Israel, Zionism, and the (((Jews)))

I didn’t want to write about this. I don’t want to write about this. But circumstances give me little choice. The ancient poison has been spreading, and the last major pogrom (this one industrialized) ended 73 years ago. The pogrom cycle is coming around again.

Most people, thankfully, are no longer susceptible to the poison. But others still are, and they are being openly encouraged. I can’t be sure how much this article will help, but neither can I watch in silence. I won’t.

First Points

Let me start by being very clear on a handful of basics:

1. Israel is a state, a violence-based hierarchy like every other state. It has done and will continue to do immoral things. That’s what all states do. To focus solely on Israel is to distort reality for a separate purpose.

2. Zionism had a reason… has a reason. To portray it as some kind of signature evil – to use the term as an all-purpose condemnation – is not based on reason or justice; it’s based on uglier things. And let me doubly clear: I am not a Zionist myself, but neither am I blind to the reasons for Zionism.

3. Jews come in all flavors: A few are saints, a few are sinners, and most are in between. Just like every other group you can point to.

4. Stories of Jewish conspiracies are vile fantasies. Do Jews sometimes do favors for other Jews? Sure, just like the Irish sometimes do favors for other Irishmen, Italians for other Italians, and so on. But no more than that. I’ve been in positions to know, and there was simply nothing there. But reality doesn’t matter in this area; those who crave such stories will grab them regardless.

5. Being anti-Jew is an obsessive disorder. Such people have a compulsion to accuse Jews. That’s why they cling to terms like Zionist, Zio, the Chosen, the Tribe, and now (((the triple parentheses))). They have a psychological need to say “Jews” – whether directly or through code words. Some of them troll the internet looking for opportunities.

Now I’ll get to some details.

Israel

Individual Israelis are no more responsible for the actions of the Israeli government than individual Americans are culpable for Abu Ghraib. Governments force people to pay for their crimes, and the government of Israel is no exception. And to pretend that Jews in general are somehow responsible for the actions of the Israeli government runs toward madness.

The actions of the Israeli government are front-page news everywhere and at all times. That is fully out of touch with reality. In truth, it’s the result of a propaganda war that the Israelis are losing badly.

Again, this is obsessive. Israel is less than 1% the size of Arab-held lands, and yet they are portrayed as the biggest, nastiest bully ever seen in the Middle East. And whatever the evils of the Israelis, I think they pale compared to large-scale honor killings, genital mutilations, and death sentences upon people who change religions. And yet, those stories are seen approximately never on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc.

Consider also that the Israelis have made multiple and substantive peace overtures to the Palestinians, while the Hamas Charter openly calls for Israel’s destruction.

Israel is a barely visible spec on a world map and is projecting military power almost nowhere beyond its own tiny borders. And contrary to what you may have heard, Israel’s military budget is less than one-third of Saudi Arabia’s. Likewise, while Israel does get considerable US military financing, Egypt gets more.

These days, however, facts seldom get in the way of a flamboyant story.

And please remember that 1.6 million Arabs are legal citizens and legal voters in Israel. I encourage you to discover how many Jews are legal citizens and/or legal voters in Jordan, Arabia, and so on.

Zionism

The Jews were ejected from Judea, their long-time homeland, in stages, but mainly in 70 AD and 132 AD. Ever since, they’ve been repetitively beaten, robbed, killed, expelled in mass, shut up in ghettos, and denied recourse for their grievances. This has continued for almost 2,000 years. Can any sane person not understand their desire for a safe place?

That is what Zionism is about.

Jews tried all kinds of strategies to cope with their endless abuse. None of them worked long term. That’s how Israel became the solution.

And by the way, Zionists purchased their land from the Arabs, until they were attacked for it.

Jews

What confuses people about the Jews is that they are a religion and a people, even a nation, with or without the state of Israel. But that’s not unique. The Basques, for example, have been both a people and a nation for a long, long time, whether or not they had a state.

In any event, the Hebrews and the Jews (the same folks, though I draw a line between the two designations in the 6^th century BC) have been hated throughout history. They were hated at 2500 BC, they were hated at 500 BC and 500 AD and 1500 AD, and they’re sometimes hated now.

They’ve been hated for lots of reasons of course, but a major component of it was that they made other people, and especially sacrifice collectors, look bad. And making such people look bad is a dangerous line of work.

So, how did they anger the sacrifice collectors? Well, that’s something the Jews have inadvertently specialized in. Here are the primary ways:

• They developed belief in a god that dealt with individuals rather than collectives. (City-states being the primary collectives at the time.) That was contrary to the rationale of sacrifice for Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

• Making matters worse, the Jews described a god who listened to and spoke to the humble and who turned his back to the mighty. Again, that disrupted the ruling rationale of the empires.

• Making things still worse, the Jews placed justice above the ruler, another intolerable demotion of the big man, who demanded to be justice personified.

• Because of these three offenses, the Hebrews and Jews were generally pushed out of polite company and forced to live on the peripheries. And from that they learned to think and operate as outsiders: separate from enforced hierarchies and collectives. That, to the sacrifice collectors, turned the Jews into a potentially deadly virus.

• On top of that, Jews always majored on morality, which meant that they’d consistently show the world a humane outside, something that shouldn’t exist according to the legends of the nations.

Last Words

Rather than going on, I’ll close with a single line from Eric Hoffer’s The Passionate State of Mind. You can provide your own commentary:

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement.

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As it turns out, history was never too hard to understand; they just told you the wrong story.

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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com