Dear Israelis demonstrating in Israel and New York:
You have forgotten the 3500 years of Jew hatred – from the four corners-persecutions, prosecutions, pogroms, auto de fe, expulsions, inquisitions, Jews shot in the back and tossed into trenches- too often alive and covered in dirt, Jews taken to crematoria via a modern day military industrial system. And now, in 2022 we have the highest levels of Jew hatred on record.
You have forgotten that these Jew haters care not if you are secular or religious, Likud or Yesh Atid. Why?
Because a Jew is a Jew is a Jew.
Every Jew has a right to be honoured in Israel. And Israel should be honored abroad.
You forgot.
Look at you.
Trying to disrupt the Israel Parade in New York, hounding - not civilly protesting - ministers and MKs representing the democratically elected Israeli government and not allowing them to speak.
Have you already forgotten about the 20 Israelis murdered and 100 more who were wounded at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv in June 2001? For the crime of being Jewish? Because a Jew is a Jew is a Jew?
Because, here we are 22 years later, and look at the Jews in Tel Aviv-the Miami Beach of Israel.
I never thought I would live to see the day when JEWS in Israel would fight against other Jews moving into their neighbourhood. Jews in Tel Aviv accused the city of plotting to give a larger building to a “far-right yeshiva” that moved into a largely secular neighborhood over thirty years ago They don’t want those observant Jews near them, even when, as in this case, they are in a religious Zionist yeshiva whose students all serve in the army and despite the fact that the newest IDF general is a graduate of that yeshiva..
They don’t want “those” Jews moving in? Those Jews? You mean the ones that were put in the camps first and then burned. Or shot in the back and pushed into pits? Mind you, your secular counterparts landed there as well. Because to Jew haters, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. You sound like the people who had signs: No Jews Allowed. The elites who didn’t want Jews in their neighbourhoods. NIMBY! Could ruin the neighbourhood.
How’s this?
I have a suggestion for these Jews protesting a yeshiva in their midst. Move to America. You’ll fit right in with the millions there who don’t want Jews in their neighborhoods either. Make sure you tell them you are a Democrat. That’s important because the Democrat Party, today, is the most antisemitic in history – and considering that Roosevelt refused to take in the Jews from the St Louis, that’s saying a lot. And the Democrats proudly support the Hamas squad. They, for sure, don’t want Jews living near them.
And look at, and I mean really look at TV host and model Galit Gutman who called haredi Israeli Jews “bloodsuckers” during a panel discussion about the government’s upcoming budget.
“How much burden can be placed on a third of this country in order to support all of these Haredi bloodsuckers, all these people who suck our blood?” she said on the Channel 12 morning news show.
Jews as BLOODSUCKERS? “famous” antisemitic trope through the ages.
Her parents must be really proud!
I’m all for free speech. But this is dangerous hate speech – words one hears from “celebrities” like Roger Waters.
Yair Lapid blasted the government’s proposed government resolution prioritizing “the values of Zionism” as racist and discriminatory, especially against Israel’s Druze community. Really? Attacking the values of Zionism?
“The values of Zionism, as they are expressed in Basic Law: Nation-State of the Jewish People, will be the leading and decisive values in setting public policy, domestic and foreign policy, legislation and actions of the government and all of its units and institutions.”
Adding a little more insult to injury Lapid stated:
“It wouldn’t do any harm if artificial intelligence could replace your entire government.”
Not done yet, Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) went to America and encouraged left-wing Jewish organizations to stand against the Israeli government. And they did! How proud Lapid must be!
How did the proposal of keeping Israel Jewish, body and soul, lead to a Jew, an Ambassador to Denmark saying,
“The haredi and Religious Zionist politicians are the Jewish jihad, they are an existential and certain threat to the State of Israel.”
And former head of Shin Bet, Carmi Gilon, castigated Israeli politicians who are religiously observant. And then we have former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin saying that the current coalition “is not a fully right-wing government, it is a fully terrorist government.”
How about that Avigdor Liberman? Liberman has a long history of making comments hostile to haredi Jews, including saying in 2021 that the religious parties should be “carted off to the garbage dump, along with Netanyahu, in wheelbarrows.” And now saying that Netanyahu should be eternally damned for allocating funds to haredi schools that don’t teach the core academic curriculum.
This is how Jews in Israel talks about one another when the world is against Israel? And then wonder why there is so much hate towards Jews and Israel?
Dear Jews:
By the grace and hand of God, you are alive and well and thriving in the only Jewish state in the world. Jewish. Not secular like America. Jewish. Home to all the Jews. Not just your type of Jew.
Perhaps Jews against Jews in Israel need to go into exile for 40 years. And relearn the meaning of freedom and the teachings of Torah.
Or is it possible these Jews are suffering from cognitive dissonance? “Who am I?” Perhaps you are too comfortable in Israel? Too assimilated? Too acculturated? Too American?
Have too many Jews in Israel lost faith? Does that explain the lack of courage to stand up for the Jewish People in the only Jewish nation in the world?
You are like Korach. A Shanda to the Jewish people and to the Jewish state of Israel – a nation, not a country.
Israel, the Jewish people, are a nation; a community of people formed on the basis of common history, language, laws, culture, ethnicity and territory. We are more than a country, like America, which is a physical territory with a government, a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated people.
As Rabbi Sacks wrote in Covenant and Conversation:
“We are a people who struggled with God and man and yet survived.”
We must never bend the knee to false gods. We must never be ambivalent about who and what we are. We must not fall to other ideologies that are anathema to Torah and Tanach, especially now, 75 years after we fought for and gained our Independence, a renewalof the Jewish state in our legal and historical land, the land where the Jewish people began to develop its distinctive religion, laws, customs, rituals, culture and the ethic of freedom, 4,000 years ago.
We were chosen to be the light unto the nations,:to co-create with God, not destroy.
Will we ever learn?