OPINION:
We were driving home from Jerusalem one warm summer day in the 1950s. It was only a leisurely four-hour drive home, heading up the road first to Haifa, then along the coast through Tyre and Sidon. Mom, Dad and baby sister Sally were in the front seat and my older brother and two younger sisters were in the back. We were enjoying the roads in our borrowed Chevy, but it wasn’t nearly as fun as riding in the back of Dad’s jeep around Beirut.
At times Dad remarked about how close we were to the Jordanian border. Even though we were running with Canadian license plates on our American embassy car, we did not want to cross over to Jordan.
It would have been easy enough to do. In those days, Israel had a long, narrow waist that in many places was only 20 miles wide (as narrow as 14 miles in some spots). That is all the space Israel had before ending in the Mediterranean Sea. An armored tank, even when in the midst of a melee, can plan on covering 20 miles in an hour. That’s all it would have taken to cut Israel in two: one hour.
Thankfully in 1967 Israel reshaped itself so the eastern border now runs along the Jordan River, giving Israel a much more robust body core. The territory gained is called the West Bank by some. And the accession of the land has resulted in a lot of displaced people who live in the hopes of returning home. We had a group of Palestinian refugees from the first Arab-Israeli war living in a neighboring compound to our apartment buildings in Beirut. It was heartbreaking to see the misery and destitution of these once happy and proud people. They are in a way similar in tragedy to our own Cherokee Nation, forced to leave their homeland through no fault of their own.
In these days of drowning irrelevancy from those in charge, I fear that in their grasping for straws someone may seize upon the anti-Semitic thinking of previous years. If they do, they need to understand that no power on Earth is going to move anyone back to the borders of the 1950s.
JAMES W. FRENCH
Dakota, Ill.
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