What was unexpected was the flow of Israelis to the beaches when the call went out for help.
By David Isaac, World Israel News
It’s not often that you get to see the mystical connection between the Jews and their land play out in real time.
Witness the response to the oil spill that hit Israel’s shores on Feb. 17, dumped by a cargo ship holding 600,000 barrels of Iranian crude, almost certainly deliberately.
As one would expect, Israel’s government responded, allocating $14 million for cleanup.
What was unexpected was the flow of Israelis to the beaches when the call went out for help.
“Over 11,000 people came within a week,” Maya Jacobs, CEO of Zalul, an environmental group devoted to protecting Israel’s waters, told Israel21c.
Israelis didn’t just bend their backs to the work. They did it with smiles on their faces.
They picked through the sand and pebbles across 100 miles of polluted Mediterranean coastline as if it was their own backyard.
They rescued tar-soaked turtles as if they were saving their own pets.
One can’t help comparing their behavior to the land’s other claimants.
Palestinians can’t seem to find an archaeological site, a pristine landscape or a clean river they don’t feel compelled to destroy, carve up or pollute.
Take the Gaza Strip, where 97% of the water is polluted. The media blame Israel. Yet the Gaza Strip is run entirely by Palestinians. In 2017, a UN report said over 108,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage flowed daily from Gaza into the Mediterranean. Read that last part. Where does Israel enter the picture from Gaza to the Mediterranean?
In April of last year, it was widely reported how the Alexander River, a beautiful river that flows from the Samaria mountains into the Mediterranean, was running red with blood – literally. Palestinian slaughterhouses were dumping their offal into the river, taking advantage of relaxed oversight during the pandemic. Israel had only just cleaned up the river, even winning an international prize for its efforts in 2003.
Then there are all the illegal quarries where Palestinians dig without compunction, along with the largest illegal dumping site in Judea and Samaria, dubbed ‘Mount Trashmore,’ courtesy of the Ramallah Municipality.
And if we had a shekel for every time we covered a story about Palestinians destroying an archaeological site, we’d corner the market on Bitcoin.
We reported the most recent violation on March 8. A Palestinian clan illegally built houses, a reservoir and a road through Second Temple-era burial caves and other ancient Jewish finds.
On Feb. 10, we reported the far more serious damage (given the uniqueness of the site) to an ancient Jewish altar dating to the 13th century B.C.E., an altar some say is the very one described in the Book of Joshua.
The destruction of ancient sites by Palestinians is systematic, ongoing and with malice aforethought. They want those sites gone because they are proof of ancient Jewish ties to the Land of Israel. Palestinians have no such ties. There are no ancient Palestinian sites because there were no ancient Palestinians. They are as ancient as light-emitting diodes, video game consoles, the computer mouse and UNIX; that is to say, other inventions from the 1960s.
What is all this leading to? The judgment of Solomon.
Solomon was presented with two mothers claiming the same child. To test them, he ruled that the baby be cut in two so that each mother might have half. The true mother begged that the child be spared and given to the other. The false mother said cleave away.
When it comes to the current conflict, the true mother has long ago been revealed.
David Isaac is managing editor of World Israel News.