When I was young, I remember hearing a story about a father and his son. They were walking from the shuk (or the European version thereof) alongside a donkey. While they were walking, they overheard people talking.

"Look at those fools," whispered one man to his companion. "They have a donkey they can ride but they both walk." So the man helped his son (a young boy) onto the donkey. As they walked further, they heard more whispering.

"That boy -- he has no respect," came the next whisper. "He should let his father ride the donkey."

The father changed places with the son. The son walked while the father rode. As they walked further they heard another conversation. "That father is mean. He rides while his small son walks."

So, both the father and the son got up on the donkey. After a short distance, the donkey collapsed from the weight.

A number of years ago, Rick Nelson, a pop icon who grew up on his parents' TV show, went to Madison Square Garden (in New York) for a concert. The concert was of "oldies" singers (from the 1950s) and Rick decided to use this concert as a stage for a comeback. When he played some new songs, he got booed off the stage. So he wrote a song about the experience called "Garden Party" (the garden, of course, being Madison Square). In the chorus of the song he says, "You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself."

This line is the moral of the first story, too.

Over most of the past 2,000 years, Jews all over the world, no matter what country they lived in, tried the best they could to be good citizens of their adopted countries. They were productive members of society when they were permitted and they by and large didn't do anything untoward to any of the other inhabitants of those lands. And yet, we were always considered outsiders, intruders, visiting relatives, so to speak. We were sometimes tolerated, often persecuted, but rarely, if ever, totally accepted.

So, at the end of the 19th century, a movement began to create a Jewish state. We all began to realize how important having a Jewish state was. And in 1948, our prayers were answered. We obtained our own country -- not through revolution or other bloody means, but by negotiations, hard work, and determination. And just as we began to bring our country into being, we were attacked and had to defend ourselves. And defend ourselves we did. We also did a good job of defending ourselves in 1956, 1967, and 1973, among other times. We discovered that centuries of persecution had given us an aptitude for defensive war.

But recently, we've forgotten this. We are allowing the enemy to roll over us. We are handing them victory -- a victory they did not earn morally or physically. We are forgetting that this is our land.

We've tried defending ourselves. We tried removing the terrorists carefully. In Jenin, we sent our soldiers in to go house to house so that civilian life would be preserved, but we then read all over the world how we "massacred" the people of Jenin. Huh? How does killing terrorists and leaving the civilian population basically unscathed qualify as a massacre?

We tried building a wall to keep terrorists out. That, we reasoned, would quiet the critics. Here we are doing something that isn't even fighting a war. It's totally peaceful. But that doesn't satisfy anyone, either.

We tried giving gifts to the enemy. We've rewarded their terrorist activities. We've all but said to them, "Come, kill our babies and our grandmothers, kill our leaders and our doctors, kill all our people, because when you do, we will give you more land until we have nothing or we are all dead."

And now, after the fiasco of giving away Gush Katif (a.k.a. Gaza) to the terrorist regimes of the Palestinian Authority, after having beautiful Gush Katif turned into a launching ground for missiles aimed at Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod, where people live day in and day out listening for the air raid sirens and rushing to bomb shelters, even after all this the government of Israel is negotiating another prize package -- Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. the West Bank).

Our donkey is collapsing.

For 2,000 years, we've been told that we're parasites and interlopers; that we should stay out of other people's countries. So we finally got our own country. And you know what? These same people who have been complaining for 2,000 years that we don't belong in their countries are now telling us we don't belong in our very own country.

When are our leaders going to learn what the late Rick Nelson learned 30 or so years ago? When are we going to learn that we can walk to market next to our donkey? When are we going to learn that this is our country and nothing we do will satisfy the rest of the world? And you know something? When we realize that, we'll also realize another thing. We'll realize that it doesn't pay to even try to please anyone else.

We and our leaders need to realize that only through our hard work will God reward us and keep us healthy and happy in our own land. We have to fight for our country. And if the world doesn't agree with us, so be it. They never have before.