A GREAT YEAR-ROUND HISTORICAL AND
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE
EXCERPT Chapter 2: Hanukkiot that Light the Way –
These Lights are Sacred
By the 1920s, Jews began to increase their numbers and to modernize
Ha’aretz (The Land) or Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), building and evolving
the civic, educational, cultural, social, and political institutions that would
increasingly serve as the backbone of their society (1). Local Arabs
preferred to continue a lifestyle established over centuries. Although initially
Jews and Arabs had co-existed peacefully, Arab resentment erupted into
increasing attacks, murderous anti-Jewish riots, and rampages. It was a clash
of civilizations that has continued to the present on a global scale. Jewish hopes
for peaceful coexistence began to fade, and the Jewish community
undertook an internal debate (that would continue into the present) about viable
alternatives (2).
Meanwhile, in Europe, the 1930s saw the beginning of a most egregious tyranny
ever perpetrated on the Jewish people. Germans shamelessly cheered Hitler’s
Nazis and their collaborators as they viciously demonized, scapegoated,
disenfranchised, and isolated Jews, gradually amplifying historic anti-Semitism to
an unspeakable thunder of evil and gruesomeness. Some Jews succeeded in
fleeing to Jewish Palestine and elsewhere, but British policy, inconsistent and
tending to appease Arabs, barred entry to many more, dooming them to certain
death.
As a mostly indifferent world abandoned European Jews to the growing atrocities
of the racist Nazi state, activist Jews in Palestine formed militant groups like the
Etzel and Lehi to respond to British restriction of Jewish immigration and to
increasing Arab violence. By the first half of the 1940s, Hitler’s murderers refined
their slaughter technology enough to finally accomplish the Nazi dream of
a Jew-free world...
Endnotes
1. For more history of Zionism, see http://www.jnf.org/ ,
http://www.jewishagency.org/JewishAgency/English/Jewish+Education/Eye+on+Israel/Story_Zionism/ ,
http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm , and http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm .
Most Jews settled in coastal cities and towns and in Jerusalem. However, many idealistic
newcomers either established or settled in the interior in kibbutzim, innovative agricultural communes
striving to become as self-sufficient economically and defensively as possible.
The early kibbutz nurtured some of the most devoted patriots and leaders of Israel.
Many outstanding IDF officers were kibbutzniks. For example, ‘The three Ehuds of Merhavia’
are remembered among the too numerous brave kibbutzniks who fell for Israel.
Golda Meir, the Russian-born American teacher who was one of Israel’s founders
and had become Israel’s prime minister, was seasoned in Kibbutz Merhavia.
See http://www.pocanticohills.org/womenenc/meir.htm ,
http://www.hagshama.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1649&subject=191 ,
and http://www.lysfrasyd.dk/Israel_-_Kibbutzim.htmhad .
2. The Arab world too was beginning to wake up and evolve several brands of nationalism and pan-Arabism, but certainly not mainly in the direction of modernity or open democratic societies. Ancient bloody tribal conflicts between Sunni and Shiite sects would be put aside only to vilify or destroy the Jews (http://www.religion-cults.com/Islam/islam5.html ).Dictatorships and corrupt monarchies abounded. Radical Islam took hold, flourished, and often hijacked the faith. For example, at this time the militant secretive Sunni Muslim Brotherhood that was formed in Egypt would later nurture the corrupt and violent Yasser Arafat and it would give rise to Hamas, the hard-line Jiahdist (spreading Islam violently in a holy war – see http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html ) terrorist organization, which will become increasingly popular among Palestinian Arabs dedicated to the elimination of the Jewish state. The Brotherhood will assassinate Egyptian President Omar Anwar Saddat for making
peace with Israel. Its members will lead anti-western Jihadist terrorist attacks, such as the 1993
New York World Trade Center bombing, and will provide inspiration and members to Al Qaeda.
Jews and the Jewish state will be the primary target for Jihadists for decades, but radical Islamic
terror will become a world-wide menace that aims to establish Muslim theocracies and thrives
on differences between Western and traditional Muslim cultures. Hopefully, moderates can
eventually gain sufficient power in Arab nations to chart a course away from archaic corrupt
dictatorships on the one and regressive and violent Jihadist ideologies that would establish radical
theocracies on the other. Hopefully, middle class moderates would establish modern Islamic
societies with their own humane, stable, democratic government. Offering Muslim societies
freedom and democracy as an alternative to the tyrannies of corrupt despots or intolerant Jihadist
clerics is one aim of the American-led efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Muslim site worth
seeing is http://www.annaqed.com/ and Muslims voices to note are Salman Rushdie
(http://www.subir.com/rushdie.html ) and Wafa Sultan
(http://www.memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1050 ).
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