The photographs are embarrassing and disappointing: Jews hitting and pushing other Jews, swearing at family members and struggling with police officers: as if Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and the communities of the Sharon were in the the Diaspora. As if they were experiencing a food shortage in the gulags of Soviet Russia, or Heaven forbid, in a Nazi camp. What's going on here? For years people were completely indifferent, not even coming to pick up gas mask kits on time. And now, they are anxiety- and- panic-stricken even though everyone knows that no one would dare to use chemical weapons against the only country in the Middle East that could inflict a Holocaust on its enemies and their rulers. What does this tell our enemies about the Jewish people? How much satisfaction does this give the anti-Semites? To what extent does it ridicule our nation? Yet again the Jewish people come across as a hysterical people, with a refugee mentality, constantly on the run, without roots, unwilling to hold fast to their homeland, forever fleeing their land. Three days ago, I heard a youngster, not yet bar-mitzvah age, telling his friends how lucky he and his family are to have American passports, and that if a war breaks out, they would flee overseas. He seemed not to realize that he was telling this to the friends he would be leaving behind in Israel. "The people of Israel are responsible for one another-" This concept is no longer taught in Israeli elementary schools in 2013. Natan Alterman wrote in his poem The Company's Melody that "there is no nation that will withdraw from the lines it has dug." Is this still true- It was not always like this. In the three-week lead-up to the Six Day War -- which on a psychological level was supremely difficult, much harder than the fighting itself -- invitations from abroad poured in. Our aunt from New York offered to take in our three-year old daughter if we couldn't leave the country ourselves. We hung up on her. Yosef (Tommy) Lapid received an offer to get his family out of Israel, but told his wife, the writer Shulamit, that he has been "done with being a refugee since leaving Budapest in 1944." Twice a week during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, I was in Zarit, and Shtula, and Kiryat Shmona, and Avivim, and Nahariya, and Baram, and Mount Adir -- and I can say that it is not a heart-warming event to watch rockets and missiles burning house after house, field after field, the municipal leadership fleeing for its life and leaving behind grazing sheep. And yet, it was still easier than watching the Jewish people now, running for their lives from a war that will obviously not break out.
