Anti-Israel People

Hello all. A couple of days ago, I and some Israel-lovin' friends attended a talk by a man named, well, we'll just call him "J," who is a known socialist anti-Israel type. In this post, I'm going to talk about a few (or many) of the essential errors that he makes in his discussions (I've listened to him speak about 4 times in the past couple of years).

In no particular order, one of the points that he tries to reiterate is that he is not anti-Israel. By making it seem like he is simply generally anti-nationalist, he hopes that the audience will believe that his rejection of Israel's existence is just a by-product of his rejection of states in general. However, we know that this is not true because he doesn't go around giving talks about the invalidity of every other state in the world, not to mention, any other state in the world. He actually advocates a Palestinian state, so I wonder where his anti-nationalist attitude disappears to in that instance.

My friend Danny brought up an excellent point after J's talk. J has a problem with Jewish sovereignty, and Danny, who is an Israeli, explained that he likes living in Israel where people speak Hebrew (a language circa 3,000 years old), living in a state with a Jewish culture (the only one) and being in a place that is predominantly Jewish. Throughout the talk, J was explaining that he doesn't dislike Jews, and he "proved" it by saying that he has absolutely no problem with Jews living in America, and that America should have opened its doors to Jews in the years leading up to Israeli Independence so that they could just immigrate here instead. Sounds good doesn't it? However, this is just a clever euphemism for saying that Jews didn't have the right to a sovereign state, while he makes it sound like he is driven by some sort of love for Jews.

Quite the contrary, as Danny pointed out; having all the Jews come to America is not an act of love (in this case), but rather a negation of Jewish sovereignty, because although living in America might have been a good life for them, they would have been a population living in a host population. For some reason, in J's mind, the Jews' rightful place in society is to live as a minority population within a host society. This is somewhat like a secular socialist white version of "dhimmitude," a variant of the Muslim classist ideal that Jews can only exist as intact populations in Muslim countries, as long as they submit to the particular Muslim state in which they live. By the way, this is the major reason why the Arabs were in utter rejection of the Jewish state, because it was a rejection, by Jews, of the "naturally occuring" dhimmi status.

J also speaks out against world imperialism, colonialism, and expansionism in all forms and that it is a passing phenomenon. However, and I asked him this during the talk, why is it that the only type of expansionism that he failed to refer to was Muslim expansionism? During the 7th century, when Muhammad collected his forces and began to spread Islam, in about one hundred years total (which also took place after his death), Islam covered the entire Middle East and spread to India, many parts of Europe (east and west), and almost all of Africa. Keeping in mind that this occurred in the 7th century (when technology was far more primitive than today's military abilities), taking over that amount of land is, by all means, a lot of land! By our standards today, it is probably more than half of the world; that's not expansionism? The Iranians didn't originally write in Arabic letters, neither did the Turks, nor was Islam their religion before this.

Related to this, Islam also took over Israel, a land that they knew was central to the Jews in the same way that Mecca was central to the Muslims. No matter though, taking over the heart of Judaism was instrumental. Israel is the only land that matters to the Jews; Judaism has no designs or beliefs in having more land than Israel (although there is a notion of "Greater Israel," which also includes land on the east side of the Jordan River, but that is another topic), while Islam's paradigm of "Muslim lands" is all the land taken by Islam during those one hundred years, and by other standpoints, the entire world, although that most-likely belongs to more extremist points of view hopefully not shared by all Muslims. The point is that rooted in Arab Muslim and other Muslim rejection of the State of Israel is that its establishment involved Jews setting up a sovereign Jewish entity in what Muslims considered "Muslim lands," not to mention, which had lasted for some 1,226 years (722-1948). The "break in the system" enfuriated Arabs and they vehemently rejected such a reversal of dhimmitude, and to this day are still having an incredibly hard time getting over largely primitive attitudes of Arab Muslim dominance over the Middle East, especially when the group at hand are "the Jews."

Interestingly enough, when the Romans wanted to take control over all of its empire, which Israel was a province of, they obsessively proceeded in their efforts in trying to destroy the resistant Jews of Matzada (Masada). The Jews of Masada were a small group of Jews living in the Negev Desert in southern Israel who held out against the Roman invaders for an amazing several years. The Romans were enfuriated and spent huge amounts of military effort in trying to "unite" their hold on their empire by quelling this small revolution so that there would be no "break" in "Roman land," and eventually succeeded in what is known as "the last stand at Masada." When the Jews were finally cornered, they drew lots and rather than becoming mistreated Roman subjects, they ended their lives (the fathers killing their families, and the men killing each other), a concept of Jewish law known as "Kiddush Hashem," the sanctification of G-d's Name by beind commanded with choosing death in the face of being forced to break His commandments. The Arab world, in the same way, has its version of the Roman Empire, the Arab (Muslim) Empire, known as the "Umma," a term used to define the world-wide collection of Muslim communities, or otherwise, Muslim lands. It's important to realize that Israel is in the Umma.