The Fire This Time In Israel
For the millionth time, Judaism is a religion, a very diverse religion with no centralized authority, and a wide range of divergent practices.
Israel is a political entity, a country, founded upon the premise that Israelis have a right to occupy the territory they purchased for cash, received as part of the Partition Settlement Plan, or won in combat, a time-honored tradition of the human race.
Israelis have the absolute right to defend themselves from foreign aggression and domestic violence, as all nations do, but Israel is the ONLY nation repeatedly excoriated for acting in self-defense.
All Jews are not Israelis, nor are all Israelis Jews.
There are Christian Israelis and Muslim Israelis.
There are in fact 1.6 million Palestinians living in Israel, where they vote, hold public office, serve in the Knesset and the military, and hold down regular jobs while living within the boundaries of the Israeli nation. They are not relegated to ghettos, except in the West Bank and Gaza, for which Jordan and Egypt are to blame, not Israel, because neither Jordan nor Egypt wants to confer citizenship on the Palestinians living in the territories.
That said, the Israelis really need to re-think their Gaza strategy because bombing and invading Gaza has now gone beyond punishing Hamas and is now punishing innocent Palestinians who are held captive by Hamas and rejected by Jordan and Egypt.
I have lived in both worlds, having worked for International Jewish organizations and having close ties with a number of Sufi orders, and doing both at the same time.I haven’t got any answers for how to fix this mess. In the end, history teaches us that both sides will win but eventually both sides will lose. When the Palestinians lose, it’s a tragedy for them. When the Israelis lose, well, that’s Armageddon, a tragedy for the world.
10/24/2023 @ 11:42 pm
It’s two million now: 1.7 million Muslim Palestinian Israelis and 300,000 Christian Palestinian Israelis.
It’s not a question of punishing anyone. It’s a question of making Hamas stop. How does Israel do that? The question, as usual, is how to attack an organization that constantly hides among civilians without killing civilians. The answer is: you can’t. Israel will get as close as it can, which is why it called for civilian evacuation, but even then it’s a question of degree and of course Israel was roundly criticized for doing something that is ultimately for the purpose of saving civilian lives. So what should Israel do?
The call is for Israel to find the killing of Palestinian civilians prohibitively immoral, but that brings its own huge problem:
If Israel doesn’t kill civilians, then Hamas’ attack is completely successful and will be repeated because it is successful. In other words, Israel has to determine that the lives of Palestinian civilians are worth more than the lives of Israeli, particularly Jewish, civilians.
That’s not happening, nor should it. Israel will at least take its time now, probably thanks to Joe Biden, who pointed out to Netanyahu that the US reacting too quickly to 9/11 resulted in a lot of costly mistakes, such as attacking Iraq.
But Palestinian civilians will still get killed, in large part because Hamas views that as a PR advantage. They’re right; it is.
The term Nazi gets thrown around way too casually. However, Hamas behaved exactly like Einsatzgruppen. There’s no exaggeration involved in that statement at all. It is, front to back, factually accurate. And so it becomes Never Again time, only this time the people expected to endure this yet again have a nuclear triad.
I’ve gotten to see some of how the other side thinks, mainly from writing on Quora. Most of my content over there has been about Zionism and, frankly, I’ve gotten more views than I ever thought I’d get anywhere, though I have not built a community, nor tried to. My community is here, such as it is. I’ve known most of the people I know here for at least a dozen years. What I’ve learned in listening to the other side is a few things. One is that they seem to think that Nazi means “generically nasty” to the point where I’ve seen many claim that what Israel does to the Palestinians is worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews. They really have no clue and, far worse, they aren’t curious, viewing such curiosity as irrelevant. Truth is not what they seek; victory is what they seek. And so their logic goes something like:
Israel isn’t entitled to be Israel. Israel is inherently oppressive of Palestinians.
Israel kills more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis. (Never mind that Palestinians attempt to kill more Israelis than Israel attempts to kill Palestinians. That is, for their purposes, irrelevant. Of course it is, because merit has nothing to do with anything.
Therefore, if Hamas kills a bunch of Israelis, they’re evening the score. More power to them.
They aren’t looking at the How. They don’t know the difference between trying to kill civilians and trying not to.
Some of them will say “What Hamas did was awful, but…”
OK, boilerplate disclaimer over. Establish cred before going functionally antisemitic. Boilerplate is as far as it goes. They are not horrified by how this was done. That should be impossible, but they aren’t. As a Jew I find that impossible, not because it was done to us but because it was done at all. They don’t get Golda Meir’s statement that she could forgive the Arabs for killing out children but not for making us kill theirs. This is a mindset where that statement doesn’t compute. To a Jew it is screamingly eloquent. That statement is to them a non-sequitur. Either these people are enemies or they’re not. There is no spilling wine over Egyptian suffering at the Seder.
Alan, I can’t ever leave Judaism for this. it’s morally too inferior. It isn’t Judaism 3.0, it’s more like Judaism 0.3. How can they not be horrified? How can they worship any incarnation of God and not be horrified? How can they watch men break into the house of an old woman, take her cellphone, take video of her murder, then post that video on the woman’s social media accounts? On what religious grounds do you justify that? That’s not self-preservation, it’s just cruelty, and cruelty is perhaps the worst evil in Judaism. The whole point of Judaism is being humane. Hillel pointed that out over two thousand years ago.
So far I think Israel is still mostly secular, but I look at this and I wonder if I’m seeing a Jewish horror in the making. I wonder if I’m seeing a population that will be viewed as Amalek. That would be religiously driven genocide, not the phony genocide Israel gets accused of conservatively every other minute, but the real genocide. Us Or Them genocide. You didn’t care enough so we had to deal with our own survival Genocide. Come after us and you will die with us Genocide. Apocalyptic Genocide.
There are hardly any survivors yet and yet large parts of the world learned nothing from the Holocaust. Nothing. It’s just another way of getting rid of an ostensible enemy.
All I can say is that this one is different.
10/25/2023 @ 9:47 pm
Kosh, I understand the Burnt Earth policy. Leave your enemy nowhere to go to ground. As Jews, we have been taught to always seek the high moral ground. It’s in our DNA, but survival has also been burnt into our DNA. If not now, then never.
We are in an insoluble dilemma. If I were in Israel right now, even at my age, I would be strapped up and thirsting for blood. (Hell, I carry a firearm every day of my life HERE, but Israelis are largely disarmed unless they are on active duty. That is simply insane.)
In the end, it is all about taking and holding your ground. If you can’t do that, you’re not a nation. You’re merely a group of immigrants passing through. We are not immigrants passing through. We bought the land. We were granted the land. We have taken the land has hors d’combat. I have always been in favor of annexing the West Bank and Gaza because unless we annex the West Bank and Gaza, this will keep happening over and over again.
The rest of the world does not understand what “Never Again” really means when the nation saying “Never Again” owns 200 – 400 nuclear warheads. They really don’t get it.
Israel cannot lose because if Israel loses, that will be a real armageddon. Therefore, from both a strategic and tactical perspective. Israel must win and that must involve the removal of threats.
I don’t understand your reference to Amalek since Amalek, descending from Esau, was a Jew who came to make war on Israel, to get back Esau’s patrimony, except in the sense that this is a family conflict that never should have happened.
As a purely practical matter, Israel cannot exterminate two million Gazans. Egypt won’t let them into Egypt, although that is the best possible solution for Israel.
I hate it like the plague. I hate it right down to the center of my core. But every Israeli leader has to live with this knowledge always in the forefront of their minds.
The smart move for Israel would be to build an impenetrable defensive wall between Gaza and Israel and kill everyone who tries to cross that line. That is a defensible behavior. Exterminating two million people is not.
10/29/2023 @ 7:35 am
Rockets cross that line. That’s why the line doesn’t work. There is no aerial impenetrable. That’s why Israel has always had to go into Gaza.
10/29/2023 @ 1:08 pm
An impenetrable defensive barrier would include a massive anti-missile system. Very expensive. Not infallible. Better than trying to control 2 million people. Way better than evicting them all. Way, way better than exterminating them, or just being accused of thinking about exterminating them.
10/29/2023 @ 11:49 pm
Accused of thinking about exterminating them has happened frequently prior to Oct. 7. Israel is constantly accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.