John Donne wrote, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main..." This may have seemed a reasonable and sagacious admonition for non-Jews of John Donne's era of history, even for non-Jews in any given era of history. But the same admonition cannot be reasonably applied to the Jews, not to any Jew, and especially not to those Jews who now are representative of or live within the State of Israel. Israel and her Jewish population, if one is to believe the Arab-Muslim view, have no right to exist in the Middle East.

"Any man's death diminishes me" wrote Donne. A salubrious and humane thought indeed. But the Arab-Muslim view, a view induced by Islam, vulgarizes that the slaying of a Jew and the extermination of his national identity (the State of Israel) does not in any way diminish the Arab-Muslim nor the legitimacy of the Islamic nation he represents. Those Arab-Muslims who kill Jews, whether they live or die in the process of committing such an atrocity, are honoured as heroes in the Islamic world. Moreover the successful elimination of the State of Israel by any means necessary (and that includes nuclear attack) would not be mourned as a loss to the Arab-Muslim Middle East: it would be celebrated as a joyous occasion, and especially should it be achieved by way of genocide. To be more specific, it would be celebrated by the same countries who, in Durban, South Africa (2001), as Alex Grobman recounts in his book License To Murder, inveighed to the non-Jewish world against the State of Israel and her Jewish citizens that "Israel should not only be censored, but also no longer allowed to exist." Israel is become an island in the world not by her own hand, nor by choice, but by those hands who work long and angry hours devising her annihilation. There really is "no rest for the wicked."

Therefore Israel is an island entire of itself. Because the non-Jewish world wants it that way. Israel cannot but fail to accommodate a non-Jewish world unwilling to accommodate a nation of Jews. Israel and her Jews should be convinced by now that giving away parcels of Jewish identity (read "land for peace") does not beget peace from an Arab-Muslim enemy.

"A nar git un a kluger nemt" goes the Yiddish proverb. A fool gives and the clever one takes. For far too long the Jewish leaders of Israel have been fools and the Arab-Muslim terrorist entities have been the clever ones. What was it Rabbi Kahane said? "Better an Israel that everyone hates than an Auschwitz that everyone loves." Better the Jews of Israel now learn to take and the Arab-Muslim terrorists learn to give. If the death of a Jew does not diminish the Arab-Muslim, then let the Jews of Israel learn that to conquer their enemies is not an evil. Let the Jews learn that if their nation is not counted as "a piece of the continent" in the eyes of their Arab-Muslim enemies, then let Israel therefore become the island of Jewish culture and tradition as prescribed for her long ago in the Torah. If living as Jews on an island of Jewish tradition and culture is the only choice left to the Jews of Israel, better then they live contentedly as Jews on that island than to diminish themselves by diving, bereft of any hope, into the sea of anti-Jewish hatred that presently surrounds them from without and befouls them from within.

Israel is an island entire of itself. Israel is not a piece of the continent nor a part of the main, therefore the death of her enemies cannot diminish her Jewish identity. The bell does not toll for the Jews of Israel; it tolls for their enemies.

"...I will fear no evil, for You are with me." - Psalms 23:4

Michael Devolin