No rivers flow through a land in which so many people—the most people per square mile in the world—have so little land. No other land has a shorter coastline either, where a foreign navy controls the sea. No other land must import everything, including electricity, from a neighbor with a long history of colonialism and a known history of collaboration with fascism.
But enough about Monaco and her reliance on France. Focus on the Gaza Strip instead, the homeland of Hamas and the spiritual home of Islamists and leftists in the West. Focus on those who make the Hajj in the streets of London and the boulevards of Paris. Focus on those who occupy our colleges and universities, and invade our cities and threaten our peace, because these people—the enemies of the Jewish people—hate all freedom-loving people.
Truth is the focus that attention requires. Not the Achtung! of the past, the word resounding with the stamping of boots and the pounding of iron, but the Allahu Akbar of the present. And yet the past is present; never again is now, in this, the newest version of the oldest hatred, based on these words: “Do unto the Jews what the Bible says God did unto the enemies of the Jewish people.”
The tragedy continues in France and Germany, where blue Stars of David mark the houses in which Jews live. Whether the color’s deliberate, denoting the dark sky-blue stripes of the flag of Israel, is unclear. The effect is, however, undeniable. The daubs are like stains of Prussian blue, a murderous shade of cyanide gas, in this perversion of the Passover story.
The stains are as blood on the doorposts, and a stain on the soul of Europe, signifying the arrival of a vile plague. What follows is a voice shouting, “Juden raus!” (“Out with the Jews!”)
Thus begins November, the month in which Jews remember Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and Israel marks the departure and expulsion of more than 850,000 Jews from Arab countries and Iran.
Eighty-five years after the catastrophe in Europe and the dissolution of Jewish life into millions of crystals, the light of the Jewish state endures. The truth is in the forbidden light of Israeli scientist and Nobel laureate Dan Shechtman’s discovery of the non-repeating patterns of quasicrystals.
If the patterns deviate from the neatness of nature, existing in spite of our understanding of nature, they nonetheless confirm the existence of some of the worst aspects of human nature. The truth of this assertion lies in the ruins of the El Hamma synagogue in Tunisia, where the mosaics on the temple walls are as the observers of the Mosaic law in this purported oasis: nonexistent.
What remains is a Hebrew inscription to God, clear as crystal and more valuable the priciest November gemstone.
The words will endure long after the inscription fades and turns to dust; for the words are true, and the Word is just.
The word Israel will never pass away.