“Our faith was born there, as was our language, our nationhood, our pride. It is incumbent upon us to defend ------ even if we all die.”
If you read those words, you would be forgiven for believing they were uttered as a declaration of eternal Jewish love and support for Jerusalem and Zion. You would be wrong. Fill in the blank and you will discover that they were uttered by Serbian Deputy Prime Minister, Draskovitch, some twelve years ago while referring to Kosovo.
The Serbs lost their ancestral heartland of Kosovo to the Muslim Turks a little over 600 years ago at the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds. Serbs never stop dreaming of lost Kosovo; it is now part of their national yearning for its eventual return, though the present occupation of Kosovo by the Albanian Muslims casts a giant shadow over any hope for its redemption. Still it is the hoped for return that unites most Serbs just as Jerusalem’s reunification and restoration to the Jewish people unites most Jews.
Six hundred years is a long time for a people to weep over its still lost heartland. Jews themselves wept over the loss of their Jerusalem for a far, far longer period – almost 1,800 years during the long exile before Jerusalem’s liberation from alien occupation in that momentous and miraculous summer of 1967.
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