UPDATES
7 pm Israel time, Sunday, April 20 2015
**As Yom Hazikaron (Israel Memorial Day) begins on Tuesday evening, here are some tragic numbers:
—31 Israeli civilians have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the last year
—2538 Israeli civilians have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists since 1948
—23,320 Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed since 1948
—67 Israeli soldiers were killed last summer, leaving behind 11 widows and 26 children
**As you undoubtedly do not know, an organization calling itself “Combatants for Peace” has held an annual ceremony in Tel Aviv for the last ten years in which the families of Israelis who have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists or killed fighting for Israel are outrageously brought together with Palestinians whose terrorist relatives were killed by Israeli forces.
Yesterday, 107 bereaved Israeli families from Samaria wrote a letter to Defense Minister Ya’alon demanding that he not issue visas for such Palestinians to enter Israel:
“The ceremony is provocative and demeaning to Remembrance Day and to the memory of the fallen soldiers. We are appalled that the Israeli government would allow such a joint memorial event to be held in memory of our enemies who are the reason for the murder and injury to our boys who enlisted in the army to protect the people and the land, and our boys living in Israel who died, if only because they were Jews.”
Your humble servant is equally appalled.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Your humble servant has often written that if you stay in your home all the time and never support Israel in public, you can have a severely distorted sense of public support for Israel. Here in the northern California university town in which we live half of each year, it is easy to think that we are vastly outnumbered by the forces aligned against us.
But nothing is further from the truth.
Yesterday was the annual Picnic Day parade at the University of California-Davis. Following a series of anti-Semitic incidents on campus this past year, we of the Israel Matters Committee felt it was more important than ever to walk as a group in the parade waving Israeli flags.
At the staging area before the walk–the front lines of our group!
So, joined by friends from the community, a contingent of us walked yesterday along a parade route that wound through the UCD campus and downtown Davis. The route was lined with some 60,000 people. We prepared ourselves in advance for what to do if we were confronted by negative taunts or worse from the crowd.
By the way, not one of the estimated 4000 Jewish students on the UCD campus joined us. Their attitude is always “we don’t want to wave Israeli flags and provoke Muslim students on campus.”
But at 10:00 am yesterday morning, under a hot California sun, we set out–but not before being interviewed by the primary news station in the area, KCRA TV in Sacramento (click here for the link to the news piece–we pop up for about 10 seconds after 1 minute of the short video).
Along the parade route!
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All along the way, we were encouraged by applause as we passed and expressions of support–especially on the campus. Students of all types, Asian-American, African-American, and Latino-Americans–and many others–clapped and shouted words of encouragement.
It was exhilarating.
And enlightening.
Each time we participate in this parade, we come away feeling that there is a reservoir of Israeli support in the country that we need to tap into–and participating in parades like the one yesterday is one way to do that.
So many people yesterday gave us high fives, shook our hands, and said “Thank you for being in the parade!”
What should we take away from this?
Always take the opportunity to support Israel–you will be surprised at those who will join you!
What have you done for Israel today?
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.