Jewish PR is schizophrenic. Jewish organizations scream of Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and persecution while Israel brags of her military capabilities. Jewish incessant wailing doesn’t persuade anti-Semites who approve of Holocaust or brush it away on par with African tribal wars, but irritates Gentile friends of Jews. Persecutions don’t easily square with our choosiness, and sheepish submission to massacres fly in the face of our professed dignity. Jews, do you care of German annihilation of Gypsies? Do you respect the Cambodians who quietly submitted to Khmer Rouge’s massacres? The best of Gentiles know they should pity the Jews; besides the short moments of looking at horrific photos from death camps, few feel compassion. That’s entirely natural.
Jews cannot both appeal to historical persecution and persecute Palestinians. Oh, stop that argument. We do persecute them. All the Israeli welfare paid to Arabs doesn’t atone for the offense of taking their land. It is because of Israel that Palestinians live in refugee camps for generations. True, they would be economically worse off without Israel – but free. Or forget the Arabs: how comes those suffering, persecuted Jews break their brothers’ heads in Amona, drag them by feet from Gush Katif, or tear their nostrils in Ramat Gan?
If Jews perpetually suffer, they should be happy leaving peacefully with Arabs in Israel even in the 1956 borders and without Jerusalem. Suffering people deserve safety – anything else is superfluous for them. Many Gentiles demand Israeli concessions on borders, Arab refugees, and Jerusalem in good faith. They are genuinely concerned for Jews’ safety, and push the unwise beings into the compromise with Arabs. Muslims are many, the Jews are few. Muslims are aggressive, Jews – weak and long-suffering. What position do we expect of well-wishing Gentiles? They ask for concessions in our best interests.
But there is an alternative. The generation of Exodus died in Holocaust. New Israeli Jews are not the perpetually suffering weaklings. Some, as in Hebron, are a truly new type of Jews, others less so, but there is a cultural gap between Holocaust generation and us. And by the way, Hebron Jews are not really a new type. Theirs is a very old type of Jew, the sort of us which entered Canaan with Joshua and smote our enemies with good bludgeons and primitive swords. The other type died in the German ovens. We remember the persecutions and hope one day to repay, but we are not persecuted crowd anymore. Jews are taking the Land of Israel not for safety – we will never feel safe among the sea of Muslims – but because we own this land, having received it in perpetual heritage from the highest authority.
We don’t need pity and we won’t pity the Arabs who stand in our way.
"We don’t need pity and we won’t pity the Arabs who stand in our way."
Wow. I just got the chills. Excellent article Obadiah.
What do you think of the increased prevalence in the Israeli army of religious officers? Are they a new breed that will help revive the IDF?
My idea is that diaspora jews had developed a sense of pity among the goyim they live with. Since they have not the guts to make aliyah, some fake argument have to mention.
Of course you cannot play weak and strong at the same time. What kind of person are you? The strong and well settled or the week and suffering wandering jew?
Arabs still are here just because we want them to stay.
About the exodus generation, seems to me be a very incomplete or limited view: Jews fled from Europe, some to Israel, some to anywhere, and a lot of Diaspora jews helped a lot to the young Israel, some with money, some with pressure, some sent their more precious possession:
their children.
So, big honour to those who conquest the land, and big honour to those who helped them.
In both cases, their hearts always were in the same place.
The strenght of the Jews is in the Law and demonstrating its incoherences not in categorizing Jews. Only God can read hearts and minds of individuals. Thus, the strenght of the Jews is showing how Islam being an organic religious philosophy cannot deplete its organic nucleus which is Judaism.
The biggest lesson of Islam is in consultation stressing the necessity of remaining united till the group comes to a scientific conclusion. The strenght of Judaism is in constitutional law demonstrating how it is possible to reduce negative nationalism close to zero by expressing harmoniously constitutional national identities. Yes, Jews had to fight for their survival in the Middle East but all constitutional wisdom leads to an affirmation of the UN decision to create officially Israel… and this including the respect of Islam as the last monotheistic philosophy since the nucleus of Islam… Judaism is in the ME. The Islamic apostasy is pretending that Israel should have been created anywhere else.
According to Islam all messengers received God's science… and God's science can only be 100% true. Thus, Judaism , Christianity and Islam cannot be contrary to each other because they are all 100% true. It cannot be read otherwise constitutionally i.e. strictly as an organic progression. Up to now the main effort constitutionally in interreligious dialogues has not been in reading religions constitutionally globally. All tenants must understand that accepting Islam as the last religious monotheistic religion or philosophy and its truth does mot mean there is not necessity of existence of the others. To draw a parallel, the constitutional Law of Canada even if the number of Natives is small in Canada must maintain their identity in our policies to maintain our organic intrinsic balance. So up to now in the Middle East, we have avoided to talk about real constitutional wisdom by focusing on the birth of Israel as an international but failing to discuss its constitutional organic conformity with Islam since Islam must have a Judaic nucleus.
Please note ,read international act in the before last line.
Obadiah — Very good article. May the type of Jew that entered Canaan with Joshua become dominant soon.
Karole du Pont — What? I tend to ramble, myself, and sometimes I'm not sure if I've understood Obadiah correctly. But your point eludes me, unless it is "Jews must understand the Muslims, and then they will know that Muslims can't kill them". Is that it?
"Constitutional", "organic"?
The Law of the Jews is the Torah. It is not "constitutional" in the modern sense. It is received of God.
You do not seem to have read the Koran. It does NOT consider Judaism and Christianity "100% true". Mohammed was illiterate, but he was familiar with Judaism and Christianity as taught and lived in his time. Where they fall short of the "100%", in his view, was that the Jews kept the Law to themselves, rather than evangelize their pagan Arab cousins, while the Christians worshipped Jesus as God. If the Arian "heresy", that Jesus was an "incarnation" of God limited to a particular time and place, had prevailed at the Council of Nicea, Mohammed would probably have been a Christian. But Jesus as fully God and fully human and at the same time God's son, was just too much logical inconsistency for him to accept.
Despite the Koran's obvious derivation from Judaism and Christianity, Mohammed claimed, and Muslims believe, that it was revealed to him directly. In Muslim belief, the essential contents of Islam would be the same if neither Judaism nor Christianity had ever existed. To Muslim fanatics, it is perfectly OK to kill all the Jews and Christians. They see no "organic" problem there.
God's laws have no ethnicity they are universal but Islam cannot negate humanity's traits in its evolutionary march towards justice. Islam must understand the Truths known from the previous messengers of God, it cannot evacuate them because these messengers were born Jewish. In fact, from King Solomon's lifetimes, the man who was given by God the highest level of wisdom any human before him or after him would have could make a judgment with a 360 degree vision from one question. Since then, humanity comes to wisdom through unity in diversity.
The human challenges through the various biblical stories is the same.. they are universal challenges in the sense humanity is liable to commit the same sins… Pharoah who refuses to submit to God's will… just switch Egyptian with the name for any nation. We learn through the Bible that even MOshe and Solomon did something that God did not agree with. So no religion or leader can pretend to be an earthly 100% replication of God on earth.. at best they can submit to God's will by favouring the highest constitutional conditions to bring symbiosis in between universal love, justice and truth to be functional. THis symbiosis for instance can be dysfunctional when Judaism, Christianity or Islam becomes negative. Christianity is negative when it has no fully applied Charter of Rights as we have seen historically and Islam becomes negative when it negates the truths it must understand and take account of . Judaism fails it roles when it fails to question the others on their understanding of Solomon's … and evenmore when negating Solomon's era is the source of misconceptions. Did Solomon proselytize the others to achieve peace? Solomon's wanted peace in order to be able to build the house of God.
Islam says more or less that humanity did not listen to the previous messengers. Actually, humanity did listen to King Solomon since he did make peace in the Middle East and the Bible says that peace is the fruit of justice.
However, justice is in symbiosis with a proportional level of universal love and truth.
In other words, the highest level of justice is proportional to the highest level of truth and universal love present in a society… this is why we all must aim towards a society always more just constitutionally.
God never said to the Jews that strictly being born of a Jewish mother was defining the Jew… otherwise Moshe would have not been prohibited entering Israel. So the same applies to Christians and Muslims in the form God chose to root his teachings through them.
Where is the universal love commanded through CHrist when one kills others because of their birth differences? What is being Muslim if one refuses any part of the Koran and thus the truths given to other Messengers?
tI adore your commantaryo Karole du Pont
If only History teachers at schools and Universitys would see it the same way!
OK. I wasn't even going to try to respond to Karole du Pont's number 6, so this is for Traudel — What?? The "schools and Universitys" do see it that way, if that way means "we should just all get along, and it is as much, or more, the fault of the Christians and Jews as it is the Muslims, that the fanatical Muslims want to blow everyone else up". Perhaps you meant "the Madrasas". That is where the hate is taught and where the Koran is redacted to eliminate the passages that would condemn the fanatics' murders. Mohammed absolutely did not consider Christians and Jews "infidels", but that is what little children are taught in these "schools".
That should be Joseph, USA.