The greatest lesson

This is an essay on the most fundamental human value.  Understanding this core value explains two very strange current anomalies.

The core human value is: self defense.  You are not a fully human being until you have the right to self defense.  Slaves never had the right of self defense, nor did women.  Women still don't have it in the Arab world.

Self defense comes before life, liberty, property or happiness. Without it, the other four don't truly exist.  Think about the meaning of each word in that Lockean-Jeffersonian sequence.  A full life is not real without self-defense as women would be the first to tell us.  While property would appear to be the basis for self defense, as the American founding fathers and English common law postulated... it is the other way around.  Having property is no protection if the rights to defend the property and yourself don't exist.  I challenge scholars of Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to defend their insights into the power and meaning of life or death without the right to self defense.  All else evaporates before the ability and right of another to kill you.

This issue is burning bright for me at this moment as I see a ship full of Muslims singing Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahoud, Jaish Muhammad Saofa Ya'ood. (Remember) Khaybar O Jew, the Army of Muhammad is returning/coming. The Jewish State used every tactic and legal form to try and peacefully turn away the ship.  The Jews finally descend from the heavens to protect their country and then they had to protect their own lives.

The successful use of self-defense to protect themselves and all their fellow Jews was met by the loudest most vociferous global outcry against Jews in memory.  

It is at this point that I see a 2,000 year old lesson that we Jews need to teach the world. The first fundamenatal human right is to defend yourself.

We are a people who have not had that right for 2,000 years.  That is what the Muslims are reminding us. They are summoning the ghosts of their marauding murderous ancestors who proudly slaughtered defenseless Jews in Khaybar ( an oasis that was in modern Saudi Arabia). 

That is similar to the chant of the modern Fourth Reich, the European nations, who never utter a word about Israel but to deny Jews the right to self-defense.  (The European chant is:'Stop, stop your Armies. Stop, you Jews are only allowed 'proportionate defense' as we Europeans define it.)

Now to be honest with my readers.  Israel has only existed for a little over 100 years and has only had an army for 60 years.  It is a little early for a world that has watched defenseless Jews get slaughtered for 2,000 years to get used to the idea that Jews can and will defend themselves. It is too soon.  In a couple of hundred years we can expect an ordinary European, Chinese or Indian to say ' everyone has a right to self defense, Jews included.' 

In the mean time we must suffer the static European world view that Jews have never had the right to self defense and still don't.

Now back to the two strange current anomalies that are explained by this understanding of the Jews newly demanding the right to self-defense.   

* The first anomaly is the enthusiasm of the Left in their hatred of Israel.  It is very strange and anomalous for Lefties, the people who believe in pacifism, the people who are opposed to capital punishment, who want to ban nuclear weapons... to be the cheer leaders of the hate Israel chorus.  But the reason is in the word pacifism.  The Left is pacifist, lovers of Gandhi.  The Jews were the former model nation.  People without guns, without defense; the Jews survived as pacifists for two thousand years (usually using bribes).  If we could only continue to be the model people for the Lefty pacifist worldview, the Left would love us.

But the Left hates us because we have abandoned self abnegation. We don't turn the other cheek, we don't love the bombers who attack our open air cafes and defenseless school buses. We Jews can never be the heroes of the Left.  We believe in self defense for Jews... and they, the Europeans and Leftists, are stuck in a 2,000 year tradition that denies us self defense.

* The Arab world is different.  The Arab world still has the taste of blood in their mouth. Like a tiger who has tasted human blood and wants more.

Since the 15th Century, when Jews were exiled by the Catholic Church into Muslim lands, Jews have been defenseless dhimmi.  That is all the Arab Muslims know. When Israel was created, the Muslim world drove all these defenseless people from their lands, roughly a million Jews.  Drove them out, kept their property. Nobody on the whole planet complained.  Nobody.  

So, justifiably, Arab Muslims still see Jews as defenseless dhimmi, with no right or ability to defend themselves.  Arabs have a long view... they still hate Alexander the Great who defeated them 2,300 years ago.  He defeated them 'unfairly' by their telling of it.  Arabs will not believe Jews have the right to self defense for at least two more centuries.

Summary: we Jews have a new lesson to teach the world.  We have taught the 10 Commandments, the wisdom of Hillel and much more.  Now after 2,000 years as defenseless people we have our own state and are defending ourselves. The lesson we are teaching is that self defense is the first and most formidable human right.