THE NEW YORK TIMES – Monday, June 16, 1975
By Rabbi Meir Kahane
Time is always on the side of the tenacious. Conversely, it is the enemy of the weary and pushes tired men into the search for compromises that are often more the product of despair than of common sense. This is precisely what is occurring today in Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel.
Eight years after 2.6 million Jews were saved from extinction, and less than two years after the near-catastrophic Yom Kippur war, larger and larger numbers of those who were almost slaughtered seek to return again to the moment of truth.
Forgotten is the insanity of comments from Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Baghdad and Fatah. Forgotten are the pledges to throw us into the sea, wash Tel Aviv clean with Jewish blood and eliminate the “gangsterstate” of Israel.
Forgotten are the insanity of borders that saw the coastal strip with its million Jews under the guns of Arab armies just miles away. Forgotten are our own projections of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead.
Forgotten are the borders that saw settlements on the plain lying naked beneath the Golan Syrian guns; the Sinai with its Egyptian armada within spitting distance of our cities. But most often forgotten are the hatred, the solemn pledges of extermination, the school textbooks with their poisonous venom, the days of May and early June, 1967, when the mobs were lashing about in an agony of anticipation of the great Jihad, about to begin.
What were the demands in those days when there were no June 5, 1967 borders to which to return? What were the Arabs marching to war about then? Forgotten is the reality of Arab refusal to recognize an Israel that is even one dunam square. Forgotten is the never-changing reality of Hebronism.
What is Hebronism? It is the Arab policy of extermination of the Jew who seeks to live in his own land. It is the reality of that summer day of 1929 that saw Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in the streets, homes and shops of Jewish Hebron. Hebronism is the Arab policy that would be the rule for us every Monday and Thursday could our enemies only accomplish it.
We are inundated with all kinds of illusions and elusions. Let us return this land or that and we will have peace. Let us not dare to settle Jews in Eretz Yisroel lest it anger the Arabs and jeopardize peace. Let us recognize the existence of a Palestine people, for that will bring peace. Let us reach peace and brotherhood with the Arabs by territorial concessions and by giving them electricity and indoor toilets.
What kind of a Jew believes that he can buy Arab national pride with an indoor toilet? What Jew does not, after all these years, recognize that the Arab will not compromise on that which he considers to be his land, and who views every Jewish kindness as a weakness to be exploited?
Our enemy, in the long run, is weariness. It is against this that we must struggle, against the weariness that rises to a crescendo with the frustrating cry of : When will it finally end?
Only weak people surrender to time. Strong and tenacious people know that there may never be an end to the struggle and the sacrifice but they also look about and see what their refusal to surrender has accomplished.
There is now a state – and today a big one – in much of our Eretz Yisroel; a Jewish state with nearly three million souls and many more to come. None of this would have come about had we listened to the intellectual precursors of our modern-day “doves.” In the name of peace there would be no Jewish state; in the name of morality there would be no free Jewish nation.
Eretz Yisroel, the Land of the Jewish people exists. Perhaps peace will come some day, but until that time let us not listen to delusions. Strength, tenacity and trust in G-d; this and this alone assures Jewish survival.
Reproduced by Barbara Ginsberg, here.
