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From The Times
January 7, 2009
Israel acts because the world won't defend it
The scenes from Gaza are heartbreaking. But the whole conflict could be avoided if the Palestinians said one small thing
Daniel Finkelstein
It was strictly forbidden to have a notebook in Belsen, but my Aunt Ruth had one anyway. Just a little pocket diary - an appointment book with one of those tiny pencils. And in it, in the autumn of 1944, she noted that Anne Frank and Anne's sister, Ruth's schoolfriend Margot, had arrived in the concentration camp.
My mother and my aunt had been watching through the camp wire when the Franks arrived. Mum remembers it well, because they had been excited to spot girls they knew from the old days in Amsterdam. They had played in the same streets, been to the same schools and Ruth and Margot attended Hebrew classes together. The pair had once been pressed into service to act as bridesmaids, when a secretive Jewish wedding had taken place at the synagogue during their lesson time.
But Ruth and Margot did not grow up together. Because while Ruth and my mother lived, Margot and Anne never left Belsen. They died of typhus.
I am telling you this story because I want you to understand Israel. Not to agree with all it does, not to keep quiet when you want to protest against its actions, not to side with it always, merely to understand Israel.
There are two things about the tale that help to provide insight. The first is that all these things, the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth, they aren't ancient history, and they aren't fable. They happened to real people and they happened in our lifetime. Anne and Margot Frank were just children to my aunt and my mother; they weren't icons, or symbols of anything.
The second is that world opinion weeps now for Anne Frank. But world opinion did not save her.
The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews....
