https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/3000-years-of-solitude-a-response-to-the-economist-cover/

Israel has always stood on its own. In our long history, we have encountered good people and nations who helped us for a while, a century or two, until they disappeared and we moved on.

We never got anything for nothing, we always contributed to those nations – in religion and morality, in law and philosophy, in economics and science, in security and politics.

For the most part, nobody thanked us. In fact, the opposite is true: In places where Jews were well integrated, antisemitism skyrocketed to lethal levels.

The pogroms that we were subjected to on a regular basis in the Middle Ages stemmed from religious incitement, the pagan belief that we murdered God (think about that sentence for a moment and see the absurd inherent in that claim). In the modern era, the pogroms were caused by nationalist incitement – "the Jews are a people within a people."

On Purim we read about both these forms of incitement as expressed by one of our greatest enemies in his prelude to a call for a final solution to the Jewish problem: "There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king's laws" (Esther 3:8). Fast forward 2500 years to the cover of the Economist depicting Israel on its own – it is as if nothing has changed.

Hundreds of years earlier, our people left the house of bondage in Egypt to receive the eternal constitution and return to the land of our forefathers. After wandering in the desert, the People of Israel approached their destination. Standing in their way on the route to the Promised Land stood peoples who were afraid of this strange phenomenon – a national collective that is not part of the known religious system and which seeks to conquer Canaan on the grounds that the land was promised to it by God. To stop them, King Balak of Moab hired the greatest prophet of the time, Balaam Son of Beor, whose prophecy was compared by our sages to none other than Moses!

This intellectual knew how to mobilize divisions just by the power of his words. He could, in today's terms, give a speech at the UN or through the cover of The Economist about the great damage that Israel's existence causes the world, and he could emphasize that if we get rid of this menacing entity, a chain reaction would end all hatred in the world and bring about world peace. The message was very catchy: These Hebrews threaten world peace. By doing so, he could have motivated the nations to unite around the goal of destroying Israel.

But Balaam had time to ponder his mission as he made his way to the world stage, and at the moment of truth, he bolted. He chose to support the People of Israel who would go on to contribute to the world more than any other national collective in history. With his words, he expressed a wish: "May I die the death of the upright, may my fate be like theirs!" Balaam had had enough of the hypocrisy and double standards with which the world judges Israel. He not only wished to live as a man of integrity, he wished also to die as such and by doing so to be a partner in the glorious future of Israel. To this end, he rejected all the benefits the world was willing to bestow upon him for the incitement, slander, and curse that it wanted Balaam to inflict on this strange people – he stuck to his truth.

With his immortal words, Balaam shows himself to be a prophet who saw thousands of years into the future right up to the cover of the Economist and thousands of years beyond that: "As I see them from the mountain tops, Gaze on them from the heights.

There is a people that dwells apart, Not reckoned among the nations." Not regular isolation, for we have ties with the nations of the world, we contribute and we benefit. Rather it is a special isolation that only someone taking a bird's eye perspective of history (from mountain tops and heights) could have been able to see this from our beginning as a people: A people who for all our efforts to be accepted into the community of nations and to be treated equally, will never be counted as a normal nation. We will never belong to the family of nations, even if our contribution to humanity is priceless. And if, God forbid, we shall no longer be here, we will not be mourned as a family member. Not only in the synchronic sense do we not belong, but also in the diachronic; in other words, it is not only is our existence in the present different from that of all other nations, but we also travel along a different historic path to other nations.

Take the United Nations, the forum where the nations of the world gather today. After a half-century of world wars that threatened to destroy the world, the nations decided to come together to solve disputes through negotiation and diplomatic mediation.  Here is a summary of the actions of the General Assembly since 2015. Over the past nine years, the UNGA has passed eight resolutions against Iran, nine against North Korea, 11 against Syria (where 11 million people have been made refugees and over half a million killed), 24 against Russia (most in the past two years since the invasion of Ukraine); not once has the General Assembly passed a resolution against China, Cuba, Qatar, Libya, Turkey, Zimbabwe or Venezuela. When it comes to Israel however, the General Assembly has passed 153 resolutions against the Jewish State. We see it with our own eyes! Has an ancient prophecy ever been so precise and so seen so far into the future when it comes to other civilizations and cultures?

This isolation is of major significance when it comes to the present military and international campaign. Our people have a role in the world that is still ongoing. That is why we continue to exist despite the consistent attempts to remove us from history's sage. We contributed to the world the Bible, faith, morality, the ten universal commandments, religious literature, and philosophy.

This time, we are called upon to awaken the world from its slumber and fight evil.

Western civilization, especially Europe, is tired of war, but so too is the United States and other countries. The initial instinct is to expel the factor that is seen as causing all the problems – namely, Israel. Beyond the antisemitic residue and the internal politics of each nation, there are other reasons: intellectual slack, failure to study the issues in depth and gain an understanding of the conflicting forces, and refusal to take a hard look at the harsh realities. The human tendency is to deny and blame the other – the Jews or their state. Anyone who has read even a little history remembers the cowardly behavior of Europe's political and intellectual elite in the 1930s in view of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Israel's war against Hamas is not merely a localized affair. It is the war of the entire free world against tyranny that seeks to enslave the world in the name of faith in a pagan death cult.

The moral perception of the nations that preach to us not to enter Rafah and finish off the job, stems from a confusion between private morality and political morality. We are not fighting individuals – as miserable as they may be – but a nation whose unifying core is the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews wherever they may be. As far as they are concerned, the Jews are the spearhead of all Western (Judeo-Christian) civilization. For them Israel is only the outpost of this civilization; our enemies believe (and they have stated as much thousands of times) that we are the gateway to the collapse of the entire West. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the West not to leave Israel alone, but to strengthen it and hasten reinforcements. We've got you covered.

Is Israel isolated? Perhaps. There is nothing new in that. As always, we will survive and win. The God of Israel did not bring us back to Zion after thousands of years in exile, in order to toy with us. The question is, will the West understand that its long-term existence lies in the balance?

Remember the words of the old prophet Balam. Learn from him and act in accordance.

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