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By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
Israel’s air offensive into Gaza — after enduring months of Palestinian rocket fire — is one more reason to give thanks for the Jews.
The world would be a worse place without them — no modern physics, no social sciences, no antibiotics, no modern banks, no department stores, and few if any of the electronic devices we have come to love — all of them Jewish inventions.
There likely wouldn’t have been a British Empire without Jews. The fortunes of English-Jewish financiers like the Rothschilds, the Salomonses, the Goldsmids, and the Montefiores helped to rise England’s star across the oceans.
The U.S. would have been a pipe dream, too, if not for Jewish cash — Jewish industrialist Louis Santanel funded Columbus’s voyage to America.
Yet Jews have been history’s eternal scapegoats, although they have refused to become its victims.
Jews have conquered and prevailed over institutionalized racism and attempted genocide, and their unassailable appetite for life over death has been stretched to the limits and back by their sworn enemies, who want them and Israel wiped off the map.
Critics, apologists, and others can wax away about Palestinian rights versus Israeli might, while vilifying Israel as an oppressor. But they’re still hard-pressed to justify why the more than 20 Arab nations that occupy 640 times the land mass of Israel — and whose residents outnumber Israeli Jews by nearly 50 to one — harbor such a resentment towards Jews.
All roads point to jealousy.
Jews comprise less than one percent of the world’s population of six billion — that’s a mere 13 million in a world that’s 99 percent non-Jewish — but their accomplishments have been remarkable. Even stellar.
Jews are leaders in science, art, literature, entertainment, modern technology, and philanthropy, and have won more Nobel prizes than any other ethnicity. All of it without fanfare.
Yet their very existence has met with resistance, mischief, all-out violence, and bitter acrimony — even in America, the most tolerant nation in the world.
Jews are the most persecuted group here, according to the FBI, whose latest figures show that Jews sustained 887 attacks in 2010.
The Zionist crusade for self-preservation would have destroyed lesser folk, yet Israel has managed to survive for one reason alone — it values Jews.
That much was witnessed last year when Israel released more than 500 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/middleeast/israel-begins-second-part-of-prisoner-swap.html">one Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas for five years.
Peace in the Middle East is not dependent on Israel, but on the Arab majority that has fostered the Palestinian sense of decay and abandonment.
Israel, by contrast, has been the region’s salvation, providing jobs, medical care, and resources to Palestinians who lost their credibility the day they began using their children as human shields, their mosques as weapons storehouses, and their schools as training grounds for a new generation of terrorists.
Palestinian schools instituted the compulsory subject “Know Your Enemy” this past May because, according to its Education Miniustry, “We look at Israel as an enemy — we teach our students the language of the enemy.”
Palestinian statehood? No thanks.
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Shavana Abruzzo's column appears every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail her at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.