Restless
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
The Non Existent Two State Solution
This statement by France, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany and Italy, is not based on any kind of logic. It's not based on any kind of reality. It's not based on anything even remotely sane.
It is based on a policy of appeasement that says that if you give into the unending demands of the Arabs, then surely, SURELY, there'll be peace.
For too long, the whole conflict between Israel and the 'palestinians' has been labelled as Israel’s responsibility. Israel’s fault. Israel the cause. Israel the guilty one. Israel must solve it. Pressure must be placed on Israel.
Well, I maintain a different approach.
There is a conflict, but it’s not between Israel and the 'palestinians' – it’s between the Arabs and themselves. Because if a new country called 'Palestine' was created today, does any logical and reasonable person seriously expect us to believe that peace will suddenly reign across the region? How is it that a 23rd Arab state will be that missing link between peace and war, when 22 Arab states have not been able to achieve that already?
Here’s a newsflash – if Israel ever does disappear, do not expect peace to come to the world. Do not expect people to lay down their weapons and hold hands while dancing around a campfire, chanting songs of love to the moon. Do not expect world hunger to end. Do not expect some kind of outbreak of goodwill to sweep the nations. Not only will none of this happen – the exact opposite of it will. Because without this little bastion of democracy and defiance against the oppressive countries surrounding it, a dark wave of Islamic Fascism will sweep the region and then the world. In Europe this has already begun, and citizens in Germany and France and Belgium and Sweden have lost the sense of security they might have once felt.
Many don't get this blatantly obvious fact, perhaps governed by the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism, or perhaps under the influence of those petro-fumes, or perhaps powered by a naivety in the same way Neville Chamberlain was back in 1938. Too many countries are too scared to call out the Arabs for their lack of human rights, their war mongering diatribes, their racism and their antisemitism. They continue to treat them with a respect they don't deserve. But by refusing to confront them, it hasn't helped peace at all. If anything, it did the opposite, because what this soft attitude essentially did was absolve the Arab world of any responsibility towards the Middle East. And without any responsibility, there is also no accountability.
World leaders are not prepared to deliver this lesson to the Arab world – out of fear that the black gold we depend on will dry up. Instead the world continues to pander to them, stroke their fragile egos, and speak of shared values! I mean seriously - can anyone name one shared value the western democratic world shares with the Arab world - other than the exploding rate of antisemitism!
They treat them and still do with more respect than they do Israel – the country that actually does share many of the same values.
And I could never quite understand how it is that those that call themselves progressive can attack the only country in the region that actually is? Are we supposed to believe that the values people hold in Europe or the USA are more similar to the Arab world and the 'Palestinian authority' than to Israel – values such as freedom of speech, democracy and the right to choose who your partner is?
Because I certainly don’t remember pride rallies in Iran, or freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia, or democracy in Qatar or Kuwait. And celebrating that women can now supposedly drive in Saudi Arabia is not really something to be hailed – when women still need written permission from their husbands or still have to be accompanied by a male relative.
The two state solution was never alive because the Arab leaders were never prepared to accept the responsibility that goes along with the rewards. But there is responsibility for the conflict, and to make Israel the cause of it is an injustice that continues to this day. If you want to look for responsibility look no further than the leader of the 'palestinians,' who refuses to lead. Look no further than their education system that preaches hatred, funded by the United Nations. Look no further than the official imams who spew hatred from their mosques. And considering that they financially reward those who murder children should tell you everything you need to know about their morality.
The stark reality is that we live in a world that places a higher value on fascism than it does on freedom.
The end to the conflict between Israel and the 'palestinians' does not lie in giving up minuscule land that will make no difference to the Arab world. It does not lie in dividing Jerusalem, a city that was never desired as a capital by any other people in history but the Jews. It certainly doesn’t lie in releasing prisoners whose blood soaked hands who will only kill again.
It lies in the Arab world accepting that they can’t have every inch of land in the vast Middle Eastern region. It lies in the 'palestinians' accepting that the State of Israel is not a colonial force or a foreign entity, but an integral part of that region with a history far longer than their own invented one. And it lies in the Arab world accepting their so-called refugees – who are Arabs like them – the way the world has accepted refugees from all over.
Until world leaders start pushing for freedom in the Arab world the way they say they value it, rather than rewarding fascism as they are doing now – then peace will remain as elusive now as it ever was before.
And any peace process is already doomed to failure.
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Hanukkah – The Battle That Never Ended
But from the darkest moments in our history, comes our greatest light.
More than 2000 years ago, the Land of Israel was under Syrian-Greek occupation and Antiochus, the Greek ruler of the time had declared war against the Jewish people.
He wanted to destroy the individuality of the Jews, who stubbornly refused to give up their ways and traditions by outlawing all Jewish religious traditions and rites. He replaced the righteous High Priest in the Jewish Temple with a Hellenistic Jew, which was basically an assimilated Jew who had rejected his own culture to embrace the Greek one. He then enacted a series of harsh decrees against the Jewish people by making it illegal to keep the Sabbath, perform circumcisions and keep kosher dietary laws. His servants even tried to force a 90 year old man, Rabbi Eliezer, to eat pork and when he refused, was put to death.
Thousands of others were murdered when they too refused to abandon their traditions.
Antiochus’s servants went from town to town, village to village, forcing the Jewish population to worship their false idols.
There was only one area that remained a refuge, an area in the Judean hills – the same area today which the world likes to call ‘occupied palestinian territory.’
Here, the Jews refused to bow down to the false gods of Antiochus – and so they revolted, started by a man called Mattityahu and then continued by his son, Judah Maccabee.
The line had been drawn, and loyal and courageous Jews fell in behind the Maccabees, determined to keep their way of life alive.
Antiochus was enraged and sent in his generals with tens of thousands of men to wipe out Judah and his Maccabean followers and although the Maccabees were vastly outnumbered, they succeeded in defeating the army, armed by a strong spirit of faith and belief.
But despite this unbelievable military victory, this wasn’t even the miracle of Hanukkah.
The miracle occurred later when they managed to liberate the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, and after clearing out all the idols, and cleaning up all the destruction and the vandalism that had occurred, they wanted to rededicate the Temple, but the golden menorah had already been stolen by the Syrians, so they built a cheap metal one instead.
With a small vial of oil that they had discovered, enough for just one day, they lit the menorah.
Except instead of flickering out in the morning light, it continued to burn for a further seven more, until more oil could be produced.
The darkness of the time has been vanquished and replaced by the simple light of a flickering flame that wouldn’t die.
So too are the Jewish people, who somehow fight against a world in which many want to snuff out their light as well, want to vanquish them from their land, want to remove them from history and somehow pretend they didn’t exist.
Just like that flickering flame, they too refuse to die, refuse to lie down, refuse to be defeated and refuse to succumb to harsh dictators who want to destroy them.
We fight back not simply to survive, but to live as Jews in our own land, carrying out our own traditions and our own ways of life, allowing our one small light to illuminate the world.
The story of Hanukkah may have taken place over 2000 years ago, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
It was only the beginning.
Because the same fight led by a bunch of crazy zealots in the Judean hills is happening today. And every time we stand up for our way of life, for our land, for our people and for our freedom, the spirit of the Maccabees lives on in all of us.
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Israel's "risks for peace"
Because the problems of the Middle East is not caused by Israel, but by the multitude of fascist Arab countries around it.
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
The Star of David is Burning Once Again
Saturday, November 18, 2017
A diaspora Jew
Sunday, July 9, 2017
A promise that will hold forever
4000 years ago, one man changed the world. He looked around him and saw a world he could not believe in. He saw a world he could not relate to. He saw a world he didn't believe in. And rather than be a part of it, he decided to stand separately. He decided to stand independently. He decided to stand alone. He believed in a single God, rather than the multitude of idols around him.
That man was Abraham and his covenant with God made him the first Jew - our original forefather. And in the same covenant, God promised him a land of milk and honey, a land in which the Jews would be able to call their own. It was a belief so strong that it caused Abraham to leave everything he ever knew and his whole life behind him and journey to a strange new land, a strange new world, and a whole new begining.
He was a simple man with a simple belief - a belief that changed everything we thought we knew.
One man.
And on that journey he began - a journey we still carry on today - he met many people and travelled to many places and had many adventures. But most importantly, he became the father of a people that still exist today. A people who still live in that same land promised 4000 years ago. A people who still believe in that promise, eventhough the world doesn't.
But Abraham was a man of the future, not the past. So he decided to purchase a cave and the surrounding land from a guy called Ephron. He paid him 400 shekels of silver in a deal, complete with witnesses and documentation. And with this purchase, he established that Hebron would belong to the Jewish people forever and ever. It was a place that he and his family would be buried, to rest forever on Jewish land.
Yesterday, UNESCO, who is supposed to safeguard the cultural and historical heritage of people, decided to declare that deal and void. They decided to erase history. They decided, rather than safeguard the cultural integrity of the Jewish people, to destroy it instead.
Or attempt to.
Because a collection of countries, many which don't even give their citizens basic human rights, don't get to decide on this. They have no authority. They have no right. They have no integrity. And they have no shame.
The UNESCO vote is not about culture or history or freedom or democracy or safeguarding anything. It has nothing to do with Hebron or Jerusalem. It has only to do with destroying the Jewish people, their rights, their history, their culture, their link to a land promised to them 4000 years earlier.
But history is an old beast, and it remembers things, long after those who have passed through it have faded away.
The dream of UNESCO, the Arab world and all those others to destroy the Jewish people will fail.
For the covenant made by Abraham is eternal and still very much intact.