Every time I write about Israel, I feel like I need a long shower. The bile, hate, and absolute ignorance displayed in comments, and online is so disproportionate to the topic that I wonder if the human race is fit to live on this planet one more day. Were I God, I would have zotted us all out of existence millennia ago. But for Moses, I think God would have.
I’ll keep this short. If you don’t want to read it, feel free to continue on with your day. If you are here because you think this is Matt Taibbi’s site, it’s not. It never has been. The Racket News™️ was founded a whole year before Taibbi renamed his own site “Racket News” (before that, it was “TK News”). We were here first, which is why we have a “TM” after the name. If Taibbi thought we were a threat, he’d have come after us legally, but he has no grounds to do so. I respect Matt, because his dad was a veteran Boston television reporter and sports beat writer for years, and Matt has a gift for writing. I mean, he coined the term “the great vampire squid” as Goldman Sachs’ moniker. Brilliant. I can’t write like Matt or compete with him. If you’re here to read Matt Taibbi, you’re in the wrong place. However, Matt and I don’t agree on many things, and this is one of them. Not that he cares, neither in the scheme of things, it matters in the least. But if you’re still reading, stick with me.
About Israel, let me get some things straight. I aim to persuade nobody, but for those readers who are not bots or some kind of AI, here’s some things I believe, and I know to be true.
America is not Israel. Israel is a foreign nation, like Brazil, or Bulgaria, or Singapore, or the Federated States of Micronesia. I have never been to Israel, though one day I would like to visit. Visit, as in, go there as a tourist, like so many Americans do each year. The main reason Americans visit is because a large part of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, happened there. The land, called the “Holy Land,” is central to the Jewish and Christian faith. It’s worth visiting, to walk where John the Baptist walked; to stand on the ground where the feet of Jesus stood. Why not do that?
If you think American Jews have some loyalty to a foreign nation because that nation is founded as the Jewish state, and American Jews, are, well, Jews, you’re wrong, and you’re not wrong.
As an American, I don’t have to listen to hateful things Israeli leaders, Knesset members, or ministers of various departments day. I don’t have a voice in Israeli politics. I don’t participate in their political system. I don’t get to vote. My voice matters not. I don’t get a say in what Israel does. It is a foreign country. I don’t get a say in Mexico either, despite the fact that Mexico’s president is Jewish. (Same with Ukraine.)
Israel is for Israelis to live in and govern.
That being said, I have a very good reason to support the existence of Israel, as does every single Jew on the planet.
If a person is born Jewish, or believes in the Torah, that person is part of a tiny population living on the earth: 0.2%. Muslims make up 25% of the world population; Christians, 28%; non-religious people, another 28%. The other 19-odd percent is everything else: Hindu, Buddhist, B’Hai, and a plethora of other small faiths. Only about 15 million are Jews. There are 51 or 52 Islamic states, many with huge populations and giant swaths of land. Some of these require citizens to follow Islamic beliefs or Islamic law.
There is one Jewish state. It is the size of New Jersey. About 10 million people live there, and about 10 percent of those are not Jewish. About 50 percent of the Jews are not particularly religious, but they are Jews. Of the other religious groups in the world, the largest ones have a history, over a thousand or so years or more, of persecuting Jews. Just about every Christian nation has expelled the Jews at one time or another: Britain, Spain, Russia being great examples. Others have persecuted Jews, forced them to convert to other religions, or outright killed them.
The United States welcomed Jews at the founding. Jews were in this land before there was a United States, though the Jews of Savannah were only tolerated because there was no good way to send them back. Jews participated in the American Revolution, and every war thereafter. Yet, for two hundred years, Jews have suffered persecution at the hands of other Americans. From soft persecution like being excluded from certain societies, or from country clubs, or from Ivy League colleges, to the activities of the KKK, to the official policies of our State Department to limit Jewish immigration.
Despite all this, America has been a haven for Jews, especially compared to other places which do not offer the freedom we have here.
American Jews are Americans. The second largest population of Jews in the world live in New York City. They helped elect a Muslim mayor. A large part of the Democratic Party makes hay by opposing Israel, the only Jewish state.
The only Jewish state has had to deal with 2.5 to 4 million refugees from its bloody founding war, where five Arab nations simultaneously attacked the nascent IDF, and two years later, the Israelis won their land. Those Arabs who had been sent to the land to occupy it to keep Jews from having it were displaced, and the nations they emigrated from would not repatriate them. So they have lived on the West Bank and Gaza for 80 years, for Israel to deal with. Call it a prison camp if you want, but the progenitors of those Palestinians were promised all the land in Israel once the Jews were removed. Except all their efforts to remove the Jews have failed.
There is one Jewish state, and its existence is the only hope Jews of the world have that they will not be exterminated at some future time, or today.
How can I not have some place in my heart where I care about Israel? How can any Jew wish there were no Jewish state, a haven that will always accept them when every other nation rejects them?
Despite being only 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews have won something like 25% of Nobel Prizes, especially in the “hard sciences” like physics, chemistry, and medicine. Jews developed life-saving vaccines like the one to prevent polio. Jews largely built the Hollywood studios. Jews stood against the evil empire of the Soviet Union. Jews have done big things in the world. They are also all over the Bible, in case you don’t know.
Why shouldn’t the land where Jews inhabited since a thousand years before Christ be the Jewish land? Why shouldn’t the land that King Saul, King David, and King Solomon ruled be a Jewish state? Who outside of Israel gets to tell them they can’t have it when they’ve clawed their way out of pogroms, the Holocaust, and being expelled from every nation on earth to go to the one place that always accepts Jews?
But I am American. Unless I move to Israel (called “making Aliyah” which means “to ascend” in Hebrew), I don’t get a voice or a vote in Israel. Their politics don’t concern me. The fact that Israel, Israelis, and their government do some awful things doesn’t directly affect me as a citizen of the United States. It does, however, affect me as a Jew. Because others who think Jew = Israel = Jews hold me and every other Jew in the world responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. This is an evil belief.
If you want to blame me for who I voted for in the U.S., that’s fair. But don’t hold me responsible for what Israelis voted for. And don’t say American Jews deserve to be punished for having place in their hearts for Israel. That’s also evil. It’s the same as saying there should be no Jews. I think you know who else said that.
The direct descendants, politically and doctrinally speaking, of the Nazis is the Islamic Brotherhood, which is the parent umbrella organization of Hamas. This dates back to the pact the Mufti of Jerusalem made with Hitler during World War II. That pact still exists, though Hitler does not. His will, so to speak, lives on, in Gaza. Support Gaza if you want, but know who you are supporting.
My heart breaks for Gaza, and for Ramallah, and all of Judea and Samaria (what Israelis call “the West Bank”). But I am not Israeli, and those things are not my problem. What is my problem is the hatred from other Americans who think I am not “pure” enough an American citizen to have a voice here. Were I not a follower of Yeshua, whom God cleaned up my potty mouth decades ago, I would have a couple of words for those people, and I think you know what they are.
American Jews are not Israel, and Israel is not every Jew in the world. I support Israel, because I enjoy living and not being murdered for being Jewish. That’s the whole reason. If you can’t accept that, it’s on you. Go open a Bible and read for yourself. Go read the history of persecution of Jews by Christians, and by Muslims. In fact, for most of history, Muslims treated Jews far better than Christians.
If you consider yourself a Christian, and you harbor ill-will against American Jews for what Israel, a foreign nation, does, you have a sickness of the heart, and the Bible has the cure.
That’s all I have to say about it.
I’m sure I’ll have to take another shower, because to some, rolling in filth is the point. But this time, I’m disabling comments, so keep your thoughts to yourself.