Palestinian Arab Refugees Killed and Injured in Attacks

 

The Yarmouk Refugee Camp, part of the sprawling Yarmouk general neighborhood, has suffered from attacks during the past week resulting in at least twenty civilians killed and numerous more injured. The attacks were claimed to be addressing the presumed existing jihadists allied with the Islamic State according to reports from “i-24 News Agency” yesterday. The camp serves approximately some two-thousand-five-hundred families who have withstood the consistent attacks. Still, there has been no United Nations emergency meeting over these attacks despite the tragic loss of life and the silence from out of the European Union is also surprising. The European Union and United Nations are often the first to decry the situation when a Palestinian refugee camp is struck by military actions and civilian lives are lost.

 

On another front, there are still reports of injuries having been inflicted on protesters along the Israel Gaza border. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arrested two armed Palestinians crossing into Israel from southern Gaza Strip illegally earlier this week on April 24, 2018. Further, the death toll from the violent protests on the Gaza Israel border has reached forty as a Gazan died of their wounds also on April 24, 2018. Also, the remains of a Gazan engineer who was killed in Malaysia on Saturday arrived in the Gaza Strip for burial on April 24, 2018. Once again, the United States blocked passage of a call for the Security Council to set up an impartial investigation into the Israeli actions in the Gaza protests and for full explanation for the numerous deaths and injuries suffered by the Gazans, especially considering there have been minimal injuries and no fatalities on the Israeli side. The evidence of disproportional force must be investigated, Hamas leaders have demanded.

 

These two sets of situations appear to be similar in serious violence and disproportional force used against Palestinian Arabs yet they are treated so completely differently. The first situation where twenty civilians were killed in what was a week of heavy bombing and shelling after the possible chemical attack in nearby Douma on April 11, 2018 take place around Damascus (see map below) and not within Israel thus is of no interest to the international community. The second set of stories concern Gaza which is where the world’s interest is laser focused because there may be opportunities to depict Israel as a monstrous state using disproportional force. Never mind that the attacks in Syria largely affected innocent civilians as the ISIS and other forces left the area and the attacks were largely done to deny the return of these anti-Assad forces, and there was no interest in the use of helicopters dropping bombs on what remains of the Yarmouk refugee camp nor the chemical weapons use in Douma outside of NATO, who used cruise missiles to strike at Syrian and Iranian storehouses and facilities which were utilized in the chemical attack. As long as al-Assad uses simply conventional weapons the world does not care how many of his own people he murders and as long as al-Assad is murdering Arabs and not Alawites, he does not care either nor do Russia and Iran or the United Nations and the Europeans.

 

Map of Damascus Area Showing Douma and Yarmouk

 

But where Israel is utilizing soldiers who are targeting only those attempting to destroy the border fence between Israel and the Hamas ruled enclave of Gaza and, as reported, took two potential terrorists who crossed illegally into custody rather than shoot them and possibly kill them and uses water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets using live ammunition only when a direct threat is posed, each time Israel responds to such a direct threat, even if the individual shot is wounded and not killed, Israel is immediately discussed by the European Union and the Security Council of the United Nations for using disproportional force. There were a couple of slip-ups by media reporters caught in live microphones or during interviews actually asking during the last Gaza War in 2014, why don’t we see more dead Israelis, as if unless an equal number of dead and injured is required of Israel otherwise Israel is guilty of some criminal act. The fact that even in the current Hamas threat coming from out of Gaza, where Gazans are the Hamas weapon of choice, Israel is doing what she has always done, attempt to minimize casualties both for Israel and for Gaza. We can hear some out there asking how can we even try to say such a thing? Let us elucidate.

 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a revamping of an older conflict which the Israelis had to be transmogrified from Israel as the weaker half of the Arab-Israeli conflict where half a billion Arabs were united against six million Jews to six million Jews against the poor, unarmed, oppressed Palestinians. The media loved this new framing of the story and adapted immediately. This provided them a way of describing the victory of the IDF in 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War as Israel as the all-powerful IDF against rag-tag Palestinian security forces. Now Israel could be the mean and horrible force and the Arabs were now the distressed and unfortunate victims of those horrible Israelis. To take the next step, we will need to take some steps at looking into the views of the post-modern world. Post-modernism claims that religion no longer has a place in our lives, because there is no Supreme Being as all is defined by science, or soon will be if we just wait a short while. Militarism is evil and any use of force must be questioned and condemned. Racism and colonialism are the past sins that must be atoned and any signs of it remaining in our world must be destroyed unless being performed by people who are viewed as struggling and power deprived during the past, especially if they can be viewed as having suffered from former racism and colonialism. The next ignominious sin is white-privilege. Lastly, there is a need for our liberal and enlightened societies to find some group which can be singled out and who allow us to feel better about our society by pointing our finger at this group and finding all the potential shortcomings in that group and thus they are the actual problem and we are innocent.

 

Unfortunately for Israel, but she has been chosen to represent that militarist, religious, racist, colonial, oppressive nation which also can be portrayed as having gained from white-privilege and thus the people are unenlightened and must be shamed and carry the full blame for not having entered the great new age of post-modernist society and being so backward and thus revolting. But why Israel, because Israel is the Jew amongst the nations and has been painted through media reporting to be guilty of all the foibles that western society claims to have moved beyond in their enlightenment, except for supporters of President Trump, Israel, the Second Amendment and Republicans who live amongst the enlightened, though in pockets of flyover country. Fortunately, the media is run and populated mostly by those enlightened people of the center such as the supporters of enlightened politics, economic equality, social progressive rationalism, post-modernism, and all the rest of the centrist positions found in the New Yorker Magazine which defines our centrist beliefs as leftist beliefs are the new center. Israel is the familiar target of the enlightened of society as well as of the Islamic society. In both cases, the Jew was the reason for all failures, problems, disease, war, evil, curses and anything else where blame was required to be assigned. In Christian Europe the Jew was the obvious other who was different and often separate and to the Capitalist the Jew was Communist and to the Communist the Jew was the Fascist and to the Fascist the Jew was the Capitalist and in all things the Jew was the one group which did not fit in the rest of society. In Islam, the Jew was a Dhimmi and the chosen hated one and thus the first group to whom one applied blame. For both Islam and Christianity, the Jew was the weak minority who was largely incapable of defending themselves and easy to place blame and either be victim of a pogrom designed to chase them from town or to murder them if caught before they could flee. When disease, crop failure or any other ill befell the community, the Jews were blamed and were made to pay the price.

 

The world has not become so much more sophisticated, it has simply transferred the blame from the Jew to the Jewish State. The sad part of this situation is that the Jews in the Diaspora are largely found to be politically on the left, what the left defines as the center, and as such, they accept without question that Israel really is as evil and to blame as their fellow leftists claim. Israel is seen as the Western, developed, white country and the Palestinians are the people of color who are poor, weak, unfortunate victims of the Israelis. What is ignored conveniently are the Jews who come from the same MENA* nation states as are called the Arab world. These Jews were chased from their homes under threat of death and often running from pogroms almost always being required to leave their wealth and property behind for which they never received reparations. The Jews who left Europe after World War II for Israel also had lost everything and this was the start of the country of Israel which today is treated as if it came from privilege and financial supremacy, not from modest means and initially socialist collectives known as Kibbutzim and was agrarian economy for the first fifteen to twenty years and from there became the modern and powerful nation far more recently than believed. The fact that Israel has gone from basically a socialist society and has become more capitalist over time until now Israel is unabashedly capitalist. This, to the developed world which has been sliding towards socialism, especially when the leftist parties are in power, is simply one of the worst sins any people can commit.

 

MENA Nations

 

Israel is seen as everything that the developed Western nations are embarrassed over and thus is treated as a pariah amongst the nations. Israel also is held to a different standard than other nations. This is made obvious by our first two paragraphs where al-Assad can murder his people without anyone lifting their voice in complaint, while Israel shoots at people attempting to force their way across the border and cause damage and possibly killing Israelis and the world comes to a screeching halt demanding Israel fall on her own sword. The entirety is an onion whose unpeeling would take more time and pages than anyone would care to read. The truth is that Israel is not the evil pariah that the media paints her for being. She takes measures to preserve even the lives of her enemies to such an extent that a report researched and filed by more military leaders of impressive qualifications states, “Hamas’s strategic concept rests in large part on a deliberate unlawful tactic of embedding its military operations deep within the urban civilian infrastructure of Gaza and drawing the IDF into that territory’s urban centers. Hamas thus exploits the advantages of fighting on pre-prepared urban terrain in addition to exploiting the constraints brought about by the IDF’s strict adherence to the Law of Armed Conflict. Fighting in urban terrain is one of the most complex, dangerous and challenging operations of war.” Additionally, the group concluded, “Israel adheres to the accepted norms and rules that make up the Law of Armed Conflict, including rules embodied in conventions to which Israel is not party, where these form part of customary international law.” We will rest on their expertise and content that as Jews, Israel is in a position which we Jews completely and totally are familiar, understand and feel complete contempt for those asserting such views which we realize is just their own contempt with themselves being projected upon the other, and as Jews we have been the world’s most convenient other throughout history.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

* MENA = Middle East and North Africa

 

Obama Setting Stage for Next Foreign Policy Confrontation, Israel

 

There has been a long list outlining the apparent policy from the White House from even before Candidate Obama won the nomination to the recent flood of reports each setting an even longer path of quotes with some stretching the line beyond credulity. The favorite around here has been Newsmax quoting Israel National News quotes alleged from Ma ‘an News references to a story out of Kuwait that American air commanders from all branches to defend Iran from any Israeli air strikes even if such defense results in their need to shoot down Israeli warplanes. We like to simply take things back to their roots from the outset where one of candidate Obama’s foreign policy advisors, United States National Security Advisor to former President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who stated and pushed the policy while campaigning with great enthusiasm called for during the 2008 campaign for the United States to shoot down Israeli planes if they attack Iran quoted as stating in an interview with the Daily Beast, “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?”

 

 

Zbigniew Brzezinski

 

 

Brzezinski’s antagonism and visceral hatred of all things Israel had led to many surmising that his deep rooted hatred was broader than just Israel but also included any Jews who opposed his Israel positions liking them to traitors who should be ignored at best and prosecuted and exiled at the worst. He had continued his argument bringing up an exceedingly sensitive subject in another quote stating, “We have to be serious about denying them that right. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a ‘Liberty’ in reverse.’” Other reverberations of this theme have been rumored to have emanated from unofficial references from the White House though nobody should expect such a policy to ever be announced nor for orders to be made overt and obvious. The command one is most likely to be found as incriminating would be an alert to the possibility of aircraft overflying air areas of responsibility and the emphasis that such passage be strictly denied. Such an order leaves the commanders free to use whatever level of deterrence they deem necessary after ascertaining the number of aircraft, their formation, likely national origin, expected or announced targets all weighed against standing orders and previously given orders pertaining to such situations.

 

In the meantime it has been made obvious to every Democrat Senator and Representative from the Senate and House of Representatives that the choice before them has little to do with Iran or the Iranian nuclear weapons program or even the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) but weather you stand with the United States and its Commander in Chief or does one choose to stand with a foreign government which has opposed the President of the United States at every turn and sought to undermine American credibility and resolute stance to enforce the laws of the United States and its Constitution which obligates the United States to enforce Security Council Chapter Seven Decrees and all they imply. Even more simply stated, each Senator and Representative must decide if they stand with the United States and its stand with the Security Council or do they stand with Israel and thus prove their loyalty to a foreign government and are potentially a traitor to their country in what could be seen as a time of open conflict. The choice has been laid out so simple that even a member of Congress could figure it out without needing a number of aids to explain it; do you support the United States or the Jews, despite the fact that American Jews support the President in greater percentages than does the remainder of the population. The Jews must necessarily be thrown under the bus as being suspected agents of a foreign and hostile nation, the Jew amongst the nations, Israel. Make no bones about it or explanations of how such is not possible or even our favorite which is right at this moment in their history becoming their position of desperation despite all the evidence to the contrary; they are exclaiming in their self-delusionary state that, “It can’t happen here.”

 

That concept of, “It can’t happen here,” requires some explaining to those not familiar with its origins. It was a part in Fiddler on the Roof and included in that story because that story is three stories in one. The first is simply a story which incorporated some realities of those times. A story of the assimilations through the changes to ‘tradition’ through Tevye and Golde and their traditional arranged marriage to their first daughter’s marriage to one of their community by choice, to next daughter’s marriage to a Jew who was secular, to the last daughter marriage to a non-Jew. The final story is how the Jews assimilated but is still the Jew in their nation and as such, despite their belief of being an accepted member of the society, a friend, as the ‘head constable’ explains to Tevye, “I only tell you this because I like you, you’re a good man Tevye and I thought you should know,” about the coming Pogrom. The Jews at the end of Fiddler on the Roof are all shocked as they had come to believe after living in Anatevka for a number of generations, “It can’t happen here.”

 

From in Egypt, where “It can’t happen here” initiated, when they first became slaves to the Babylonian exile and Persian Empire, Greek, Rome and lastly in more modern times over the past Century plus a few years, the Czars, the Communists, the Nazis, the numerous other European nations when the Nazis provided the perfect cover, the “What could we do, we were conquered,” excuse. There were records from the Nazi files how the French, Belgians, Polish and others when the Nazis demanded so many Jews the townsfolk, the neighbors, not all but many, often the majority, rounded up twice as many Jews as demanded and pleaded, “take these as well.” The story is always the same, “These are our neighbors.” “We are accepted here.” “They mean those other Jews, we are doctor, lawyers, judges, in the Parliament and whatever other excuse and then the chorus line, “It can’t happen here.” Then the final realizations and the shocked “How could this happen to us, we were so sophisticated, successful, accepted and members of the community, respected…” but lastly you know what they were; Jews, Jews first, Jews last and Jews always.

 

In all too many cases after World War II when the emaciated but surviving Jews returned home they were not met with open arms, with pleadings of forgive us; they were met with pitchforks and worse and chased from their former home towns because how could they be accepted when everything they owned including their homes and shops had been divided up amongst their neighbors. It was easier to chase them off or even murder them after all, they must have died in the camps it would be said. When they were met and told honestly that the town had moved on and so should they, you want to know where they were told to run to? To Israel, go to your homelands in Israel, that was what they were told, and many tried but there the British were rationing the number of Jews who could legally make return to Israel, to make Aliyah. A paltry seventy-five thousand a year were being permitted entrance. Want to know where some of the Jews being refused entrance to Israel and had nowhere else to turn were held by the British? You probably already knew, the concentration camps, the very camps the Nazis held them in became their refugee camos when Cyprus overflowed with Jewish refugees. And after the British had let a number in, then the Arab nations made life difficult to unbearable to simply evicting their Jews. Many were expelled by one means or another, almost another million Jews who made their way to Israel and how many others to Europe or the United States, who knows exactly?

 

These Jews were resented initially but were accepted and are approaching full equality as the two separated Jewish communities once again intermarry with each and the other and a new set of bondings between Ashkenazim and Sephardim Jews such that in the not too distant future Israel will have but one Chief Rabbi instead of the current two. The other choice would have made the insanity worse as a third Chief Rabbi would be necessary for Jews where their parents were from opposing camps like myself where my father was British and therefore Ashkenazim; he was sent to fight in Burma and met my mother in Bombay and thus he married a Sephardim and presto, a mixed Jew with a foot in each world and customs from where only Hashem knows for sure.

 

The irony is that the Europeans and the Arab and Muslim nations of the MENA Region (Middle East and North Africa) all spat the words of “Why don’t you just go home to Israel,” into their faces. The sarcasm is their thinking living as a Jew in Israel would be their punishment when to the Jews, any and all Jews, “Next Year in Yerushalayim” is a dream come true, dreams of two thousand years come true. Those expelling us and claiming to force the Jews to Israel being used as a threat, missed the fact that it is the Jewish dream to live in Israel. To tread the dusty narrow streets in Old City Jerusalem, and to feel the joy of being in Israel despite the threats, despite any hardship, despite what others thought such a decree meant punishment, is our dreams realized. And just as Torah predicted, a nation built in a single day, Israel. On May 14, 1948, there was no Israel and at dawn of the next day there is Israel stretching from the shores all the way across the Judean Hills and half the way across the Jordan valley trimmed by the river, the very river Joshua led the first Israelis and still standing are the broken and crumbled walls of Jericho and the jewel atop the central hills lies Yerushalayim, our first and only true love, Jerusalem.

 

 

Eretz Yisroel the Israel Solution to Problems is One State Solution with Citizenship for Anybody Who Desires Living in Peace with Equal Rights Responsibilities and Worshiping as One Pleases

 

Still we have brothers and sisters remaining out there, the not Israel and the place where it can happen again and is starting to happen again. We can hear the cries starting with the Rabbis, we can hold on to that we built, we will be protected, the government has laws, the rule of law is our protector. There is but one rule of law that will protect any Jew and that is Torah and Torah will only live and rule eventually in Eretz Yisroel. The Chief Rabbi of the Ukraine just a few short weeks ago was crying out that, ‘That can’t happen here,” and, “This is our home. This has been our home, these are our neighbors; they are good people.” Then it comes, the first note of that familiar refrain where the first chief of security in a town or city pronounces they cannot be made responsible for protecting the Jews. That one of the towns in war-torn Ukraine made this statement is almost understandable, that a town in Sweden also made this comment is far more troubling but that statement was made by the last police chief just before he was relieved of duty and a new chief of police who at least claims he can protect all in Malmo. That phrase, that feared phrase renouncing the responsibility for protecting the Jews as it has become hopeless to stand against the wave of oncoming hatreds which has possibly even infected some in the police though rooting them out would be problematic, it is so much easier to toss the Jews before those demanding human sacrifice, demanding human blood, demanding Jewish blood. It is a familiar face for those who know its history and we have met this face before, but before we were powerless and could not take up arms. Not any more as we have Israel and there we do make our stand once more and this time it should prove permanent. Baruch Hashem!

 

But what is about to start in the United States will sound ludicrous and nobody will dare predict the monster which lurks in the fog of the future. Very few are capable of actually seeing through that fog and pierce the path that the world will take but almost anyone might claim to have a clear prediction of what is coming. Anything we claim is to be seen comes from a study of what has happened before, how those times played out, what their correlation could potentially hold for the present situation. Every repeat of history is not absolute but more like the next refrain from a poem, we know the rhyming scheme; we know the meter and all that remains is to flush out the words, the actions, the intentions to come. The three most interesting communities come from, obviously the United States’ and a little less obviously France which has the second largest Jewish community outside of Israel and the third is a bit of a surprise as it is Britain.

 

France is an easy prediction and we might as well cut to the chaff, France will eventually do what France has always done. During the Inquisition the French Monarchy surrendered the French Jews, later after the French Revolution the two sides of the revolution did agree on one item, the Jews had conspired against them. They both agreed the Jews held too much power and wealth and were obviously in league with the monarchy, the same monarchy which arrested and executed Jews in higher quantities compared to their percentage of the population. When the two winning factions from the revolution turned on each other, both sides decided that the Jews supported the other side and sent a high percentage fleeing or being executed. The fact that a percentage of Jews were fleeing meant that all Jews were guilty as suspected and charged and could never prove their innocence. Such remained an undertow within French elite and once again came to the fore in the Dreyfus Affair where Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason serving as the sacrificial lamb for a nasty intrigue amongst the General Staff. He was found guilty and sentenced to life served on the infamous Devil’s Island Prison Colony where he was held in solitary confinement and was eventually manacled to his bed which was nailed to the floor. Emil Zola took up the cause with his famous editorial article J’accuse. We have given this deeper coverage in our articles The Unkindest Cut of Anti-Semitism from August 12, 2015, and Israel Unfortunate Choice Ahead Due to State Department from Jul 19, 2015, as it has become a much more identifiable current in modern events.

 

The United States is a very different case as, outside of Israel, the United States with four and a half million Jews and possibly fifteen percent more, it has the highest population of assimilated Jews very similar to Germany, France and Poland amongst European nations including western Russia. The Jews then as now were politically active supporting the socialist revolution wherever they arose. We witnessed how the French treated many of their Jews who either ended up in one of the major cities or had moved out of France or been murdered by the revolutionary parties. Still, German and Polish Jews in the major cities were indistinguishable from their fellow citizens. The Jews in Russia had supported the Russian Revolution but were seen by the Communists as Bourgeois and by the Bourgeois as Communists. The Germans once the Nazis came to power saw the Jew as a Capitalist while during the short rule by the Weimar Republic the Jews were seen as socialists or Communists, as both were feared by the Republic. Of course once the Nazis climbed to power the Jews were initially seen as capitalists before taking on the role as inferior excuses for human beings and thus a plague upon society which must be destroyed. During the late 1920s and 1930s the Jews saw the changes and simply denied what they saw. They stuck with their story that “It can’t happen here,” They were considered an intricate and vital part of the society and held positions of power and respect. They were judges, lawyers, doctors, professors, teachers and Ministers in Parliament. That all changed and changed with viciousness unrivalled in history starting with Kristallnacht, “Crystal Night”, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass. These were pogroms spread across all of Germany where Jewish shops, homes and even the Jews themselves were set upon and destroyed with many burned to the ground of the two day span of November 9–10, 1938. Then the Jewish Laws were enacted forbidding Jews holding positions of status and slowly but surely dehumanizing the Jews as the other in the society, the cause of unrest, distress, economic hardship, basically whatever your problem a Jew was the cause even to almost include even illnesses. The Jews were cast as the ones opposing progress, being greedy and taking more than their share of wealth, controlling the media, entertainment, and worst of all opposing the Führer Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler the Führer was one of the top three murderers of modern history exceeded by Mao Tse-tung and Joseph Stalin.

 

 

Adolf Hitler Führer and Detestable Murderer and one of the top three murderers of modern history exceeded by Mao Tse-tung and Joseph Stalin

 

 

The rise of a visceral anti-Semitism started in the Beer halls and the halls of academia, specifically the college campuses throughout Germany. It reached across the Atlantic and took root in the United States with support from some surprising people who advocated euthanasia of those inferior and the infirm. This started with the Jews but did not end there as it spread to include millions of others, many for simply disagreeing with the method of perfecting the human race through selective breeding and euthanasia of those deemed inferior. They believed they could breed a master race of men over two meters in height, slender athleticism, blue eyed and other physical and mental attributes including the specific and approved political opinions. Amongst the Americans who were enamored with Herr Führer were Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and other leaders of major American corporations all of which were instrumental in implementing the growth of the Third Reich by supplying parts, knowledge, systems of production and raw materials along with political support. They were all members of Eugenics societies and believed fervently that the human race could and should be improved by sterilization of the inferiors which included Jews and other minorities. They were supporters of Margaret Sanger and her organization which is known as today’s Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood initially sterilized blacks in huge numbers and remains today the number one murderer of minority children and gets away with it calling it a choice. Add to this the anti-Israel, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism rampant on many major universities and the parallels in the United States right now which has been aided by the Administration claims that the Jews are attempting to run the government and are trying to destroy all he has done and force the United States into a war with Iran to aid Israel at a grievous cost in money and troops, an insufferable cost in innocent American lives.

 

Britain and the United States share a trait that we can only hope grows and remains strong. Amongst the Evangelical Christians there is this movement which might just save the English speaking Western world. Christians for Israel in its different organizations and leaders is are interesting groups as for Jews it is refreshing to have others who worship Hashem, even if they have their own manner and structures, who are not judging their holiness and success with Jews by how many Jews they turned to Christianity and instead seek mutual strength and advancing the cause of an open Israel and especially Jerusalem and other holy sites for all peoples of any faith to visit and enjoy in their own constructive manner. These Christians also hold that the Jewish People becoming reestablished in our homelands as a good thing which will, in its own time, assist all who worship Hashem whether they be Jews, Christians or whatever religion they claim and all can share in the holy sites, cities, synagogues, temples churches and burial locations of the forefathers of each faith which spawned here in the Holy Lands. The one thing which is guaranteed, Israel is going to need all the help she can muster in the coming years as everything builds towards a fateful climax, may it be a blessing to all when it comes. In the interim, President Obama does not appear to be making things for the better but all in its good time and for every day of relative bliss let us all thank Hashem in our own way.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

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