Dear world

Although the European Union and many countries around the
world are supporting the Palestinians (Arabs), it is clear that very little
thought is being given to the Israeli people who are under continuous threat.
The following essay was written in 1988 by Rabbi Kahane only a couple of years
before his murder by an Arab terrorist, Egyptian-born El Sayyid Nosair, who not
only was convicted of the murder but also of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing.

Dear World,

It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you
are upset over us here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset,
even angry and outraged. Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over
us. Today, it is the brutal repression of the Palestinians; yesterday, it was
Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and
the Yom Kippur War campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph, and who
therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.

Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we
the Jewish people upset you. We upset a German people, who elected a Hitler and
we upset an Austrian people, who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a
whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians,
Russians, Hungarians, Romanians.

And we go back a long, long way in history of world upset. We
upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki, who massacred tens of thousands of us in
1648-49; we upset the Crusaders, who on their way to liberate the Holy Land,
were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. We upset, for
centuries, a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship
through inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther,
who in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an
admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

It is because we became so upset over upsetting you dear
world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a
Jewish State. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as
resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you,
irritate you, and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you and
thus love you - and have you love us? And so we decided to come home, to the
same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world
that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.
Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts,
having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little
state, we continue to upset you.

You are upset that we repress the Palestinians. You are
deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are
clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Moscow is upset and Washington
is upset. The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from
Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede
peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset
anybody. Never the less, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians
slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. In deed, 67
Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.

Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre
67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli
aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered
in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you,
World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a
Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war
and killed 6,000 Jews - was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967?
And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset then?

The Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and
firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the
territories they now demand be given them for their state - attempted to drive
the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same
cry of "idbah-al-yahud" - "Slaughter the Jews!" that we hear
and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream -
destroy Israel.

What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today - but
we should not "repress" them. Dear world, you stood by the Holocaust
and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League
proudly compared to the Mongol massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly
cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews
into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.

And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of
that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land.
If that bothers you, dear world, well - think of how many times in the past you
bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is
one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

Written by Rabbi Meir Kahane