By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
Sep 13, 2004
As tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Jerusalem Zion Square Sunday to protest Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan, 12-year-old Noam Namir asked the question that has been haunting both Israelis and their Christian Zionist supporters.
“How could you threaten to throw me out of my home in Israel?” Namir asked of the man who once championed the right of Jews to settle their God-given homeland.
Incredulous, Namir said she didn’t know “how any Jewish soldier or police officer could bring themselves to throw my family and me out of our house! How will they be able to listen to such an order?”
She recounted how her grandmother was “expelled from her home in Poland, my grandfather was thrown out of Spain, and my father was exiled from the Sinai town of Yamit…”
For many in Israel, Sharon’s evacuation plan has conjured memories of past expulsions, and brought into stark reality the history of displacement the Jews have been subjected to.
From the Babylonian exile of 587 BC to the final Roman conquest of 135 AD, the Jews were regularly driven from their land in ancient times.
They fared no better during their long exile in the Christian nations of Europe.
During the 1100s, Jews were expelled from various German cities. Less than 200 years later, England forced its Jews to leave. In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish citizens, followed by Portugal five years later.
And during the first half of the last century, Jews were regularly displaced as the nations of Europe sought a scapegoat for their various woes.
Right-wing Israelis and Christian supporters of Israel are dumbfounded over how a mighty Jewish warrior such as Ariel Sharon could now travel a similar path in dealing with the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria.
Referencing to the ghettos and death camps the Jews of Europe were confined to from 1939-1945, legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once labeled the Jewish state’s indefensible pre-1967 boundaries the “Auschwitz borders.”
According to Sharon’s deputy, Trade and Industry Minister Ehud Olmert, the end result of the prime minister’s plan would be the relinquishing of most of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and a return to those very borders.