Wednesday, April 8, 2009

A Country under Siege

Imagine living in the State of New Jersey and being surrounded in all directions by enemies desiring your destruction.

Imagine that the 22 states closest to the borders of your state despise you and all of New Jersey's inhabitants with such intensity that only your total annihilation will satisfy their blood curdling desires.

Welcome to the State of Israel. A country smaller than the State of New Jersey, bordered by enemies from every view, over every hill top and abutting many of its cities.

One Israeli said to me, "I am educated. I have been taught to hate the Arabs but if they come up to me and say to me, ‘I want peace,' I would say to them, ‘Here is a piece of my land. Let us be neighbors.'"

Unfortunately, the Arabs do not approach Israelis and say, "I want peace." They say, "We do not recognize your right to exist. We will not rest until your country has been destroyed and you are gone from our land."

And so instead of walking the streets of Israel's cities touring art museums and shopping, we visited the Golan Heights riddled with shell casings, mine fields and Syrian bunkers. We walked past Mike's Place, the beachfront restaurant in Tel Aviv, at which a suicide bomber blew himself and three Israelis up and wounding countless other innocent victims.

We traveled to Sderot, the town bordering Gaza that has been the recipient of thousands of Qassam missiles shot by Hamas. And we looked over the mountains to the border of Lebanon and the site at which three Israeli soldiers were kidnapped several years ago and later returned in coffins.

The list is endless...

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