Investment and Divestment

Israel and Israelis invest a great deal of time, energy and money in life. From even before the UN November ’47 vote to partition Palestine, the focus of Jewish investment was in life.  Besides everything I have read, I know this because my parents were Palestinians, Jewish Palestinians who became Israelis in May ’48.

They had both invested the energy of their youth in agriculture, fisheries, orchards, livestock, irrigation.  They had both been communal farmers, “kibbutzniks”.

The Nazis obliterated Jewish life in Europe and they forged a dark and evil alliance with Hajj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.  It served both of their purposes to further destroy the Jews.  This time it would be the Jews of Palestine who would, like my parents, become Israelis in May of 1948.  It would also be that remnant of Judaism that the Nazis had not succeeded in obliterating when the second World War ended.

Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini and his followers also invested their energies.  They invested in death and destruction.  That investment has continued to this very day.  It bothered those who followed el-Husseini’s ideology that all around them, whatever the Jews of Israel touched would turn the scrub and brush and sand and dirt into a flourishing paradise.  It bothered them that rather than wallowing in self pity these Jews, with the help of Jews from around the world, were turning Israel into a success story.  It bothered them that such a tiny percentage of the world’s population would invest so much time, energy and money in life.

And so, rather than emulating that behavior, learning from that knowledge and technology and science and innovation, which Israel so gladly shared with so many nations in Africa and Asia and South America, the followers of el-Husseini, and later the followers of Arafat and Yassin (the founder of Hamas) once again turned their collective energy to invest in the obliteration of the Jewish people.

Surprisingly, despite these opposing philosophies and seemingly unbridgeable chasms between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Israelis, there were signs of co-operation and even some joint ventures. Enlightened people from both populations overcame themselves and worked together and created businesses together.

Rather than encouraging and supporting such behavior, Hamas threatened those Palestinians working with Israelis with death, and Hamas murdered those Israelis who worked with Palestinians.  I know this for a fact.  Two of my very best friends were murdered by Hamas terrorists in June ’92.

The Europeans also took their cue from Hamas and other Palestinian organizations bent on the murder of Jews, by divesting themselves of anything Israeli.  Some would boycott Israeli products, and some would boycott Israeli thought and innovation.  There were even some outside of Europe who followed suit.

Strange, isn’t it, when you would rather invest in the death and destruction of a people who brought you the chip in your computer, for instance.  Stranger still might be the boycott of the polio vaccine, and for that matter many other medical innovations like the stent.

Let’s think about this again.  Israel opens its border to allow Palestinians thousands of tons of cement to build homes.  Hamas commandeers that cement and uses it to build a network of tunnels to enter Israel and murder and obliterate Jews.  Israel supplies water and electricity to the Palestinians living in Gaza, and Hamas commandeers those resources to build launchers and launching sites for rockets and sophisticated missiles to obliterate Jewish life, Jews, and Israel.

I continue to believe that we should invest in life.  I believe that we should divest ourselves of Hamas, and its philosophy of murder and death.