The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents nearly half of the world’s Jewish people.
The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews.
Yet, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protesters throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”
Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyo💃ne in it.
There would currently be zero𓄧 chance ♍that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government.
In the postwar era, nearly aᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries — Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Yemen — despite hundreds of years of residence.
Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly 500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.
And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them ꦑare in the vo෴latile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors.
The others have also suffered 🌌a long history of persecution and periodic genocide — catastrophes that are not ꦡnecessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.
Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied for♋ces in the disput🔯ed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces.
As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacr🔴e of Jews on Oct. 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaꦚking Azerbaijan.
This current ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-K🉐arabakh comes a little more than a century after the Turkish genocide of Armenians that led to more than 1 million people being driven out of their ancestral 💧homes and slaughtered.
Christian Armenia,🐈 with only 3 million𝔍 inhabitants, is even smaller than Israel.
And it is nearly ꦜsurrounded by hostile Muslim states.
As in the🌠 case of Israel, the world mostly either ignores the old, familiar brutal sc๊enario, now recurring with the same aggressive players — or does not care.
Christian Greece — a NATO and European Union member — also is similar to Israel in being relatively small, with ܫa population of 10.5 million.
For more than 400 yea𒁏rs, Greece was occupied by Ottoman Turkey.
Roughly a century ago, Turkish forces ethnically cleansed Greeks fromꦕ ancient Ionia ✅and its capital of Smyrna, a homeland of Greek peoples for millennia.
Like Armenia, it shares a border with its historical ෴aggressor Tur🌞key.
Greꩵek islands off the coast of Asia minor are currently subject to constant overflights by Turkish milita💝ry jets.
To Greece’s north are the historically volatile Balkans.
Across the Mediterranean lie a number of often violent and unstable North African nations, the frequent source of mass🔯ive, destabilizing illegal immigration inꦏto Greece.
Tiny Cyprus is another equally vulnerable nation.
Cypriot history is one of constant invasion and occupati🦩on.
Most recently, Cyprus was forcibly divided into Greek and Turkish states in 1974, after Turkey invaded and expelled some 200,000 Greeks from their centuries-o🦋ld homes in the north of the island.
And all these small nations’ vulnerabilities are neither abstract theory, nor ancient history.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, has recently w🐭eighed in on the tensions currently buffeting them all.
With apprehensions rising over Turkish violations of Greek air space in the Aegean, Erdogan has threatened to send a shower of missiles into Athens: “We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes.”
Erdogan also recently bullied Israel with nearly the same warning of a preemptive nocturnal Turkish missile attack, bragging that Turkey could “come at any night unexpectedly.”
He also has ominously weighed in on the Oct. 7 massacres and the Israeli response to it in Gaza: “We will tell the whole world that Israel is a war criminal. We are making preparations for this.”
Of the recent expulsion of the Armenians and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Erdogan also boasted, “We will continue to fulfill this mission which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus region.”
Apparently, Erdo♒gan was referring both to the Ottoman conquest of Armenia and to the later Turkish efforts in the early 20th century to ethnically cleanse Armenia of Armenians.
In all these cases, small and vulnerable countries hold transparent elections and ensur♌e individual rights — in stark contrast to their larger and more aggressive neighbors.
Thei🔯r very continued existences hinge on Western alliances and support — from the European Union, NATO♎ and especially the United States.
In the past, they all suffered catastrophes because they differed from their neighbors in ethnicity, religion and history — and were seen as eith🏅er expendable or irrelevant to their supposed allies and patrons in the West.
If we are not careful, what suppoꦓsedly cannot happen agaඣin most surely will.