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Letter To The President In Support Of Israel ~
Posted on 09/08/2003 8:40:30 AM PDT by US admirer
A failed Israeli society is collapsing, The end of Zionism?
JERUSALEM The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state in the Middle East, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.
There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out. If the pillar collapses, the upper floors will come crashing down.
The Israeli opposition does not exist, and the coalition government, with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality.
Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvillea and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip just west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.
If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.
Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:
The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let's institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.
Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse - or separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements - all of them - and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.
Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.
That's what the prime minister should say to the people. He should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire, roadblocks and suicide bombers, or a recognized international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem.
But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head. David Ben-Gurion sometimes erred, but he remained straight as an arrow. When Menachem Begin was wrong, nobody impugned his motives. No longer. Polls published two weeks ago showed that a majority of Israelis do not believe in the personal integrity of the prime minister - yet they trust his political leadership. In other words, Israel's current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law - combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead.
Why, then, is the opposition so quiet? Perhaps because it's summer, or because they are tired, or because some would like to join the government at any price, even the price of participating in the sickness. But while they dither, the forces of good lose hope.
This is the time for clear alternatives. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position - black or white - is in effect collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What is needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.
Israel's friends abroad - Jewish and non-Jewish alike, presidents and prime ministers, rabbis and lay people - should choose as well. They must reach out and help Israel to navigate the road map toward our national destiny as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality.
We always lose a few. But we endure...
"My mother started to leave, but then the woman asked who she was. She said she was my grandfather's daughter. The woman then asked he to come to meet her husband, who, it turned out, knew my grandfather."
"Still, imagine hearing: "We have no Jews here."
"I hold no malice towards you. You certainly have done no wrong to me or my family. That was another generation, another time."
Agreed. But these stories are nonetheless important to remember, they are so instructive.
Many of us of German-American families cling with added loyalty to our dads and uncles who went quickly and willingly to fight Hitler in WWII. We kind of use it as an "honor preservative."
After my {Lutheran) grandparents came to the US (they left before WWII}, they moved to South Dakota, where they went to a Baptist revivalist meeting and "got saved." Unable to find a nearby Baptist church, they joined the Mennonites, who have many commonalities with the Baptists. But mennonites are also strong pacifists.
My uncles joined the US army already in 1940, even before the war began, which caused a horrible row and earned them excommunication from the church. One of them managed to patch things up after the war and ended up as a church elder, the other joined the Presbyterians.
My connection with the jews comes not only as an American and a christian of the type that is toward the hebraic side, but also because I managed to end up married to a wonderful young Moroccan jewish young lady who has lots of Israeli relatives. My uncles both arrived in Casablanca in 1942, as the Nazis were laying the groundwork to snatch the jews of morocco---including my wife's family. When my wofe was growing up in the 50's, she was pretty impressed with the American GI's that were still frequenting Morocco. "One day, I'm gonna get one of those," she said. And she did.
So life is what? ---pretty "educational" I guess.
Good comments.
If you'd like to be on or off this
Christian Supporters of Israel ping list,
please FR mail me. ~
Letter To The President In Support Of Israel ~
For the life of me, I don't understand how "conservatives" who purport to believe in the inalienability of rights, can look the other way when it comes to the rights of Palestinians.
Racial segregation has been a miserable failure everywhere it has been tried. It is anathema to our American sensibility. And yet we continue to subsidize Israel to the tune of $30 billion per year to practice the sort of racial segregation we locked people up for in this country decades ago.
The choices this author offers are obvious to any educated observer in the Middle East. Ultimately, they lead to the same end as the roadmap.
Unfortunately for many Freepers it seems, neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing are options for a civilized society. As the author points out, ultimately Israel must choose between racial separatism or pluralism.
I agree, and I'm bookmarking this thread for that reason.
If their desire is to build a racially separatist state then let them do it on someone else's dime. I am opposed to racial segregation in America, and I see no reason to support it in Israel.
Mind you, I don't care so much that this is the solution they have chosen. I mind that I am paying for it. If the Israelis wish to be segregationists, then let them pay for it. I'm tired of my tax money being spent to prop up a government that is built on a foundation of racial segregation and denial of human rights based on ethnicity.
It is anathema to what I believe as an American.
Abu Buchanan's Fatwah on Israel
Frontpage Magazine ^ | August 31, 2004 | Don Feder
Posted on 08/31/2004 12:56:59 AM PDT by rmlew
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1203643/posts
"An architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Burg is bitter because his handiwork (now seen as paving the way for the present jihad) has been overwhelmingly rejected by Israeli society.
"In other words, Burg is as representative of Israel as Michael Moore is of America.
"When it comes to terrorism, Pat practices a moral equivalency worthy of the most slavish Soviet apologists at the height of the Cold War.
"Consider the following: 'Sharon promised peace and security. Since his provocation on the Temple Mount in September of 2000, he has delivered war and hatred. Over 900 Israelis are dead. Some 3,300 Palestinians have died, including hundreds of children.'
"His 'provocation on the Temple Mount'? For an Israeli prime minister to visit Judaism's holiest spot (where the First and Second Temples stood), in Israel's sovereign territory, is a 'provocation'? Besides, Sharon's visit -- which was approved in advance by the so-called Palestinian Authority -- was a pretext for the violence, which was planned months in advance, as Palestinian leaders have since admitted."
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