UPDATE: This blog which was written yesterday (Friday) is being automatically published today (Saturday) because of Yom Kippur. There will be no israelstreet breaking news today unless a dramatic situation warrants.
Israel is closed.
At 4:56 pm Friday, Israel will come to a halt as the Yom Kippur fast begins. As of that moment, there will be no cars on the highways, no programs on Israeli TV, and no businesses open. The only movement one will be able to see will be people going to the synagogue to pray and children riding their bicycles in the street.
A Yom Kippur traffic jam in Israel. No cars are permitted on streets, roads, or highways.
Israel air space closed at 1 pm Friday as all plane traffic to and from Israel stopped, and will not reopen until 9:30 pm today. The Taba border crossing to Egypt and the Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan River border crossings to Jordan as well as the Allenby terminal have all shut down..
Your humble servant was thinking about all of this in the context of President Sarkozy’s remark published Thursday in a French magazine concerning the Jewish identity of Israel: “It is silly to talk about a Jewish state. It would be like saying that this table is Catholic.”
It is silly to talk about a Jewish state.
4000 years of Jewish history in this land is nothing.
4000 years of Jews being slaughtered by Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Christian Europeans, German Nazis, and others too numerous to mention because there was no safe place for them to live is nothing.
The idea of having a Jewish state where Jews can attend Yom Kippur services without fear of being massacred in a pogrom and where little children can play in the street on Yom Kippur is just a silly idea–just as silly as a Catholic table.
Your humble servant is struck that after 4000 years of Jewish history many in the world just don’t get it–they cannot understand why there must be a Jewish state of Israel.
Your humble servant is also struck that after 63 years the world still doesn’t understand the central issue of Israel’s problem with the Arabs, and like the Arabs, still does not want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state–a recognition that was specifically spelled out in United Nations Resolution 181 that created not only a Jewish state of Israel but also an Arab state:
“Independent Arab and Jewish States . . . shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.”
The Arabs did not accept the United Nations resolution then and they do not accept it now. There will never be peace here in Israel until they do. The ‘Sarkozys’ of the world have never accepted the idea of a Jewish state and they do not accept it now. But you know what? The Sarkozys of the world had better get used to the idea–because the Jewish state of Israel is here to stay.
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A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.