The Jewish Problem

The Jewish problem has always been around. When Jews lived in their homeland, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and then Arabs again, swept through Israel with the sword and the torch. Over and over again, the Jewish population of Israel was murdered and enslaved, the land was emptied and renamed, new populations were imported to take their place. Then the subjugating empire would fall, the Jews would return, reclaim their holy places, build new homes, plant vineyards and cultivate fields. And the cycle would begin again.

In exile, the Jewish problem did not go away. Islamic Arab rulers barred the Jews from even approaching the site of the Temple. Medieval Europe penned Jews into Ghettos. Czarist Russia had the Pale of Settlement. The liberals of the French Revolution proclaimed that the Jews were to assimilate and cease to be a separate people. As the counterrevolution, Nazi Germany began with plans to expel the Jews and ended with wholesale genocide. Jews fleeing the Nazis found the gates to Western nations barred on the ground that they all had enough Jews already, and to Israel, on the grounds that the British authorities did not want to upset the Arabs, who were already sympathetic to Nazism.

The year now is 5769 or 2009. And the Jewish problem still persists today, because for those who see the existence of Jews as the problem there will always be a Jewish problem.

Barely was the modern State of Israel rebuilt, that the world decided that the Jewish refugees of Nazism were the oppressors, and the Palestinian Arabs under Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni who worked with Hitler on the Holocaust, were their victims.

This would become the conventional narrative of the latest phase of the "Jewish Problem". The Jewish problem being of course that there are Jews. The greatest threat to peace in the Middle East today, the world declares, is that there are Jews living in towns in Judea and Samaria. These towns are called "settlements" and they "prejudice the outcome" of the peace process, in a way that apparently all the Arabs towns and villages in parts of Israel do not.

If an Arab builds a house, his rights to do so are defended. If a Jew builds a house, he's a threat to peace. Never mind that there is no peace and no peace process, for the simple reason that the Hamas and Fatah terrorists that the world wants to hand a state to, keep trying to kill Jews.

To a diplomat however that only demonstrates that this is a Jewish problem. After all the terrorists are trying to kill Jews. Clearly the Jews are the problem.

The Obama Administration's two big overseas agendas are to keep Jews from living where he doesn't want them to in their own country, and to keep Israel from defending itself against Iranian nuclear attack. As usual it is not the Islamic Arab terrorists trying to kill Jews nor Iran's nuclear weapons program that is the problem-- it is the attempts by Jews to not be killed by them that is the threat to peace.

And of course there are always Court Jews who rush to their aid, not the aid of the Jews, but the aid of those who keep plugging away at the Jewish problem. Alan Dershowitz repurposed a suggestion from Yousef Munayyer, of the pro-Hamas American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee that Jews in settlements be forced to build only vertically, up instead of out. "Let them vertically" or piled one on top of the other, in a truly postmodern architectural vision of a ghetto as skyscraper.

100 story glass and steel ghettos are not likely to solve the Jewish problem. They only make for a better target. The problem is not the settlements, because it is not a settlement problem, but a Jewish problem.

Hitler's problem was not that there were Jews living in Germany, but that there were Jews living, period. When the Jews left Germany, Hitler's armies followed them to the West and to the East. Even to the Middle East, as Hitler vowed to the Mufti of Jerusalem, that his goal in the region would be to wipe out the Jews in Israel. Islam's problem is not that there are Jews living in parts of Judea and Samaria. Neither Hamas nor Fatah are prepared to recognize the rights of Jews living in any part of Israel, or the right of Israel to exist. Not even with the settlements gone.

The Jewish problem cannot be solved by moving Jews to ghettos, vertical or horizontal. Because it is not a problem caused by where Jews live, but by living Jews. Fatah and Hamas, and their ancestor the Mufti, have worked hard to solve the problem of living Jews. Obama is helping them solve that problem by once again viewing it as a "Jewish problem", rather than the problem of those who hate Jews too much to live and let live.

Diplomacy has tried to replace "the cycle of violence", with "the cycle of appeasement", but one naturally enough feeds the other. Israel has spent a generation since the Yom Kippur War trying to appease its enemies, only to learn that not even turning over land several times its own size, is appeasement enough. Jews in the West have worked hard to appease every minority with a grudge against them, and have still failed to learn that no amount of appeasement is ever enough.

A century of rhetoric, philosophy, debate and angst boils down to one simple fact. There is no way to solve a problem if you fail to define it. The Jewish problem is a problem not of Jews, but of those who want to kill Jews. There is no solution to the problem except to prevent them from accomplishing that task.

While some plan skyscraper ghettos and are convinced that the solution is some tough love from Obama to stop Jews from being such a problem-- the simple answer is that there is no answer, but that we go on living. Life is not such a complex equation, it can be understood in simple enough terms. When people consider you a problem, preventing them from doing whatever they can to "solve that problem" is your solution.