We are the Party of Freedom
The comedian Dennis Miller has claimed that the Arab world is like a football stadium and Israel like a book of matches on the 50-yard line. The Jews keep offering the Arabs, two, three, even twenty matches - "the two-state solution," "land for peace" - but the Arabs keep refusing. They don't want just a few matches. They want them all.
That’s no joke. Practically all the polling that's ever been done on the subject confirms it. Among so-called Palestinians, support for Hamas' October 7 pogrom, for instance, ranged from "extremely support" by about a third of respondents, to "strong support" by another third and "support with some reservations" (worried about future payback) by all but a few percent. (In no polling among the Arabs - not just "Palestinians" - outside Israel is there any kind of constituency for a "two-state solution.")
The huge crowds around the world chanting "Free Palestine!" think they are pro-freedom. "The Palestinians" are supposed to be the revolutionary "Stick it to the man!" party of liberty. Imagine! That the outrageously chutzpadik scheme cooked up by the Arabs' medieval-minded clerics and tyrants - its long con, its big scam, its multi-generational confidence game, jamming together a phony nation out of the wildly disparate non-Jewish herders, wanderers and squatters who'd ever passed through the Holy Land, calling them "Palestinian refugees"; barring them from permanently settling anywhere except in Jewish Israel, to create, forge, fatten, multiply, indoctrinate and arm a whole made-up nation just to sacrifice it - to crush Israel and annihilate Judaism, would win over so many!
You wonder how these folks could ignore the larger story - of Israel's struggle against persecution and European colonialism, British imperialism, Turkish and Arab despotism, the depredations of the Nazis and the Communists, to try to create an exemplary society in a neglected semi-desert region smaller than New Jersey. How could people support such a transparently artificial cause, fronted by such a murderous anti-Western "vile nation that is no nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21) as the so-called "Palestinians," as the Arabs' and Iranian clerics' Palestine scam?
Obviously, part of the problem is anti-Semitism. Not just the outlandish, Nazi-inspired propaganda that the Muslim countries pump out by the car-load - new sets of the Czarist-era "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," movies, music, plays, poems, kiddy shows, and streaming videos of Jews baking matzos with the blood of Gentile children, learned commentaries by talking heads proclaiming Jews and Judaism to be Satan's slaves - but, IMHO, more of an envious free-floating resentment of world Jewry.
Consider Israel's "mission civilisatrice," its "civilizing mission." The Jews' role on earth is to serve all the nations of mankind as an elder brother (Exodus 4:22), as witnesses to the reality of the Living Yah, the Creator and Master of all things (Isaiah 43:10), as His designated "light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6). Alas, that project's insulting, unless one's personally on-board with it: the Jews' mission is to help fix others' deficiencies - or at least refine them somewhat - to elevate Gentiles so they're more like Jews. Is it any wonder that people thus regard the Jews as guilty unless proved innocent, thinking that they, the Jews, have a much too high opinion of themselves? (It calls to mind a quip that may or may not be from Winston Churchill, defining anti-Semitism as "hating the Jews more than necessary." Hating the Jews too much is creepy, in other words, but one must hate us somewhat.)
Then there's the injustice factor. Injustice makes people crazy. It “brings wild beasts into the world, filling it with violence" (Mishnah, Pirke Avot 5:12).
Our esteemed counselor Rabbi Katz always tells me to avoid politics but, frankly, to hell with that: when, following the Great Recession, not a single banker, rating agency, regulator or crooked money-man who'd helped cause the debacle went to jail - the Obama White House explaining that it couldn't focus on that kind of thing while it was busy trying to save the economy - millions of Americans decided that "the whole system's rigged!" and itched for anyone who'd "shake things up." That great failure helped shape America's politics. Similarly, the "Palestinians" and really all the Arab League's pro-Palestine chumps, their "useful idiots" and sympathizers, naturally perceive injustice in "Palestinians'" suffering. It's just that they lazily swallow the Arab and Iranian propaganda archetypes, the utter baloney of primitive native people oppressed by powerful Jewish interloping colonialists, concluding - despite the reality of the matter, that the Arab League simply determined to sacrifice their fellows, dashing them like firewood against the only nation on earth that's guaranteed to be eternal - that the people of Israel are mere strangers in the Land of Israel, tyrannical conquerors, racist occupiers of "Arab lands."
Time and Memory and History
On top of that there's the factor of memory, and story-telling, and perceptions of time and history. People of different cultures naturally process time and history with different mental structures. Jews have a more intimate relationship with ancient history and the prophet Abraham than most non-Jews would ever imagine, due to our prayer-life; Jews who pray walk in Abraham's footsteps every day. Religious Jews all live with visions of someone, like his grandson Jacob, our father "Israel," watching us over our shoulders - an old ancestor but a vivid character, worrying for his descendants and the cause that bears his name. To the Jews, history is continuity, part of a religious mindset, and our connection to the past in every generation is fundamental to our consciousness. Our current affairs, our daily activities, and the continuity of reality, are part of Israel's sacred history.
Christians don't have that. The 33-years of Jesus' life matter more than all of history put together. Muslim's don't either. The life of Muhammad, Islam's founder, and the years of his followers immediately after his death, matter more than anything. Whatever else ever happens is radically less-important. We could go on and on about the Arab and Qur'an-influenced peoples' lack of historicity, their vague time-sense, and the blasé constant lying, such a striking feature of the world of Islam (See "The Arab Mind" by Raphael Patai, 1983 rev’d. edition, pp. 65-72). Let’s just say, that while non-Jews' relative lack of an acute historical sense or adult regard for facts tends to handicap them in secular and business matters, vis-a-vis the Jews, it's also very frustrating for Jews, since weighty historical facts and truth have much less impact than they might.
Younger people, suspicious of "history written by dead white males," have a tendency, supposedly, of disregarding historical arguments involving facts that aren't already known to them. So, for instance, the millenia of Gentile persecution of the Jews generally come down to them foreshortened, with the entire history of the Jews and Israel in the world presented as Jews versus Nazis and the Holocaust. Which, alas, is not enough to help them recognize recurring historical patterns, nor even distinguish between such actual freedom-fighters as the defenders of Israel and the Jew-hating anti-Western phony revolutionaries created by Islam’s most-medieval minded clerics and the cynics of the Arab League.
Where to Go
If Patai's "The Arab Mind" is correct in its thesis that only transactional arguments based on personal advantage, honor and shame - as opposed to appeals to historical truths, ideals and moral principles - the only way to get the Arab peoples to stop polluting the world with ship-loads of racist, anti-Semitic hogwash, including the loony suite of "patriotic" lies that's Palestinianism, is: 1) to shame them: to convince them that decent people have gotten wise to their lies, and that it's past time for them to start treating the phony nation that they created as real human beings, not sacrificial objects - and let the “suffering refugees” settle finally in their own almost-empty countries; and 2) Point out that by attacking Israel they have been ruining themselves, stuffing billions of Arabs and Muslims full of stupid racist Jew-hate and sub-rational magic-thinking, and falling farther and farther behind Israel, and subjecting themselves to the Bible's special curse for they who oppress Israel, continuous civil wars ("I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; they shall be drunken with their own blood," Isaiah 49:26)
The Arab world generally applauded Hamas' October 7th pogrom, as did very many of the world's Muslims. Since then Israel's fierce response has the world's attention - even the attacks from Hamas' "Palestinian" ally Hezbollah, shooting rockets into Israel's northern cities, seem very secondary. The people of Gaza, steeped in the "Palestinian" cause, chose Hamas over the equally appalling Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Gaza became Hamastan, the apotheosis of Palestinian irredentism ("never to be appeased") and revanchism ("revenge"), more loaded with lethal, genocidal Jew-hate than Nazi Germany. (The Nazis didn't drill their youngest girls and boys to physically murder Jews.)
The Stakes
My worst fear is that, if the world doesn't get this right, how will the human race ever deal with problems of climate change and the movement of billions of people? How can the West deal with tidal waves of Muslim refugees, loaded full of Jew-hate? Who will help the refugees of the future, who will need to be resettled? UNRWA, the United Nations' agency for "Palestinians," started out 70-years ago with a couple of hundred thousand "Palestinians," and now has more than 5.5 million on its dole - with no one resettled! Gaza and the rest of the "Palestinian" centers are all huge obstetric centers/nurseries, with the world's highest live birthrates, subsidized by UNRWA and the Arabs.
If the world followed the UNRWA "model" with future refugees... then the hundreds of millions or billions of our fellow men who will surely need help due to coming climate change - and probably we too, if we can't get such stuff right - are doomed.
I'm deeply dismayed by the awful jurisprudence that went into some legal “thinkers’” pronouncement that the return of the Jews to Judea and Jerusalem is a war crime; that the Jews illegally "occupy" the old League of Nations' mandate lands, despite seizing them from no sovereign authority at all; capturing Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in wars waged against the Jews by practically the whole Arab world - applying the Fourth Geneva Convention's so-called anti-Nazi law, forbidding murderous Nazi-like forcible population transfers, to declare the heartland of Israel "occupied" and a crime for a Jew to live in Judea. It's such a clear perversion of law! In fact - as a law never ever applied to anyone, except in this regard, prohibiting the long prophesied return of the people of Israel to the land of Israel - this "anti-Nazi law" exemplifies the principle that Palestinianism makes people stupid.
The Arabs' Anti-Jewish War is evil. How many times have the assembled Arab peoples with their armies or their designated sacrificial lambs, the "Palestinians," dashed themselves against Israel, to annihilate it? If they had won even once, there wouldn't be an Israel. They keep trying…Why won't they let up?
Causes
Yes, of course it starts with hate for Judaism. The Arabs' claim that the Jews - "so-called Israel," the Muslim clerics called us - weren't and couldn't be the true "first born" of Allah (because Allah had called the Arabs to be His special people instead of Israel). The Jews' exile from the Land of Israel was the proof that Allah had damned the Jews. So the Jews' return from exile, the beginning of the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures' prophecy, starting around the end of the last century, was intolerable to the Arabs' awful leaders' stupid sense-of-self.
If facts and history could convince anyone, the accusations against Israel and Judaism - Christianity's claims to be "the religion of love" by dishonestly suppressing the Torah's "love your neighbor," "love the stranger," and "love HaShem", while claiming Jesus, not the whole Jewish nation, as Deity's sacrificial offering to the nations....; and then Islam's claims that Muhammed's followers fulfill the role of Israel under Allah's heavens - are idiotic. But the Jews also have to recognize that today's messy situation couldn't have happened if we had done better.
It's not just the obvious things - treating Palestinianism with all its lies irresponsibly respectfully, letting the Arabs completely off the hook in accomodating their own brethren, related to them by language, religion, history, customs and blood; letting the world community set up a whole special agency to reinforce psychotically irredentist, revanchist, completely artificial national feelings in "Palestinians"'; even experimenting with co-governing fast-multiplying millions of people raised to hate and kill Jews... - but, at least partly, a failure of Jewish confidence.
Is there or isn't there a God over all the Earth? Are we or aren't we His witnesses? Do we or don't we represent El, HaShem, the Living Yah of Abraham, Isaac and Israel? Christianity and Islam - not to mention all the later gods of the nations - are bankrupt and absurd, but we, Israel, are still flailing around over how mankind (all the Noachites, or Noachides, or Noahides, noting that we even lack common, agreed-upon terms) should serve HaShem.
Conclusion
We're going to have a challenging next few months, as Israel tries to liquidate the enemy that unexpectedly hit us with that last pogrom - obviously, in retrospect, we should have expected it, because that is the whole point of Palestinianism - while the world mourns the suffering "martyrs" of Palestinianism. As I write, Israel's accused of deliberately starving Gaza's children, insisting that - regardless of Gazans' psycho commitment to "martyr" their loved ones and even themselves to stab or bomb any Jew, including any Jews who’re trying to help their children! - Israel feed and medicate and clothe and house them. They cry about their own people, "They have nowhere to go!" when Egypt and Jordan insist on it: the Arabs could easily take all the “Palestinian” children and adults into their vast countries, but they won't. They could provide medicine and food to their brethren without getting suicide-bombed - unlike the Jews! - but they don't.
“Palestinian” misery won't be ended by giving away what the world is demanding - the escape of lethal blood-drenched enemies, and the delivery of Israeli real estate, to help the Arabs win the next-coming war.
The only way the suffering of "Palestinians'" can be avenged is by holding the hate-filled clerics and tyrants of the Arab and Muslim worlds to account, recognizing what they're doing and requiring them to stop their shenanigans and stop inciting evil. They love the "Palestinians," whom they deliberately created, and armed, and incentivized, so much: let them take them, finally, into their embrace.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March 31, 2024
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
