten and tortured. The political and spiritual forbears of the judges on the International Court exhibited little if any concern when the fences around the crematoria and the killing fields made it all that much easier for the Nazis to exact their grisly toll.

The world then saw no injustice in fences designed to separate Jews from their parents, siblings, spouses and children. In fact, the general populace in most European countries (the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of those who today demand that the Jews of Israel take down the fence that keeps out their would-be murderers) embraced the concept of fencing Jews in and separating them from their property and loved ones.

Yes, it was not so very long ago that they watched, unconcerned, as my loved ones and your loved ones were gassed and burned behind those fences. They didn’t sneeze even once from the black smoke and the stench of burning Jewish corpses. They shed no tears as the starved and emaciated children of our people – our innocent little babies – stood a few feet from those fences, afraid, bewildered, their frail bodies wracked by torture.

No one thought to convene an international court to pass judgment on those fences, to demand that they come down. I’m afraid that when it comes to Jews, the world’s self-styled humanitarians couldn’t care less about lofty concepts like justice.

This lack of concern for Jewish rights, even the minimal right to survive, outlived both the Nazis and their Jewish victims. We, the Jews, were judged guilty in every war, every defensive action, we took to establish and secure our sovereign state in our ancient homeland.

The world, led by smiling Ike Eisenhower, condemned us in 1956 and forced us to surrender to the belligerent Egyptians the territories that we?d captured.

In 1967 the world stood by as Egypt’s Nasser threatened to throw us into the sea and finish the job Hitler had only begun. They were silent as a cemetery while the call for our annihilation was shouted throughout the Arab world.

And then, when we refused to wait for our enemies’ onslaught and instead showed the world what an unsheathed Jewish sword can do, the compassionate ones, whose hearts bleed for everyone but the Jews, wasted not a minute in demanding our retreat.

For decades there was no surcease as we were condemned reflexively and routinely by the United Nations and other international bodies for our stubborn refusal to die. Any pretext was used to bash us and scream for our doom, from women’s rights conferences to the UN’s anti-racism hatefest at Durban, where every anti-Semitic snake on the planet was welcomed and not a word of protest was heard as the gathering degenerated into a modern-day Nuremberg rally. 

There are fences in many areas of the world. I wonder how the International Court would rule if it were asked to consider the U.S. fence between Texas and Mexico. Or the barrier between Kuwait and Iraq. Or Spain and Morocco. Have the judges even heard about the fence between India and Bangladesh?

Now we have the International Court joining the UN and the European Union as bodies whose very existence seem to center around condemning Israel and defending Israel’s enemies. Seeing as how deep the judges’ brains are all too obviously immersed in their posteriors, some clarification is warranted:

Homicide bombings, your honors, are illegal. Ambushing innocent drivers and slaying sleeping children? Illegal by any standard of law and civilization. Lynching, beheading and murdering pregnant mothers and tiny babies? Also illegal. And, I believe, the same holds true for blowing up buses filled with innocent civilians and using ambulances to transport explosives.

The list of illegalities committed by vicious Arab marauders against my people is so well documented that I need not bore the overworked judges with every detail. I feel for them. I really do. Inundated as they are with the myriad problems we Jews are responsible for in the world, they have no time to concentrate on other pressing matters. Everything else must take a back seat to the immense difficulties our mere existence creates for so many people, and for that I apologize profusely, if only tongue in cheek.

There is, of course, a positive side to all this. As long as there are rulings, edicts, decisions and statements from the likes of these judges that declare, proclaim, announce and promote our guilt, I’ll know we must be doing the right thing and walking the correct path. Should the world ever, G-d forbid, applaud any action we take, it is at that point that I’ll begin to worry.

As far as I’m concerned the judges can take a long walk on a short plank, but I thank them anyway. Their words serve to remind me on which side of the fence I can expect to find the world’s concept of justice.