Now that your leaders have seen fit (so soon after the Holocaust) to resurrect the one universally accepted, eternal hatred, I would like your attention, people of the world, for a moment or so.
And what an exalted collection of leaders you have: rogues and thieves, despots and murderers, dictators and oppressors. Sitting in the seats of power, to mention but a few, are the crazed Islamofascists in Iran, the lunatic in Libya, the blood-soaked mental midget of Syria, the iron-fisted tyrants of China.
At this juncture, as the universe hurtles toward the fulfillment of the prophecy of Gog and Ma’gog, some honest words ought to be heard.
I have come to the conclusion that you hate me, the Jew, because I am and you hate me because I’m not. You hate me for what you think I ought to be and you hate me that much more when I try to be that which you imagine me to be.
You hate me when I succeed and when I fail you rejoice. You hate me for being poor and hate me even more if I’m rich. Whatever wealth I have was stolen, you say. Honesty, according to you, is not part of my make-up. So you have proceeded in all ages to steal from me, to rob, to plunder, to pillage.
You lament: “Why do you stay apart from all of us? Why don’t you try to come closer, adapt to our system, our ways.” But if I do, you hate me for stepping over the line that you in your hate for me have long ago drawn in the sand.
You hate my unshakable faith in the G-d of my fathers and you do whatever you can to reach my soul. And if, at times, you succeed in turning a minuscule number of my fellow Jews, you hate those even more for not being true to their religion, for being traitors to their faith.
Only recently, world, your hate-poisoned minds devised the most gruesome methods to better vent your hate for me; you gassed and hanged and shot and bludgeoned me. Your hate filled the rivers with my blood, the crematoria turned the skies black with my ashes. You hated me for what you took to be my passivity in the face of such unimaginable atrocities and you hate me now for no longer cringing meekly in the face of your desire to see me destroyed.
You hated me long before the State of Israel was even a dream. “Go to Palestine, that’s your land,” your crazed, rampaging mobs screamed as government-sanctioned, Church-sponsored pogroms raged through my villages and towns.
So I did! I left your miserable, evil-infested shores and returned to my own land, the land that for centuries you insisted was mine. And you hate me for doing exactly that — only now you scream ‘Get out of Palestine, you stole the land.’
Because I survived against your wishes and against all odds, you hate me that much more. You hate my ability to rise again and again from the inferno that your hate keeps igniting. You hate my resilience, my perseverance; you despise my capacity to outlive, outsmart, outperform. I have outlasted every one of my detractors and tormentors. The Romans and the Greeks, the Crusaders and the Nazis — all are now merely figures in history books or artifacts in museums and archeological digs.
But I survived and flourished. My fingerprints are visible in every facet of daily living, in science and technology and medicine. You use and employ and utilize all of my successes. And for my achieving all that you hate me too.
After two-thousand years of unrelenting persecution, I am still here. I have resisted and survived everything your evil minds could conjure. The gallows were never high enough, the fires never hot enough, the torture never painful enough. You did your best to break my body and my spirit, but you never touched my soul. And as punishment for my having survived, you confiscated my property, denied me basic human rights and expelled me from your lands.
If I were somehow to disappear, one in my image would have to be created. Just think of how boring life would be without me. Imagine a Durban Conference Against Racism without the “Kill The Jews” signs and placards. How empty and silent would the UN Security Council chambers be without a Jew to condemn; how listless and boring the proceedings of the General Assembly without the ever-present punching-bag?
You hate me, world, and I despise you.
Advertisement