Once there was a house, built a long time ago. Many years after it was built, a family named Hughes moved in. They lived there for a while, but soon enough they moved on. The house changed hands a few more times until one day a new family, the Alensteins, moved in and settled down.
The Alensteins stayed for a long time, having children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And then one day, the Hughes family came back. They kicked down the front door, barged into the house, settled down in the kitchen and announced that he house was theirs again. The Hughes family said that God had decreed that they should have the house. It didn’t matter to them that somebody else lived there, not at all. They wanted the house back, and nobody was going to tell them otherwise.
Now, the Alensteins were a part of a much larger family named the Ahabs, and although they wanted to help, they were powerless because the Hughes were close friends with a rich, powerful family named the Amerigos.
The Amerigos gave the Hughes’ money for lawyers, and they gave them guns and ammunition, and they bribed, intimidated and bullied the whole neighbourhood so that nobody would help the Alensteins. Slowly but surely, the Hughes family moved into the rest of the house, finally forcing the Alensteins into the smallest closet in the smallest bedroom. They said they needed to do it, because the rest of the Ahab clan wanted them out of the house.
Of course, that made no sense to the rest of the neighbourhood, and it made the Ahab clan very angry. They started shouting and throwing stones at the windows of the house. The Hughes family got very upset by this, and they responded by throwing live hand grenades into the smallest closet, in the smallest room, where the Alensteins still lived, and by firing machine guns at every Ahab they saw.
The Amerigos threw their weight around, and bullied and intimidated and bribed the rest of the neighbourhood some more, so that hardly anybody dared to say anything about it. And anybody who did dare to say anything about it got shouted down by the Hughes family, who invented a special word that they used to mean that if anybody dared to criticise them, it meant the person must just be prejudiced. Pretty soon, nobody criticised the Hughes family anymore, no matter how monstrous their behaviour, because nobody wanted to be bullied by the Amerigos, blown up, shot, or called the bad word by the Hughes.
And that’s the story of Israel, but we don't know how it ends yet. My money's on a fire taking out the whole neighbourhood.
