History shows Israel alternative to resistance

by Don Feder
May 13, 2002
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/donfeder/df20020513.shtml

MASADA, the Judean Desert -- In Israel, history is inescapable. 
It almost overwhelms you -- in monuments, museums and memories. 
Roughly 4,000 years of it, European as well as Middle Eastern, 
is crammed into a country half the size of New Jersey.

Modern Israel is the redemption at the end of two millennia 
of exile.

The Diaspora is framed by two historical events -- Masada and 
the Holocaust. To understand Israel's near obsession with 
security, start at A.D. 73, then fast forward to 1943.

Standing on the windswept heights of Masada, everything 
is serene. This desert fortress built by Herod the Great 
(with its remains of an ancient synagogue, ritual baths 
and storerooms) has become an attraction for retirees 
from Omaha in tour-group caps.

In the first century, Masada was not a tourist attraction, 
but a scene of fire, blood and terror.

During the Jewish revolt against Rome, after the fall of 
Jerusalem, zealots established their base here. 
(Pity Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn't on hand to 
suggest the conflict could be resolved by a Roman state on 
the West Bank.)

The Jews were besieged by Flavius Silva, commanding the 
Tenth Legion. After months of desperate fighting, the 
Romans built a ramp of stone and earth against the 
western approach to the fortress. Then a battering ram 
was brought up. When the wall was breached, the remaining 
defenders -- almost a thousand men, women and children --
chose suicide over defeat and slavery.

Men killed their families. Then 10 chosen by lots slew 
the rest. The last man dispatched the other nine and fell 
on his sword.

Above the landscape of history, smoke rising from ruins 
of Masada mingles with the smoke of the crematoria.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, is 60 miles north of 
Masada. Its archives include 58 million pages of documentation, 
100,000 still photographs, and thousands of films and videos 
of survivors.

Engraved on limestone blocks are the names of thousands 
of Jewish communities (from Lithuania to Tunisia) destroyed 
by Hitler's legions. Displays include canisters of Zyklon B, 
which fueled the factories of death. In one case, a dress 
worn by a little girl bears mute testimony to the murder of 
1 million children.

Yad Vashem also celebrates Jewish resistance, which peaked 
in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Germans crammed half 
a million human beings into the ghetto. Then deportations 
to the camps began (6,000 to 10,000 a day).

On April 19, 1943, the Jewish Combat Organization rose. 
Armed with pistols, hand grenades and one light machine 
gun, its fighters held off tanks, artillery and bombers 
for a month, until overwhelmed. (Had the United Nations 
been in existence, it would have demanded to investigate 
reports of the massacre of S.S. troops.)

Holocaust survivors, arriving in Palestine on transport 
ships, had rifles thrust in their hands for the next 
life-or-death struggle. This time the line held, as it 
has for the past 54 years.

Men and women of the Israeli Defense Forces are spiritual 
descendants of Masada's defenders and the Ghetto fighters. 
They, too, know defeat would bring annihilation.

Today, the Jews are again besieged. Instead of the greatest 
empire on earth, with its invincible legions, or the Third 
Reich, with an army that had conquered Europe east of the 
Urals, 22 Arab nations (oil-rich, homicidal, heavily armed) 
carry the banner of genocide into the 21st century.

The Palestinians are their advance column.

Last week, 16 young Israelis died in another terrorist 
bombing. What Flavius Silva did with battering rams and 
Hitler with gas chambers, Yasser Arafat does with explosives. 
Like the Romans, the Palestinians deny the Jews' national 
identity. Like the Nazis, they seek to make the territory 
under their control Judenrein.

"Masada Will Not Fall Again," say the souvenir T-shirts 
tourists buy. "Never Again" is the slogan of Holocaust 
remembrance. These are words blown away by the wind over 
the Judean desert. But as long as memory remains strong 
in the land of Israel, its people will find the courage
to resist -- because history has taught them the alternative, 
time and time again.