Ethnic cleansing, eggs, and baskets

I don't normally waste much time thinking about foreign affairs -- I figure it's pointless when there isn't much I can do about them -- but I happened to catch a discussion on NPR yesterday morning that gave me pause. Following recent attacks on Jews or Jewish businesses, e.g., that Jewish supermarket in Paris, Israeli's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is once again urging European Jews to move to Israel. He's doing the usual Zionist sales pitch about all Jews living together in one place, their ancestral homeland of Israel. Part of the sales pitch is that it's so much safer there for Jews than it is elsewhere in the world. But is it?

I could be wrong, but I think if I were a member of a group that has historically been persecuted repeatedly for thousands of years, the last thing I'd want to do is concentrate my people in one central location, especially when that central location is surrounded by people who make no secret of hating my people. Not only that, the people who hate my people still manage to periodically launch rocket attacks or send in suicide bombers to create havoc. Is a country where apartments come with steel shutters for the windows and built-in bomb shelters really such an attractive option? All it took was a couple episodes of House Hunters International featuring people looking for a place to live in Tel Aviv and I'd figured out there are times when a diaspora is a good thing. If you're a Jew living in Sweden or the United Kingdom or almost any place else on the planet, maybe the local synagogue or a kosher market will get targeted by fanatics, but unless you're ultra Orthodox you can go about your day just blending in with everyone else. Even if you wear a kippah, most people don't notice it. On the other hand, if you fall for the sales pitch to move to Israel and be safe, it doesn't matter where you go, it's a potential target: every shopping center, bus stop, restaurant, etc., in the country is on the hit list of Palestinian extremists.

I don't know. Maybe I'm totally off base in thinking this way, but there are days when I get the impression Netanyahu's goal in life is to create super-sized Masada. This is not a good thing.