If Pinoy workers decline to come home from dangerous Israel, perhaps they think it’s safer there than Manila

The all-out and brutal offensive launched by Israel’s military 13 days ago against the Palestinian "resistance" strongholds in the West Bank hasn’t stopped the suicide-bombers.

This is now clear, after eight days of pause during which the Israeli Defense Forces’ strategy of hitting the Palestinians "terrorists" and knocking down their communities seemed to be working. Yesterday, a Palestinian suicide-bomber boarded a crowded passenger bus in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa and blew himself up – killing eight Israelis. The vehicle was shredded by the more-sophisticated explosives the infiltrator had strapped to his body, and everybody else in it was seriously wounded.

Trying to put their best face on that terrible counter-blow which put to shame the extremely tight security the Israelis have imposed everywhere, from their state to the West Bank, Jerusalem is now saying that the suicide-bombing was counter-productive since it will show US State Secretary Colin Powell (who’s due to arrive in Israel tonight) that discussing a "ceasefire" or talking "peace" with Yasser Arafat and other radical Palestinian leaders is impossible.

The truth is that the already hated Israelis have provoked even more resentment by being particularly cruel in their military intrusions into the West Bank’s towns and cities. They have been savaging and humiliating civilians along with intifada fighters and jihadis, preventing ambulances and medical and food supplies from getting in, and hindering the evacuation of the wounded to hospitals, destroying shops, buildings, vehicles, water pipes, and electrical facilities, willy-nilly.

It’s increasingly evident, from their violent actions, that they’re out for revenge rather than simply "protecting" themselves from future suicide-bombing attack and other forms of murder and sabotage.

They cutely labeled their attacks, initiated March 29, "Operation Defensive Shield." What we’ve been seeing is not "defensive" but definitely offensive.

* * *

One cannot entirely blame the Israelis. They are a desperate people whose lives have been rendered hellish by unremitting suicide-bomber incursions which have left men, women and children bleeding and dying, or blown to pieces, on their streets, in their shops and cafés, and in their buses.

In a sense, they brought this curse on themselves by humiliating the Palestinians (even their own Israeli-Palestinians) year after year. They continued gobbling up "Palestinian land" by setting up 231 Israeli settlements in the West Bank alone (the present Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in 18 months, even "approved" 39 new settlements). They established 42 Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights, which were seized from Syria in the 1967 war. They put up 25 settlements in Gaza. They crowded the Arabs out of East Jerusalem itself, by installing 29 settlements.

When confronted on this creeping cartographic aggression, the Israelis would refer to the Holy Bible to "prove" that the tracts of land they were taking had been deeded by God to them. When one uses a "real estate" record thousands of years old, how can anybody argue against it – particularly since the confiscation is backed up by Uzis, Galils, US Carbines, helicopter gunships, F-16s, tanks and artillery?

I’m reminded of the theme song of that old, heroic movie, Exodus (based on the novel by Leon Uris). It goes: "This land is mine, God gave this land to me!"

From the early years of the Jewish pioneers, having interviewed their leaders and founding fathers, having tarried with them in their besieged kibbutzim, seen their plucky efforts to make the desert bloom while defending themselves, at first, with primitive weapons, I’ve admired the Israelis. And yet, with growing dismay, over the past two decades, I’ve seen them grow arrogant, swaggering, suffused with hubris or worse.

I realize the Jews suffered greatly during the pogroms that characterized the years of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Indeed, just three days ago, Israelis stopped in their tracks and paused bareheaded in a minute of prayerful silence to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust – the six million Jews who were herded into the Nazi death camps and exterminated during World War II.

This was a timely reminder to all Jews that meekness could bring no dividends to them, and remind them, as well, that in the two millenniums that they wandered "homeless" in the diaspora they had been persecuted and scorned.

The tragedy is that having acquired or re-acquired a homeland, Israel, they’ve begun to take on the paranoid, racist, and bullying ways of their former tormentors. This is sad, for otherwise they are a remarkable and courageous nation.

Even more tragic is that they don’t seem to have changed since Jesus Christ was crucified, on accusations by the High Priest and the Sanhedrin that He had blasphemed and committed hersey. (Great shades of the Spanish Inquisition!) The Jews have for centuries tried to expunge from the Christian New Testament the paragraphs that recounted how the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate had called for water, then said that he washed his hands "of the blood of this innocent man". To which the crowd had cried out: "May his blood be on our heads and that of our children!"

Did the Evangelist "libel" the Jews with such a passage? Or was that really what they had shouted in their determination to eliminate Jesus Christ? An Evangelist, after all, is a "reporter". What the Jewish leadership was trying to say, many centuries later, was that they had been misquoted.

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I recall what the great David Ben Gurion told me in 1970. He was literally Israel’s Foundation Father, the man who had proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel in 1948, then led the Israelis in defeating seven invading Arab armies.

Born in Plonsk, Poland, in 1886, David Grin (his original name) had emigrated to Palestine where he became leader of the Mapai and president of the Zionist Executive under his new name of Ben Gurion. Forty-two years later, he was to proclaim Israel as a state, and served as its Prime Minister for many years.

Ben Gurion was in retirement, his party having been routed in the last elections, when I called on him in his Tel Aviv home (he had his more permanent residence in a distant Kibbutz). His wife Paula met me at the door, which was guarded, by the way, by a single soldier. She looked me up and down, and directed me to wipe my feet clean of dust and mud on the mat before entering the house. She sternly told the soldier accompanying me to wipe his feet also.

"Are you a student?" Mrs. Ben Gurion, who was renowned for being a tough lady, asked me. "No, ma’am," I replied. "I’m a journalist."

She snorted: "That’s even worse!" But she led me upstairs where Ben Gurion was waiting in his library, which was lined floor to ceiling with books in Polish, French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

"Are you Hawaiian?" Ben Gurion inquired.

"No, I am a Filipino," I said.

"What is the religion of the Filipinos?" He inquired further.

"We are Catholics mostly, meaning Christians," I said. (Tactfully, I didn’t bring up our millions of Muslims at first, but he looked at me shrewdly and remarked: "Some of you are Muslims, too." I nodded, smiling.)

"Bah," Ben Gurion snorted. "Your New Testament is a work of fiction written in very bad Greek!"

When he saw me bridling, his craggy face lit into a broad grin (no pun intended on his name). He laughed: "I was only joking." Yet, to this day, I suspect he was not.

Frankly, for all his typically irritating Jewish wit, I found Ben Gurion delightful. He looked like an Old Testament prophet, bald on top, with the rest of his hair standing out on end with ferocity. He was brilliant in conversation and oozed chutzpah and charisma from every pore.

In 1948, when Ben Gurion’s fledgling, badly-armed army (their only armor had been steel plates welded on old jitneys and vans, and their only "air force" had been composed of piper cubs and other light aircraft) was attacked by seven Arab armies, led by Egypt and Jordan’s redoubtable Arab Legion, it was obvious the Arabs intended to crush Israel once and for all. The Jews had instead defeated the invaders decisively. I asked Ben Gurion how they had won. Instead of trying to say something pious or portentous, he grinned even wider: "Why, it’s simple. They were pushing us to the water. They wanted to force us into the sea. And I can’t swim! So, we had no alternative but to beat them."

What impressed me most about the "old warriors" of the early Israeli days was their friendliness. The next day, Ben Gurion sent his picture over to me at my hostelry, the King David Hotel. On it he had scrawled: "To Max Soliven – in friendship." It still hangs on my wall.

What a contrast he was, I still shake my head, to Ariel Sharon.

Another impressive trait of the early leaders was their simplicity. In 1972, on another visit, I saw the formidable General Moshe Dayan, his trademark "eye-patch" jauntily aslant, on the terrace of the King David hotel. What surprised me was that he apparently had only one bodyguard, a fellow in a loose civilian shirt, leaning casually against the wall several yards away. Here was a man "wanted dead or alive" by many Arabs – not to mention, if I may add, angry women – and there he was nonchalantly sipping a cup of tea as if he hadn’t a care on the world.

He wasn’t wearing a uniform or badge of any rank. If he hadn’t been so famous, and wearing that famous eye-patch (like the Hathaway shirt man), he would have appeared ordinary.

What happened to such leaders? Are they gone?

* * *

Our government has been informed that the 30,000 or so Filipinos working in Israel don’t want to come home. This might indicate that they feel it’s better to be gainfully employed in a danger zone than to be jobless at home. Or else they believe they’re safer in war-threatened Israel than on the streets of Metro Manila or elsewhere in our crime- and rebellion-wracked archipelago.

Last Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune (April 9) frontpaged an embarrassing article by Jane Perlez of The New York Times. It was headlined: Educated Filipinos Pack Up.

The subhead declared: "Disillusioned, they seek a better life abroad."

I think those headlines speak volumes. Is what journalist Perlez reported true? If we look at what’s happening in our land, we may, grudgingly enough, concede she may be – at least partially – right.

Her concluding paragraphs are not only interesting, but should be a wake-up call to our government.

"Last month," Perlez wrote, "amid much fanfare, Australian dignitaries welcomed Cristina Jurado, 29, accompanied by her husband, Karlos, 32, and their two children, to Sydney. She was the 6-millionth migrant to Australia. Before leaving Manila, she said her patriotism was very much intact and that she did not really want to go. She had a stable job as a system analyst, and her husband worked in his family’s industrial gas business."

"But she did not want her children to grow up," she said, "in a country where even 5-year-olds are raped, the pollution will kill you and the authorities cannot be trusted any more."

In the rush to deadline, I suppose, writer Perlez made it sound, without meaning to, that Mrs. Jurado was the 6-millionth "Filipino" immigrant to Australia. Not so. She meant there have been six million immigrants from all countries to Australia, and Jurado is the six-millionth. The last time I looked, I think there were about 120,000 Filipino immigrants in Australia. That’s better than in 1966, of course, when we were fighting the "White Australia" policy, and there were only a handful.

But are Pinoys and Pinays deserting our country? Some, indeed, are fleeing. Those of us who remain not only live in hope – but hopefully work and fight for change.