YOU SHALL NOT BE RESENTFUL
When we left Egypt God did NOT allow us to become a bitter, violent and resentful people. We had every reason to hold grudges: we were enslaved by the Egyptians for over a century, but HaShem had a different plan for us. He included among His commandments an absolutely FORMATIVE Mitzva in terms of our relationships with other peoples, which became part of our DNA. Debarim 23: 8 says: “לא תתעב מצרי כי גר היית בארצו” , ” You shall not abhor [hate] the Egyptians, for they received you as foreigners in their land. “ This revolutionary verse says that holding resentment, even when justified, would destroy a person –or a people– inside. When what defines you as a society is “grievances” your identity will be founded not on positives qualities but on hatred for a common enemy: today the Egyptians and tomorrow the next foe. A culture of grievance would have transformed us into a people with an insatiable resentment that would not let us enjoy peace and prosperity, but would drive us to seek violence and destroy whoever does better than us. This amazing verse also teaches us to practice an extreme gratitude towards anyone who once did something for us: we should never forget that the Egyptians opened their doors for us and welcomed into their land in Yosef’s time. This and other similar commandments have forged very special qualities in our Jewish DNA: A “positive” selective memory. We should not live with resentment –which destroys mainly the person who lives with it– and never stop appreciating and being grateful to anyone that ever did anything good to you. But not all the peoples of the earth hold these same values … not even those civilizations that supposedly have the Bible as a reference for their religion.
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY
Israel is facing a new conflict with the Palestinians. I am not referring now to the terrible confrontation with Gaza (see the article below) . This new crisis is a little different from the previous ones. And it can become more serious. It has new protagonists: the Arab citizens of Israel. They are not “refugees” but Muslim legal Israeli citizens living in Yafo, Ramla, Acco, etc. Tens of thousands of these citizens have carried out violent demonstrations and attacked the Israeli civilian population, and there have been already several casualties. What happened in Lod, a city that should be the perfect model of Arab and Israeli coexistence, is inconceivable. Three synagogues (so far) have been burned down in the city by the Islamist Arab mob. THREE SYNAGOGUES! This is not happening in anti-Semitic Europe but in the ONLY JEWISH STATE of the world. The “Times of Israel” described what happened as “The Kristallnacht of Lod.” And Lod was not an exception: similar things have happened in many other cities with Arab and Jewish population. This is how an Israeli journalist from Makor Rishon newspaper explains: “… the surprise of the surprises [in this war] has been that tens of thousands of terrorists have emerged overnight among the Israeli Arab population, ordinary citizens crying out for the destruction of the state and they are carrying out hundreds of pogroms throughout the country every day, terrorists-civilians who are going out every night looking for prey: Jewish blood … »
THE CULTURE OF RESENTMENT
These Israeli Arab citizens vote in Israeli elections, hold Israeli passports and are represented in the Keneset, the Israeli parliament. The irony is that in Israel they LIVE MUCH BETTER than they would live in any Arab Middle Eastern country like Syria, Lebanon, Egypt or Jordan AND THEY KNOW THIS VERY WELL. They enjoy a very high quality of life, have absolute religious freedom, access to the best universities in Israel and they benefit from Israel’s booming economy and its modern medical system. Why then this violence? Why do Arab extremists shout: “Death to Israel”, “Death to the Jews”? I believe with Guy Bechor, that the culture of resentment, the fact that it is the Jews and not the Arabs who have created one of the best countries on the planet, does not allow them mentally to enjoy the privilege of living there and being grateful for it. It is as if for their culture it is more important “that the Jews do not enjoy peace and prosperity” than that they enjoy these privileges.
THE CULTURE OF GRATEFULNESS
In this sense, something similar happens with the Arab extremists in Europe: they want to “destroy” the very country that offers them peace, prosperity and opportunities for growth. In France, for example, Islamic extremists have murdered hundreds of their benefactors, with bombs or firearms, or beheading French citizens with knives or throwing them off the balcony, as happened with Sara Halimi z ”l. These criminals are refugees who escaped from their Arab countries where they were starving or persecuted or tortured by corrupt regimes or by other Islamists more extreme than them. And instead of being eternally grateful to France, the country that gave them refuge, welcomed them and “gave them everything without asking anything in return,” they dedicate themselves to destroying the country and their religion: In medieval best fashion, these Islamic extremists set churches on fire whenever they could. See, for example, this article and this article, which dares to mention that in recent years dozens of churches in France have been desecrated, and in many cases burned, by French Islamists.
CONCLUSION
I’m not sure what the final result of this new conflict will be. Israel will have to prepare itself for a new type of fight much more complicated than the war against Iran, Hezbollah or the terrorists in Gaza. It is a new conflict in which the enemy does not need rockets or missiles but simple “knives” (see video below) or cars to carry out their deadly attacks … Israeli Arabs are “neighbors” who live in Haifa, Yerushalayim, Tel-Aviv: they drive taxis, work in hotels, restaurants and hospitals. How many of them have become or will extremists? If they begin to rise up, murder and commit acts of violence, we might expect a civil war, because Israeli Jews are not going to sit idly by: they will defend themselves, especially if the Israeli police is still paralyzed.
We might be witnessing a clash of civilizations in the heart of Israel between those who want to live in peace and those who want to die in the process of killing their neighbors.
May HASHEM protect us from our enemies and grant us the strength and intelligence to neutralize them!
