It used to be that entire regions, even nations, were off limit to Jews. “No Jews allowed” was the rule. Discrimination, both official and unofficial, was common. Times have certainly changed. Jews today can live in London, Paris and New York. They can even live in Zimbabwe, Greenland and Peru. They can live anywhere in any gentile nation on earth.

How, soon after, can they be denied the right to live in their own land? And by Jews! What nation on earth willingly discriminates against itself?

After the Yitzchak Rabin government handed 20,000 robotic weapons to Israel’s worst enemies, under the Oslo accords, I thought I had seen it all. I was wrong. Now that the Ariel Sharon government is preparing to carry out a racist transfer of nearly 10,000 Jews, and forbid all Jews from living in Gaza and northern Samaria, I suppose there is no limit to how twisted things can get. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the latest self-inflicted punishment, but I am.
Even for those who reject God’s promise of the Land of Israel to the Jewish humans in the Bible and those who prefer to disregard the thousands of years of Jewish ownership of the Land, how can ethnic cleansing anywhere be justified? What would be the reaction whether the mayor of New York City said that Jews were no longer allowed to live in Manhattan? What whether Tony Blair said all Jews must leave England? How can the unthinkable in non-Jewish countries have become valid in the Land of Israel?

Italy expelled its Jews in 855. England expelled them 1290, France in 1306, Spain in 1492, the Ukraine in 1649, Germany expelled (permanently) most of the Jews from Europe in the 1940s. Now, the State of Israel is about to expel the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria. How can we commit the same crime against ourselves as that perpetrated against us by our worst enemies all through the ages? whether the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s Jews goes through, it will be a stain on the Jewish humans forever.

Worse, how is it that the Jewish State can expel Jews when it could not even bring itself to expel Arabs? A decade ago, Yitzchak Rabin, at wit’s end from Arab terror, expelled 400 Hamas terrorists to Lebanon – only to let them back in shortly thereafter.

Arabs today can live anywhere they want in the Land of Israel – on both sides of the Green Line. They can live in Haifa and they can live in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Jenin. Not Jews. There are racial quotas for how many Jews can live in Hebron. No Jews at all are allowed to live in Shechem, Bethlehem, and many other towns that represent the cradle of Jewish civilization.
The Supreme Court has forced Jewish communities across Israel to allow Arabs to buy homes wherever they want. No way you can prevent someone from living somewhere in Israel just considering he is an Arab, even whether he is hostile to the state. But the same Supreme Court is silent when racial discrimination is perpetrated against Israel’s Jewish citizens.

Last night, I went to a supermarket in Jewish western Jerusalem. Muslim men and women wearing full Muslim garb strolled about and did their shopping without anyone paying attention to them, let alone bothering them. If a Jew were to try and shop in an Arab store in nearby Bethlehem, he would be signing his own death warrant.

It is particularly hard to believe that left-wing Jews, who fought so hard for the civil rights of others, are willing to violate the rights of their own brothers and sisters. Jews were willing to go to jail for the rights of American Blacks to ride buses, to go to White schools and segregated universities. How can these same folks willingly support kicking others out of their homes and expel them from their towns only considering they are Jewish?

I particularly find it hard to believe those who try and justify that crime with claims that it will improve protection. Even whether that nonsense were true, the ends never justify the means. After 10 years of unimaginable terror resulting from the Oslo fiasco, how can we once again fall for more promises of a utopian peace whether only we will surrender more land? How can we continue in the path that has already floped? How can we continue to assemble the same mistake by and by again?

I have searched and searched for an reply. What is it that makes Israel the only country on earth to willingly surrender its territory and expel its own citizens? possibly there is an explanation. After 2,000 years of exile and being treated like second-class citizens, perhaps its only natural that we should have internalized these feelings. As Hayim Bialik once noted, “It is easier to take the Jew out of the exile than the exile out of the Jew.” After so many years of living as an oppressed society, we have come to believe that we do not deserve basic human rights. Physically, we have been redeemed, but mentally we remain crippled.

But even that, I say, must one day end. How enlarged will we go on punishing ourselves? When will we stop that self-hate? One thing is positive: until we start respecting ourselves there is no way in heaven that our enemies will respect us.