There are those times when you just feel haunted by news of conflict, violence, bloodshed and misery. It is a combination that is dreaded by civilization. Yet one that some segments of some societies find glory in. And it is the stuff of nightmares. For me, in any event, it hits very close to 'home', in the sense that it is the people of my ethnic group who have already suffered the greatest mass trauma of vulnerability in the vile annihilation known as genocide that any ideological regime could purpose devise and put into action.

Once again my people is faced with a threat of annihilation, only this time they have a reborn nation of their own with the resolve and the might and the dedication to ensure there is no repeat of the Holocaust. It is a nation that must rely on its own resources for as during the Holocaust years of World War Two, there are no other nations that are prepared to sacrifice their own in defence of a Jewish homeland.

That there are deaths of innocent civilians, Jews and Arabs, among them the most precious that any group would wish to protect, its children, that are dying because of bellicose threats carried into violent action through ongoing barrages of rocketry with one purpose only; to kill or maim as many human beings as possible, is a reality hard to fathom. That hatred so venomous could drive human psyches to plot and to carry out attacks on those they perceive as enemies because they have declared that they are; other human whom they have no wish to live alongside in peace is beyond belief.

I, at least, and others like me who live in the ancient diaspora, have shelter from those missiles. Jews -- and other ethnic groups living as citizens in Israel -- have no such relief; those rockets can and they will and they do strike anywhere at random. Our souls ache for those who must seek out bomb shelters every time a siren sounds its dreaded message.

From that scenario to one of peace and tranquility speaks to history, geography and a sense of 'belonging' both to ethnic identity and to the country where one was born; in our case, Canada. Far from the Middle East, a land of peaceful complacency unless one lives in Toronto where hundreds of thousands of Jews do, and where I was born, and where in the last several decades Muslims and those supportive of Palestinian Arabs march to commemorate their Nakba; their perception of the tragedy visited upon Palestinians with the (re)creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Where Jews mounting a counter-demonstration in support of Israel, to refute the slanders of a nation dedicated to the welfare and security of Jews worldwide, but which has accommodated itself to the presence of almost two million Arabs, Druze and B'hai residents who have full citizenship rights, belying the claims of anti-Semites that Israel is an 'apartheid state' can be physically attacked, their human right to security violated. 

Whereas Arab states summarily exiled their Arab-Jewish populations that had lived for a thousand years in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, following Partition and Israel's declaration of statehood, and where the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has pledged that no Jews may ever live among Arabs in a Palestinian state. So which is the apartheid state?