Jack Schwartz

Under Hitler it was the entrepreneurial and professional classes who were the first victims of Nazi boycotts and exclusion. Today it is Israel, the most powerful symbol of Jewish national resurgence in two millennia.

When Arab apologists wring their hands over an Israeli military incursion, they never mention what the Israelis are reacting to, or else diminish and distort it.

The situation in the West Bank and Gaza involves a military occupation amid urban guerrilla warfare, analogous to the British security measures in Northern Island, that hopefully will end with a cease-fire.

In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.

The Arab representatives and their followers were not interested in the persecuted millions throughout the world; they were fixed on a political agenda that distracted the world from their own serious shortcomings in the human-rights department.

The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

It would be hard to ignore the absence of democracy in any Arab nation.

Muslim delegates concerned about rights in Palestine could have brought their enthusiasm closer to home by addressing the fate of black Christians being slaughtered and enslaved in the Sudan.

The disappearance of the Jewish state will not mean the disappearance of anti-Semitism.

Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe without sounding like reactionary troglodytes.

Israel is now sustaining a war for its own existence. A nation defending its citizens against terrorist bombings and a military and diplomatic onslaught by an array of Arab foes is practicing survival, not genocide.