Time to Come Home
I was having a quiet evening at home, and as does most of today’s world, casually skimming through Google. A site caught my eye – Israeli Inventions That Changed the World.
Here I found a long list of Israeli inventions in fields ranging from medical to computer technology. Many of the every-day devices we take for granted were invented, developed, and manufactured in Israel. You are probably reading this on a device that contains many Israeli components.
And what, I wondered, have our neighbours, the Palestinians, done for the world? A quick glance at Google – What have Palestinians done for the world – brought up precisely nothing. A look at Palestinian suicide attacks, however, brought up a horrific list of some 150 bombings over the last 20 years. Since September 2000, Palestinian terrorist attacks have claimed at least 1,376 Israeli lives.
A search for terrorist attacks by Israelis brought up nothing.
The Jewish Agency for Israel, in Sep 2021, put the number of Jews worldwide at approximately 15.2 million. This is just 0.2% of the nearly 8 billion humans on our crowded planet. Truly insignificant by numbers, we have had a tremendous impact in nearly every field of human endeavour.
Sadly, nearly half of the world’s Jewish population, around 6 million people, has chosen to live in self-imposed exile in the United States. And, incomprehensively, some 118,00 have chosen to live in Germany. How short can people’s memories be?
Even countries like the United Kingdom and France, that have times in their histories when Jews were not welcomed, are home to some 290,000 and 450,000 Jews.
After centuries of suffering, scattered around the world, we have our own land again. Built from almost nothing, we have turned the desert into a green and flourishing land. After years of pioneering hardships, we lack for nothing. How long will it be before our brethren decide, or are forced, to join us? We are waiting for them.