A confusion of festivals

By Dr. Rodney Gouttman

December 2, 2009

Writing this column soon after Armistice Day, which in America is called Veterans Day, I was again made conscious of the great failure of hope expressed at the end of World War I that it would be "the war to end all wars." My recent trip to Cyprus and the Holy Land reminded me how easy it is for local conflicts to morph into global ones.

The animosity of Greek Cypriots to what they see as the Turkish invasion of their island is as strong as ever. And it became obvious that if simmering communal hatreds were not handled judiciously, military conflict could well re ignite there.

On another matter, I was often regaled by comment that Israel should never trust Turkey. That nation's recent Islamist path, and hence its bitter verbal attacks on the Jewish State especially since the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, were tendered as evidence of this. When I mentioned, however, that the Greek motherland has also often displayed enmity toward Israel, an eerie silence prevailed.

Along with countless others, I celebrated Simchat Torah at the Kotel in the Old City of Jerusalem. There, it was a combination of sound, sight, and emotion in a seamless blend of religious fervour from Jews of so many races and cultures. The spectacle of dancing with the Torah in this atmosphere was electric and incomparable.

All this enthusiasm and pietism, however, is always counterbalanced by the reality that this miniscule patch of territory is a tinder box of conflicting forces which could explode into warfare with monumental national and international implications. At the time, a beefed-up presence of Israeli police and border guards was ready to quell any disturbance fuelled by Islamist agitators on the Temple Mount as had occurred only a few days earlier. Rioting Palestinian youths had targeted a group of European Christians tourists on the pretext that they were Jews with designs on the Islamic holy sites.

Some days later I visited the moshav, or farming settlement, Sde Nitzan, on the western edge of the Negev Desert. It became the border with the Gaza Strip when Menachem Begin withdrew Israel from the Sinai as agreed in the Camp David Accords with Egypt. The moshav lies at the mouth of the Philadelphia Corridor, one of the three principal entrances to the Gaza Strip. My guide was an old friend who, starting 40 years ago with his wife and other pioneers, transformed the sand dunes of the region into an important Israeli food bowl and horticultural hub for the daily export of local produce to the markets of Europe. However, the area is also a war zone, and for years its farmers and their families have had to endure missile and terrorist attacks from their Islamist neighbors. This reality, unfortunately, is omitted from the justly maligned Goldstone Report, which has become Holy Grail in the United Nations.

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