Prime Minister Netanyahu, reacting to the increasing isolation of Israel, suggested that Israel may need to shift to a “super-Spartan” self-sufficiency.

His critics ran around like their hair was on fire. Jewish talking heads exploded, How will we ever survive without the world?

Would strongly suggest that those griped with panic are looking at this situation from the wrong end of the telescope.

Let us remember who exactly it is that’s going to be isolated.

Jews, comprising 0.2% of the world’s population:

  • Have won 22% of Nobel Prizes (24% since 2000)
  • Have won 50% of non-fiction Pulitzer prizes (not to mention Pulitzer himself)
  • Enough medical advances, everything from pacemakers to polio vaccines, to have saved an estimated 3 billion lives,
  • Enough agricultural advances, from drip irrigation to smart beehives, to save a few billion more
  • Developed everything from Game of Thrones to grape tomatoes
  • Created everything from lasers to Let it Snow (and 16 more of the most popular Christmas songs, including, wait for it, The Christmas Song—“Chestnuts roasting…”)
  • Gave us Leonard Bernstein, Leonard Cohen, and Leonard Nemoy. And Lenny Bruce. But not Lynyrd Skynyrd (although their first producer was Jewish and first drummer, while not Jewish, spent time at the Diaspora Yeshiva in Jerusalem)
  • Israel recycles 90% of its water, and intercepts 90% of the missiles fired at it—and that was before the Iron Beam laser system became operational. (Who knew? MTG was right!! Ther are Jewish space lasers!)

Here’s the bottom line: We shouldn’t be afraid of our isolation from the world. The world should be afraid of their isolation from us.

All we need to do is remember what Donniel Hartman taught us: “We have become a people motivated and guided by crises….We need [instead] to recommit to being a people of great ideas”

We’re Jews. We can handle this.