re: #5 CuriousLurker

Actually, after re-reading your excellent post - I think this is the best answer to your question about what it means to the other side. On the one hand yes, it is a video. ON the other, it hits home.

Youtube Video

Here is the unedited text. It is a bit more potent.

A Letter to the World from Jerusalem
by Eliezer ben Yisrael
(Stanley Goldfoot)

I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to believe. I am a
Jerusalemite-like yourselves, a man of flesh and blood. I am a citizen of my
city, an integral part of my people.

I have a few things to get off my chest. Because I am not a diplomat, I do
not have to mince words. I do not have to please you or even persuade you.

I owe you nothing. You did not build this city, you did not live in it, you
did not defend it when they came to destroy it. And we will be damned if we
will let you take it away.

There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin, Moscow,
London, and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was a thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves- a humane moral code.

Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightning. Here
apeople who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen would-be conquerors, bled and died on the battle-ments, hurled
themselves into the flames of their burning Temple rather than surrender,
and when finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they forgot Jerusalem, they would see their tongues cleave to their palates, their right arms wither.

For two pain-filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome guests, we
prayed daily to return to this city. Three times a day we petitioned the
Almighty: “Gather us from the four corners of the world, bring us upright to
our land, return in mercy to Jerusalem, Thy city, and swell in it as Thou
promised.” On every Yom Kippur and Passover, we fervently voiced the hope that next year would find us in Jerusalem.

Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos into which you jammed
us, your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel anti-Semitism,
and the final unspeakable horror, the holocaust (and worse, your terrifying
disinterest in it)- all these have not broken us. They may have sapped what
little moral strength you still possessed, but they forged us into steel.