Israel long understood its destiny, even before WWII with the Zionists, and as part of Jewish DNA since the Diaspora. It is my contention that it deserved all the lands it conquered and held in 1967 and defended and held in 1973.
Yet most the world treats the Israelis as mere tenants at best, and by most as interlopers. The real interlopers are the Muslims, where Muhammad not only usurped much of the Jewish tradition into the Koran in the 7th Century, they attacked the and conquered most of the Middle East. Yet there is no international questioning of the sovereignty of nations across the Muslim world.
Unfortunately. the Obama administration treats Israel as a squatter to be moved out of the lands that it justifiably took and removed to the pre-1967 boarders. Instead, the post 1967 territories should be recognized as part of Israel. m/r
| The state as a rootless transient | ||
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One of my favorite all-but-unknown books is The Heart Of Princess Osra, written by Anthony Hope in 1896. Hope hit the big time with The Prisoner Of Zenda and its boffo sequel Rupert Of Hentzau, two rip-roaring yarns in which an English dilettante twice contrives to save from usurpers the throne of Ruritania. The Heart Of Princess Osra is also set in Hope's fictional Mitteleuropean kingdom, but this time a century and a half earlier - the 1730s - and it's not a rollicking adventure but a series of ill-starred romantic vignettes featuring King Rudolf III's younger sister and various unsuitable suitors. Yet it does make you appreciate how fully the author conceived his fictional landscape: Ruritania wasn't merely the setting of a thriller, so why just use it as such? Hope knew its history, its rulers and its laws long before the events of The Prisoner took place. As evidence of that, look no further than chapter one, page one of Princess Osra: "Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!" The impatient cry was heard through all the narrow gloomy street, where the old richly-carved house-fronts bowed to meet one another and left for the eye's comfort only a bare glimpse of blue. It was, men said, the oldest street in Strelsau, even as the sign of the "Silver Ship" was the oldest sign known to exist in the city. For when Aaron Lazarus the Jew came there, seventy years before, he had been the tenth man in unbroken line that took up the business; and now Stephen Nados, his apprentice and successor, was the eleventh. Old Lazarus had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but since Jews then might hold no property in Strelsau, he had taken all the deeds in the name of Stephen Nados; and when he came to die, being unable to carry his houses or his money with him, having no kindred, and caring not a straw for any man or woman alive save Stephen, he bade Stephen let the deeds be, and, with a last curse against the Christians (of whom Stephen was one, and a devout one), he kissed the young man, and turned his face to the wall and died. Therefore Stephen was a rich man, and had no need to carry on the business, though it never entered his mind to do anything else... -more at link-
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