YOUR AD HERE »

Z Blog: What’s so important about Israel?

Matt Zalaznick

Why is the most violent element of the Muslim world so obsessed with the Jewish homeland?

The governments that support groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have vast and valuable natural resources, such as oil, while Israel is mostly a desert with some nice beaches, acclaimed snorkeling in the south and a tourism industry supported by American Jews.

The government sponsors of anti-Jewish terrorism rule over land masses hundreds of times the size of tiny Israel.



So why is Israel so important and offensive to them?

Israel’s military tactics have often been brutal, but only because its people have been attacked brutally. And Israel, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, has never targeted civilians.

Support Local Journalism



And Israel, when left alone, is not a threat to anyone. When I visited Israel I learned the Israelis have no territorial or colonial ambitions. They just want to hold on to the tiny sliver of beach and desert given to the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust.

The Israelis gave up Gaza and will give up more of the West Bank as long as they’re confident the parade of suicide bombers and rocket attacks will stop. But as one Israeli official said during the recent violence, Israel gave up land for peace and got nothing but war.

I suppose one reason Israel’s enemies are so virulent is they’re anti-Semitic. But that can also be said about elements in the European Union and the United Nations. A more practical reason Iran, Syria and other repressive governments so noisily excoriate Israel is to hide their tyranny and corruption from their own Muslim citizens.

Israel is free and vibrant, while Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are police states.

Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist from Los Angeles, has called the conflict between Israel and Muslim terrorists a battle between modernism and middle-age mentalities.

In an interview on Al Jazeera, she called the current violence, “a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship.”

“It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings.”

The same can be said of the wider war on terror. Unfortunately, war is exactly what the terrorists want. Though Israel didn’t have a lot of options, Hezbollah’s aim was to cause chaos and to allow Israel’s missiles to fall on Lebanese citizens and cast the Jews, not the fanatics, as the evil oppressors.

Baiting the West into violent reactions, as Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qaida have done so deftly, will continue to work until there is a homegrown movement ” not one imposed by the American military ” that demands freedom in the Middle East.

I hope the West is doing something to help.

Vail Daily, Vail, Colorado


Support Local Journalism