ALLEGIANCE TO THE UNITED STATES

The other day, some friends and I were discussing Obama's campaign for the presidency. When I offered my opinion that an Obama administration would change America's Mideast policy in favor of the Palestinians, one participant said that I was one of those Jews with an allegiance to Israel. I tried to make it perfectly clear that my allegiance is to the United States of America, the country I dearly love, and not to Israel.

Admittedly, because of my background, I am a very staunch and hard-line supporter of the State of Israel. My parents and I came to this country in 1936 as refugees from Nazi Germany, three years after Hitler came to power. Both sets of my granparents were lost in the holocaust which took the lives of six million Jews.

The persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Germany and Austria was preceded by a history of progroms against Jews in eastern Europe - Poland (In 1648, 100,000 Jews were slain by Polish Ukranians), Russia (In 1905, hundreds of Jews were massacred in Odessa), Lithuania, the Balkans, etc.. In every country occupied by the German army during WWII, there were many people who were eager to point out Jews and to help round them up for deportation and shipment off to Nazi death camps.

My family was very fortunate in that we were able to come to America at a time when the United States refused to take in most of those Jews who tried to come here in a desperate attempt to flee the Nazis. We were admitted only because we had some relatives here who agreed to sponsor us. Despite our government's awareness of the Nazi's "final solution," Jews were not allowed refuge in the United States if they did not have an American sponsor.

Thus, most German Jews were not as fortunate as we were. When we came here, this country was ripe with anti-Semitism and I suspect that was the reason the United States refused to accept Jewish refugees. As a result, countless Jews who could have been saved, perished in the Holocaust. My love for and allegiance to this country has never wavered even though the United States must bear some responsibility for the deaths of many Jews in Hitler's concentration camps.

This brings me to the reason why the survival of Israel is so important to Jews. Jews continue to be persecuted in parts of eastern Europe and in the Muslim dominated countries of Africa and Asia. There has been a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany and other western European countries. Israel is the only place of refuge for those Jews who are not wanted in other countries where they happen to live.

Israel is in an extremely precarious position. It is surrounded by millions of Arabs, the Palestinians among them, who have vowed to destroy the "Zionist entity." Israel is a very tiny nation, only nine miles wide at one point. For security reasons, it is imperative that Israel must retain parts of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Israel is constantly pressured by the United Nations, the European Union, and to some extend by the United States, to make concessions to the Palestinians that will be detrimental to its security and survival.

And what about the Palestinians? We are constantly subjected to the false but politically correct assertion that Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction of the Palestinian Authority are "moderates" who want nothing more than an independent Palestinian state living in peace, side by side with Israel. When Abbas and other Palestinian leaders speak to the Western World in English, that is what they say. But that is a big lie! Nothing could be further from the truth!

When Abbas and his lieutenants speak in Arabic, it is clear that their true goal is an independent state which encompasses all of the old Palestine and calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state. And since the inception of Yasser Arafat's PLO, Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, have repeatedly expressed the vow to exterminate Israel, and they continue to do so to this very day. Moderate? That's a joke! Abbas and Fatah may not be quite as radical as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, but make no mistate about it, they are radicals in sheep's clothing.

As a former refugee from Nazi Germany, I am a staunch supporter of Israel and I take a hardline position against the Israelis giving what I call suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. But, I owe no allegiance to the State of Israel. Let there be no doubt, my allegiance is to this great country of ours, the United States of America! That is why I proudly fly the American flag (illuminated at night) in front of my home 24/7. God bless America!