By Sanford Goodkin

Without trust there is nothing; with trust there is risk. When you are young and you trust your significant other, you risk a broken heart; when you trust an enemy who has promised to exterminate you, you risk that he means it and you have a broken body.

As we read the press reports on Gaza and what follows, what are we asked to trust, and dare we? If Hamas tells Jews that they will drive them into the sea, for it was “Hamas who drove them from Gaza”, what should we do? Do they mean it? Yes. Does God ask us to risk all by trusting them? No. Yet we are asked to be a forgiving people, but we are told to preserve our lives when we are threatened. God says to forgive but not to be fools by risking our lives and those of our families if enemies, who have been nurtured on hate, tell us that they will kill us or bomb us, or on the part of Iran, nuke us.

Am I exaggerating any of this? I don’t think so. It’s not like trusting a home’s value in an overheated marketplace and it crashes, for market forces are acting out the scenario. No, with the Arabs, this is pure hate, which is a manufactured state or commodity. German Jews, as I understand history, did not take Hitler’s word when he promised-in writing-to exterminate the Jews. The N Y Times didn’t take it seriously and the Allies didn’t, so there we were, lonely and alone and it cost us over six million extinguished from the earth.

This time it is just as serious and even if Europeans do not take it seriously, we should and must. We have learned that Europeans never took the plight of Jews seriously, in fact they initiated a lot of the murdering and persecution. If you read Martin Gilbert’s Atlas on the Arab/Jewish history, you will note that the Arabs killed Jews long before there was an Israel; and when Israel was created by the U.N., they immediately attacked them again, to drive them into the sea. We must have learned from this, so with all the pressure on Sharon and the pitiful letters to editors of most newspapers, from Jewish sounding names, expressing how badly the Jews have treated the Arabs, have occupied their lands, and must give up more land and villages to them, it is a pain that Tums cannot alleviate. Common sense can and knowledge of history must.