Ethiopian Jews Helped by Prime Minister Peres

                                         Nadene Goldfoot
Premier Peres poses with young Haim in Upper Nazareth on March 26, 1985. They are immigrants from Ethiopia. They were flown to Israel and many also were moved into Safed, Israel, where I lived. They came dressed in white sheets and were barefoot. In no time at all they learned Hebrew and how to shop in supermarkets. People set up clothing shops in their apartments and they were able to acquire western style clothing this way. While I lived in Safed, they put on an art display of things they had made.

The story is that when they landed in Israel they wondered where the Jewish women were. They were not used to seeing women wearing slacks, which many do.

On June 13, 2007 Shimon Peres was elected the 9th president of Israel. He was a former prime minister and Nobel laureate. 
 He has had a six-decade political career.

Safed Israel, My Home

Nadene Goldfoot

The year is 1980. This is the Rimon Inn in Safed, Israel, where I lived for almost five years. This inn was marvelous. We went here for special dinners. All the food was kosher and delicious. We came to Safed on a field trip with our school in 1980 and later moved here in 1981. The brochure says that Safed is high in the mountains, and it is at the same level pretty much as Jerusalem. We had dry, cool mountain air in the Spring, and it was hot and dry in the summer. You could sit out at the inn amid gnarled olive trees. People came here to explore this medieval city of Jewish mysticism. 

 The Cabbalists lived and prayed here. It is written about in James Mitchner's "The Source" with the chapter about the Saintly Men of Safed. Nearby is the Artists' Quarter which called to me as I do oil painting. The Rimon Inn is one of the fine hotels in the IRH Israel Resort Hotels chain. It was damaged in the recent shelling from Lebanon.

My Safed Apartment in 1981

Nadene Goldfoot
This is my apartment in Safed, Israel that I moved into in 1981 and moved out of at the end of 1985. It was at ground level and was a very high building with an elevator. Notice that the barred window also has a metal shade because terrorists could come in if it wasn't this way. All ground level buildings and stores had protection like this on windows.

I'm sitting on an extra bed in our living room in September. It is night. It's hot and I'm wearing a caftan. We had just moved in and were yet to buy furniture. There is no air conditioning, only a fan that we bought.

Updated 3/27/19 

Beth Hatefutsoth Mureum , Tel Aviv, Israel

This is Beth Hatefutsoth, a museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv, Israel. We went here in 1981 with our class also. All the buildings are so modern, though Israel was born amidst a war in 1948. This is one of many museums. When you are in Israel, you may wind up doing a lot of walking as there is much to see even though the country is so little.
Nadene Goldfoot

Hamat Gader Springs, Israel

Nadene Goldfoot
This is Hamat Gader (El Hama) with a pool. It is one of 5 mineral springs and is famous since ancient times. People with arthritis come here for relief. 

 We were here with our class on January 23, 1981. It was great. We went into the water which was about 85 degree F. It looked like the garden of Eden to me, a truly beautiful oasis. This was a former Roman Springs. 

 We had a wonderful trip through the Upper Galilee, and included seeing Lake Tiberias on the Jordan border. 

 We planted trees for Tu Betshuat.

Why It Took 2,000 Years to Return to Our Promised Land

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                     

Moses with Ten Commandments

Moses decided to take the Jewish people out of Egypt and back to the Promised Land of Canaan. He not only received Ten Commandments for us to live by but 613 more. This created a society that was probably the most advanced in the world, showing a reverence of all life, including animal’s feelings of all sorts. Female babies were not killed. No human was sacrificed. This all happened at least 3,000 years ago. There was no other group of people that were so sensitive to living creatures or were so much in the here and now of the living and not the deceased.

We lost our civilization in 70CE when the Romans conquered Jerusalem. We had been carried off as slaves before this several times. Again our people were either killed or carried off as slaves. Yet some were able to hide in the small kingdoms of either Judah or Israel.
The Jewish survivors adjusted their thinking to fit the circumstances they found themselves in. Their prayers included returning to Jerusalem or losing their right hands as a reminder of its importance. During this time they found they had to live by their wits, not being allowed to own land in other’s countries where they were expelled to or taken. They already were a group who valued the art of reading and writing and found that trading was a skill they were good at. They kept to themselves, thereby preserving their inheritance of values and ideals.

After living in Italy, Germany, England and other places, they continued to be successful but lived according to their own values on foreign soil. This would cause jealousy and antagonism with the populace, causing them to be driven out. In the late 1800's several groups finally moved back to what was now called Palestine to live and prosper. By 1894 a reporter named Hertzl realized that anti-Semitism was on the rise again and looked for a solution. Not being a religious man, he thought of Africa as a home for the Jews. Then he realized that not once had their prayers strayed from the promise to remember Jerusalem and to return to her. "Palestine," that hot wasteland, was the only place that Jews could possibly return.to and strive to rebuild.

Then the 2nd world war happened, being declared December 7, 1941 in the USA. Six million Jews who lived in Europe were slaughtered. Many survivors made their way to Palestine because other nations still had rules barring Jews from entering. A deal had been made with the English, who were responsible for the land at that time to allow Jews to have their own homeland back. After being pressured by some Arab heads, they reneged on their promise with proclaiming their "White Paper", which barred Jews from entering this barren unclaimed parcel of land. However, by 1948, Israel managed to be born.

For two thousand years Jews have tried to live in other people’s countries. They have led the way in many areas of business, medicine and science. Knowledge and education have been the driving force in their families. Knowing that six million of their people were murdered for no reason other than being Jewish has been the driving force to have their own country once again. It has not been an easy road since all the surrounding countries attacked once the birth of Israel was announced. These are countries with more square miles than USA is made of, attacking the state of Israel which is one third as big as Oregon. At this writing only two of the countries have made some sort of peace with Israel; Egypt and Jordan. Lebanon is still trying to get on its feet and fighting there is very close to Israel. Israel is only 59 years old in this second birth and has had to fight in about seven wars. It took the Jews a long time to throw in the towel and return to their own land, and perhaps it will take us another two thousand years until our neighbors realize that we’re there for good and quit fighting us. For here we must stay. There is no other way. No, we never did forget Jerusalem.

Kassam Rockets Attacking Israel

Nadene Goldfoot

The Palestinian Hamas movement has been raining Kassam rockets on Israel. Hundreds have been falling, making life absolutely so impossible on nearby towns that the town of Sderot has been evacuated. General Normin has said that these simple homemade steel rockets filled with explosives are militarily insignificant. That may be in Iraq, but not for Israel.

One must remember that a range of distance of 3, 8 and 10 kilometers is deadly for Israel. Israel is only as big as 1/3 of Oregon. The surrounding countries are very close. General Normin may think Kassam rockets are militarily insignificant but he has never fought for Israel nor has he been on such a small turf. The joke in Israel used to be: don't put your arm out of the window on the train or it will be in Jordan.

When I moved to Israel in 1980 I moved to Safed after studying for 10 months in Haifa. On the way to Safed in the moving truck I was told that a Katusha rocket had fallen in the back of a nearby apartment building only two weeks before. Then, Katusha rockets were in vogue and continued to fall in the Northern Galilee. Now they use Kassams out of Gaza, but because they are easily home made, are falling by the hundreds.

Finally Israel is retaliating while trying not to enter the Gaza territory. They've been enduring these attacks for far too long.

West Bank: It's Importance to Religious Jews Today

 Nadene Goldfoot
Moses, after four hundred years of slavery in Egypt, led the Jewish people out and back into the land of Canaan, from where they had been living before.

The people prospered and decided they needed a king like other countries had. Saul was the first, then David was chosen king. His son, Solomon, followed him. When Solomon died, his land was divided into two parts; Israel in the north and Judah in the south with its capitol being Jerusalem. The capitol of Israel was Shomeron.

Israel/Samaria (North)

What had happened was that Solomon's son, Rehoboam, was ruling the land. Jeroboam revolted against him along with the ten northern tribes, establishing and ruling Israel in the north. Then Jeroboam became Israel's first king. This was similar to the American civil War. The northern ten tribes had much wealth. Rehoboam continued to rule Judah in the south. This was in 928 BCE, or about 3,000 years ago. Omri, the 6th Jewish king of Israel after Jeroboam, bought a hill from Shemer for two talents of silver, and built on it the city which he named Shomeron, or later, Samaria. This was about 884 BCE. Samaria was the new capitol of his kingdom. He lived in Samaria during the last six years of his reign. Omri's son, Achab, married Jezabel, a Sidonian princess, who introduced the worship of Baal. This was against Judaism, yet he allowed a temple to Baal to be created.

Along came the strong Assyrians, who were occupying the territory immediately north which is today's Syria, Iraq and Turkey. They were building an empire and conquered the northern Israel. This was at a time when Israel was weakening spiritually, physically and also militarily.

They conquered Israel and took the people, moved them someplace else, and brought others in to take their place. Decades passed and they didn't remember to rebel anymore. By 575 BCE, the Assyrian Tiglathpileser took over the lands belonging to the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali and exiled them. Then Shalmanaser V, another Assyrian emperor, took over the lands belonging to the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh, and exiled them. Finally, by 556 BCE Sargan II, one of the great emperors of Assyria, finished the job and the whole northern part of the country ceased to exist as a Jewish state. (2 Kings 17:6-7) "The king of Assyria took Samaria and exiled the Israelites to Assyria, and he settled them in Halah at the River Habor, at the river Gozan, and in the cities of Media." Sargon claimed that he carried away 27,290 people from Samaria, the capital of Northern Israel.

The Assyrians brought in people from someplace else and placed them in what was then known as Shomron or Samaria, and they came to be known as Samaritans. They were a people who more or less adopted Judaism, but not completely. These new people worshipped their own gods, but when the area became infested with dangerous wild beasts, they asked the king of Assyria for Israelite priests to teach them on how to worship the "god of that country." They created a syncretistic religion, in which national groups worshipped the one G-d, but they also served their own gods. Because of this, they were never really accepted by the Jewish people, and they were very resentful. They had a long history of animosity towards the Jews. In Jewish consciousness and history, the Samaritans are rarely considered good. Today there are about 6500 Samaritans left and their cult site is in Mount Grizim, which is right next to the city of Shechem, called Nablus in Arabic.

A genetic study concluded the Y-chromosome analysis of men show that Samaritans descend from the Israelites, including Cohen, or priests, which is a very distinctive marker, and the mitochondrial DNA from females shows descent from Assyrians and other foreign women. This showed that Jewish men fathered children with the new immigrant women, and this was the makeup of the new Samaritans.

Meanwhile, the Jewish people of the north making up the 10 tribes who were taken to the Assyrian empire were assimilated and became the ten lost tribes.

Judah (South)

When the Jewish people dispersed from the northern kingdom of Israel, the Assyrians wanted to take over the southern kingdom, but this was not to be easy. They also had competition from the Babylonians which today would be Iraq.

By 132 CE, which was 132 years after Jesus's birth, the Jewish people in Judah revolted against the Roman Emperor Hadrian. He had rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman City called Aelia Capitolina and sold most of the people into slavery, and then renamed the country that was then called Syria or was part of Syria, belonging to the Assyrians, Palestina. Hadrian had a different way of dealing with the population. He gathered soldiers and civilians from all over the Empire though most of them were from one area and swamped Judea with these new immigrants. He kept the name of the province as Judea and the name of the city remained Jerusalem by the people, but he aimed to de-Judaize the country. Only the new immigrants were allowed to hold government offices or any power and both Hebrew and Aramaic languages were discouraged. Strangely, the immigrants were immersed in the Jewish culture, though their native language was replaced by Romance with a Hebrew/Aramaic accent. This Italian became the language spoken by the majority of the population.

In the late 7th century, which would be about 1,400 years ago, the Islamic Empire came out of Arabia and took over the Middle East. Finally, as with the Jewish Empire after Solomon, the Islamic broke up into rival Caliphates. Then Judea declared its independence and the 3rd Jewish Commonwealth began.

By the 11th century the Crusaders came to liberate the Holy land from the Infidels. Judea, with its military helped by refugees from the falling Khazaria (Jewish people), could not offset the attack as Jerusalem was invaded by them.

During the 16th century the Judeans finally kicked out the Crusader forces to start the 4th Jewish Commonwealth. The Ottomans conquered the Middle East and much of the Balkans. At this time Judah sided with Lebanon. This lasted until 1922 which the 5th Commonwealth began.

Judea and Samaria have become what is now called "The West Bank", but had originally been an integral part of the Jewish land. It fell into the hands of Jordan, and when Jordan attacked along with all the other Arab neighbors, Israel won and regained the area of Judea and Samaria, or West Bank. Now it is to become a new state for the "Palestinians" as soon as they recognize Israel and its right to exist which so far, they refuse to do.

The religious Jews do not want to give up the West Bank. It is an important part of the history of the Jewish people. While Israel is being pressured to give up what it was originally promised, both by G-d and then again by England, the religious Jews have been encouraged to settle in the West Bank as it was part of Israel. Now, like Gaza, many may have to move out of the area. Politicians have forgotten how difficult it is to move once people become attached to the land and improve it. They have been treated like chess players on a board, and they are rebelling at this gambit.

Perhaps they won't have to move as it seems that the prevailing government of the future Palestine state is now imprisoned by Israel for not stopping the attack of Kassam rockets from Gaza. The factions refuse to stop their attacks, making them unlikely neighbors now.

Jews, an Endangered Species

Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Jews are an endangered species. We have been threatened by Iran who wants to wipe Israel out. Now that they may have atomic energy shortly, this is an even bigger threat. We're a very small group of about 14 million people. More than that make up Mexico City. We've been around since our origins with Abraham in "Iraq" for about four thousand years. We need Israel as our own country simply because we need this sanctuary that we can call our own that was our own once upon a time when Moses passed away in 1271 BCE.  

 If the United States can proclaim certain animals as endangered species, why not the Jews? We're such a small group and so many have been killed in the past just for being Jews and are now being killed because many are living in Israel and Israel is constantly under attack.

For some reason (perhaps it was G-d telling us to live in Israel) we do our best thinking and creating in Israel. Since 1948 tons of inventions have come out of Israel. Many of these have been in the area of medicine and health and the world has benefited by these discoveries. Our intellectuals are turned on by the air there. Even I became extremely creative living in Safed where I wrote plays. Something happens to us in Israel.

I've been reading the book by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkm called WHY THE JEWS? The Reason for anti Semitism:  and am reminded that we have not been on anybody's popularity list. Part of this reason is that we are different and we haven't mixed in well with other people. We've been rather standoffish. This goes the other way, too.  People have been afraid to get to know us.  

Yet, these are the very reasons that we have continued to exist for all these years. We did not assimilate well. In fact, our host countries aided in this seclusion by keeping us in ghettos against our will many times. In the enlightenment of Germany, we started to think of ourselves as Germans and became enlightened along with all the others which turned out to be for the worst. Many people have tried to change us with forced conversions, but we are an unusual group. We're stiff-necked, which means we're rather obstinate. We're the only religion that is not only an ethic/philosophy of life, but is nationalistic as well. We're an unusual group of people.

There was no country of "Palestine" with a Palestinian government. There was an Israel. This was the land of King David and his son King Solomon. We were in existence with a bigger piece of land than of today. Today we are again a legal country having been sanctioned and blessed by the United Nations in 1948.

Do the Palestinians need Israel? Does Iran need Israel? Are there not enough Muslim countries? None of the few people living on the land had done anything with it. It lay barren until Jews came back to their homeland. We returned after suffering from Russian pogroms, antisemitism everywhere, the slaughter of six million Jews in the Holocaust of the 2nd world war, and even living under dhimmi status in the Middle Eastern Countries who now resent our leaving for our own country. They treated us as 2nd-3rd class citizens when we lived with them, and they are horrified to have us stand in their midst.

We've offered the Palestinians land to create their own state of Palestine next to us and they have refused it since the creation of Israel! The only thing we keep asking is that they recognize us as a legal state and quit shooting at us and this both Fatah and Hamas have refused to do. Why have they continually turned down the chance to have their own state and then cry about not having it? They seem to want the whole area and are not willing to let us have our increasingly shrinking piece.

So, unless people are still siding with Hitler and feel we need to be exterminated as a final solution, we need a protective area in which to live in, and what is better than our original country which we've already been granted in 1948? Israel is our sanctuary.

Jews NEED Israel. Zionism and Judaism are one and the same. We need this land because we are a very small, almost extinct group of  people. Israel is part of our history where our religion was born. We've tried for 2,000 years of living among other nations. It didn't work out very well. The Holocaust was our big wake-up call telling us that we needed a sanctuary. In 1948, Israel was born again and we aim to keep it.

Reference: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Jews_in_Arab_lands_(gen).html

Senator John Kerry's Voting Record on Israel

Senator Kerry’s Voting Record on Israel

by Nadene Goldfoot
Information fromJohn Kerry On Israel: Second To Several (Kerry’s voting record) Jewish Press: June 16, 2004, by Rick Richman, from Fair Opinion

It has been said that Kerry’s voting record of positive voting in favor of Israel was second to none. Here are the facts after being researched by a reporter for the Jewish Press.

There were 60 Senate bills, resolutions and other matters. The reporter disregarded the 17 measures that passed with 90 or more votes out of a possible 100. Everyone voted that way.

He discounted 18 measures that garnered between 82-89 votes. Then he looked at the pro-Israel positions that got 60 votes or less, the most controversial situations, where his vote would have mattered.

There were 10 of those votes in the list, and Kerry’s record was 6 pro-Israel votes out of 10. Kerry was basically, the reporter stated, a "60-40 guy."

On the Foreign aid Conference Report, Kerry was against the pro-Israel position. In 2000 he failed to join 60 co-sponsors of the "Middle East Peace Process Support Act" which called on the president not to recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state.

He failed to co-sponsor the pro-Israel "Peace Through Negotiations Act," which had 60 co-sponsors.

Kerry failed to join 55 senators signing the Grassley/Lautenberg letter in 1993. This was to the State Department and demanded that it included Hamas in the report on terrorism. It was inexcusable not to sign this if he was a big supporter of Israel. When Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, Kerry would not comment when repeatedly asked. A whole month after the assassination in 2004, he was again asked about his position. He did not directly answer the question. He went around the question saying that he believed Israel had every right to respond to any act of terror against it, and that Hamas was a terrorist organization. He suggested that Hamas only had to say it has given up violence and prepare to negotiate and Israel would pick up where things were left off at Taba. That was not saying that he supported their assassinating him, and this is exactly what the USA is willing to do to Osama bin Ladin.

He has been telling people that he has a 100% record of sustaining the special relationship with Israel. It’s actually been about 60%.

Lebanon, July 2006 Being Tested

Nadene Goldfoot

God has tested the hearts of the Arab people by placing Israel in their midst. What has been their reaction? They want to drive Israel into the sea.

Because of their hatred for their cousins, the Jews, they are now suffering because they helped to cause suffering to Israel by not caring that terrorists were shelling innocent Israelis.

Israel does not want their land. For too many years the Lebanese terrorists have been shooting rockets at Israel. Lebanese allowed their government to be taken over by these Hezbollahs because they probably were sympathetic with their cause. Israel hopes that the Lebanese army will take over Southern Lebanon and protect the border as they should. However, today they are of the same mind as the terrorists. There is no hope for these people as long as they sympathize with them.

The Lebanese Hezbollah and the Lebanese people have no reason to hate Israel. The occupation of Lebanon by Israel was done in response to the constant attack on Israel by them. Their actions cause their own problems.

They are reaping what they had sowed. Destruction of Israel is bringing about the destruction of Lebanon. Once they decide to be good neighbors and not be overcome by the terrorists, their country will once again be the Paris of the Middle East and be prosperous.

Iran and Jews: History Repeats Purim

                                                                                      Nadene Goldfoot

Haman and King Ahasueros (Xerxes)  of Persia 

History from 485-465 BCE called the King of Persia Xerxes. Jews called him Ahasuerus.
So at least before 330 BCE, in Persia when King Ahasuerus was ruler, there arose a man named Hamen who had a solution for the "Jewish problem". He devised a plan to kill all Jewish men, women and chldren in a single day. This was before the Muslim religion which was only born in about 700 AD.                                                                          

Queen Esther (Hadassah) and her son, Darius 

The king had been angry with hist first wife, Vashti. She had not come and danced for his friends when he had called her, so she was banished. To replace her, King Ahasuerus had a beauty pagent held, and who won but the Jewish girl, Esther "Hadassah". Her uncle Mordechai happened to be the king’s advisor, and he advised Esther not to say anything about being Jewish. Already the Jews were having popularity problems.

One day Mordechai sensed danger for his people. He was a descendant of King Saul, and people talked freely with him. The morale of the Jews was very low. The Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed and the nation of Judea had been conquered, and for the past 70 years the Jews were living in foreign lands, including Persia. Now there were more problems for the Jews.

A descendant of the Amaleks, an ancient tribe that fought the Jews while they followed Moses from Egypt named Hamen, lived in Persia and like his ancestors, hated the Jews. Hamen was the king’s chief minister. Actually, he resented and had a dislike for Mordechai because he felt he had an independent attitude. Because of this, he hated all the Jews. Hamen was called the Agagite, which meant that he was a descendant of Agag, king of the Amaleks. Mordechai heard of his plan to annhialate all the Jews, so he went to his niece Esther and begged her to help her people.

                                                                             

Queen Esther 

After fasting for three days except for eating seeds, Esther approached her husband, the king. All the Jewish people in Persia joined her in her fast to help her. She told him of Hamen’s plan and then told him that she too was Jewish. At the time she also was in disfavor and feared talking to him, but knew it was most important to do so. After listening to her, the king turned on Hamen.

He ordered that Hamen and also his ten  sons to be hung, and so they were. That ended the plan to exterminate the Jews then.

That was not the end of evil plotters who have tried to kill all the Jews in the world. Hitler was almost successful in that he killed six million Jews in Europe.

Strangely, the Persian Gulf War ended on Purim, in the year 5751 on the Jewish Calendar. Purim is the holiday that celebrates Esther's success in saving the Jews.                                                       

                                                                         

Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Shahab 3 missile
that they threaten to destroy Israel with by carrying atomic weapon 

Now we have Ahmadinejad, the modern day president of Iran, which used to be called Persia, stating that the solution to the Middle East problem is to destroy Israel. Perhaps he should remember what happened to Haman.

Reference: Chistopher Baysinger on "Xerxes and date" Hadassah was queen of the Sindh long before anyone ever hear of a Khazer!!!"

Your Purim Guide 1997, Chabad, Lubavitch world Headquarters, Rabbi Schneerson

Israel, Born Out of the Ashes-And Its Arab Neighbors

                                                                         

 Nadene Goldfoot 2006-08-09
Born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel has realized that the world really has not cared whether it exists or dies. She has quickly determined that she must fight for herself to live. Becoming a state and being accepted by the United Nations indeed seemed like a miracle after awaiting for 2000 years to be born again. It was not to be a slam dunk, however.

Her people, both men and women, have had to become warriors to protect their incredibly small nation. For a group hungering for peace, they have had to think of nothing but engaging in defensive wars. Their teenagers have had to grow up knowing their inherited obligation means going into the army as soon as high school is over, and facing the possibility of dying before their allotted time.
                                                                     

Her daughter religion, Christianity, has not had to send troops to help defend her. They saw in their mother religion aspects of their own morality, however, and helped supply her with much needed weapons. Without these, she would perish. Now, the United States alone stands with Israel, knowing that her fall will signal immense problems for itself.and the hope of peace in the world. Even Britain is on the fence, thinking of their needs before Israel’s. Alone, and for the very first time in history, the United States is taking the barbs and hatred of the world for standing with Israel and not relenting.

Israelis have fought against Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Transjordan, which is today’s Jordan and have won. This was at the time of it’s rebirth in 1948. That was the War of Independence. Then they had a war of 1956 and the war of 1967 which lasted for only 6 days and found they had conquered the Gaza Strip, the vast Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, and repossessed the provinces of Judea and Sumaria which the outer world calls the West Bank, and the eastern part of Jerusalem which had been occupied by the Jordanians 19 years earlier when they invaded Israel in 1948. Let’s not forget the war of 73 which occurred on the highest Jewish holy day, Yom Kippur, when all people were praying in the synogogues. After this attack on Israel, Egypt and Jordan begrudgingly accepted Israel’s presence, which aggravated their Arab brothers to the nth degree. Jordanians come back and forth into Israel to find work and many tourists have gone into Egypt from Israel since then. Then there was the war of 1982 when Israel went into Lebanon due to Katusha rockets that were continually being aimed at Kiriat Shimona, very near the border, as well as other northern targets. There, the lovely Hamishbeer Department Store was located that all the northern Israelis loved to shop in. Many American Jews resided there, becoming unnerved by the constant need to live in bomb shelters.

Israel has only fought defensively, having accepted the United Nations’ decisions as to size and shape of Israel. The Palestinians have never accepted their offered state, hoping instead to own all of the land of Israel as their given share. Since 1990, Israel has left the contested Lebanon strip they needed for defense, which has given the terrorsts time to arm themselves with highly sophisticated weapons supplied from Iran with the help of Syria.

Iran has never forgotten its loss in 1948 and has developed a religion that deems Israel a thorn in its side and has decided that Israel must be removed. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has stated to the world over mass communications that the solution to the Middle East problem is to destroy Israel. Israel took his words seriously. They know that Iran is seeking atomic energy and figures it’s not because they need better heating methods. They know it’s to make atomic weapons to use on the United States and Israel.

Israel’s Mossad, the Intelligence Agency, must have known that Lebanon’s terrorists were planning something. Katushas have continued to fall from Lebanon. They are not invitations to a party. They can kill and destroy. They’re not exactly a friendly action to their neighbors. The same thing has been happening on the Gaza Strip. When the soldiers in both areas were kidnapped, this alerted the IDF, Israel’s Defense Force, that something was brewing, and luckily, it alerted the country.

The IDF was made aware of the danger by the kidnappings. To find that 13,000 rockets of various sizes and capabilities were lined up in the northern country of Lebanon was more than Israel had imagined. They quickly realized that Iran was most serious in its declaration of destroying Israel.

This is Israel’s Pearl Harbor call. It is the most serious war Israel has ever faced. Israel may be highly trained, unfortunately, for survival reasons, and may have a wonderful arsonal in air power and land due to the United States, but finds that the Arabs have gifts of weapons even more deadly due to the Soviet Union’s sales to Iran.

We have only 5.4 million Jewish people inhabiting Israel. Being a democratic country, the only Jewish country in the world, it also is home to Christians and Muslims. Even at that, we have only 13 million Jews in the world. The Arab world has 1 1/2 billion Moslems and they all seem to be against us.

Our original forefathers who established Israel thought things would be a little different. They talked to Emir Faisal’s father, Hussein in 1918 who had then written and called upon the Arab population in Palestine to welcome the Jews as brothers and to cooperate with them for the common good. At that time, most Arab leaders were living in comfort in Europe and sold land to the Jewish pioneers at very high prices, but land was bought legally and the empty desert and swamp called Palestine was holy to the Jewish returnees.

Later Muslims like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have decided that Israel, which is much less than 1/3 the size of Oregon, is too great a piece of real estate to house Jews. It’s about 260 miles long, 60 miles at the widest, and 3 to 9 miles at the narrowest. Israel consists of 8,000 sq. miles.  Compare that with the state of Oregon, population of 3,930,065 but having a width of 400 miles (640 km), and length of 360 miles (580 km), or 144,000 sq. miles,   where the top 3 people living there have the ancestry of Germany-22.5%, England-14% and Ireland -13.2%.

It is an affront to the Muslims to have a democratic Jewish state in their midst. Their people might get ideas of wanting democracy, also. That is a threat to their realm. The strange thing is that little Israel has no oil wells. Israel was given people who had to learn to use their minds to survive and not be dependant on oil, like their cousins. No people had ever developed the land. It lay in the sun, waiting for its people to return to bring it back to life.

Reference:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon