Crying 'War Crime'
Crying 'war crime!' against the long-prophesized re-connection of the People of Israel to Judea, the Land of Israel... Calling Israel’s ages-old struggle to return, "white-settler imperialist colonialism"... and the land's liberation and hard-won modern revival, "ethno-colonialist white-racism," "illegal occupation," and even "genocide"....
You couldn't write this stuff.
We've gotta hand it to the nations of the Arab League and the other Jew-haters who've accomplished it.
We should definitely expect these things, which are so weird, to be recorded for all time as an extension of the Bible. The Holy Book will undoubtedly be supplemented in time to come - as with the late introduction to the canon of the Book of Esther, say - with spectacularly instructive fresh revelations. Possibly some of the earlier historical Biblical Books, like Chronicles and Judges, will be relegated to background-reading. So it follows that when we hear, "Nobody could believe" the wild ironies and preposterous absurdities of our days – just one stand-out item: ordinary people, unquestioningly confident in their own righteousness, justifying appalling barbaric attacks against ordinary Jews, as in the Nazis' time and nowadays - it's quite reasonable to expect it to end up Biblical, as canonized sacred history, in the ever-developing saga of Divine Providence, human free will, and the fate of Israel.
We certainly appear to live in such times. Future generations will study them and wonder!
Philosophers
In the context of absurd reactions to Israel and Torah, consider the subject of Philosophy: an outstanding mix of related nuttiness.
Some examples: Voltaire insisting that only Jews were descended from Adam while everybody else was "pre-Adamite," who should be separated from the Jews because of what he called "the horrible immorality of the Bible." Immanuel Kant, a central Enlightenment philosopher, declaring the Jews to be "a nation of cheaters," enslaved to purely material, amoral considerations, so utterly incapable of participating in an ethical society. Hegel calling the Jews "indissolubly bound up with the Land of Israel and inextricably connected to the God of Israel," and, thus it follows, utterly unfit for Christian society.
The towering German philosopher Martin Heidegger was literally a big fan of Hitler and a member of the Nazi Party. Arnold Toynbee, a supposedly great English “wise man” - my personal favorite, who reigned in my childhood, soon after the end of the Nazis' war against "the Jew" ("the anti-man," in Hitler's phrase) - decreed the Children of Israel to be mere "fossil people," who'd missed the boat as to Jesus and have been pointless ever since. (Presumably nagging data-points like Freud or Marx or Einstein, or Nazi Germany's crusade to utterly exterminate them, didn’t bother him.)
Philosophers on Law
In the same vein, modern philosophy makes a sharp distinction between man-made law and Torah, or Divine Law. The fundamental qualities of man-made law - apparently, the ancient Greeks first said this - are, supposedly, intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutably, or permanence. On the other hand, Divine Law, because it's grounded in Revelation, needn't be any of those things, philosophy teachers teach (they really teach this!) so it carries no - that is, zero - presumption of rationality, truth, universality, nor immutability. "Don't expect it to make any sense," in other words. Which suggests that Jewish people who try to fulfill these laws are blindly but stubbornly obedient to arbitrary, capricious, irrationality.
Modern philosophy is so nuts... This shouldn't be hard: Abraham, the father of the movement called Israel, confronts God, demanding, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?" (Genesis 18:25). Jews praise God: "You, HaShem our God, gave us the Torah of life and a love of kindness [chesed, "loving kindness"], righteousness, blessing, compassion, life and peace [shalom, "completeness," "perfection"] (Jewish prayerbook, Sim Shalom). "God's seal is truth" (Talmud, Shabbat 55a).
Man studies God's laws to gain insight into the thinking of their Author and the underlying nature of reality. An unjust Divine Law or an irrational, false, impermanent or vain one, is a contradiction in terms.
Indeed, one expects Divine Law to be MORE just, penetrating, truthful, universally applicable and permanent than the laws devised by mere human kings, courts or legislators. We study Divine Law to deepen our understanding of all existence.
But that's not the philosophers' take. They regard observant Jews more as sheep. "How could any rational person bother with a bunch of supposedly Heaven-made commandments, rules and instructions," professors ask, "that don't even purport to be reasonable, that date back to the Bronze Age?"
Let's quickly examine two examples of such laws. Both are black-letter Scripture, Moses' Laws from Sinai. Only one connects to any kind of explicit Scriptural rationale.
Milk and Meat
A basic rule of Torah-interpretation, an invariable principle, holds that the Written Torah contains no excess words, nor even a single surplus letter. Yet the Torah warns Israel no fewer than three times, "You shall not cook a kid [a suckling, a young goat, sheep or calf] in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19, 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21). So this is obviously a significant matter to God. Happily, we can look to the Oral Torah for greater understanding. Which teaches that it is unholy - it is unrighteous, and certainly insensitive - to eat meat cooked with the milk of any mother at all. In fact, the Rabbis teach, expanding on the Black-letter Torah's ban on cooking meat and milk together, Israel may not mix meat with milk in any manner, for any purpose (Talmud, Hullin 115b).
Obviously, milk means growth and life for the young of all the higher species. Milk is a symbol of motherhood. It represents the providential mechanism by which the higher creatures, including man, lovingly sustain their own kind - their weakest ones, their youngest.
So, thinking about this... Slipping cheese, made from a live mother's milk, onto meat - the dead flesh of a mother's child – is that an act of great good taste or elevated morality? Jews may kill and eat the clean (kosher) animals and may take their milk from them as well - milk coming from a clean source is itself clean - but does anyone need the added triumph of adding insult to their injuries by devouring both their life's milk together with their flesh? Plainly, non-Jews, in the exercise of human dominion over planet Earth, may do so - no Divine law forbids it - but, in this as in other matters, it seems, God holds His "people of priests" to a more refining standard.
The law against eating milk and meat together is called a "Chok," a "statute," in that the Law itself does not reveal its rationale - we don't know exactly why God legislated it. Does that - the lack of a stated rationale - make it vain, irrational, impermanent, or false?
Expel the Aliens
The Torah declares: "Speak unto the Children of Israel... "you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you...” the Torah commands. “And you shall drive out the inhabitants of the land and dwell therein, for unto you have I [God] given the land to possess it... But if you will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that you let remain of them be as pins in your eyes and as pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein you dwell. And it shall come to pass, that as I thought to do to them, so will I do unto you" (Numbers 33:51-56).
Later, in the Song of Moses, Ha'azinu (Moses’ amazing farewell Teaching), "Give ear, o ye heavens, and I will l speak...."), the great man predicts how God will respond if we fail to follow His Law. Channeling the LORD: "They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god; they have provoked Me with their vanities; and I will rouse them to jealousy with a no-people [a lo-am, a nation that is no nation]; I will provoke them with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21).
In Psalms we have the enemies of God and mankind taking "crafty counsel" against the Jews. The historical enemies of Israel, including Ishmaelites (Arabs), Amalekites and Philistines combine in a vast international conspiracy to "cut them off from being a nation," to erase even the "remembrance of the name of Israel" (Psalms 83:5).
Of course Amalek, the anti-Israel, is germane here. Amalek, history's vicious pogromist, the psychotically jealous Jew-hating spirit eternally inherent in the like of Nazis and Hamas, is related to Esau, Jacob's brother (Genesis 27), and Haman, the Hitler-figure in the Book of Esther. The Torah command to expel the enemy aliens obviously relates to the several Torah Commandments against Amalek (see Exodus 17:8; Deuteronomy 25:17-19).
Regarding those Biblical commandments, and their seeming harshness: the Black-letter Torah often come off as coldly severe but it's really more of a cream-puff. It's holy - and full of loopholes. In fact, this is not a bug but a feature, the inherent nature of a Law that must be studied, not just scanned - including legions of God-given logical exceptions to the laws, which soften them - which ensure, for instance, that no one ever gets executed for eating a shrimp cocktail. So, speaking of expelling enemy aliens, for instance, no Torah authority anywhere would ever require the expulsion of a decent law-abiding resident - even a child of the leader of Hamas! - who sincerely pledges his or her allegiance to Jewish Israel. [See Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Melachim 6:1]
With Divine law, unlike man-made law, it's impossible to know everything behind it - the laws' rationale, their complete reason for being. But clearly, part of the thrust of this Scripture is keeping the Children of Israel in the Land of Israel, and helping them succeed despite all Jew-hatred.
The Arab League Conspiracy
Anyone can read a Bible and the Arab world's intellectuals are no exception. Possibly they merely stumbled onto Palestinianism, but some of them certainly read Numbers 33, and liked it, and decided to make it come true. About the time that their countries drove out their ancient Jewish communities, shortly after the Holocaust, they came together and plotted. Israel’s Arab enemies determined to concentrate their own brethren in special camps as close as possible to Jewish Israel.
Who ever heard of "refugee camps" existing generation after generation? Instead of letting their supposedly beloved brethren settle in ANY of the 22 countries of the Arab League - collectively, more than 650 times larger than "Palestine" - as equal citizens, allowed to do things like work there, or own land there, they pushed them into camps: to count the days until the promised time for "driving the Jews into the sea."
People who had been Syrians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis, Jordanians and Turks, mostly, became "Palestinians." (Before that, the Jews in pre-state Israel were called Palestinians. The Romans had renamed Judea "Felix Palestina," Happy Palestine, after the Roman-Jews wars, after exiling all the Jews; the original Palestinians were the vile Philistines of the Bible. In Arabic, the Palestinians are Filistin, Philistines.)
The cruelty is breathtaking. With immense cynicism, defying the appalled advice of all the international refugee-resettlement experts, the Arab countries, advised and helped by other Jew-haters, invented a new nation - a people supposedly indigenous to the Holy Land! Not to help it to accomplish good deeds but, rather, to indoctrinate it, fatten it, multiply it and arm it, to throw it against Israel, to sacrifice it as their spear-tip for annihilating the Jewish state.
This Arab-Israeli War! It’s unique in history: never has there been a war like it! Look at ancient enemies, like France and Germany, China and Japan, Rome and Persia… never have countries combined together like this, to utterly annihilate a neighbor, denying the neighbor's very existence, boycotting it, attacking it, generation after generation, as the countries of the Arab League have done with Israel. The nearby "confrontation states," Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, initiated and lost multiple hot and horribly costly wars against Israel, but – even after all that - still train against Israel as the "main enemy." Now, in the last few decades, the world Shi'ite movement, which purports to be Islamic and dominates Iran and Yemen, keeps pledging to violently obliterate Israel. While Muslim Turkey talks all the time as if it wants to, along with Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.
From Time Immemorial
How did the Arab "Palestinians" become so connected to a land as to peculiarly belong to it, supposedly, like its hills and lakes and mountains? How did people famous for "quietly slipping away" with their tents manage to attach themselves to this one particular place like coral? In fact, actually, many thousands of Muslims today consider this nuts.
Islam is pretty clear on the subject of the Land of Israel belonging to the Children of Israel, while denying any right in the Land to the Arabs. The "crafty counselors" of the Arab nations, in their hatred, didn't care that Islam's abhorrence of Israel is ridiculous. The Qur'an itself declares the Land of Israel to be the Land of Israel - of and for "the Children of Israel." So it's contrary to Islam to push Muslims into fighting Israel to keep Israel from succeeding in the Land of Israel.
The Holy Qur'an, as it's called, declares: "And We [Allah] said thereafter to the Children of Israel, 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land'" (Sura 17:104). The Prophet [Muhammed] himself says to them, "O, my people [the Jews], Enter the Holy Land, which Allah has assigned to you" (Sura 5:21).
From where does all this hate in our time come? Probably from dumb pridefulness and ego. After all, if the Torah is true, that means the Jews - the supposedly cowardly, cheating, animalistic, criminal, weak Jews, as the Qur'an tells the story - were and still are the special people of HaShem. Which means that they remain God's special "witnesses." Which means that the Arabs and Muslims aren't. Which also means, ultimately, that they've got profoundly wrong ideas about Allah and reality.
In creating the Palestinians, the Arab countries also obviously inflicted acute antisemitism on their people, and on their fellow Muslims. Presenting the "brave Palestinians" as the world's purest, truest suffering selfless warriors for Allah and Islam, the Arab world injected itself with passionate hatred of their enemies. Palestinianism is simply the photo-negative of Zionism. To be pro-Palestinian is not to desire the good welfare of the so-called Palestinians but, rather, success for them in their mission: the complete elimination of Israel.
What a lousy mission! What a lousy cause!
Lies and More Lies
Clearly, a principal theme of the Bible is the Land of Israel's unique connection to the People of Israel. It's also a feature of history - a fact that the belligerent lying narrative of the Arabs' is designed to obscure. After the ancient Bronze Age's Cana'anites, nobody but the Jews ever succeeded there.
Mark Twain, visiting Palestine a little before modern Zionism began bringing the Jews back in numbers, spoke of its dreary emptiness, it's out-of-the-world quality, asking, "Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?" (The Innocents Abroad, 1869). The Torah promises, in one of the most daring prophecies in the Bible, that the Land of Israel, with the Jews exiled, will remain mostly empty, a wilderness. "Your land shall desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy its sabbaths, as long as lies desolate, and you be in your enemies' land" (Leviticus 26:34). God will preserve it desolate will it awaits the Jews (Leviticus 26:43). It’s a spectacular historical truth and also a cosmic dynamic: whenever Israel is separated from the Holy Land, the Bible promises [right at the end of the Bible, closing out Chronicles], the Holy Land will remain untilled and barren, "enjoying its sabbaths" (2 Chronicles 36:21).
By the way, you'll notice when you see photos of "the Occupied West Bank," as it's called - Divinely liberated Judea and Samaria - the barrenness and emptiness of the rocky rolling hills. That's because the Arabs, and the Turks and Mongols and Egyptians and Kurds and Circassians and Romans before them never did very well there. But, after the Jews began coming back in numbers, the Arab population, partly from immigration, partly from lavishly subsidized "natural" increase, exploded. Yet the land outside their fast-growing cities, their palaces and their slums, remains mostly desolate, without the Jews.
The Arab League
Besides supplying their Philistine brethren with Jew-hating propaganda, weaponry, rocket tubes and rocket fuel, and enough food and aid to encourage the continuing population explosion, the 22 countries of the Arab League, with more than 650 times the land of Israel, ALL absolutely banned ALL of them from settling down with them as equal citizens with recognized human rights. Usually, they refuse to even let them work!
That's been the rule, generation after generation. They've all refused - as they accuse Israel of committing "genocide" against the Palestinians - to take them in. Cynically, cruelly, they simply keep insisting that the only place on earth where their brethren properly belong is Jewish Israel. To them, obviously, the name of the game is imposing their brethren on Israel. To defeat Israel according to the Bible's own published formula for defeating Israel!
After October Seventh
One good thing about theOctober 7th Simchas Torah pogrom by Hamas in southern Israel, and the continuing rocket fire into Israeli population centers from Lebanon as well as Gaza: it proves that the so-called "two-state solution" is ridiculous.
Parenthetically, October 7th might also be said to demonstrate the absurdity of claiming that Isaiah 53's "suffering servant of HaShem" is anybody but the People of Israel collectively, given the pogromists' crazed, specifically anti-Jewish viciousness, and the atrocious suffering inflicted. Who’s the inheritor of Esau’s wrath, of God's eternal war versus Amalek? Whom do the Nazis, the Arab terrorists, Communist tyrants, ISIS, Hamas, Iran, etc., hate more than they hate the Jews? Who can doubt that the Jews whom they so hate are the true Israel of Isaiah?
No sane person would ever hand over the highlands of the Holy Land to anybody who admires and praises pogromists. Who would seek to live near Hamas, nor anywhere close to anybody who even likes Hamas? But that, according to the evidence - including polls and mosque-sermons and man-in-the-casbah interviews, online commentary, newspaper commentary, etc. - is more than 80% of all adult Palestinians in the Middle East. More than a quarter express "extreme admiration" of Hamas' pogrom. So in the name of peace, for the good of the haters as well as the hated, nobody should allow Jews to live anywhere near such people. Which means the "two-state solution" isn't a solution but only a formula for endless violence. Which means that, in the name of peace, the Arab nations need to finally stop trying to annihilate Israel, and start taking care of their own. Not just by supplying them with weaponry and copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!
I admit that my main interest is the Jews, not the so-called Palestinians, but it should be obvious that being used as a sacrificial offering to destroy Jewish Israel is no path to success for them, either. If you wish them well, help them free themselves from the Arab nations’ evil plot.
Solutions
Usually when I mention getting the Arab countries to stop screwing over their own people in their shameful crusade to annihilate Israel, folks reply, "Ain't gonna happen." However, these folks probably aren't prophets and don't foresee the future prophetically.
Prophecy's hard. We remember when the Kaiser of Germany met Theodore Herzl, a father of Zionism: "Herr Herzel, for your plan [for a sovereign state for the Jews in their Holy Land] to succeed, no fewer than THREE empires [Russia’s, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turkish empires] would have to die." That was in 1898. All three were gone by 1918.
The Arab nations’ plot can't be allowed to succeed. Decent people can't be expected to want to live anywhere near people of bad, vicious culture. A good definition of a bad culture is a Jew-hating culture. People who hate Jews make bad neighbors, because that sickness spreads and they will ultimately set themselves up as the enemies of all mankind.
The Arab countries have cynically fomented, cultivated, subsidized, broadcast and manufactured Jew-hate now over more than a century. You can't expect the Jews to solve that problem when they're the chief victims of it. Nor expect them to fulfill whatever legitimate (non-genocidal) aspirations that the Jew-haters may have. Making the Jewish people responsible for the happiness of Jew-haters is ridiculous. The Arab countries ginned up this mess on their own and the world can't let them impose the burden of their folly on Israel, nor on anyone but themselves.
We have good reason to hope. Relying on truth and other Torah values - above all, the fact that God made all men in His image - and the resilience and richness of planet Earth, mankind can save itself along with the Earth.
One thing we can expect in the future is mass movements of different peoples, in their millions, fleeing droughts and floods, tidal waves and climate change, earthquakes, wars, anarchy and oppression. If we can deal wisely with the so-called Palestinians we can deal wisely with all such challenges, particularly, what can be done with people whom no one wants?
We suggested before that the world can use the genius of Palestinians, their youth - they're one of the youngest populations on Earth - and energy and numbers, to help save the world, to restore life and fertility particularly to the vast waste places of the ridiculously underpopulated Arab countries, who've been cruelly trying to sacrifice them in their misbegotten war against Israel.
In a world where people need labor, young, healthy, versatile and honest workers, they, and the other peoples whom no one wants, should be allowed to redeem themselves through labor. Culture, we know, is malleable. It changes in the historical eye-blink of one or two generations. People can heal themselves.
The key to the human future will be dealing with this issue, the world's Jew-hating Arabs against the Jews. We mustn't reward the Arab countries for their evil. If we can crack open the Arab world's plot against the Jews it'll take us directly to the solutions for other misused, under-used, and currently unwanted people. In all things, if we can address the problems of the world and our fellow men honestly, as God wants, the future is bright.
Mankind needs truthfulness, fairness, compassion and wisdom for tackling the human population issues of the future. Sometimes people need to move - as the Jews moved from the Arabs' and other Muslim countries, and from Europe, and all over. The Southern and Western Asian and Central American and African peoples fleeing war, drought, bad government and anarchy needn't remain paupers. The world can afford them and the so-called Palestinians a never-ending supply of rewarding, productive, necessary work.
No people is completely immune from the historical imperative to need to move. Nobody has an absolute entitlement to occupy any portion of the planet! Change your place and change your mazal [your "stars," your fate or destiny] is ancient Jewish folk-wisdom but it seems appropriate in the circumstances. The so-called Palestinians need to change their mazal.
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
December 5, 2023
If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.
