"ISRAEL NOW: OUR SEARCH FOR PEACE"
SPEECH GIVEN BY STEVEN A.
BRICKMAN, SAMFORD UNIVERSITY, LESLIE WRIGHT AUDITORIUM, APRIL 23, 2002
As long as we live, I want us to always remember tonight - a night we
stand shoulder to shoulder, people of different faiths and backgrounds, in
unity, as one people with one destiny, to proudly proclaim to our Community and
to our State and to our Nation and to the World - Am Yisrael Chai - Israel
Lives - Now and Forever.
Israel Lives because it is the fulfillment of
G-d's everlasting covenant with the Jewish people. Israel Lives because of the
G-d given faith and strength and resilience of its people who have justly and
proportionately responded, just like America does, to the evil face and madness
of terrorism.
Israel Lives because of its deep and irrevocable
friendship with the United States, rooted in the rich soil of democracy, and
our shared values of freedom and justice and the rule of law, and our shared
principles of eliminating groups which fund, support or harbor terrorists;
Israel Lives because of its 54-year-old Search for Peace with the Arab world,
so evident to anyone willing to open their eyes and free their minds; Israel
Lives, because, while the world has no memory, Israel remembers the past and
speaks the Truth, which sets it free.
1947 PARTITION
The
Truth that, in 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine and to
create two states between the Jordan and the Mediterranean - one, a state for
Palestinian Arabs, and the other, the modern State of Israel, with a majority
Jewish population established on less than one percent of the land in the
Middle East. Israel affirmed its desire to live in peace, side by side with a
Palestinian State. But the answer of the Arab world was for the armies of nine
Arab States to come pouring over the borders of Israel to drive the Jews into
the sea and extinguish the new Jewish State.
The Truth that, in the
aftermath of its creation, Israel absorbed and settled millions of refugees,
many who fled from the Arab world, while the Arab world, with its vast wealth,
refused to absorb the Palestinians who left at the request of their leaders in
the face of their invasion of Israel, and left them to live, as political
pawns, in the squalid refugee camps, festering in hatred and rage;
The
Truth that, from 1948 through 1967 when Jordan controlled the West Bank and
Jerusalem and Egypt held Gaza, the Arab world engaged in acts of terror against
the Israeli people, desecrated and closed off the Western Wall and other Jewish
holy sites and never once offered to create a Palestinian Arab State on land
they controlled;
The Truth that Israel gained control of the disputed
territories of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Golan Heights and Sinai
in the Six-Day War in June, 1967, not because they sought to occupy the
Palestinians, but because the Arab world once again massed their armies on
Israel's borders in yet another attempt to destroy its existence;
The
Truth that Resolution 242 of the United Nations, passed in the immediate
aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, reaffirms Israel's right to sovereignty
within secure and recognized borders to be negotiated face-to-face with the
Arab world and intentionally does not require Israel to withdraw to its
pre-Six-Day War borders; The Truth that Israel has been willing to swap land
for peace with Egypt, returning the entire Sinai with its oil fields and
settlements, which comprised over 90% of the territory absorbed in the Six-Day
War and to sign a peace treaty with Jordan when it was clear that these
countries, and their leaders, sincerely sought to live in peace, warm or cold,
with Israel;
The Truth that Israel has desperately searched for peace
with the Palestinians and the Arab world, both before and after signing the
Oslo Accords in 1993, offering at Camp David in the year 2000 and again at
Taba, Egypt, the return of all of Gaza, and 97% of the West Bank, retaining 3%,
as permitted by Resolution 242, to insure secure borders, and an equitable
resolution of the refugee situation, and all other issues, solely in exchange
for a complete cessation of the conflict so that the Palestinians could
establish a contiguous and viable independent state with East Jerusalem as its
capital, living side by side, in peace, with the Jewish State of Israel;
The Truth is that Arafat rejected this generous offer proposed by both
the United States and Israel, which would have given the Palestinians an
independent state they would be governing tonight and then rejected his clear
and unequivocal written obligations under the Oslo Accords to renounce terror
and negotiate peace, making it crystal clear to Israelis of every political
stripe, who want an end to the conflict and true peace, that Arafat does not
want a state to live beside Israel, but a state in the place of Israel.
A WAR OF TERROR
Instead of negotiating peace, Arafat and
his leadership have embarked on a deliberate and systematic war of terror,
seeking to kill as many innocent Israelis as possible, using as his primary
weapon of death the suicide murderer, young Palestinian boys and girls,
inculcated with the Anti-Semitic hate taught in their schools and published in
their state media, and mobilized and rewarded by Arafat and his minions.
These suicide murderers revel in the martyrdom of killing innocent Jews
- men, women, children, families, grandparents - who are sitting down for the
Passover Seder in Netanya, or eating pizza for lunch at Sbarro in Jerusalem, or
having fun with their friends at a club in Tel Aviv - none of which seems to
trouble the rest of the world or invokes the wrathful censure of the United
Nations, or other international organizations, or bothers the diplomatic salons
of Europe and the Arab world, where the rising stench of Anti-Semitism grows
more rotten every day;
The Truth that Israel today seeks peace, but is
engaged, after much restraint, in a war against terrorism, which can never
again be appeased. Israel is not waging a war against the Palestinian people or
a war to capture land but a war for peace and its survival, supported by all
segments of a very diverse Israeli society, that is its second War of
Independence, brought to its homes and doorsteps by the leadership of the
Palestinian Authority who sign checks of death to pay the suicide murderers,
and to purchase boatloads of weapons, expressly banned under the Oslo Accords,
from the Axis of Evil.
Israel does not seek or want this war of
self-defense, which it is forced to fight to defend its citizens, and which it
has fought justly and humanely and proportionately against terror networks,
which prepare their homicide bombs and explosive belts and operate their bomb
factories in camps like Jenin, administered by the United Nations relief
agencies, hiding behind civilian shields, in booby-trapped buildings, alleyways
and casbahs.
The Truth is that there is no cycle of violence or moral
equivalence between the tyranny of a totalitarian regime which sings songs of
worship and praise to their children who deliberately murder innocent, men,
women and children who are simply trying to live their daily lives and the acts
of self-defense engaged in by the Israeli government to defend its children and
their dreams by rooting out and destroying the terror networks birthed and
nurtured by these terrorist leaders.
A SEARCH FOR SURVIVAL
The Truth is that one day, as Golda Meir once said, the Arab world will decide
that they love their children more than they hate the existence of a Jewish
State, and on that day, swords will be turned into plowshares and peace will
come to Israel. We hope and pray that day will soon come. But, until that day
arrives, we must look deep inside ourselves and ask what we can do for the
people of Israel in its search for peace and survival.
We must pray in
our own traditions for the peace of Jerusalem; We must continue our advocacy by
writing letters to newspapers and petitioning our government leaders; We must
continue to educate the public at large about Israel by telling the truth to
our friends and co-workers and neighbors. We must join with the Birmingham
Jewish Federation, the glue that holds this effort together, to continue to
mobilize understanding and support for the State of Israel.
If we can,
we must help financially by participating in the Israel Now campaign to help
Israel in its response to terror just like we helped our fellow citizens who
were victims of terrorism after September 11.
We must help Israel
rebuild its struggling economy with the highest unemployment rate in the
Western World, caused in large measure by businesses which are afraid to do
business in and with companies in Israel. The streets and hotels are empty, the
cafes close early, the tourists are gone, and families stay home.
We
must help rebuild the lives of so many families, particularly new immigrants
who have been hardest hit and have the most difficulty coping, whose lives have
been shattered by the loss of their children or parents or wives or husbands or
grandparents who innocently left their homes to go shopping or have lunch or
meet their friends and were killed or maimed by malicious acts of terrorism. We
must help them emotionally, psychologically, and financially as they cope with
this senseless loss.
We must provide hope for the victims of terror
through the Koby Mandell Foundation, which responds to death with life and the
promise of a better tomorrow. And we must do all that we can to insure Israel
remains strong and secure so that it can continue to be the Jewish Statue of
Liberty, providing a homeland for Jews throughout the world, who arrive each
day, like the new immigrants from Argentina, and who breathe life into its
hallowed soil.
'THE WORLD ENTIRE'
Tonight, as we join
together in support and solidarity for Israel and reflect on what we can do as
a community, I am reminded by a scene at the end of the film Schindler's List.
The war has ended and Oskar Schindler, a Righteous Gentile, prepares to
leave the Jews he has saved during the Nazi Holocaust. One of the Jewish
survivors, presents him a gift from all of the survivors - a gold ring -
inscribed with the words of the Talmud: "He who saves a Life Saves the World
Entire." Schindler takes the ring and looks in the faces of all those whose
lives he saved and plaintively cries out with despair "I could have done so
much more."
Tonight is our moment to do so much more. We have done much
by simply being here tonight to show our support for the State of Israel. But,
like Schindler, there is so much more we can do to aid Israel in its search for
peace.
Join me in Declaring and Decreeing - Israel Lives Now and
Forever!
SAY IT LOUD so that our government leaders in Washington
continue to understand that Israel's war against terrorism is America's war
against terrorism.
SAY IT LOUD so that the Government of Israel knows
that we understand the justice in their search for survival and peace.
SAY IT LOUD so that the courageous people of Israel feel our warm and
loving embrace and see us tonight, standing with them, shoulder to shoulder, to
insure that their State will continue to be blessed with victory and peace and
that the "Star of David will forever wave in triumph over a Land of Freedom and
a Home of the Brave."
AM YISRAEL CHAI!
ISRAEL LIVES - NOW AND
FOREVER!
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2002 Temple B'nai Sholom.
All rights reserved.