Dear World – Gekweld Israël gooit zachte handschoenen weg

Dear world,

You may forget, but we have long memories. We are, after all, the eternal nation.

We remember how Rome, the vaunted and celebrated foundation of your civilization, massacred our towns, ravaged our people, and ripped us from our homeland.

We haven’t stopped bleeding.
We have been commemorating our Nakbas for over 2000 years, each generation mourning anew.

We remember how your crusaders, hungry for our homeland and thirsty for our blood, tore through our communities and families with swords and fire.

We remember how your revered religious ideologies, tormented and enraged by our maintaining our faith, subjected us to the auto-da-fe and dhimmitude.

We remember how your great empires persecuted us, expelled us, tortured, raped, pillaged, sent us as wanderers from place to place.

You took our homeland and then you took our homes.
You took our possessions and then accused us of robbing you.

When we were poor and downtrodden we were dirt to you.
When we were successful even more so.

When we kept to ourselves it bothered you that we were different.
When we tried to fit in it bothered you that we were defiling you.

We remember that the fall of your kingdoms and empires brought your newfound philosophies.
Right wing national socialism and left wing communism, united in their hatred of the Jew.

Wanting to be rid of us you painted on our shops “Jew, go to Palestine!.”
Now you take to your Judenrein streets chanting “Jew, get out of Palestine”

We remember how you turned your back on us, not sparing a single bomb to disrupt the trains taking us incessantly to our death, with a temporary reprieve when we were at our lowest and most broken. Just enough to, by the skin of our teeth, barely grant us a sliver of ghetto of a land with indefensible borders.

And then we were a pawn in your cold war. You will be our ally so long as we serve your purposes. Your gifts come with so many strings attached they might as well be chains.

When we got too strong, we were human rights violaters, occupiers, colonists. A wise rabbi wrote before his assassination that the world loves weak and dead Jews.

You showed us that love for a few days the other week. How the naive among us relished it…
But excuse us if we don’t fawn over your short-lived sympathy.

So dear world,

We hear your protests, your calls for restraint.

We hear your human-rights loving masses foaming at the mouth about our committing genocide while polishing their halos with our blood.

We hear them telling us that we have no right to self-determination, that we should instead entrust our safety to you.

We hear you calling for us to self-destruct with just enough plausible deniability to tell us that you don’t really hate us.

Dear world, we are on our own as we always were, with nothing but one another and our faith in God and in His ultimate redemption.

We hear you loud and clear, world, and we have long memories. We are, after all, the eternal nation.

So excuse us if this time we don’t give a damn.

An open letter to the world
Tzachi Fried