Place of Refuge

“Spread out, ya knuckleheads!” Our drill sergeant barked at us in his normally cheerful tone. “One grenade’d get all y’all!”

Murmuring alarm at the inevitable bloody future awaiting us, we shut up and spread out, thus facilitating getting dropped to the red, South Carolina dirt for a smoke session. The lesson held: crowding together equals death. Those lessons would be underscored, years later, when I went back into harness and deployed to the Middle East.

Some habits die hard. A few years ago, reports of a deranged gunman on a forested hillside behind the playground summoned us to pick up our junior high student. Standing in a long line of parents, queued up outside the schoolhouse like cattle in a slaughterhouse chute, made me sweat bullets. By the time reports were confirmed bogus, my reaction had already darkened the day.

Nobody wants to be near a target when ordnance comes visiting. When you ARE a target, you take all the precautions: camouflaging artillery emplacements, hardening bunkers, digging foxholes behind the crew-served weapons. Those are all magnets for bullets, bombs, rockets, and grenades. Who wants to be there when THAT happens?

Israelis.

But what the actual fuck, Israelis? Why there, in practically the only Middle Eastern state without a drop of crude oil? Why congregate there, perched on a nearly indefensible strip of dully unproductive land that was benignly neglected by Ottoman rulers between its Roman and British administrations?

Israelis want to be there because it’s their homeland. Like Native Americans, they’ll defend it to the last. Their Zionism isn’t political, but the urgency of millennia firing the same, last-stand mentality that seared Masada into permanent human memory.

Israelis want to be there because they are the last and only people who speak, write, and trade in the language of the Dead Sea scrolls.

Israelis want to be there so they can rock out to concerts in coliseums built by the Romans who subdued Judeah, the same imperialists who executed Jesus of Nazareth and countless other resisters. Bloated beyond purpose, the Roman empire crumbled to dust, yet “Zion” still rings down the ages to emerge in Bob Marley’s music and The Matrix movies.

Whomsoever yearns for their safe home is a Zionist in their soul.

Israelis want to be there because Jews have gone home. Far from representing Jewish imperialism in real time, Zionism is the final dismantling of an ancient imperialism.

Israelis want to be there because Hebrews built their first temple in Jerusalem around the time that the Bronze Age phased into the Iron Age. That Solomonic temple stood until razed during the Babylonian siege — more than a thousand years before the Prophet Mohammed was born.

The second Hebrew temple was destroyed by a Roman siege, some 500 years before Mohammed’s birth. Nobody has more history in Israel than Jews — nobody.

For over a thousand years, the Temple Mount has hosted Islam’s third-holiest site, the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Those grand Muslim architectural flourishes are built directly on top of what has been the holiest site in Judaic tradition for three thousand years.

Israel is nobody’s homeland more than it is the homeland of Jews.

Israelis want to be there because, besides being their original homeland, Israel is their last bolthole. German Nazis showed the whole world that no one will take in the Jew, and U.S. neo-Nazis would like to remind you of that. So would Dutch, Polish, and British antisemites — and the entire balance of the Middle East. Political progressives would be well-advised not to join them, yet here we are…

The great thing about antisemitism isn’t just that it “explains so much,” but that it’s elegantly self-reinforcing. Why does everybody hate Jews? Well, they must be simply awful people! Or perhaps not people at all.

Maybe they’re lizards. Maybe they have horns on their heads. I heard they don’t believe in an afterlife. Didn’t they kill Jesus?

It is one nation, under attack, with liberty and justice for Jews… and for Drouze, and Bedouins, and Palestinians who aren’t bombing buses.

Perhaps progressives, tired of playing the tolerance game, are relieved to find an outlet. Everybody likes a consensus bad guy. Jew-hating always finds reasons, never going out of season.

Most people who are generous in their criticisms of Israeli actions have no affirmative suggestions for how Jews should behave in a hostile world, which I suppose is understandable. Jewish existence has long been a hard problem to solve.

When desperate Jews poured their life savings into bribing officials and boarding ships to flee industrialized Nazi death camps, those ships were refused entry all over the world — including at U.S. ports. The world heard the rumors, and plugged its collective ears.

They have no one to rely on but themselves.

Rank antisemitism plays shockingly well with modern progressives, who are pleased to overlook the thousands of Hamas rockets that fly out of Gaza, Hezbollah rockets that fly out of Lebanon, Houthi rockets that fly out of Yemen, and ballistic missiles all the way from Iran in favor of admonishing the whole world that Israel is an “apartheid state” (despite Palestinians serving in its Knesset); it’s a “colonizer” (despite not expropriating resources back to Israel from client states); and it’s an “imperialist state” (ignoring that Hebrew — unlike English, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish, et al — is spoken in only one nation).

Modern-day Israel is where the whole human race agreed to dump its “Jewish problem.” Certainly, we’d all like to reassure ourselves that the United Nations, when it partitioned territories in 1947, didn’t actually hope the new nation would be killed in its crib. Historically, after Israel declared its statehood on the day Britain pulled out of Mandatory Palestine, it was invaded the very next day by every surrounding nation, in a war intended to exterminate its Jewish population.

The cavalry did not come. No one did.

Freshly minted Israelis were left on their own, firing bullets painstakingly handmade in underground bunkers under threat of death from the erstwhile occupying British army, and flying cheap Czech fighters next to three limping, old B17 bombers smuggled there from Florida by sympathetic Yank privateers (who were subsequently convicted in U.S. federal court of violating the Neutrality Act of 1939).

The world sat on its hands and watched as, three years past the wind-down of the Holocaust, Jews fought a full-scale war for their very existence against five nations, without a single ally standing beside them.

When it couldn’t update its air force with U.S. birds, Israel bought Mirage fighters at a high markup — until France embargoed them. Then they reverse-engineered the French airframe, built Kfir fighters around surplus American J-79 engines, and flew those against all enemies until we finally agreed to sell them F-15 Eagles. While Americans dithered over selling M16 assault rifles to sweaty Zionists, IWI developed the Uzi submachine gun, the Galil battle rifle, the Jericho pistol, and the Tavor bullpup — and sold them all over the world.

They are resourceful; they’re hard as a Negev rock formation, and they’re not giving up.

Maybe one grenade (or MOAB) would get them all, but I have my doubts. October 7 was the mightiest sneak attack that Iranian-backed Hamas could muster, yet Israel is still there for you to protest against. Although it is by far the most-sanctioned member of the United Nations — that peace-promoting organization employing blood-soaked rapists who personally gallivanted into Israel on October 7 — Israel keeps showing up, saying its piece, and paying its dues. Then its representatives go back home and drill with their reserve units.

History keeps reminding Jews that waiting for your permission to exist is not a survivable strategy.

Israelis want to be there because “Zion” remains the mother of all metaphors for refuge and safety. Israel maintains a Law of Return for anyone Jewish enough to be hunted for their heritage. As a matter of permanent national policy, anyone with one Jewish grandparent has the right to claim Israeli citizenship — as do their immediate family members. The shorthand for it used to be “anyone Hitler would have killed,” but there are more modern takes now, aren’t there?

Israel’s Law of Return contrasts sharply with Arabic Jordan, which closed its borders to Palestinians after Arafat’s PLO stoked a civil war there; as well as with Egypt, which refused to open its gates to Gaza’s citizens out of fear of Palestinian terrorists.

And with every other Arab nation.

Israel’s right of return policy was directly inspired by Nazi massacres, but it’s been reified by the political left’s useful idiots lapping up Iranian/Palestinian propaganda; by the perennial currency of Rothschild and Soros conspiracy theories; by repeated wars of obliteration against the state of Israel since 1948; by synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Seattle and Eugene and NYC; and perhaps by you, dear reader.

Aliyah — to “go up” — is a cherished, ancient Jewish tradition. It means to ascend the bimah and read at temple, or to climb Mount Zion to Jerusalem, holy of holies. Since the founding of Israel in 1948, “making Aliyah” has come to mean leaving the diaspora to return to Israel — the first and only place Jews have succeeded in forging a nation unto themselves; the place to which they were specifically consigned by the United Nations; and also their ancient homeland, which the whole world wants Jews to apologize for occupying.

Since the October 7 assault, facing international waves of antisemitism so vicious that Hamas hostage murders are celebrated in song, some 30,000 Jews have made Aliyah. That’s the biggest surge since 2022, when 73,000 Jews fled the quietly endless pogroms of Russia and Ukraine.

 Faced with your heartless scorn, Jews are going home — and they’re manning the barricades. It says something about them, and it says something about the rest of us.

Jews are massing in the only place on Earth where they can trust their neighbors. Perhaps not the neighbors over the border, but at least their neighbors across the street. Could my Jewish family trust you, in your neighborhood? I’m not eligible under the Law of Return. My wife and two of our children are, and I would no longer begrudge that choice.

Yeah, one grenade might get ’em all, but in the meantime they’re dancing, praying, screwing, singing, performing class-leading research, and developing the richest agriculture in the region. Jews could do that anywhere, of course. Kickin’ ass is a fungible capacity.

But where would you have them go?

 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there, they who carried us away captive required of us a song;

And they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying,

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!“

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

–Psalm 137, Ketuvim