photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

I stood next to the border between Israel and Lebanon on a hot day in the summer of 2008. When I approached the fence of a lemon grove on the Israeli side, one of my colleagues yanked me back. Look, he said, pointing to a dirt road a few hundred yards away where I could make out the white vehicles of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL). I could also see the glint of binoculars and rifles aimed my way by members of Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored terrorist militia.

UNIFIL’s mission was to establish a demilitarized zone of 15-20 miles between the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon and the northern border of Israel. It never really worked. UNIFIL looked the other way as Hezbollah stored missiles and other arms in homes and tunnels in the DMZ. The day after the Hamas terrorist attack launched from Gaza at southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah began launching missiles at northern Israel from Lebanon, some from the area ineffectually patrolled by UNIFIL.

Israel showed itself willing to ignore this history in its acceptance of the Nov. 27 ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon brokered by President Joe Biden and his administration. Hezbollah again is promising to move away from the border with Israel. It may be a step toward peace in the region, but it’s only a baby step.

While a ceasefire is being implemented on Israel’s northern border, there’s no ceasefire in Gaza. Just as importantly, there’s been no stoppage of antisemitic and anti-Israeli attacks in the rest of the world.

On the night of Nov. 7, marauding crowds in Amsterdam went on a “Jew hunt,” cruising the city on motorbikes and assaulting any Jews they could find. Israel sent planes to pick up its citizens who were in town for a soccer match.

It was just this type of riot against Jews in European capitals over a century ago that gave birth to modern Zionism — support for a Jewish homeland in the Promised Land of the Bible.

The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodore Herzl reported on anti-Jewish riots in Paris and Vienna in the 1890s. He was horrified by the notorious Kishinev Pogrom in Czarist Russia, which began on Easter Sunday in 1903, during which 49 Jews were murdered. The founder of the World Zionist Congress, Herzl came to believe Jews could only be safe in a homeland of their own, not in Europe where two-thirds of the world’s Jews lived. In 1923, a major step toward Herzl’s goal was taken by the League of Nations when it set up temporary British rule in what was to become “a national home for the Jewish people” — now known as Israel.

During the Second World War, Herzl was correct that Jews in Europe were not safe. The United Nations partitioned Palestine in 1947 between a Jewish state and a prospective Arab one. Israel became the 59th member of the United Nations in 1949. (Much of the land that was supposed to become an Arab state was seized by Egypt and Jordan.)

So then, who are the Jews of Israel? Just under half trace their ancestry to Europe and are alive because their forebears left Europe before the Holocaust or survived it. And there’s another half descended from the 900,000 Jews who fled neighboring Arab and Muslim countries.

Given that national DNA, Israeli Jews know they cannot rely on the goodwill of the world’s non-Jews. One-time allies such as Russia and Turkey no longer support Israel. Arab leaders, who were willing to contemplate peace with Israel, such as King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, were assassinated. The Hamas Charter does not call for an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside a Jewish one. It calls for the obliteration of the state of Israel and adds a call for the extermination of all Jews.

What are Israelis to think when within hours after the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 civilians by Hamas, 33 student organizations at Harvard held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible” for the violence? The International Criminal Court has indicted the Israeli prime minister and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in Gaza, even though, according to the Wall Street Journal, Israel’s military “may have achieved the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in the history of urban warfare.”

The casualties in Israel, Lebanon and Gaza are tragic indeed. But even in the midst of the fighting, Israelis know they can only count on themselves.

On his way out of office, President Bill Clinton tried to leave a Middle East peace as a lasting legacy. He blamed head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat for “miss(ing) the opportunity to bring a (Palestinian Arab) nation into being.” U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross explained Arafat wanted “a one-state solution. Not independent, adjacent Israeli and Palestinian states, but a single Arab state encompassing all of Historic Palestine.”

Will President Biden be able to establish the peace in his last months in office that Bill Clinton could not?

Damon Runyon, that chronicler of New York gamblers and wise guys, used to say, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” I’m rooting for Biden’s peace efforts with all my heart, but my brain tells me that betting on their long-term success is a 100-1 shot.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.