The Young and the Restless. I saw them, not by the dozens, but by the hundreds. I saw them: jobless, angry, with nothing to do and plenty of time to do it. I saw them filling the sidewalks and hanging onto the lamp posts. I saw them on the West Bank and in Gaza. They saw me for just a moment, passing by in a speeding motorcade.

A number of years ago I was traveling on a peace mission in the Middle East with a group of Muslims, Christians and Jews from all over the US. That day we were going to meet with officials of the PLO. We were supposed to meet with Yasir Arafat, but a surprise visit by President Clinton changed that. Some lower level officials would have to do.

The PLO took us to those meetings. We piled into old Mercedes, two or three of us to a car, with several cars in front and several in the rear without passengers. The first two and the last two weren’t Mercedes. They were jeeps with the tops open and a mounted machine gun with a soldier at each one.

Single file we zoomed through streets teeming with people at somewhere between fifty and sixty miles an hour, screeching around corners, not braking for a second as people scattered to get out of the way. We didn’t slow down until we came to a screeching halt at our destination.

All around us was devastation and poverty. Buildings half-built or half ruined – it was hard to tell which. Cracked sidewalks that just stopped for no apparent reason. Roads with potholes everywhere. Factories venting foul smelling liquids that ran continuously down the street, and hordes of half naked children – no shirts and no shoes – playing in it.

That, many have said, as have I, is the source of Palestinian terrorism, and the other strains of terrorism that followed it. The anger, the poverty, the lack of meaning and direction, the crowded streets; that was the breeding ground of terrorism. If we could but help the Palestinians grow their economy, help provide jobs and housing, and streets and buildings that weren’t falling down – if we could do this we would remove the root causes of terrorism. Thus went the conventional wisdom.

We were wrong, horribly, terribly wrong. Gaza and the West Bank are truly hell on earth. But by themselves, they don’t account for the kinds of terrorists, the kinds of suicide bombers we’re seeing now, and that Israel has suffered from for years. As a matter of fact, the first suicide bombing against Israel took place long before the supposed persecution of the poor, displaced Palestinians even began:

The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred ten weeks before Israel even became independent.

On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel’s independence, a truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street, in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the “desperation” of “occupation”, but by the VERY THOUGHT of a Jewish state. [Remarks of Brigitte Gabriel, delivered at the Duke University Counter Terrorism Speak-Out, October 14, 2004]

When Israel first became a state, leaders of the Arab and Muslim world (and the two terms are not necessarily interchangeable) instructed all Arabs, all Muslims, living there to flee the evil Jews. It would just be for a short time, they said. The Arab armies would destroy this infidel state in their midst, and the good people who left could return.

It didn’t quite work out that way. True, the Arab armies attacked as soon as Israel became a state. And they lost! They attacked again and again, and each time they lost. The Muslims who fled Israel couldn’t go back. Where were they to go? Ah, there were so many Arab countries, so much room, so many of their co-religionists, so many of their literal as well as figurative relatives with whom they could be re-united.

The Arabs wouldn’t take them. Their own people wouldn’t let them in. Thus were the Palestinians born, an identity bestowed upon them by the very despots who were responsible for their misery. In limbo ever since, they remain suspended between a country from which some of their grandparents fled and an immense array of Arab countries that won’t let them in. They remain a political football tossed at Israel to deflect attention from the real evil: the Arab dictatorships.

Is Islam inherently evil, bloodthirsty, and intolerant? No more so than Judaism and Christianity. But in the Middle East, parts of it have become perverted. After the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1923, tribal sheiks continued to rule. When oil brought untold riches and power beyond imagining, hell would freeze over – twice – before they’d give that up. The evil in the Arab world comes not from Islam but from the same sort of tyranny that has stained the 20th century and now part of the 21st with blood.

But the people were rightfully angry, resentful that they lived in filth and squalor while their leaders lived like kings. What about the secularism that seeped into these countries despite the state-controlled media? How was outright rebellion, outright revolution prevented? How were the masses held in check?

Israel. Of course! Deflect all the anger, the yearnings for personal liberty, for modernity, for prosperity, onto Israel. Whatever was wrong with the Arab world, it was Israel’s fault.

A Lebanese Christian woman named Brigette Gabriel had the courage, at real peril to her own life, to become a journalist and strive to tell the truth about what’s really going on in the Arab world. She comes from a small town in southern Lebanon, Merj Eyun. I’ve been there. On the same trip that we visited the PLO, we went to Merj Eyun, a box of hand grenades and an armed guide at the ready, to visit a radio station run by an American group that was beaming uncensored news to the Arab world. Two weeks after we returned home the papers reported that the radio station we had visited had been destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists.

Listen to what Brigitte Gabriel has to say:

I was raised in Lebanon, where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.

When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.

It was Israel who came to help the Christians in Lebanon. [Ibid.]

The hatred is not universal or irreversible. For our survival as Jews there must be a homeland, an independent Jewish state to which Jews anywhere in the world can come protected by one of the most powerful armies in the world. But also, if the tyranny of the Arab states is to be broken, if justice is to even begin to emerge, there must be an Israel. Among all the reasons you’ve ever heard for supporting Israel here’s one you’ve probably never heard before: Israel needs to exist because of the Arabs, because of the terrorists.

A strong, independent, democratic Israel right smack in the middle of what much of Islam considers its own sacred ground is an absolute necessity. It is a constant thorn in the side of those oppressing their own people. It is a constant example, and many in the Arab world do look, of the blessings that secularism and modernity can bring even alongside the strictest and most traditional religious beliefs. There must be an Israel. Israel represents the best chance the truly oppressed Palestinians, oppressed by their own people, and the truly oppressed masses in the Arab countries have for beginning to reap the benefits of modernity.

Last night we had an appeal for our Temple. I hope you will respond generously if you haven’t done so already. Now we appeal for the support of Israel, our homeland, and our local Jewish community, our home. Our donations to Federation help Israel provide programs for children traumatized by terrorist attacks. Our donations to Federation enable Jewish Family Service to provide counseling for women abandoned by their husbands. Our donations to Federation help the Kosher Food Pantry provide meals for poor and hungry and often elderly Jews. Our donations to Federation support the Center on Jewish Education, source of materials and teacher training for all of our Religious Schools, and one of the finest adult education programs in the country, the Melton School. Our donations help fund the educational, cultural, social and recreational programs of an ever-busier Jewish Community Center.

For the next few moments of silence I’d like to ask all of us to think about the evil that is spreading from the Arab world like a foul cancer. I’d like to ask us all to think about who will support us Jews, our community, our homeland. I’d like us all to think some more, think about how much we are able to give and what a blessing it is to be able to give, and add as much as you can above and beyond that. Then make your pledge to the UJA, to the Jewish Federation of Rockland.

Please remember, always, we make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.