Why I'm Thinking About Moving to Israelby Donna Rachel Edmunds 24 Aug 2014, 2:29 AM PDT 120 post a comment
I was as surprised as anyone when I found myself uttering six loaded words recently. And by ‘recently’ I don’t mean once, dropped into a passing conversation. I mean at least a dozen times, in a dozen such conversations over the past few weeks. Those words were “Maybe we should move to Israel”.
Not, primarily, because I worry about the rise in anti-Semitic attacks affecting me personally. As a church-going Christian I wear a cross on a necklace, and am more often assumed to be Spanish, if anything, so I doubt I would be targeted on the street. And anyway, in our little Sussex village aggression is more likely to be of the passive variety than in the shape of a brick through your window.
And not because I have any great yearning to live in the country of Israel, charming though it is. I’ve visited a few times; it’s nice. The people are friendly to the point of lively gregariousness, and the food is exotic, but good. But the desert landscape, to my mind, compares poorly to the verdancy of my beloved South Downs despite the Israelis’ pioneering use of modern irrigation techniques; also, I don’t speak the language.
No, the reason that I’m seriously considering a move to Israel in the next few years is because I’m developing a strong suspicion that Israel is going to be one of the safest countries on the planet to live in over the next few decades. An odd statement considering the thousands of rockets that have rained down across the country since early July, but consider this – last Wednesday the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), and in a filmed discussion had this to say:
“Radical Islamic terrorism now threatens the entire world. It threatens Israel, it threatens the United States, it threatens the moderate Arab regimes, threatens Europe – everybody. I think we face the same Islamist terror network and we have to fight it together. Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas. You saw the gruesome beheading of James Foley. We see the gruesome murder and execution of three teenagers which Hamas has just admitted that they did. These are branches of the same poisonous tree. We have to make a common front against the common front of radical Islamic terrorism. The free world, the democracies have to stand together against this terrorism. That's the only way we'll roll them back. Ultimately that's the only way we'll defeat them.”
Read more:
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/24/Why-Im-Thinking-About-moving-to-israel
