Depriving the World of What It Wants

I once read a cynical explanation of why so many Jew-hating countries in the world voted for the UN Partition Plan of 1947 include the Soviet Union.  The theory, as it went, was that much of the world felt bad for us in the wake of the revelation that six million of us had been slaughtered while they either looked the other way or assisted either actively or by preventing the escape of many Jews from Europe.  The vote for partition was a great opportunity to assuage that feeling of guilt.
On the other hand the vote was also relatively risk free.  After all, the 600 000 Jews of Israel were surrounding by millions of hostile Arabs armed to the teeth and waiting for the chance to invade and slaughter.  The British, may their island sink, were also up for the moment doing everything they could to prevent Jewish attempts to build an army and an arsenal while doing all they could to give the Arabs of Israel the superior fighting position for when the time came for the English to finally abandon the Mandate and go home.  The Jews would have no chance against such formidable odds and would be driven into the sea.
The vote therefore offered the Jew-hating countries everything they wanted.  They could vote for partition and tell themselves that they had done something for those poor Jews but at the same time they could position themselves to shed genuine tears over another 600 000 Jewish graves and what would certainly be the final blow to the Jewish nation from which it could never recover.
Oops.  We won that war.  And the next several.
My father always says that the reason the world is so hostile to Israel is because what the international community likes more than anything is Jewish funerals.  The thought of burying more Jews makes them giddy.
Israel, on the other hand, prevents this from happening.  As a lifeboat and source of protection it may not be perfect but a lifeboat and source of protection it remains.  In Israel Jewish life has value and is something to be protected.

Even Israeli humanistic preachers of “normality” and of being a “nation like all other nations” know that the Jewish oasis in the desert was made possible by the fact that Israel was “armed to the teeth,” as anti-Israel literary critic George Steiner once said. Even Diaspora Jews, from London’s Golders Green to Toronto’s Forest Hill, can enjoy quiet nights because they know that every Israeli fence is guarded by armed Jews and that Israel’s sky is sealed by its Air Force and by the Dimona nuclear plant.

Israel is the only nation deprived by the United Nations of its legal right to defend itself, the only UN member surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves to destroy the Jews, and the only democracy that in the last 40 years had to dig trenches in public parks as potential mass graves.
As the number of firearms proves, no Western society lives in greater intimacy with death than Israel. During the Second Intifada, the most effective protection against terrorism in the cafés and shopping malls, aside from IDF incursions into Palestinian cities, was a kind of spontaneous form of Jewish civil defense, the only thing that worked even when terrorists from Jenin and Nablus showed up at a café in Tel Aviv or a gas station in the settlement of Ariel.
That’s the Jewish revolution, which the West can’t accept, the most admirable Israeli phenomenon: A people still able to defend itself against the forces of evil.

On one hand it is not our destiny to simply be a nation like all others.  This would be a horrible disappointment and an abandonment of the responsibility God has given us through the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  On the other hand virtue does not equal vulnerability.  We are enjoined by "the Three Oaths" not to rebel against the nations but they are enjoined by those same oaths not to be cruel to us.  We are nowhere told that being led helplessly to slaughter or exposing ourselves to torture is a mitzvah.
We must therefore pray that the international community continue to be frustrated and disappointed at our insistence on surviving for a long time to come.