COMMENTARY: Israel, Where News Always Happens

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Even though modern Israel will be 57 years old on May 14, many Jews still consider it a good day when there are no stories about that country in newspapers or on television. That’s because much of the coverage deals with terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, United Nations votes […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Even though modern Israel will be 57 years old on May 14, many Jews still consider it a good day when there are no stories about that country in newspapers or on television. That’s because much of the coverage deals with terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, United Nations votes that repeatedly condemn Israel and other depressing reporting.

The coverage never stops. Someone unacquainted with the Middle East might assume Israel is a large country with a huge population.


But Israel, the Middle East’s sole functioning democracy, is a small nation, about the size of New Jersey, numbering 6 million people, less than greater Los Angeles’ population. Yet the media pays more attention to Israel than to nations far larger in area and population.

The world’s only Jewish state will always remain a “big story.” That is not likely to change, and, indeed, it is nothing new.

A journalist for a Christian publication once told me, “Jews always make news,” and she was right. Jews have been a big story throughout history. It began with the Exodus of Hebrew slaves from ancient Egypt, and continued with the radical teaching there is a single invisible God who rules the universe and a system of ethics based not on human whim or caprice, but on divine teaching. It culminated with the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in the land of Israel. That “big story” and much more appears in the Hebrew Bible, which has remained a revered text for thousands of years and for billions of people.

For Jews, modern Israel will always be “big news” because it fulfills long-deferred dreams, mystical hopes and pious prayers. It is the earthly flesh and blood reality of the one place in the world where Jews are the majority. Only in Israel are they free to shape their own political, economic and cultural self-determination, free to “be themselves” within their biblical homeland, free to achieve national greatness, but also free, alas, to make the same errors other independent nation-states have made throughout history.

For Christians, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Cana, the Sea of Galilee and the River Jordan resonate on a deep spiritual level. Because it is the land where Jesus was born, preached, died and was resurrected, Israel will remain a big story.

Israel is a big story among Muslims as well. Although Muhammad never physically visited the land of Israel, Muslims have integrated it into their religious tradition. They believe the prophet was miraculously transported from Mecca to Jerusalem, and from there he made his nocturnal ascent into heaven on his winged horse, al-Buraq.

Fifty years after the caliph Omar captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Christians in A.D. 638, the Dome of the Rock was erected on top of the site of the Jewish Temples that were destroyed in 586 B.C. and A.D. 70. Shortly thereafter, the al-Aqsa mosque was built nearby.


Tragically, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a Muslim, left behind his egregious “big lie” that the Jewish people have no religious, historic, moral or juridical claim to the land of Israel. Arafat even denied that the two Jewish Temples existed in Jerusalem.

While one could hope the Christian and Muslim attachments to Israel resulted in interreligious harmony and mutual respect and understanding, the reality has frequently been otherwise. Fierce battles between Christian Crusaders and their Islamic adversaries in the “Holy Land” were commonplace in history and religious rivalry continues to this day.

There are other groups for whom Israel is always big news: the people who do not accept the reality of modern Israel. These include closet anti-Semites in the United States and Europe who use the screen of anti-Zionism to vent their hatred: “We’re not against Jews, only the existence of the Jewish state.”

Then there are the Western political leaders and academics whose mantra is: “The creation of Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians are the root causes of instability in the Middle East. Solve those problems, get rid of Israel, and we will have peace, cheap oil, an end to Islamic terrorism and good relations with the Arab world.”

Such simplistic thinking overlooks the civil strife in Lebanon, the intra-Arab struggles between feudal monarchs and cruel socialist dictatorships, the fear of democracy in the region, the duplicity of Saudi Arabia, and questions about the kind of regime that ultimately emerges in Iraq.

But stay tuned. Israel and the Jewish people will always be part of the Middle East. It’s been that way for more than 3,000 years.


MO/PH RNS END

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University in Saint Leo, Fla.)

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