Should Israel Be the 51st State?

For the first time in our history, we Americans have learned what it is like to be the targets of irrational, international hatred. We have learned what is it like to be attacked without provocation. Most of all, we now know how it feels to be accused of being an aggressor when we simply act in self-defense.

Of course, these are things that the Jews have known for millennia. And this puts America and the Jews in a strange but shared category.

When other world nations are subjected to brutal and unmotivated attack, they are usually granted the world's sympathies. Not so with the Jews. Not so with America. The reaction of the world to September 11th was a few moments of shocked silence and then an immediate onslaught of, "I told you so's" and "what do you expect when you throw your weight around with such arrogance?"

Most Americans are rightly outraged as to how our preemptive actions of self-defense are interpreted as unprovoked American aggression. But for the Jews this is just so ho-hum. Israel has, of course, observed this phenomenon for decades. When Israel takes action against terrorists that wreak havoc with suicide bombing after suicide bombing, they are condemned as merciless aggressors. Throughout Europe, Israel is reviled as a state that tramples on Palestinian rights. China has virtually ceased reporting on Palestinian suicide bombings, choosing instead to report only on Israel's response.

How do we explain such patent absurdity (after all, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are the manifestly evil ones, right?) unless we see it in the larger context of America experiencing something akin to anti-Semitism?

And the clincher of how America has now become the world's Jews was the recent comparison, by the German "Justice" minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, of President George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler. The irony of comparing the leader of the democracy that liberated Germany from Hitler to the dictator himself is matched only by the constant comparisons of Israel, the country that was built by the survivors of Hitler's genocide, to the Nazi beasts who tried to extinguish them.

Now, these contemporary comparisons between the United States and world Jewry can be treated as a mere coincidence. Or else we can make the most of the hand the world has dealt us. I propose that this series of factors suggest a political and practical application. Now that the Americans have become the Jews of the world, I propose to formalize the arrangement by making Israel the 51st state in the Union.

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