By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — A biblical story tells of a prophet-for-hire name Balaam. The professional seer was engaged by a regional king, Balak, who was anxious about the approaching Israelite nation that had been freed from Egypt. Balaam was paid a sizable amount of silver and engaged to climb up, observe the Israelites, and roundly curse them.
The Bible reveals that when Balaam, a mercenary man without a soul, observed Israel, he was literally unable to scourge them. He heard their songs, observed their festive rituals, and noticed how they venerated their children and recorded their history. He burst out with a refrain that is now the classic morning prayer of every Jewish service: “How goodly are they dwelling places, Jacob; your dwelling places, O Israel.”
While genuinely hoping that new Observer status for Palestine will be a stepping-stone for a dignified statehood and the renouncing of terrorism, I’d like to suggest that the Palestinians observe the following:
• What Palestine wants, it had in writing on November 27, 1947, when the UN Security Council partitioned the region into two states; the Arab world responded with a massive invasion of the nascent Israel and obliterated the legally mandated two-state solution accepted by Israel.
• Israel recognized the Palestinian Authority with the Declaration of Principles signed at the White House on September 13, 1993. (I happened to be present, along with 3,000 other people, most of whom wept when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with President Yasir Arafat of Palestine).
I’d like to ask the Palestinian Observer State to kindly observe these ennobling and exemplary facts:
• Israel has the highest ration of university degrees to the population in the world.
• Israel per capita has the largest number of startup companies in the world, but for the US.
• Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies in the world, but for the US and Canada.
• Israel’s $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined.
• Israel remains the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
• In 1984 and 1991, Israel airlifted 22,000 at-risk Ethiopian Jews to safety in Israel. [Syria has exterminated an estimated 38,000 of its own citizens in the last two years.]
• Israel was the first nation in the world to adopt the “Kimberly process,” an international standard that certifies diamonds as “conflict free.”
• Jerusalem’s world-renowned Hadassah Hospital routinely treats Palestinian patients under the state’s free-access socialized medical system.
• During the 1991 Gulf War, as Palestinians cheered the scud missiles fired by Saddam Hussein at Tel Aviv, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra played a concert while wearing gas masks.
• Israel has the world’s second highest per capita number of new books published annually.
• Israel has more museums per capita than any other country on this planet.
• Israel is the only country on earth that entered the 21st century with a net gain in its number of trees.
• Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic.
Welcome, Observer State of Palestine. Please be like Balaam and observe our trees and books and schools and bless us. All we have wanted to do, from the beginning, is to sit in the shade with you as neighbors. Peace be unto you.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
Ameyn. Selah.