The Realities of Life

The Jews, throughout their long history, have suffered unimaginable sorrow. There is a saying among Jews who hear new information that might impact on their collective well-being: "Is it good for the Jews or not?" An event, a decree, and Jewish antennae rise in an attempt to evaluate the meaning, the fall-out, the purpose of whatever it represents, whether it will have a dangerous effect on Jews.

Jews are ultra-sensitive to occasions and events and rulings because they have been the recipients over millennia of occasions, events and rulings which have horrendously victimized them.

And because they are so sensitive to their history of rejection and oppression, of pogroms, and slaughters and the culmination of anti-Semitism through the institutionalization of genocide as a Final Solution removing six million Jews from the possibility of further populating the planet, they have a finely engrained sense of justice.

Not just on their own behalf, but as it should be prosecuted on behalf of anyone else, Jewish or not.

The Jewish philosophy of "do unto others" is attributed to the famed Rabbi Hillel who advised that all of Jewish thought and values are summed up by the phrase "do unto others as you would have them do to you". Everything else, he advised, is "commentary". So that is the foundational ethic of Judaism, one that decent people anywhere and everywhere are meant to practise.

It is not exclusive to Jews by any means, and the ethos that freedom from oppression is a universal human need is beyond dispute.

Israeli doctors and medical institutions pride themselves quietly on their willingness to deliver medical services to anyone, irrespective of whether they are Israeli citizens, or whether they belong to societies openly at war with the State of Israel. The case has been cited of a 45 year-old Syrian woman horribly wounded in the civil war last month.

At the Rambam Health Care Campus in Israel a cardiac surgery team removed a half-inch piece of metal fragment from the woman's right ventricle. "She was lucky", said Dr. Zvi Adler. "Most of these types of injuries end in death." The woman was released a week after surgery "in excellent condition". It will be unknown whether, returning to Syria, she will be grateful and become a friend to Israel, and convey her feelings to other Syrians.

She is not alone in receiving life-saving treatment at the hands of Israeli surgeons. Other Syrians, some of them combatants, have been brought to Israeli hospitals because Syrian hospitals were unable to provide the level of care they required to prolong their lives. Similarly, Palestinian children from Gaza requiring specialized life-saving care, have been ushered to Israeli hospitals.

These events have done nothing to diminish the hatred of Jews and Israel generally within the Arab world, despite a long tradition of poor Arabs living close to the border of an Arab country with Israel have taken their medical conditions for treatment to the closest Israeli health-care facility. But then, there is another Jewish tradition; it is one where charity is to be given without thought of personal advantage.

To best advantage the philosophy of charitable giving, charity should ideally be undertaken without identification respecting the giver. Pure altruism; to come to the aid of others whether they are known personally by the giver or not. The fact that they are in need demands a response with no thought whatever of recognition or recompense in any manner

During an interview, the director of Ramban, Professor Rafi Beyar stated: "I am proud of our ability to save lives, regardless of religion or nationality. We turn away no one. There are no Arabs inside the campus and no Jews, only doctors and patients."  That sentiment does not exclude others. One that holds that those who wish ill upon Jews should expect no free hand by Jews to allow them to continue their abuse.

Jews will fight back. The world once wondered how it was even remotely possible that six million people could be assembled and herded like sheep to the slaughter. In the ghettoes when it became abundantly clear that the next stop was death camps, starving Jewish youth put up a last stand using any kind of weapon they were able to acquire in the underground market they smuggled in through underground tunnels with the help of partisan resisters.

In Israel now as has been done in the past, Israeli administrations have surrendered to the demands of  belligerents surrounding their state in the Middle East by meeting in battle and through prowess and determination born of desperation, returning triumphant from conflict. But for Jews there is another little item; life is precious and life of a Jew must be preserved at all costs; even a Jewish corpse is similarly honoured.

Thus came about the acquiescence in returning multiples of non-Jews for the life of a single Jew, ransomed at the expense of permitting belligerents to be set at loose with the realization that they will return to repeat the same violence against Jews that imprisoned them to begin with. Jews do not subscribe to the pathology of suicide bombing, a political, religious, ideological conviction held widely by the Arab populations surrounding Israel.

"It's not a gesture. It's not an act aimed at advancing the peace process and building trust between the two sides. It's a futile, unnecessary move, and therefore immoral." "How is it that the state of Israel is the only country in the world that repeatedly, routinely dishonours its own citizens as it releases their murderers, unrepentant terrorists, en masse?" questions requiring no response, purely rhetorical in nature posed by those who are aware of reasons but rail against the inequality of moral justice.

There are some groups of people, primitive in their reasoning, for whom hatred is so overwhelmingly welcome in their mental-philosophical apparatus of honouring heritage and custom, that inflicting death on others represents a solution to a vexing problem that enrages them. And there are others for whom reasonable concessions must be made, however painful, to achieve an successful end to a peace-seeking mission.

These are facts of the realities of life.