"All predatory systems of power seek to mask their ultimate aims. As they become more repressive, they become more deceptive. They silence dissidents and bombard the airwaves with lies. Those who effectively resist have to peel back the layers of deceit to understand the intentions of the elites." Chris Hedges
In the middle of the last century an assortment of pseudo-intellectuals in the form of the idle rich, the beatniks, and the hippies imported Eastern religions into the Western world. They didn't bring in these religions in their entirety, rather they plucked out the philosophy and left behind the idolatry that would not have been palatable to Western Judeo-Christian audiences.
The idolatry is the main part, the philosophies being thin and quickly consumed. Nevertheless, the Eastern religion importers, in the spirit of Hollywood producers, did their best to make the philosophies seem as substantive and glamorous as possible, sometimes getting rich in the process. In so doing they conned millions of people into Eastern religious practice, starting with the philosophy, moving on to mantras consisting of the names of false gods, and ending in many cases with special rooms for idol worship in nice American and British suburban homes. Many Jews were duped.
One sees the central workings of Eastern religions with a simple trip to the Orient. The idols are everywhere. I made such a visit - on a business trip - expecting to find Zen literature book stores but finding instead idols and more idols and more idols. The main tourist attraction in many famous Asian cities is the huge statue of the god. The beautiful buildings seem to be built by the British, the idols were local. My trip occurred a decade ago but I still haven't quite recovered from the gush, the avalanche of idolatry.
Similarly, Modern Orthodox 'rabbis' imported Israeli Zionism into the West. As the beatniks sanitized Hinduism, the Zionism importers packaged up their alien religion into a pseudo Torah with pseudo idealism. I reflect on the numerous shiurim I attended at Yeshiva University and Modern Orthodox synagogues in Teaneck and Manhattan where the lecturer and attendees happily engaged in tidy investigations into such matters as whether one can say Hallel on Yom Hatzmut or whether we have found the historic techeles dye. Equipped with source sheets and vague references to an actual contemporary rabbinical figure or two, we pretended to consider such matters as whether redemption need come all at once or if it were unfolding before our eyes. Few of us seem to really weigh out the question as if it were difficult. The general assumption sat decidedly in the camp of the latter perspective. But it all seemed reasonable, and thoughtful, and intellectual and idealistic. It was packaged up to be like any other Torah study. It seemed sincere and not far from what we were used to.
I came to Israel expecting heightened discussion along the same lines but found myself recalling my trip to the Orient. In Israel, few if any in the Zionist camp are analyzing Gemaras and Rambans to get to the truth about snail shells, nobody other than American Zionist rabbis teaching American students in their one year abroad. Rather, they were busy hailing the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, and determining where they should flex their muscles next. Hallel and blue strings were a given, not even a question. So was land conquest. It's all a question of what they can get away with. And the Gemara in Kesubos about the Three Oaths doesn't exist for them. Rather, they were preparing celebrations for Yom HaAtzmut and Yom Yerushalayim. And what was special about those days, those were days marking military victories. At the 'Chardal' - 'Charedi' national religious - day school near my house - the one where the boys carry cell phones - Yom Yerushalayim is getting a special set of festivities tomorrow and the boys will wear white shirts. No matter that Shavuous is also taking place this week. There's no special day for or even focus on that, but Yom Yerushalayim is front and center. So much for the 'Charedi' in Chardal.
And what about Yom HaZicharon, the day a principal in that same school described to the boys as being as holy as Yom Kippur? A ceremony was staged by some unknown organizer outside my apartment this year and centered around a video of footage of tanks in the desert. Israelis are very taken by footage of tanks in the desert. Interviews with solders talked about military strategies and battles. We saw little about individual solders, their lives, their family losses. They weren't people, they were little disposable pieces of the IDF, dying for the cause of IDF victory.
And then there was the obligatory ceremony by the Kosel, the merging of the IDF and Judaism. This reminded me of incident from years ago where a neighbor in New York invited me and my roommates over for an apartment warming festivity. It turns out that she was an adherent of Jews for J. And so we walked into the apartment to see on her wall a huge mural - seemed almost like wallpaper - with an image of the Xtian god superimposed over the Kosel. In near horror, my eyes darted around the room to see men and women with yarmulkas on their heads, tzittizis hanging from their wastes, and crucifixes from their necks. It was the craziest, most confusing sight. The IDF ceremony at the Kosel reminded me of this. I was thinking, David the King was not allowed to build the Temple because he had, out of necessity and command of God, engaged in war. And here was this secular army which has engaged in endless questionable violence which turns boys into thugs and girls into zonas having a staged solemn ceremony at the wall of the Temple build by David's son.
So the military is staging ceremonies at the Kosel. I have seen them at the Kenesset too, sitting in the viewing balcony. They are on the buses and train platforms, smoking cigarettes. They fill the restaurants. The military is everywhere and everything in Israel. Solders are everywhere as the government enforces mandatory global conscription. Seeing young men with Jewish faces slinging rifles over their enlarged biceps is a strange site and seeing young women with Jewish faces slinging rifles over green fatigues is an even stranger one.
Seeing the dead, killer looks in their eyes is the strangest sight of all. I sit with solders for hours a day on the train. They show none of the joy of youth and the glow of innocence as they appear to have no innocence. The military beats it out of them and turns them into what seems like pure arrogance. They sit all over the steps that lead to the train platform, they block the aisles, they put their feet on the seats. They seem markedly different from the American solders I saw in the USA as the latter seem to be trying to live up to a code a conduct. The Israeli solders seem to be trained to not have any code at all, other than fear and loyalty to the commanders and relishing in their own power. The IDF has turned a generation of Jewish youth into Esav.
Numerous Israelis have confessed to me how much they suffered in the military. While the Zionist rabbi salesman paint a picture of a professional high-tech force that nurtures its charges with self-discipline, the military is in fact an institution of abuse. One young man told me that he was changed forever for the worse by his three years in the military. He said that he lost his joy for life. I know of another that has had a sleep disorder ever since his time in the military. This wasn't from combat as he didn't see any. It was from the treatment of his commanders. Another told me that life in the military is pure hell. Another told me that he contemplated suicide about a dozen times.
Evidentially, he wasn't the only one as suicide is the highest cause of death in the IDF. Haaretz reported that in 2011, 21 solders committed suicide, "more than the number of soldiers who died as a result of disease, traffic accidents, operational activity or other calamities." Regarding 2010, Haaretz reported:
And just as a side note, 357 died in road accidents in 2015. (Source: Israelnationalnews.com), yet Israelis who claim to care so much about Jewish lives continue to drive like maniacs. The rate has risen in each of the last three years.
I expected to come here and hear debate about the military because part of the packaging of Zionism for Westerners is the portrayal of Israel as a vibrant democracy full of open debate. Perhaps it once was, but I see little evidence of that now. There's some debate as to whether solders can be held accountable for shooting disarmed terrorists but next to none about the two-state solution, the draft, torture, the military budget and the country's alarming dedication of resources to its military machine. The newspapers seem to spend about half their ink ranting about world antisemitism and the other half on whether we should care about world opinion from the horrible antisemites that mysteriously litter the world. I say mysteriously because how do people who don't believe in God or Torah believe in the concept of antisemitism? What would cause it? Nevertheless, that's the explanation for every aspect of the world's condemnation of the antics of the Israel military.
Even the debate about shooting terrorists doesn't focus much on the morality of it but how it looks to the world. Most don't care how it looks in any sense of morality or general approval but fear somewhat that upsetting the entire planet might have negative affects on the economy. There's something distinctly narcissistic about the whole discussion. There's next to no questioning of the military in any existential or moral sense. You are as likely to find questioning of the military in the Jerusalem Post as you are the question of gadolim in the Yated.
There's little questioning in private conversation either. Another myth of the Zionism salesmen is that Israel is a land of open debate that never affects relationships. This is completely false, particularly if you question the military. Now, you are a traitor. We never talk to you again. Ever. A guy at work stopped talking to me because I questioned the Shin Beit's torture of Jewish youth in the territories. We were supposed to trust this agency and its goons and their secret, magical ways of sniffing out guilt. The Israeli public ascribes supernatural abilities to the security agencies. They worship them.
Some claim that the Jewish part of Israel consists of religious Jews and non-religious Jews but really they are all religious. And there are two religious - Torah Judaism and militarism. Chiloni society is preoccupied, obsessed with the military. They worship it. It is nothing short of a god. And as with any idol worship there are two dynamics: terror of nature and worship of a worldly god that is just a little more powerful but no more moral.
This deal with the devil is justified by endless propaganda about the Palestinians. They are all killers you see. Now this is just an assertion. It's not backed up by any fact. Let's look at some facts. There are 4.4 million Palestinians in Israel. (Source: Haaretz, Jan 1, 2013, "Palestinians to Outnumber Jewish Population by 2020, Says PA Report") From 2011 to 2015, Israel endured an average of 50 terrorist attempts a year, most of them closer to random acts of violence than organized activity. (Source: Johnston Archive) The math comes out to .001%. The facts don't support the assertion that they are all killers and we must be completely mobilized at all times to stop them. So where else are our enemies? Jordan, Egypt? We haven't had a war with them in 40 years.
So why does Israel continue to drain its energies, money, and youth on the military? It is habit? Maybe to some extent but I think much more than that it's a religion, a false god, maybe the most toxic in the history of klal Yisroel. The military for Israelis operates as a kind of mesorah. It's as if they have taken a Jew's natural instinct for mesorah and applied it here. They cling to it with the stubbornness that a Jew is supposed to direct towards the Torah mesorah. It's like the naaseh, we will do, of naaseh v'nishmah. The v'nishmah consists of lies and propaganda that would give the Soviets a run for their money.
The propaganda is relentless. The Israeli government organizes it and pays for it. They put it in the papers, they operate websites, they put it in the school curriculum, and they swarm foreign governments, particularly the USA, with lobbyists. They say always, you must trust us, we live in reality, you fantasy. Yet, they misinform and rarely use facts. I watched a debate recently between an aide to General Sharon and a critic of Israeli policy. The aide in that smug manner of nearly everyone in his camp constantly reminded us how he lives in reality and the rest of us don't. Yet, I noticed that he never cited facts. He kept referring to his grandfather who came to Israel with his bible in one hand and his gun in the other. His talk was nearly all romantic, romantic about violence, strangely, yet he, we are to believe, is the one who lives in reality. He was a goon. He was stupid but he didn't know it. He thought he was brilliant. After all, he is Jewish. Aren't we all brilliant whether we work at it or not? That's the attitude around here. We are Jewish we are brilliant and moral. It's automatic and can't be questioned. Pay no attention to the facts behind the curtain.
I could talk for hours about the facts I have uncovered, facts that refute our glamorous image of ourselves as having the world's most humane army, with a wondrous democracy, in a first-world country with equal rights for all citizens. Meanwhile, Arab citizens in Israel constitute 20% of the population and live on 7% of the land. Each Arab citizen receives 1/5 the government services received by each Jewish citizen. In the territories, the non-citizen Arabs get 20% of the water even though they constitute 80% of the population. Those are facts. And we wonder why the Palestinians are angry with us.
And then there are the myths like Barak offered Arafat everything he wanted but Arafat refused only because really he just wants to kill us. The fact is that the offer at Camp David II was for 73% of the West Bank, a figure that would rise gradually to 92%. The land was a patchwork of discontinuous cantons that's almost comical when one views the drawing. The Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami says that the offer was unreasonable. That's the Israeli foreign minister, not the UN, not Norman Finkelstein. The Taba talks were thrown together in a hurry before the upcoming Israeli elections and there the offer was reasonable and the Palestinians were close to accepting it, as they had the Clinton parameters, but Israel paused the talks because of its elections, and then Sharon, who won, canceled them entirely. It was we, the Israelis, who walked away. My source for this, in addition to numerous documents and witnesses, is the Israeli foreign minister, who is, by the way, a reasonable, decent man and not a goon at all.
Israel has produced other reasonable decent men but many of the are forced to leave the country. I refer to Miko Peled who is the son of an Israeli general and grandson of a signer of the declaration of Independence. I refer to the academics Zev Meoz, Ilan Pape, and Avi Shlaim. They are Israeli born and raised but dare to criticize the government. None of them live in Israel anymore. Life was made too difficult for them there.
What about the goons. We outsiders who come to Israel all wonder about the source of the Israeli personality, the brash, arrogant, domineering, argumentative, impatience. The common explanation is that their sufferings are the cause. Yet, my grandmother suffered in Eastern Europe, suffered much more than Israelis have ever suffered and she was a sweet as can be.
So I propose a different theory which is that idol worship of the military is the cause. We become like the god we worship. If one worships the God of kindness and compassion, self-discipline and law, holiness and transcendence of the physical, then that person will become sweet. If one worships the god of war, he will become like the aide to General Sharon and many others around here - brash, lacking in empathy, impatient, bull-headed, and prone to violence.
I hear many in the Modern Orthodox "Religious" Zionist camp defend the Mistake of Israel on the grounds that it prevents assimilation. It may prevent intermarriage to some extent but with all the fake conversions they staged and half-Jewish gentiles they took in, we can't brag so much about this anymore. Either way, it does not prevent either assimilation or mamzerus. And is marriage between two Jews who are acting like the worst gentiles not a kind of intermarriage? The whole secular part of the country is one big intermarriage with the gentile world. At this point the bad behavior is so ingrained, one wonders if Moshiach can pull them out of it.
Judaism has never been about the numbers. There were other good men in Avraham's day but we hear little about them. Hashem wants only the best and so history became the history of Avraham and his family. There were 12 tribes in Israel, descendants of the sons of Yaakov, but 10 of them were chased away and lost forever because they didn't measure up. 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva, scholars that would blow any of us out of the water, were killed in a plague because they didn't measure up. Prevention of intermarriage is not reason enough for a society of sin, theft, and murder. Far better people were wiped out or chased off the land. The Modern Orthodox Zionists don't understand any of this because quite frankly they are not people of Torah and they don't want you to be people of Torah either. They want you to worship their god, the god of war.
They don't tell you all that when they are working over your brain back in the Five Towns. But Israelis kind of know it. An Israeli man complained to me today about the harshness of the typical Israeli personality. I suggested he move to Haifa where people are reputed to be a little nicer. He said this wasn't possible because of all the pollution there. Some recent studies have shown that the pollution is so bad that babies are being born with smaller heads. I noted how odd it was we'd find such an intense pollution problem in a society that claims to be advanced and progressive and first-world. He said to me, nobody here in Israel believes that about Israel, about it's being progressive and civilized.
It's like the Indians in India. One who was living in America used to tell me about all the idols he worshiped. He was quite open about it. No shame in it for him. It's no secret out there in the real India, as opposed to the fake India of Berkeley and Greenwich Village. It's Westerners who don't know the truth about India or Israel and the idol worship that dominate their societies.
In the middle of the last century an assortment of pseudo-intellectuals in the form of the idle rich, the beatniks, and the hippies imported Eastern religions into the Western world. They didn't bring in these religions in their entirety, rather they plucked out the philosophy and left behind the idolatry that would not have been palatable to Western Judeo-Christian audiences.
The idolatry is the main part, the philosophies being thin and quickly consumed. Nevertheless, the Eastern religion importers, in the spirit of Hollywood producers, did their best to make the philosophies seem as substantive and glamorous as possible, sometimes getting rich in the process. In so doing they conned millions of people into Eastern religious practice, starting with the philosophy, moving on to mantras consisting of the names of false gods, and ending in many cases with special rooms for idol worship in nice American and British suburban homes. Many Jews were duped.
One sees the central workings of Eastern religions with a simple trip to the Orient. The idols are everywhere. I made such a visit - on a business trip - expecting to find Zen literature book stores but finding instead idols and more idols and more idols. The main tourist attraction in many famous Asian cities is the huge statue of the god. The beautiful buildings seem to be built by the British, the idols were local. My trip occurred a decade ago but I still haven't quite recovered from the gush, the avalanche of idolatry.
Similarly, Modern Orthodox 'rabbis' imported Israeli Zionism into the West. As the beatniks sanitized Hinduism, the Zionism importers packaged up their alien religion into a pseudo Torah with pseudo idealism. I reflect on the numerous shiurim I attended at Yeshiva University and Modern Orthodox synagogues in Teaneck and Manhattan where the lecturer and attendees happily engaged in tidy investigations into such matters as whether one can say Hallel on Yom Hatzmut or whether we have found the historic techeles dye. Equipped with source sheets and vague references to an actual contemporary rabbinical figure or two, we pretended to consider such matters as whether redemption need come all at once or if it were unfolding before our eyes. Few of us seem to really weigh out the question as if it were difficult. The general assumption sat decidedly in the camp of the latter perspective. But it all seemed reasonable, and thoughtful, and intellectual and idealistic. It was packaged up to be like any other Torah study. It seemed sincere and not far from what we were used to.
I came to Israel expecting heightened discussion along the same lines but found myself recalling my trip to the Orient. In Israel, few if any in the Zionist camp are analyzing Gemaras and Rambans to get to the truth about snail shells, nobody other than American Zionist rabbis teaching American students in their one year abroad. Rather, they were busy hailing the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, and determining where they should flex their muscles next. Hallel and blue strings were a given, not even a question. So was land conquest. It's all a question of what they can get away with. And the Gemara in Kesubos about the Three Oaths doesn't exist for them. Rather, they were preparing celebrations for Yom HaAtzmut and Yom Yerushalayim. And what was special about those days, those were days marking military victories. At the 'Chardal' - 'Charedi' national religious - day school near my house - the one where the boys carry cell phones - Yom Yerushalayim is getting a special set of festivities tomorrow and the boys will wear white shirts. No matter that Shavuous is also taking place this week. There's no special day for or even focus on that, but Yom Yerushalayim is front and center. So much for the 'Charedi' in Chardal.
And what about Yom HaZicharon, the day a principal in that same school described to the boys as being as holy as Yom Kippur? A ceremony was staged by some unknown organizer outside my apartment this year and centered around a video of footage of tanks in the desert. Israelis are very taken by footage of tanks in the desert. Interviews with solders talked about military strategies and battles. We saw little about individual solders, their lives, their family losses. They weren't people, they were little disposable pieces of the IDF, dying for the cause of IDF victory.
And then there was the obligatory ceremony by the Kosel, the merging of the IDF and Judaism. This reminded me of incident from years ago where a neighbor in New York invited me and my roommates over for an apartment warming festivity. It turns out that she was an adherent of Jews for J. And so we walked into the apartment to see on her wall a huge mural - seemed almost like wallpaper - with an image of the Xtian god superimposed over the Kosel. In near horror, my eyes darted around the room to see men and women with yarmulkas on their heads, tzittizis hanging from their wastes, and crucifixes from their necks. It was the craziest, most confusing sight. The IDF ceremony at the Kosel reminded me of this. I was thinking, David the King was not allowed to build the Temple because he had, out of necessity and command of God, engaged in war. And here was this secular army which has engaged in endless questionable violence which turns boys into thugs and girls into zonas having a staged solemn ceremony at the wall of the Temple build by David's son.
So the military is staging ceremonies at the Kosel. I have seen them at the Kenesset too, sitting in the viewing balcony. They are on the buses and train platforms, smoking cigarettes. They fill the restaurants. The military is everywhere and everything in Israel. Solders are everywhere as the government enforces mandatory global conscription. Seeing young men with Jewish faces slinging rifles over their enlarged biceps is a strange site and seeing young women with Jewish faces slinging rifles over green fatigues is an even stranger one.
Seeing the dead, killer looks in their eyes is the strangest sight of all. I sit with solders for hours a day on the train. They show none of the joy of youth and the glow of innocence as they appear to have no innocence. The military beats it out of them and turns them into what seems like pure arrogance. They sit all over the steps that lead to the train platform, they block the aisles, they put their feet on the seats. They seem markedly different from the American solders I saw in the USA as the latter seem to be trying to live up to a code a conduct. The Israeli solders seem to be trained to not have any code at all, other than fear and loyalty to the commanders and relishing in their own power. The IDF has turned a generation of Jewish youth into Esav.
Numerous Israelis have confessed to me how much they suffered in the military. While the Zionist rabbi salesman paint a picture of a professional high-tech force that nurtures its charges with self-discipline, the military is in fact an institution of abuse. One young man told me that he was changed forever for the worse by his three years in the military. He said that he lost his joy for life. I know of another that has had a sleep disorder ever since his time in the military. This wasn't from combat as he didn't see any. It was from the treatment of his commanders. Another told me that life in the military is pure hell. Another told me that he contemplated suicide about a dozen times.
Evidentially, he wasn't the only one as suicide is the highest cause of death in the IDF. Haaretz reported that in 2011, 21 solders committed suicide, "more than the number of soldiers who died as a result of disease, traffic accidents, operational activity or other calamities." Regarding 2010, Haaretz reported:
In 2010, more soldiers committed suicide than those who died due to other circumstances, including traffic accidents and disease. According to the army’s statistics, 28 soldiers took their lives in 2010, 14 soldiers died in traffic accidents and 10 from disease.11 people died in 2010 from acts of terrorism. This means that the sick culture at the IDF took more than twice as many lives as the so-called enemies of Israel. Who is the real enemy I ask?
And just as a side note, 357 died in road accidents in 2015. (Source: Israelnationalnews.com), yet Israelis who claim to care so much about Jewish lives continue to drive like maniacs. The rate has risen in each of the last three years.
I expected to come here and hear debate about the military because part of the packaging of Zionism for Westerners is the portrayal of Israel as a vibrant democracy full of open debate. Perhaps it once was, but I see little evidence of that now. There's some debate as to whether solders can be held accountable for shooting disarmed terrorists but next to none about the two-state solution, the draft, torture, the military budget and the country's alarming dedication of resources to its military machine. The newspapers seem to spend about half their ink ranting about world antisemitism and the other half on whether we should care about world opinion from the horrible antisemites that mysteriously litter the world. I say mysteriously because how do people who don't believe in God or Torah believe in the concept of antisemitism? What would cause it? Nevertheless, that's the explanation for every aspect of the world's condemnation of the antics of the Israel military.
Even the debate about shooting terrorists doesn't focus much on the morality of it but how it looks to the world. Most don't care how it looks in any sense of morality or general approval but fear somewhat that upsetting the entire planet might have negative affects on the economy. There's something distinctly narcissistic about the whole discussion. There's next to no questioning of the military in any existential or moral sense. You are as likely to find questioning of the military in the Jerusalem Post as you are the question of gadolim in the Yated.
There's little questioning in private conversation either. Another myth of the Zionism salesmen is that Israel is a land of open debate that never affects relationships. This is completely false, particularly if you question the military. Now, you are a traitor. We never talk to you again. Ever. A guy at work stopped talking to me because I questioned the Shin Beit's torture of Jewish youth in the territories. We were supposed to trust this agency and its goons and their secret, magical ways of sniffing out guilt. The Israeli public ascribes supernatural abilities to the security agencies. They worship them.
Some claim that the Jewish part of Israel consists of religious Jews and non-religious Jews but really they are all religious. And there are two religious - Torah Judaism and militarism. Chiloni society is preoccupied, obsessed with the military. They worship it. It is nothing short of a god. And as with any idol worship there are two dynamics: terror of nature and worship of a worldly god that is just a little more powerful but no more moral.
This deal with the devil is justified by endless propaganda about the Palestinians. They are all killers you see. Now this is just an assertion. It's not backed up by any fact. Let's look at some facts. There are 4.4 million Palestinians in Israel. (Source: Haaretz, Jan 1, 2013, "Palestinians to Outnumber Jewish Population by 2020, Says PA Report") From 2011 to 2015, Israel endured an average of 50 terrorist attempts a year, most of them closer to random acts of violence than organized activity. (Source: Johnston Archive) The math comes out to .001%. The facts don't support the assertion that they are all killers and we must be completely mobilized at all times to stop them. So where else are our enemies? Jordan, Egypt? We haven't had a war with them in 40 years.
So why does Israel continue to drain its energies, money, and youth on the military? It is habit? Maybe to some extent but I think much more than that it's a religion, a false god, maybe the most toxic in the history of klal Yisroel. The military for Israelis operates as a kind of mesorah. It's as if they have taken a Jew's natural instinct for mesorah and applied it here. They cling to it with the stubbornness that a Jew is supposed to direct towards the Torah mesorah. It's like the naaseh, we will do, of naaseh v'nishmah. The v'nishmah consists of lies and propaganda that would give the Soviets a run for their money.
The propaganda is relentless. The Israeli government organizes it and pays for it. They put it in the papers, they operate websites, they put it in the school curriculum, and they swarm foreign governments, particularly the USA, with lobbyists. They say always, you must trust us, we live in reality, you fantasy. Yet, they misinform and rarely use facts. I watched a debate recently between an aide to General Sharon and a critic of Israeli policy. The aide in that smug manner of nearly everyone in his camp constantly reminded us how he lives in reality and the rest of us don't. Yet, I noticed that he never cited facts. He kept referring to his grandfather who came to Israel with his bible in one hand and his gun in the other. His talk was nearly all romantic, romantic about violence, strangely, yet he, we are to believe, is the one who lives in reality. He was a goon. He was stupid but he didn't know it. He thought he was brilliant. After all, he is Jewish. Aren't we all brilliant whether we work at it or not? That's the attitude around here. We are Jewish we are brilliant and moral. It's automatic and can't be questioned. Pay no attention to the facts behind the curtain.
I could talk for hours about the facts I have uncovered, facts that refute our glamorous image of ourselves as having the world's most humane army, with a wondrous democracy, in a first-world country with equal rights for all citizens. Meanwhile, Arab citizens in Israel constitute 20% of the population and live on 7% of the land. Each Arab citizen receives 1/5 the government services received by each Jewish citizen. In the territories, the non-citizen Arabs get 20% of the water even though they constitute 80% of the population. Those are facts. And we wonder why the Palestinians are angry with us.
And then there are the myths like Barak offered Arafat everything he wanted but Arafat refused only because really he just wants to kill us. The fact is that the offer at Camp David II was for 73% of the West Bank, a figure that would rise gradually to 92%. The land was a patchwork of discontinuous cantons that's almost comical when one views the drawing. The Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami says that the offer was unreasonable. That's the Israeli foreign minister, not the UN, not Norman Finkelstein. The Taba talks were thrown together in a hurry before the upcoming Israeli elections and there the offer was reasonable and the Palestinians were close to accepting it, as they had the Clinton parameters, but Israel paused the talks because of its elections, and then Sharon, who won, canceled them entirely. It was we, the Israelis, who walked away. My source for this, in addition to numerous documents and witnesses, is the Israeli foreign minister, who is, by the way, a reasonable, decent man and not a goon at all.
Israel has produced other reasonable decent men but many of the are forced to leave the country. I refer to Miko Peled who is the son of an Israeli general and grandson of a signer of the declaration of Independence. I refer to the academics Zev Meoz, Ilan Pape, and Avi Shlaim. They are Israeli born and raised but dare to criticize the government. None of them live in Israel anymore. Life was made too difficult for them there.
What about the goons. We outsiders who come to Israel all wonder about the source of the Israeli personality, the brash, arrogant, domineering, argumentative, impatience. The common explanation is that their sufferings are the cause. Yet, my grandmother suffered in Eastern Europe, suffered much more than Israelis have ever suffered and she was a sweet as can be.
So I propose a different theory which is that idol worship of the military is the cause. We become like the god we worship. If one worships the God of kindness and compassion, self-discipline and law, holiness and transcendence of the physical, then that person will become sweet. If one worships the god of war, he will become like the aide to General Sharon and many others around here - brash, lacking in empathy, impatient, bull-headed, and prone to violence.
I hear many in the Modern Orthodox "Religious" Zionist camp defend the Mistake of Israel on the grounds that it prevents assimilation. It may prevent intermarriage to some extent but with all the fake conversions they staged and half-Jewish gentiles they took in, we can't brag so much about this anymore. Either way, it does not prevent either assimilation or mamzerus. And is marriage between two Jews who are acting like the worst gentiles not a kind of intermarriage? The whole secular part of the country is one big intermarriage with the gentile world. At this point the bad behavior is so ingrained, one wonders if Moshiach can pull them out of it.
Judaism has never been about the numbers. There were other good men in Avraham's day but we hear little about them. Hashem wants only the best and so history became the history of Avraham and his family. There were 12 tribes in Israel, descendants of the sons of Yaakov, but 10 of them were chased away and lost forever because they didn't measure up. 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva, scholars that would blow any of us out of the water, were killed in a plague because they didn't measure up. Prevention of intermarriage is not reason enough for a society of sin, theft, and murder. Far better people were wiped out or chased off the land. The Modern Orthodox Zionists don't understand any of this because quite frankly they are not people of Torah and they don't want you to be people of Torah either. They want you to worship their god, the god of war.
They don't tell you all that when they are working over your brain back in the Five Towns. But Israelis kind of know it. An Israeli man complained to me today about the harshness of the typical Israeli personality. I suggested he move to Haifa where people are reputed to be a little nicer. He said this wasn't possible because of all the pollution there. Some recent studies have shown that the pollution is so bad that babies are being born with smaller heads. I noted how odd it was we'd find such an intense pollution problem in a society that claims to be advanced and progressive and first-world. He said to me, nobody here in Israel believes that about Israel, about it's being progressive and civilized.
It's like the Indians in India. One who was living in America used to tell me about all the idols he worshiped. He was quite open about it. No shame in it for him. It's no secret out there in the real India, as opposed to the fake India of Berkeley and Greenwich Village. It's Westerners who don't know the truth about India or Israel and the idol worship that dominate their societies.
Comments
Post a Comment