Never again

There is a lot of worry popping up in the media just now -- ``Can Israel Survive?''

It relates to something that Palestinians, the Arabs and perhaps most Americans don't realize -- the Jews are never going quietly again. Never.

And if the world doesn't come to understand that, millions of Arabs are going to die. It's as simple as that.

Throughout the history of the world, the most abused, kicked-around race of people has been the Jews. Not just in the Holocaust of World War II, but for thousands of years. They have truly been ''The Chosen People'' in a terrible and tragic sense.

The Bible story of Egypt's enslavement of the Jews is not just a story, it is history, if festooned with theological legend and heroic epics.

In 70 A.D., the Romans, who had for a long time tolerated the Jews -- even admired them as ''superior'' to other vassals -- tired of their truculent demands for independence and decided on an early ''solution'' to the Jewish problem. Jerusalem was sacked and reduced to near rubble; Jewish resistance was pursued and crushed by the implacable Roman War Machine (see Masada). And thus began The Diaspora, the dispersal of Jews throughout the rest of the world. Their homeland destroyed, their culture crushed, they looked desperately for the few niches in a hostile world where they could be safe.

That safety was fragile, and often subject to the whims of moody hosts. The words pogrom, ghetto and anti-Semitism come from this treatment of the first monotheistic people.

Throughout Europe, changing times meant sometimes tolerance, sometimes even warmth for the Jews, but eventually it meant hostility, then malevolence.

There is not a country in Europe or Western Asia that at one time or another has not decided to lash out against the children of Moses, sometimes by whim, sometimes by manipulation.

Winston Churchill calls Edward I one of England's very greatest kings. Edward embraced the Jews. Actually, Edward didn't embrace Jews so much as he embraced their money.

For the English Jews had acquired wealth -- understandable, because this people who could not own land or office, could not join most of the trades and professions, soon found out that money was a very good thing to accumulate. Much harder to take away than land or a store was a hidden sock of gold and silver coins.

Ever resourceful, Edward found a way -- he borrowed money from the Jews to finance imperial ambitions in Europe, especially France. The loans were almost certainly not made gladly, but how do you refuse your king? Especially when he is ``Edward the Hammer.''

Edward was especially inventive -- he did this twice. After a time, he invited the Jews back to their English homeland, borrowed more money, then expelled them again.

Most people do not know that Spain was one of the early entrants into the Renaissance. People from all over the world came to Spain in the late medieval period. All were welcome -- Arabs, Jews, other Europeans.

But in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella, having driven the last of Moors from the Spanish Shield, were persuaded by the righteous fundamentalists of the time to announce ''The Act of Purification.'' A series of steps were taken in which all Jews and Arabs and other non-Christians were expelled from the country, or would face the tools and the torches of the Inquisition. From this ''cleansing'' come the Sephardic Jews -- as opposed to the Ashkenazis or Eastern Europe.

In Eastern Europe, the sporadic violence and brutality against Jews are common knowledge, Fiddler without the music and the folksy humor. At times of fury, no accommodation by the Jew was good enough, no profile low enough, no village poor enough or distant enough.

From these come the near-steady flow of Jews to the United States. And despite the disdain of the Jews by most ''American'' Americans, they came to grab the American Dream with both hands, and contributed everything from new ideas of enterprise in retail and entertainment to becoming some of our finest physicians and lawyers. The modern United States, in spite of itself, is the United States in part because of its Jewish blood.

Then the Nazi Holocaust -- the corralling, sorting, orderly eradication of millions of the people of Moses. Not something that other realms in other times didn't try to do, by the way, the Germans were just more organized and had better murder technology.

I stood in the center of Dachau for an entire day, about 15 years ago, trying to comprehend how this could have happened. I had gone there on a side trip from Munich, vaguely curious about this Dachau. I soon became engulfed in the enormity of what had occurred there, nestled in this middle- and working-class neighborhood.

How could human beings do this to other human beings, hear their cries, their pleas, their terror, their pain, and continue without apparently even wincing?

I no longer wonder. At some times, some places, any sect of the human race is capable of horrors against its fellow man, whether a member of the Waffen SS, a Serbian sniper, a Turkish policeman in 1920s Armenia, a Mississippi Klansman.

Because even in the United States not all was a Rose Garden. For a long time, Jews had quotas in our universities and graduate schools. Only so many Jews could be in a medical or law school at one time. Jews were disparaged widely. I remember as a kid Jewish jokes told without a wince -- ``Why do Jews have such big noses?''

And that's the point. It doesn't matter how many times the United States and European powers try to rein in Israel, if it comes down to survival of its nation, its people, the people will fight like no lioness has ever fought to save her cubs. They will fight with a ferocity, a determination, and a skill that will astound us.

And many will die, mostly their attackers, I believe. If there were a macabre historical betting parlor, my money would be on the Israelis to be standing at the end. As we killed the kamikazes and the Wehrmacht soldaten of World War II, so will the Israelis kill their suicidal attackers, until there are not enough to torment them.

The irony goes unnoticed -- while we are hammering away to punish those who brought the horrors of last September here, we restrain the Israelis from the same retaliation. Not the same thing, of course -- We are We . . . they are they.

While we mourn and seethe at Sept. 11, we don't notice that Israel has a Sept. 11 sometimes every day.

If it comes to where a new holocaust looms -- with or without the concurrence of the United States and Europe -- Israel will lash out without pause or restraint at those who would try to annihilate the country.

I believe that the circumstances under which Israeli use of nuclear weapons is thinkable are plain enough when you consider this report from last December:

TEHRAN, Dec 14 (AFP) - Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani raised the spectre Friday of possible nuclear conflict in the Middle East.

Rafsanjani, speaking at the weekly Muslim prayers in Tehran, said that because Israel does not have enough soldiers to defend itself, Western powers had "provided her with unconventional arms of mass destruction, chemical and nuclear."

"The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while (the same) against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable," he said.

Rafsanjani, who heads Iran's powerful Expediency Council, said that "if the Islamic world armed itself with the same arms, then that equilibrium would be broken".

If Israel is the object of a nuclear attack, or if Saddam puts chemical warheads on his SCUDS like he promised to do last time, look for a respond in kind. Jews aren't and shouldn't going to sit there and let the Islamofascists finish what Hitler began.

By the way, one can only enjoy Rafsanjani's remark that Israel needs unconventional weapons because Israel lacks "enough soldiers to defend itself." This is obviously from a guy who thinks that World War I achieved the pinnacle of military tactics - send wave after wave of bodies at machine guns and tanks. Which is basically the way Iran fought the war with Iraq, which led to 70, 000 killed or wounded Iraqis at Basra in 1987. If having enough soldiers to lose 70,000 a pop is what you need to defend yourself, then Israel is indeed in trouble. But there's always the alternative of fighting smart.

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