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Lake Success–or Lake Failure
Day
of Judgment Opens in Shadow as Nations
of World Debate Doom of Justice
By OBSERVER
IT IS LIKE
a scene on the Day of Judgment. The time is the day after World War
II, that had been fought on land, on sea, and in the air. A shadow
lies over a desolate world, for already it is the twilight before
the darkness of another World War that will eclipse the previous ones
and may mark the end of the age of man on earth. The world with its
two billion human beings sends emissaries from all its nations to
its greatest metropolis. For a year and more they debate, and search,
and argue for and against giving a little strip of land, 12 miles
wide, to a stateless nation that lives there, the most ancient of
them all, to be called home.
* * *
THE SUN rises
and goes down; the streets are filled with people; cars run on winding
high-ways; trains speed underground; and life goes on its way. But
the sand runs low in the hour glass, and the weapons of destruction
are piled high, and still the Conscience of the world deliberates.
To give the people of the Bible their Promised Land as agreed to by
55 nations at San Remo 28 years ago? To give them, perhaps, only the
part that is this side of the Jordan? Or maybe only a strip twelve
miles wide?
The nations
of the world send emissaries from 12 of their number to investigate
on the spot and to report. The emissaries return: the nations of the
world again deliberate in commissions and vote, in committees and
vote, in the plenum of the Assembly and vote. Finally, they appoint
emissaries of live nations to give the narrow strip of land to this
most ancient people.
The nations
around the Holy Land move their bands there to destroy what Israel
has built; and those on the isles of “The Ten Lost Tribes”
(as the English say of themselves) send arms to the aggressors to
make the destruction possible; and those in the land of the Star Spangled
Banner put an embargo on arms needed by the ancient nation for the
defence of its home.
* * *
THE NATIONS
of the world reconvene. They are given a last chance to make good
the evil which they and their fathers and their forfathers did to
a homeless people, to wanderers over the face of the earth since the
day they lost their home in war of independence with Rome and through
all the generations when they were persecuted for being true to their
faith and to their heritage.
But the nations
repent of their openhandedness. A twelve-mile strip? Too much! They
were too generous! Return the judgment of the nations for reconsideration.
Let us assemble together again at Lake Failure; it is certainly too
much, a twelve-mile strip.
SAYS THE
Prophet Isaiah (Chap. 43) “Let all the nations be gathered together,
and let the people be assembled. . . O, Israel, Fear not: for I have
redeemed thee. . . Fear not: for I, am with thee. . . I will say to
the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back; bring my sons
from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.”
In these
days, in dark store rooms, missiles by the thousands are heaped, one
of which sufficed to snuff out the breath of seventy thousand people
of Hiroshima. Whoever c r e a t e d this world—or did it create itself?—man
can destroy it.
If the nations
of the world, Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike, sitting in
their Tribunal in this year 1948, will twist justice and empty it,
and will stretch out their hand to extinguish the hope of the eternal
people to return home, then:
“Behold
the nations are as drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small
dust of the balance. . . All nations before Him are as nothing;
and they are counted to Him less than nothing, and vanity”
(Isaiah 40)
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