The Differing Dreams of Two Peoples

 

The basis for the “Two State Solution” is to share a land equally between two peoples who both have an attachment and love for the land. If only this were so there might be some means by which it would work. The problem is that this premise is a lie. There can never be a two state solution which will satisfy one side because they have no love for the land, they are driven by a different drummer, and then there are two groups who wish to live productively, so let’s compare and contrast the driving force behind each of the three groups. We will start with the Jewish desires of the two Jewish residents and then the Palestinian side after a few clarifying notes. There are two completely separate Arab cultures and two somewhat separate Jewish groups. These disparate groups can all but one live in this land relatively peaceably but that final group can never be appeased and has the same desires as the extreme groups currently spreading their insatiable drive across Europe and into the United States and Canada, a group with whom there is no middle ground.

 

The easiest group for us to define is the Zionist Jews. They are here to realize a dream which has lived simmering just below the surface sometimes breaking through as happened to a fervent group led by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Rabbi Zalman Melamed, each at their own time and in their own way. The Zionist Jew has a desire to live once again in the ancestral home of the Jewish People, to live in Eretz Yisroel. The Zionist shares this dream with countless Jews throughout modern history and considers living outside of Israel as a form of punishment that though started by the Roman dispersal of the Jewish People to the farthest hinterlands of the Roman Empire in order to destroy the central pillars of Judaism which would necessarily lead to the death of the Jewish People within a couple of generations. This is what had happened to other peoples the Roman Empire had so treated but the Jewish People had a secret weapon, so to speak, called Torah. The attachment to the land of Israel was rooted in the Torah Scroll and thus Judaism is rooted in the Land and in Torah. Without the sacred and blessed land of our forefathers we were not completely lost and rudderless, we still had Torah; the Commandments, though some were to remain unfulfilled as they dealt with the land, the Priesthood, the Temple, the required Sacrifices; the rules for living a righteous life; the dietary laws; and other rules including the Oral Law which was for the first time written down. Torah became the link between one Jew and the next Jew and in Torah was the promise that in the future we would regain our land and rebuild the Holy Temple. The Zionist desire was to realize the dream of living in our Biblical and ancient lands. The Zionist dream was to live and rebuild our ancestral lands and reestablish the Promised Land to its place of prominence in our lives. This was always expected to be a realization which would take generations before it would be a dream fulfilled though the growing anti-Semitism may be the force which speeds up the return of the Jewish People to the land. The dream of the Zionist is one of rebuilding and restoration.

 

There are other Jews who were born in Israel who do not share or understand the significance of living in Israel. Many of them simply desire to live a normal life without complications and who want to find a solution to the conflict. There are also Jews born in Israel who are Zionist and thus share the dram described above and treasure their fortune of being native born and the reality that the dream has started to become a reality. There is little difference between the native born Zionist and their cousins who are returning to the lands; both have a deeply rooted tie to the land through Torah whether they can define it as such or not. Then there are the leftist Jews who do not share the Zionist dream and actually see the Jewish presence as denying the Arabs their lands and actively work to undermine any religious or secular drive to restore the Holy Lands as they see both secular and religious Zionism as being the problem and see both groups as actually being religious. Most of these Jews are referred to as post-modernist who have moved presumably beyond the primitive religions of the world and are now enlightened and thus true believers in this New Age leftist, and often environmental and so many other leftist progressive causes and thus more advanced than the simple minded Zionists who need to be awakened to the reality that they are invaders stealing the lands which has to be stopped. These Jews have so much in common with the anti-Israel activists found largely in Europe and throughout the Western World. They support the most extreme Arab claims seeing that desire to own the land as superior to any Jewish claims to the land. Many of these Post-Zionist Jews have over the past forty years or so been moving out of Israel seeing nothing special and placing no real attachment to the lands leaving it to live in Europe where their views on life are a better fit. Some of these Jews when faced with the vile and visceral anti-Semitism begin to understand some of the logic for a Jewish nation as a place of refuge from the hatreds and some even gain a further understanding of the Zionist love for a Jewish State, some solely the logic and fortunately the majority the religious. Still, there are the many who are so sold on their post-modernist lifestyle that they work ardently to destroy Israel as a national homeland of the Jewish People regarding such as a racist and supremacist set of values and one that has to be destroyed if the nirvana of the truly multi-ethnic society where all peoples are equal in value and there is no nationalist identity exists and everybody is a citizen of the world. These Progressive Jews are progressives first and foremost and secondarily Jewish if even remaining Jewish does not interfere with their progressive lifestyle and political socialist views and mores.

 

The indigenous Arab population, many of which arrived after the initial influx of Zionists had arrived and brought with them an economic outlook and productivity that increased the economic base of the area providing for more and better paying jobs. It was this economic environment of opportunity for a better life which attracted many of the first Arabs to move their families here to share in this opportunity for wealth and a comfortable life for their children when they grew up. These Arabs joined with the Jews though often the two groups lived in communities separate but in close proximity so as to share in the bounty of the land and the economic wealth. This influx started towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It was when the Arab nationalist movement first became a relevant segment of the Arab societies that the initial buds of the desire to take over the lands where presumably the plan was to establish one Jewish state amongst the fields of Arab states being established throughout the now defeated and defunct Ottoman Empire, and what would come to be seen as the last caliphate which must be rebuilt. This Arab nationalism was used by the Mufti of Jerusalem to whip up resentment for the Jews who had come and were stealing lands that were rightfully Arab lands. It was implied that the Jews were stealing the land and Arab wealth and it was the Arab economic opportunity which brought the Jews to the area being denoted under the British Mandate to form a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, an area of extreme economic opportunity which had even built cities with commercial and manufacturing centers resembling the cities in Europe and the United States and the rest of the Western World. Even the mode of dress was largely Western in its appearance. Still, a large portion of the Arab population remained dedicated to raising their families and was not drawn into the nascent Arab-Israeli conflict. There were riots started which were stoked by some of the British who were set against the formation of a Jewish state and assisted the Arab nationalism as their weapon against these Jews who desired to form a Jewish state. They viewed the idea of Jews having their own nation as an affront to all they believed and held as holy. In their limited view of history, which started somewhere around the twelfth century, the Jews were a despised, small and petty group of undesirables to be scorned and looked down upon. These British anti-Semites, for lack of a better description as actually theirs was the mainstream view throughout most of Europe, saw the Jews in the Mandate lands as an oddity as they were proud and strong, completely unlike the Jews in Europe, these Jews obviously did not know their place. Their fellow Arabs who were working to build a nation that would no longer need the British heel on their collective throats ignored the British and their values as much as was possible and continued their lives. After World War II and the revelations of the Holocaust, the idea of finally acting on that promise given back in the San Remo Conference which was finally ratified in April of 1920 and backed by the League of Nations by unanimous affirmation and later agreed to by the United States in an agreement with the British. This was the point the Mufti of Jerusalem simply was unable to allow and thus he began assembling groups to fight against this idea.

 

That leads right into the final group, the Arabs who refused to permit anything which permitted Jews to rule over Arabs, even as equals before the law. They knew only Sharia by which the Jew would be cast off to the realm of the Dhimmi, the scorned and abused second class people who were subservient to their Islamic masters by whose grace they were permitted to exist. Eventually this led to the KGB established Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which was established in 1964 and had as its charter the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel which would then be united with the rest of Jordan and the Jews subjugated or murdered. The PLO was a nationalist and socialist organization designed around the call to destroy Israel and remove any lands from Jewish ownership just as had been done by Jordan when they managed to retain Judea and Samaria from the initial war of eradication which pitted seven nations and militias against Israel the initial morning of her existence and before anything resembling a national military could be established. Still, somehow the separate Jewish organizations merged and formed a rudimentary military which would succeed in defending much of the lands. The PLO was organized and trained mostly in Jordan with many of its leaders taken to Moscow where they received specialized training by the KGB in guerilla warfare tactics and revolutionary ideals and the best manner of methods to use against the Israelis. Their basic premise was that if they committed sufficient numbers of horrific terrorist strikes the Jews would turn tail and run. There was one main error in their reasoning, that the Jews would have anywhere to run to that had the same meaning of their national homeland in which they had resided for more than three-thousand years, far outstripping the under two-thousand years of exile. The Jews had returned to their lands of promise and eventual salvation and could not think of a place they would ever accept replacing Eretz Yisroel. But the PLO eventually got an Islamist entity which would compete with them for the crown of the greatest enemy of the Jews, and not just Israeli Jews as Hamas in their charter call for the eradication of Jews throughout the world (and beyond if it should ever be found that the Jews really are from another planet and have their own mothership sitting on the backside of the Moon). Then there came an alphabet soup of groups all fighting to destroy the Jewish state which included Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Fatah, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Abu Nidal Organization, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Al-Quds Brigades, Arab Liberation Front (ALF), Army of Islam, Black September Organization, Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PRFLP), Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), Force 17 (Security force for the leader of the PA), Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Authority (PA). There have been other such as those claiming to be followers of al-Qaeda and ISIS as well a smaller groups which surround a charismatic leader but many such groups eventually fall to the side and merge with one of the major groups. The table is currently set with Hamas and Islamic Jihad ruling in Gaza while the remainder of the PA, which is mostly comprised of Fatah and the PLO which overlap in membership and leadership with each other and the PA. The driving force behind most of the current PA is to play up their victimhood and play on the guilt feelings of the Western world in order to gain the one manner the Western world knows to perform penance, they send funding and promise further contributions to the cause. To continue to receive these guilt payments there is a necessary but unspoken second necessity, this oppressing group which is to be thought of as evil and a horrific injustice. For the Arab cause it is this anathema that is the Jewish state, Israel. This serves as a twofer for many in Europe, they are supporting the downtrodden Arabs and at the same time ridding their world eventually, should their Palestinian allies ever succeed, of that most unholy of things, a Jewish state. The argument many of the progressives make is that Israel is a theocracy which by definition must be oppressing all the non-Jews and exalting the Jewish religion. They refuse to allow the freedom of religion laws which are part of the Basic Laws which form a legal backbone to the nation of Israel. The fact that the Palestinian Arabs demand that their areas be made Jew free is completely understandable by the Europeans and the Western world. In their post-modern world view which has reached such heights of reason and truth that their nations are self-destructing through a refusal to bother to have children as such is such a bother and requires difficulties which are just too messy to put up with. That is the gift of having no religious moral underpinning which makes the dedication to others, especially the youth who are to come to the world you leave them, and replace that with a simplistic Cyrenaic Hedonism or other offshoot of Hedonism in place of the morality of the previous religiously guided, and considered restrained, life where the raising of children was held in high regard as such preserved the future of the system and guaranteed the central pillars of the society. Often those pillars were also shared by the religious institutions and have been cast aside completely as the post-modernist seeks to be rid of those old-fashioned codes. This makes Israel a reminder of their former restrained lives and the fact that Israel is succeeding while Europe finds itself in a quagmire of a quandary of where did it go so very wrong. Thus they cast Israel as the representation of everything they hated from within their history and cast the Arabs as the innocent indigenous peoples who are enslaved and brutalized by the colonialist, capitalist, racist, oppressive and, worst of all, religiously observant continuation of the old and evil European values. Never mind that the Jews were either the brutalized of the Europeans or of the colonizing, conquering, religious, enslaving and master oppressors who had burst from the Arabic Peninsula towards the end of the first millennia and spread their will of force across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and on into east Asia, southeastern Europe, Southwestern Europe, the Balkans, northwestern China and are currently attempting another expansion, their third, into south and central Africa and the Horn of Africa, southern Europe and beyond throughout Europe, and all of Western world taking a foothold in the campuses across the Western World and into government bureaucracies taking particularly into planning for school boards and other central controlling departments. The Europeans are willing to cut their own throats if it rids the world of that anathema and effrontery known as Israel, the Jewish State. In this hatred the Arab World stands in complete harmony with the Europeans and apparently the United States State Department except the Arab World’s reasons are very different as the Arab World’s reasoning is Islamic and based in a supremacist religious interpretation of the Quran. For a basic view into and describing the initial events and interpretations that guide much of Islam to this very day read our introduction to the duplicitous stories within the Quran explained Which Quran, Mecca or Medina?. The reality is that the European and the Islamists are in complete harmonious thought for diametrically opposite reasons, one fleeing anything religious and the other intent on the supremacy of their religion, holding the destruction of Israel as one of the prominent aims of their societal norms. Another difference is the Europeans are also destroying any hopes that their beliefs and societies will continue more than one or two generation forward and the Islamists are willing to assist this as long as their religious theocracy replaces the European post-modernist belief structure. So the Western world desires to take Israel down as its final achievement before disappearing while the Islamists simply want to steamroll Israel while also stretching their dominion over the remainder of the globe.

 

The saddest reality is the Islamists militancy will eventually destroy the peaceable Arabs who simply want to raise their families and bring them into a world which holds the greatest promise for their children’s children, a very similar desire shared by the Jewish People, especially the religious Jews. The Jews also have one other desire, to build their homelands to their former glory all held within the areas from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and no further. The Jews have no desires to rule the world or even to influence the world beyond the hopes that the Noahic Code, seven laws on which to base any civilization be used to guide the rest of the world and we will attempt to live by example of what righteousness can bring and to make discoveries and insights which we will gladly share with all who desire knowledge, be that knowledge in medicine, computers, agriculture, manufacturing, resource preservation or any knowledge of discovery which would go to further the development of the better human spirit and the ability for all peoples to live harmoniously. That is the gift we will exchange for this little strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Fair enough?

 

Beyond the Cusp