How can the Jewish people have respect for our president, who does not know the value of Jewish history and has no respect for any religion? We the Jews lived in a dozen of Arabs countries and we have for centuries respected the religion of the land, although we knew from history that the Muslim religion was born 18 centuries after the Jewish religion. We have never shown disrespect for Islam or any other religion. With all due respect for our president, I have to say, that I was born in Tunisia, North Africa as a French citizen and I grew up there until I had to leave the country that I loved. Now I am a US citizen. I read various newspapers every day and it seems to me that the biggest subject that preoccupies the president and Secretary of State John Kerry is Israel, as if they were no other problems in the world, while the population of Syria, had lost over 200,000 people. Children and innocent people died, not counting the wounded and the 6 million refugees who are starving, despite the fact that in 2012 our president has created the “Atrocities Prevention Board”. I wonder what this board has accomplished.
Furthermore can we forget that El Qaida succeeded to occupy what the American soldiers had liberated? Secretary John Kerry seems to focus only on Israel, the only democratic, stable, and peaceful ally we have in the Middle East. I wonder what Secretary Kerry can achieve? While we didn’t succeed in the entire Middle East by encouraging the Arab Spring, in Tunisia, in Libya, in Egypt, and now in Syria and in Iraq, but only caused death and suffering for the people, destruction and destabilization for those countries, do we really want to also destabilize Jordan and Israel? Just the fact that we are eager to democratize people which are not ready for such a change does not give us the right to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. At the same time we are not even able to manage our own country.
I am neither a politician, nor a lawyer, nor a secretary of state. Since I was at the age of seven, I noticed that we the Jews were always harassed by waves of anti-Semitism - from the pogroms everywhere in Europe to the emotions surrounding the framing and false accusations of Dreyfus in France, known as the Dreyfus Affair, to the holocaust, which brought the destruction of the Jews wherever they were and killed one third of the Jewish people and after the war created a stream of Jewish refugees. At that time, no one could help them to settle. Even the United State did not accept the Jews as immigrants. The Jewish communities took care of their refugees wherever they were, without the help of the UN. I know the history of my people, which created feelings of isolation and abandonment in the heart of every Jew. Now that I reached the 83rd year of my life, I’m not feeling any sense of security. And now I wonder where our President is leading the United States and what he would like to see in the Middle East, another war between Arabs and Israelis?
During the war between Israelis and Palestinians, the Palestinians were forced to live in camps. But this was 65 years ago. Their Arab brothers did not budge to help those Arab refugees, although there is no lack of money or land in the Arab countries. Has our president asked himself if this is fair?
Unfortunately, Secretary of State Kerry is trying to manage this problem with a very heavy-handed approach and I can tell you right now that this way it won’t be resolved. Secretary Kerry is handling the problem by forcing the Israelis to submit to our power. It’s not by force that anything can be solved and I understand that force means war. Is this what Kerry means? Is this the wisdom that we are using for such a delicate situation like this one, without even asking the question, since when the name “Palestinian” existed? Is it not the British who gave this name, “Palestine,” which included the Jews living in Palestine and who were the majority in that country? After this, the British had granted 70% of the entire “Palestine” to the King of Jordan, without any consideration for the Jews. As a mediator Secretary Kerry should not have stopped for trivial private remarks, which unfortunately were overheard and published, and let the problem hang in the air, by complaining about the Israeli Minister of Defense, instead of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
My father was a master shoemaker and in the evening he was an arbitrator between Jews, Arabs, and Italians. Any case that was brought before him, he solved in a way that there were no winners and no losers, only happy people, as both parties would find a reasonable solution. He made them respect one another and sometimes they even worked together.
I’m not happy that our president chose to push Israel into a direction it cannot safely go, while he has plenty of other problems on his hands. And he is trying to give us the feeling that nothing else needs his attention.
I came to the United States in 1972. I came as a French citizen and a businessman, while having enough jobs for my factory in Germany. I admired this country. From day one I settled in New York and created trade shows with my knowhow I had acquired in Europe. I created jobs for the people; I attracted international visitors; my activities filled New York hotels, Chicago hotels, and Los Angeles hotels at a rate of 100,000 room nights for every endeavor. I helped African American schoolchildren solve the problem of not attending school for lack of appropriate school clothing, by participating in the school uniform project and donating the clothes. The event was published in the New York Times.
Our president would do better assigning the time of Mr. Kerry to other urgent matter, such as stopping the killing in Syria and in other countries, rather than to a problem like Israel and the Palestinians, where he is about to enter into a big mess and create an enormous problem.
We should stop inciting the Europeans, as they themselves are not clean. They fermented anti-Semitism, not only in France but in all of Europe, from the time when the Jews were refugees from Palestine as they were chased by the Romans, who not only killed over a million Jews, but also took a significant number of Jews who did not submit to them, back to Rome as slaves. They did however also leave a large number of Jews who stayed in Israel until now. A large number of European Jews are the descendants of those slaves taken by the Romans.
As Americans, do we want to repeat the injustice Rome has done, Spain has done (inquisition, expulsion of Jews) and Germany has done (holocaust)? As for the Palestinians they can stay there as long as they want in a prosperous country, without turning everything upside down.
Copyright 2014 Emile Tubiana
"After the war, all the displaced Jews should have been allowed to freely go back to or not the countries of their birth, like Tunisia, Germany, or Poland. The greatest mistake the Allies made was establishing the Israeli state for all of the refugees."
What do you call this?
Ron