The second case involves Wahid Baroud, who is a past member of the PLO, and a former bodyguard of Yasser Arafat. Baroud was arrested on a security certificate declaring him a danger to the public. He has been incarcerated since his arrest last June, and last week appealed to the Supreme Court on the grounds that his rights have been compromised by his incarceration of more than a year with no immigration review. The Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. Although the court never releases its reasons for any decisions, the Canadian Immigration Act states that because he is not a permanent resident of Canada (he was never granted that status), he must be detained, without review, until Canada finds him a country that will accept him as a deportee. He is still here because, as he is a citizen of no country, none is willing to accept him.
In light of these two cases, I feel it appropriate to make a public announcement. On September 4, I will be moving to Israel. This is to be the first of three or four articles dealing with this decision, its reasons, its consequences, and the processes involved in the move. But in this article, I will deal with the confusion involved in making such a decision.
Many people, both in Israel and in North America, have asked if I had somewhere lost my sanity. I live in Toronto, one of the greatest cities in the world. (This point was raised by a well-meaning former New Yorker who now lives in Jerusalem.) It is a clean city, friendly and safe. It has a large, vibrant, and active Jewish community, with which I am well-acquainted, and in which I have been quite active for the past 18 years. Many of my friends live here, and my entire life has been spent in this type of culture and society. Why would I want to leave all this for a place half way around the world, to which I have only been three times, for a total of fourteen weeks? I am not as fluent as I would like to be in Hebrew, I need to learn a whole new culture and way of doing things, and I need to adopt an entirely new world view. My former New Yorker friend had an easier time, he claimed, beacuse he was leaving a city like New York, whose faults can be easily enumerated. But Toronto, he said, is different.
When he finished his harangue, I answered his questions. I told him that I grew up in B'nei Akiva, and that I felt that Israel is where all Jews ideally belong. But beyond that, my grandparents lived through the Holocaust. They showed me pictures of little Jewish communities in Hungary where they lived, and of the people in those communities. They were a part of a glorious and painful history, in a community hundreds of years old. European society had managed to outgrow its old hatreds and even managed to come to the rescue of Russian and Rumanian Jewry in the late 1800's due only to the righteous indignation of its governments and industrial leaders. Jews were beginning to make in-roads into commerce, industry, government, law, and other professions that form the backbone of advanced societies.
Then my grandfather ob'm showed me pictures of himself during the war, living on the streets of Budapest. My grandmother showed me pictures of herself and her sister hiding out with a Christian family in the countryside of Hungary. And after they died, I inherited the tefillin that saved my grandfather's life.
It is not hard to understand how a society as nominally advanced as Germany and the rest of Europe could descend so quickly and so easily into the type of bestiality that I cannot begin to imagine, but which my grandparents lived through. That descent was brought on by latent bigotry and anti-Semitism on the part of many governments and citizens of Europe. It is very telling, I think, that people who refused to acquiesce in the murder of others are called heroes, while many of those who did the killing are considered normal, and still live among us in North America, Europe, South America, and Australia.
Today's society, in my view, is not that much different from that in Europe seventy years ago. We are all comfortable and living normal lives. But Ernst Zundel is still in our midst. Our government has not been able to silence him, or to eradicate him and his ilk from our midst. Crown Heights has become the Odessa or Minsk of our time, suffering hateful pogroms at the slightest provocation.
So why is my decision confused? From the above, it seems I have it all thought out. North America is a powder-keg awaiting its spark, its Hitler to come out of a bar and rouse the masses to the slaughter. Israel, as it is, in part, an answer to this type of eventuality, seems the logical place to go for any Jew who feels this way. But is it so logical?
Mohammed Issa Mohammed, and Wahid Baroud belie this premise from their living room and prison cell in Southern Ontario. Canada, even with its Ernst Zundel, still understands the fanaticism and irreconcilability of Palestinian terrorism, and imprisons or deports such beasts. The United States, even with its Crown Heights, still guarantees the freedom of every citizen regardless of religion, or any other determinant. And then there is Israel.
I am here in Toronto, preparing for the big move, and contemplating my future in the homeland of my people. In that contemplation, I am left asking myself what Israel would do with Mohammed or Baroud if they showed up there. Baroud was born in Gaza City. Israel would likely admit him as a native Palestinian and pay the PLO money to train him further in attacks on Jews. Or Israel would give the PLO an AK-47 with which to arm its new "police" officer. Mohammed would probably be allowed to retire peacefully in Jericho or Jenin and write a book describing his thrill during the attack in Athens when he saw that one Jewish passenger had actually been killed. In Canada they are imprisoned or hounded by the media. In Israel they would be set free.
This is indeed how I see the current situation in Israel. Rabin's administration has seen fit to grant clemency to thousands of Jew-killers out of his ill-conceived notion that this will actually bring peace. So why am I going?
The easy answer is that it is Israel and I am Jewish. That seems logical enough when Rabin and his cronies are removed from the equation. But the real answer is more involved. Over the past year, my words have appeared on these pages complaining about the situation in Israel and the responses of certain elements of the Toronto Jewish community. But I believe that complaints are not productive unless alternative answers are also offered. I have just received my degree in International Relations, and I intend on working in Jerusalem within the public policy framework of the National Camp, especially in the run-up to next year's elections. Thanks to the agreement of this paper, I will continue to write this column from Israel, and some of the answers I hope to offer may soon grace these pages as well. But in the next few issues, I will describe the process of Aliyah from an insider's point of view. I will hopefully provide some hints for those who will follow, and share some of the frustration for your reading enjoyment.
Copyright 1995. Reproduction in electronic or print formats by permission only.
Author's Note: I did proceed on my pilot trip to Israel in August 1995, but for a variety of reasons my Aliyah was delayed until May 1997.
