"I am a Jew.  Hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?  If you poison us, do we not die?  And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

These questions were asked by Shylock in Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice. 

The Jews were a discriminated, if not persecuted, lot during most of their history, a history that goes back to 18th century BCE.  They were enslaved by king after king.  Later they were discriminated against by government after government. No other people, perhaps, know better the meaning of exile.  Doesn't their history in the Bible start with the book called Exodus?  No wonder a popular anthem in Israel today is: "I have no other land."

Israel was made their land with much pain, tears and bloodshed. 6 million Jews had been mercilessly massacred by Hitler.  Gassed to death!  Buried alive in some cases!  Burnt like timber!  And for what crime?  That they were more hardworking than their counterparts in the country?

It's not true that that the Jews were the economic titans in Hitler's Germany.  The post-World War I Germany was a developing nation, not a developed one as it is today.  In 1923 the rate of employment in that country was a meagre 29%.  Malnutrition and diseases were common.  Many people did not have proper houses to stay.  The Jews constituted just about one percent of the German population.  One percent!  Yet they became Hitler's favourite targets.  Every Hitler loves to target some small religious community, it seems.

Yes, Hitler had a reason for hating the Jews.  The Jews were highly successful in their life.  They were disproportionately represented in certain professions and occupations such as trade, banking, law and medicine.  How could an alien people achieve so much success?  Hitler couldn't tolerate that. 

Aliens.  That's what the Jews were wherever they went(with a few exceptions like America and Kerala, perhaps). Except for brief intervals like during the reigns of Kings David and Solomon (10th century BCE).  The feeling of alien-hood is palpable in Jewish literature.  Look at these lines of a Psalm from the Bible:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,

when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

we hung our lyres.

For there our captors

required of us songs...

How shall we sing the Lord's song

in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

Let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth... (Psalm 137)

When they were made captives by Babylon the Jews sang these lines.  How much more captivity was to come their way!  Babylon was conquered by Persia.  Alexander the Great conquered the Persians. Then came the Roman enslavement, followed by the Byzantine tortures.  Then came the Crusades and Inquisitions.  The Jews were victims of all these conquests.  Did any other people suffer so much?

Four hundred years before Hitler, a few decades before Shakespeare created the character of Shylock, Martin Luther of Germany (not to be confused with Martin Luther King of America) said that Jews "hold us Christians captive in our country.  they let us work in the sweat of our noses, to earn money and property for them, while they... mock us and spit on us, because we work and permit them to be lazy squires who own us and our realm."  Luther was a religious reformer.  He led the Protestant Reformation in Europe.  But he did not seem to have much compassion in his heart or integrity in his vision.

And the history of Jewish hatred continued. 

Finally, having quenched its thirst for blood by killing 6 million of Jews, the hatred began to subside.  Not promptly, though.  When the first ship (a rusting one, in fact) reached Israel with 4500 Holocaust survivors, it was sent back by the British authorities (who were given the mandate by the League of Nations) there.  They were sent to France and from there (of all places) to Germany!  How much insult had to be added to injury!  Yes, Israel finally took shape in 1948.  Sixty years ago. 

And the people of Palestine paid the price. 

For the Jews the millennia of exile had to end.  But does anyone have the right to occupy by force the land that belongs to somebody else? 

Didn't the white men do just that when they captured America?  Wasn't that done in Australia?  Of course, we can relegate those incidents to the forgotten and dust-ridden pages of history. 

But the white men were not people without a homeland!  They were adventurers and fortune-seekers.  The Jews were homeland-seekers.

Finally they got a homeland.  Even at the cost of the Palestinians.  Now as they are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the birth (or should we say re-birth?) of that homeland, is the nostalgia beginning to wane?  The latest issue of Frontline (June 20) reports that "the number of people leaving Israel exceeds those coming in" (P. 62).  There is no peace and security in Israel.  How many years will you live pinning your hopes on guns and bombs?  The same report says that demographers have forecast that by 2050 Arab citizens will constitute 30% of Israel's population. 

Has the Jewish nostalgia for the Promised Land drowned itself in the Dead Sea?  Are the Jews destined to be perpetual exiles?