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Lo Nafseek Lirkod: We Won’t Stop Dancing
By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
January 22, 2004
The ugly terrorist onslaught of the last three years has imposed a new geography of anguish on Israel. The Israeli compulsion to rebuild, balanced by the Jewish commitment to remember, has yielded an urban landscape pockmarked by mini-monuments mourning the sites of Palestinian mass murder.
The beachfront stroll from high-tech Tel Aviv to the prophet Jonah's port city, Jaffa, passes Mike’s Place, where a middle-class British Muslim poisoned by jihadist hatred murdered three music-lovers. It then passes the Dolphinarium, the disco where a killer later glorified by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat slaughtered 21 teenagers and wounded 120. Today, Mike’s Place still bops to the beat that made it famous. Outside the closed Dolphinarium a simple monument promises defiantly: "Lo Nafseek Lirkod," We Won’t Stop Dancing.
Despite the toll of Arafat’s war, Israelis remain unbowed. Shopping malls are full, cafes are brimming, traffic is snarling, tempers are occasionally flaring and the warmth of many Israelis remains overflowing. After years that brought the sounds of silence to tourist-dependent Jerusalem, the sounds of the Americans have returned.
We won’t stop singing or dancing is indeed the right response, the spiritual reply to 21st-century terror. But continuing the poetry and prose of daily life should not blind anyone to reality or blunt the rational response of anger at the outrages committed these last few years against Israel, the Jewish people and those who seek peace and champion liberal democracy. Jews and non-Jews should remain furious at the epidemic of terrorism that has killed thousands worldwide, and murdered more than 900 Israelis.
It is reasonable to rage not only at the terrorists but at their fellow travellers, the Arafatists who facilitate mass murder by "contextualizing" and rationalizing it. We need to confront and refute ridiculous yet dangerous documents such as "the basis for unity" for November’s Toronto "Palestinian Solidarity Conference," which rejected a two-state solution and linked the Palestinian cause to a grab-bag of left-wing passions, including the fights for feminism and gay liberation and the fights against apartheid, colonialism and –– 30 years late –– the Vietnam war. Where is the outrage? Why don’t feminists resent the hijacking of their agenda to support a regime that epitomizes sexual patriarchy? Why don’t gays protest having their cause co-opted by a Palestinian Authority that tortures homosexuals? Where are the historians to deconstruct the dishonest analogies demeaning campus discourse, to note that Nazism entailed mass murder, that Americans in Vietnam fought a war 10,000 miles from home, that apartheid South Africa mandated inequality and lacked no recourse such as Israel’s Supreme Court.
The Israel debate often appears Orwellian. After September 2000, when Arafat led the Palestinians away from negotiation toward terror, too many Israelis, too many Jews, asked, "What’s wrong with us?" By contrast, after Sept. 11, 2001, most Americans asked about the terrorists, "What’s wrong with them?" Perhaps Americans could be a bit more self-critical, but many Jews could be less self-loathing.
Standing at the outskirts of Jerusalem, seeing that finally a wire fence blocks the route at least 10 terrorists took to kill dozens of innocents, one wonders why Israel waited so long to build this barrier and how the world dare begrudge any state a well-protected border.
The relentless attack against Jews’ deep ties to Israel, the ugly violence being controlled daily by an Israel Defence Force open to worldwide scrutiny and fighting with great restraint, the hate-filled rhetoric pervading the Islamic world, represent a systematic attempt to rob the Jewish people of their past and ruin the Israeli present, in order to destroy our future. No people should apologize for defending themselves under such circumstances. And that is where the anger and the joy become essential, "Lo Nafseek Lirkod" encourages spiritual and military resistance.
These days, Jerusalem has been relatively quiet, thanks partially to the much maligned fence. Today’s loud boom, boom rocking Jaffa Road, the site of many bombings, is the sound of construction crews laying monorail lines.
Much of the world has written off Israel, yet Israelis are building their future. That kind of vision fuelled 19th-century Zionists to dream the seemingly unrealistic dream of a Jewish state –– and make it happen. These days, that same optimism should fuel their great-grandchildren to dream of living in a state of peace, and make that happen, too.
Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.
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