By Seth Lipsky, Mideast Outpost
What I keep thinking of on the 65th anniversary of the Founding of the Jewish state is a phrase Ariel Sharon used to offer to his friends in the diaspora. Israel, he would say, is a “world wide project of the Jewish people.” It was his way of welcoming. As the anniversary nears, I’ve been re-reading the diaries of Herzl and essays of Jabotinsky and enjoying both their personalities that have done so much to inspirit the state they envisioned.
It happens that this week I am also putting the finishing touches on my biography of the Founding Editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan. It includes a telling of the events in the spring of 1940, when Jabotinsky gave, at the Manhattan Opera House, his speech calling for the evacuation of 6 million Jews to Palestine from Europe. He was promptly mocked in a column by Cahan. It filled a full page of the Forward, and Cahan sneered that Jabotinsky knew nothing of practical problems.
My own sense of it is that Cahan knew he was wrong even as he wrote those words. When, four months later, Jabotinsky died, Cahan couldn’t find any of his senior staff willing to go to the funeral. He assigned a youngster. Then he sat down in his own office to write the editorial that began by asserting the death of Jabotinsky, at such a grim time for the Jewish people, was “ in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.”
He proceeded to laud Jabotinsky as a person, a writer, and an orator. When Jabotinsky spoke, Cahan wrote, “even the deaf could hear.” What has always struck me about that editorial was Cahan’s prediction that Jabotinsky would be missed not only then, “in the middle of the storm,” but “also later, when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”
How prophetic those sentiments were. And how much fans of AFSI appreciate the work it is doing—its programs, its yahrzeit gatherings for Jabotinsky, its celebration of the writings and life of Shmuel Katz, and its publication of the Outpost. I believe I have read, front to back, every issue that’s reached me. So on this anniversary I send this note of congratulations and appreciation, which I look forward to conveying personally the next time we get together, in either New York or Jerusalem.
Seth Lipsky is founder and editor of The New York Sun. It ceased its print edition in September 2008 but continues as an online publication.
@ David Legrem:
Yes, back to the hard slog – nose to the grindstone! How impolitic to get off topic.
The nation of Israel is under attack militarily, politically, economically, and in other ways from all directions. The UN, once the hoped-for salvation of mankind, has degenerated into a corrupt anti-Semitic cesspool. There is a Jew-hating, white-hating, America-hating crypto-Muslim in the White House. And almost all of our liberal Jewish establishment is hiding its head in the sand, or lying outright.
With all this facing us, why are we wasting time arguing about Canada and its arrogant French-Canadians?
I think that the melting pot of the US and the multiculturalism of Canada amount to much the same in the end. After a people reach a certain population (in Canada, French are roughly 25%), they will have their way and so forcing people to integrate only works if the dominant people have the numbers and the will to force integration. That would entail a lot of strife.
The case of Quebec in Canada is actually a bit different because the French have their own province which is, in effect, a separate country (with a few pockets of English) – they even have (or had) their own party in the Parliament of Canada (called The Block). As unworkable as this seems, it is better to have a separate people in a separate province (with a few scattered pockets of French throughout the country) – the French could never hope for better and they are unlikely to want to fight for more except to force monetary concessions from the rest of Canada (by constantly using “separation” as a threat).
Actually, Israel ought to look to Canada as the very flawed model of how a separate people can live within a larger country and remain relatively peaceful. Granted, the Quebecois are a lot easier to live with than Islamists with support from a huge region of Islamists pushing them to terrorize and war against Israel. If, however, Jordan became the de facto home of the Palestinians, leaving behind a couple million Arabs in Gaza, J&S and inside Israel, then maybe it could work. Hope springs eternal but I do not have much hope left.
Laura,
If you are a Canadian, and if you therefore want Canada to survive as a unified commonwealth, then you and the other Canadians of English-speaking background should have compelled the Quebecois to use English. Or, conversely, the English-speakers all could have adopted the language and culture of Quebec.
The Canadians did neither, and events have taken their course. Just as they probably will take their course here in the USA in dealing with all those Spanish-language immigrants, both legal and illegal.
So now there is in fact a Quebecois nation that none of the English-speaking Canadians can really be part of. That, after all, is the way culture makes and breaks political boundaries. One day, the Quebecois will break up Canada. Or you can try your luck with civil war.
None of this is news to me. I traveled to Montreal in company with my late mother in summer 1967 for purposes of visiting the great Expo 67 exhibition, along with Habitat 67, a unique housing development located on an island in the St Lawrence River that was designed by an Israeli architect, Moshe Safdie. While in Montreal, we stayed a few days with a French Canadian family. I think we were among the few English-speaking persons our hosts ever interacted with. As I recall, the late French President Charles De Gaulle had visited the country a few months earlier, and in his speech to a multitude of Quebecois, had voiced the call that was on all their hearts and minds:
“Quebec libre”.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I care about those countries, people and leaders who care about freedom and the sanctity of life – all life. I do not care about the enemies of freedom and the enemies of life. I consider certain ideologies to be enemies of life. I define life as human life but also life forces that sustains our planet.
I watched an interesting documentary about Mount Everest climbers and the ethics of reaching the top. Many die in quest of the summit and when climbers reach higher elevations, there is an unwritten ethical code that the sick/wounded are left to die because saving those in such severe and dire conditions would endanger other climbers. Some argued the unethical nature of such a survival code. Many climbers merely walk by and ignore stranded, wounded and dying climbers to reach their personal goal instead.
The same ethical code is followed by people who say that they care only about themselves, their religion and their immediate family and to hell with others. This seems to be the Everest (Dark Summit) version of selfish devotion to oneself. I can understand devotion to ones goals and interests and a firm offensive against foes but I have a hard time understanding the pursuit of those goals over the dying bodies of ones fellow man unless they are foes who would leave you for dead according to their immoral ethical codes.
I do care about the fate of Canada along with of course the US and Israel. The rest of the world I do not care about.
Optimism without the power to protect oneself or one’s nation is and always has been a frequently fatal disease of fools. The fool in this case was the smirking idiot Cahan, who realized only too late in the dreadful proceedings playing out their drama across the face of Europe that Jabotinsky had indeed been right in his call for an immediate evacuation of the Jews of Europe.
On the other hand, who among the western leaders cared about the fate of the Jews of Europe. And why should they have felt otherwise? I personally care only about the fate of the Jewish nation, my wife’s Croatian nation, and the various nations that make up the citizenry of my country, the United States of America. And all of you should take note that I care little or nothing about the ultimate fate of Canada, which, I am certain shall inevitably break apart on national lines. Multinational states such as Canada, Belgium, the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Syria, India, and the Hutu-Tutsi republic in central Africa will all break up along national lines.
The worthwhile characteristic of realism bordering on pessimism is that one often can find himself pleasantly surprised.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI