Israel Is Here To Stay

I cannot say I agree with everything Prime Minister Netanyahu decides to do. Why should anyone care whether I do or do not anyway?
I do understand, however, the basic precept by which the Prime Minister must both live and drive
policy.
Jews in the world of men are done running. Period.
I read Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. My mother insisted of course. I felt I had much better things to do with my summer. Still, I felt numb with horror as I read certain passages over and over again. I asked my mother to explain, and she tried; but I didn't read any other Shakespeare until I was assigned to read it in school.
I do believe the author was principally just one man, and he was a genius. But while giving the devil his due, I have always taken all his wondrous pearls with that inevitable grain of salt I knew I needed in order to have a correct conscience. I felt as a Catholic, that Catholics had a right to a conscience most fair to all people. That's smug. But I was a kid. (Later, when ma lost some faith in Catholicism, she would say: "How can you still be Catholic? They are Mafia! They are child molesters!"
 I would say, "Ma. I'm not that kind of Catholic."
When I learned later that ancient Jewish people eventually got sick of Britain in great numbers of their faithful, I could not understand how an entire population could be fine with losing so many gentle, intelligent, citizens. I figured when I got older I would understand. Like that happened. I'm a boomer and...I don't get it.
I was so puzzled when I got to university, to see Jewish literature professors who were
pre-eminent Shakespeare scholars. They were brilliant; so I studied with them, hoping to better understand. Naturally, I wasn't going to be crude enough to ask them why they were willing to make a career of the work. I therefore, in the end, had to settle for their wisdom about the individual works.
I felt their insight would be better than any from of a majority point of view, because the injured may see many sides at once, simply from the point of view of having many senses of a thought as it comes into view. Someone less affected may naturally see a point only in hindsight, which is qualitatively
much different. In electronics an immediate recognition is called 'real time'.
I feel I have to listen to Wagner when I am listening to opera. Truly, though, separating the man
from the music is a constant struggle. Normally, when I can help it, I choose Mozart, or Verdi or some much less controversial, much less vile-thinking composer.
When I did begin my university studies, I visited the undergraduate library of my college. I was
eighteen. That library featured a photographic retrospective of the emptying of concentration camps
by Allied Forces in the 1940s. So, I went from photo to photo for a few moments, thinking I would
have to be able to take it in in some way. That didn't happen either. I skipped the rest of my classes
that day, so I could go home to cry. I knew that if people could suffer that way the least any of the
rest of us should be able to do is witness, acknowledge, and commit to any possibility of those things
for the future becoming and being an impossibility. I felt awful I was unable to stay that course.
I felt a bit vindicated when years later I bore witness to Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. I knew I had
contributed next to nothing. However, I wanted to try. Lanzmann showed things which aid the flow in all effective plans. He outlined the ways in which Germany raided Jewish property in order to pay for train fares to camps, to pay for the poison gas, to pay soldiers wages; so that we know before any
planned mass murder, we can follow the money, right from the start. The more of us who understand,
the better the chance more of us will play a part in recognizing and standing against forces dead set
against the family of man.
At some point in my studies, I read about the Russian pogroms, and other European atrocities. They were unbelievable to me. Jewish people fled it all. Yet Christ never made any declarations of wanting a different nationality. He surely had the power to do that. He was Jewish. And He always will be. What about that do people chose to ignore? But Jewish people fled the pogroms, fled the Gulag. As late as the 1960s and 70s Jewish Ph.D.s fled the Russia they thought would be more just after WWI, after the Czars, and after WWII- sometimes going to the Near East (even at times the Far East) to be maids and waiters in Israel, where so many citizens had an advanced education, professional jobs were scarce.
Whenever Jewish people returned to their lands, they did so under duress. Galilee was said to have been an unmanageable swamp during much of the 20th century.
British White Papers restricted Jewish immigrations into Palestine, and Israel last century.
Jewish people who left Europe in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s often had to leave loved ones and property
behind never to be reunited or made whole again.
During WWII, David Ben Gurion is said to have declared he wasn't going to entertain the ideas of Jewish citizenship in his country espoused by either Hitler or the British.  Many Jewish citizens smuggled people into Palestine and its environs continuously during that war. That was Israeli advocacy.
We know insanity when we we see it because decent people don't attempt to 'round up'
any group, even groups who have perpetrated the most heinous of crimes against humankind.
And so when Prime Minister Netanyahu says he intends to protect Israel's right to exist, he may often
seem prickly to peaceful people. However, he means, and Likud means, that each of them in their own country, is the last man standing. The pharaohs are dead. The Ayatollahs who would like to be pharaohs are out of luck.
Israelis are in Israel to stay, no matter what that may come to mean.
It may mean one thing to you, another to me. What it means to Bibi Netanyahu is that he will constantly, and vigilantly assess the safety, the lives, the livelihoods of Israeli citizens for as long as there is breath in any Jewish person.
Jewish people are, for good or for ill, done with flight, save in religious commemorations.