Evocative and meaningful words, as always. But one phrase puzzled me: referring to Israel as “the state that it (the international community) re-created”.
Israel was created as almost all other states were: by the toil and the blood of its people. Had the United Nations fought off the Arab armies in 1948, as they did the North Koreans in 1950, or even had they organized arms shipments to Israel, then they should indeed be giving the credit. But all the international community really did was endorse the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. Those who were there still had to fight to exercise that right– and they fought essentially alone.
Let’s stop referring to the myth that the UN “created” the state of Israel. If it did, then Israel also has a higher degree of obligation to the UN than other states do; and with a UN that has long since squandered whatever moral authority it once had, that’s a dangerous fiction.

My heart wants to believe that Khaled really does want peaceful coexistence. I wish you had asked him, in response to his incredulity about hate against dead Jews, how one is supposed to relate to live Jews. I felt the question hanging in the air after his remark. As I said, I want very much to believe that many Arabs truly do want to live in peace as my neighbors. But I remember a Jewish kablan friend relating a discussion he had with one of the Arab workers who was preparing a floor in a new Jewish home. “Ahmed,” my friend asked, “how do you feel about the whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Does it bother you to be helping to build homes for Jews?” Ahmed continued lovingly polishing the newly-laid floor by hand. Without looking up from his work, he answered, “It doesn’t bother me at all. I am only waiting for the Jews to be driven our or killed. Then, this will be my house.” So I remain cautious. Hopeful — but cautious. I always wish that the Arabs who work all over my yishuv would have a neon sign above their heads: “I hate Jews and want them dead,” or “I have nothing against Jews.” It would make loving my fellow man so much easier.

I grew up believing that the US was solidly behind the fledgling Jewish State, at least at the beginning, and that Europe understood the need for the State as well in those days. But the more history I study, the more I wonder if there were a full five minutes during which the commitment to a State for the Jews was seriously supported.

Color me increasingly cynical about anything but G-d’s love of us.

The second omission is the fact that the Arab population between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is largely descended from non-Palestinians who emigrated in during the twentieth century. The notion that Jews have displaced Arabs who lived here for a thousand years is equally false.

Questions regarding Israel’s right to exist seem always to focus on ancient or continuous history (in the case of the affirmative) and European guilt for the holocaust (in the negative).

But, where is the discussion of the 100 years of nation building that led up to the creation of Israel? It’s not as though the Jewish presence just magically appeared because of the holocaust. Even before WWII there was a thriving Jewish community with schools and hospitals and an economy and a cultural life that had started in earnest in the 1860s and continued full steam, with legal land purchases, right up to the actual creation of the state.

Doesn’t the fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews moved to the area, purchased land and built a community, doesn’t that give them a right to be there? What about the Arabs that moved from Egypt and Syria and other parts of the Middle East? Are their rights to live in the villages built by their grandparents also suspect because they originally came from elsewhere?

I suspect the idealogue is the intellectual. He doesn’t see the truth of history because he is so committed his vision.