Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin
Rabbi Yitschak RudominCourtesy

Click here for Part One of this article.

See: "War is not new to Israel" (Oct 16, 2023); "Jewish wisdom during war" (Oct 23, 2023); "Abraham's principles in war and peace" (Oct 31, 2023); "Facts and truths amid the fog of war" (Nov 13, 2023); "Samson in war and peace" (Nov 26, 2023), "The indestructible Jews in peace and war" (Dec 5, 2023), "Jewish victory depends on Jewish unity" (Dec 14, 2023), "Dear World, Part One" (Dec 25, 2023).

One would think that with the advent of modern times people became smarter but often the opposite seems to be true. In past centuries, when religion was dominant in people's lives, it was religious dogma and slogans that influenced the masses. With the rise of secularization in recent years, great gaping holes and vacuums have been created in people's minds as they occupy themselves with popular culture, a shallow substitute for the profundity of the religious thinking of previous times.

Modernity has seen the advent of mass propaganda and brainwashing by modern states through the use of mass communications mediums such as newspapers, trash pop literature, radio, television, the internet and its social media. Powerful modern totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, Once, Soviet Russia and Communist China indoctrinated their citizens and allies with outright lies and irrational ideas by using the mass communication tools at their disposal. China's ownership and use of TikTok to mass market brainlessness as well as outright lies and plain old evil is a good current example.

The Nazis in particular mastered the art of what is known as the BIG LIE with devastating consequences for the German people and a horrible aftermath for the world as it was soon engulfed by the flames of the Second World War 1939–1945. Frighteningly, this is what Wikipedia says about the impacts of the Nazis deploying more than one BIG LIE against the Jews: "According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that [Nazi propaganda minister] Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged nation striking back at 'international Jewry', which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held outsized and secret power in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It further spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and used these to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews in self-defense."

This did not stop with the eradication of Nazism, but has continued to be deployed in our own times by Israel's enemies and antisemites all over the world, particularly by fundamentalist Islamic radicals. Millions of gullible people fall into the trap of believing all the big lies conjured up and levelled at Israel and the Jews. Here, continued from part one, are some of the major myths they peddle:

Chanting the slogans "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" and "free, free Palestine:":

The current modern country of Germany, based on its own dark history, knows first-hand that under Nazism it propagated the genocide of the Jewish People of Europe, has made the slogan of "from the river to the see..." "a form of incitement to hate and subject to criminal penalties" ("Berlin Criminlazis Slogan 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'").

Slogans can be very useful if they have positive purposes and promote peace and harmony but in this case, perhaps unbeknownst to the mobs that run around chanting these "free Palestine" slogans they promote a direct and blunt euphemism for the genocide of Israel's Jews and are also a distortion of reality because in any case, historically and politically the Jews were granted a "charter" to the right to have their own Jewish state in Palestine by the official 1917 Balfour Declaration from the British government that ruled all of Palestine in the Land of Israel in the areas of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948). It was the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (Resolution 181 II) that the world's nations officially accepted and agreed to create a Jewish state in Palestine, but was of course, a "two state solution", rejected by the Arabs who were not happy with the large portion of Palestine for a new Arab state that the UN handed them.

These chants are detached from reality and may as well say that "from the Earth to the Moon, the man on the moon will be free" or "free the man on the moon"! Only Zombies and foolish empty heads ignorant of history would say such things because the Jewish People have the longest connection to the Land of Israel and are here to stay in Israel forever and nothing will change that. Besides, the Arabs have lost all the wars they fought against Israel and each time, thank G-d, Israel emerges stronger and more powerful than ever.

The Jewish People have their own slogans that they have chanted during their religious holidays and during all their prayers about "Next Year in Jerusalem," praying to God to return the remnants of the Jewish People in exile to their homeland in Zion, the Land of Israel now miraculously reincarnated in the modern state of Israel with the help of God.

Refusing to call Israel by its rightful name and instead resorting to miscast terms such as "Zionist entity" and "little Satan":

In the Bible, check it out, Israel was a name given to the patriarch Jacob who is subsequently known by both names. Jacob's children are known in the Bible and in Jewish History as the Children of Israel meaning Jacob's children. Historically, according to the Hebrew Bible, there was a united Kingdom of Israel mainly under the Jewish kings Saul, David, Solomon roughly between 1047–930 BCE, and a later northern Kingdom of Israel (930–720 BCE) that was destroyed by the Assyrians, while the southern Kingdom of Judah existed from 930 to 587 BCE. The people of Judah or Judea were known as Judeans or Jews and Jews have been known as both Hebrews and Israelites. In 1948 the leadership of Jewish Palestine debated whether the new Jewish country should be known as Israel or Judah and they decided that it would be called Israel while its Jewish inhabitants were of course Jews.

During the course of the Jewish exile Jews have been called and depicted by all sorts of pejoratives such as "parasites", "bloodsuckers", "christ-killers", "userers", "shylocks", "kikes", "rootless cosmopolitans", as each place that didn't like them made it up its own favorite slurs to lob at the Jews.

Now that Jews have had a country of their own since 1948 that they call Israel, let's not kid ourselves that Arab and Iranian antisemites that hate the Jews spitefully and hatefully call the Jews' country a "Zionist entity" or a "little Satan" with America being the "big Satan" in their distorted eyes. In the Hebrew Bible, the Children of Israel are called a "Light to the Nations" and God's First Born, a Chosen Nation, putting them at the peak of mankind's nobility, something radical Muslims cannot get their overheated heads around.

Come along the antisemites, like the Nazis, and call the Jews subhumans and vermin and their ilk in the Arab and Iranian world who reduce Israel and the Jews to a subhuman "entity" and a "satan" that is not much different to the Nazi way of "thinking" about the Jews that they hate.

Urging that Israel's Jews should go back to where they came from, such as Poland and Germany:

If there is one thing that Jewish History teaches it is that the Jewish People basically never return to former host nations in any significant way. This argument that the Jews of Israel must go back to Poland or Germany ignores the fact that at least half of Israeli Jews, if not more, are not White Europeans and have roots in North Africa and the Middle East and not in Europe!

To have an intelligent discussion about Israel's Jews one must learn the basic facts about its mixed population of Jewish Israelis. About half, if not more, of Israel's Jews are known as Sephardic Jews and also as Mizrahi Jews or Oriental Jews or Mashriqi Jews and include many other groups such as the Maghrebi Jews, Berber Jews, Yemenite Jews, and even Palestinian Jews some with roots that go back to Spain under Islamic rule, North Africa and the wider Middle East. These people have ZERO connection with "Poland" or "Germany" and as far as Spain goes the Jews were booted out of Spain by the Alhambra Decree of 1492 once the Catholics took over from the Muslims with the Catholics happy to get rid of its religious Jews, while plenty of Jews apostatized and stayed on after being forced to convert to Christianity.

Therefore anyone calling for Jews who have no connection with Poland or Germany to "go back" there is an ignoramus and an idiot. Now as for the Jews of Europe who were basically wiped out by the Holocaust, many of those refugees from countries in Europe who somehow miraculously survived the Holocaust became stateless refugees after the Second World War 1939–1945 because they were survivors of Nazi concentration and death camps that after the war found themselves far away from their countries of birth and origin.

Many of these refugees had nowhere to go and many were trapped under Soviet Communist rule behind the Iron curtain after the Second World War. Nevertheless, they tried to move to the Land of Israel still under the control of the British, who stopped ships with Jewish refugees from reaching the shores of Palestine. In 1948 independent Israel opened its doors to hundreds of thousands of stateless European Jewish refugees who had nowhere to go.

Much like in modern times the United States, Western European and other countries took in MILLIONS of Arab and Muslim refugees of the Syrian civil war (2011–present) as well as the refugees of Iraq (1980–2017) causing among other things the 2015 European migrant crisis . So Western countries, including Israel, have a record of taking in stateless migrant refugees. Unlike the Arab countries of today who refuse to take in the Arab refugees from Gaza who have been displaced from their homes by wars that they started themselves against the Jews of Israel!

That Arabs exiled from the original British Mandate of Palestine during 1948 have a "right of return" to modern day Israel:

This is utter balderdash because in 1948 and onwards the Arab countries themselves expelled about one million Jewish citizens of their own countries who then were taken in by Israel during what Wikipedia calls the "Jewish exodus from the Muslim world" with the word "exodus" hiding what was in truth a cruel dictatorial expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries after they had lived there for as long as, if not longer, than the Arabs themselves.

That would seem a fair exchange of populations that Israel took in the Jews from Arab lands and that the Arabs take in the Arabs from places they had formerly resided in in the new state of Israel. That would require logical and rational people to expect such a reasonable quid pro quo reciprocity, but no, the Arabs and enemies of Israel like to stick to their stupid arguments that they have "eternal right" to return to Jewish neighborhoods in Israel. They confiscated and looted all the old neighbourhoods and possessions of Jews who used to live in Arab and Muslim countries, but were expelled with little more than the shirts on their backs and sent scurrying to Israel or to any country that would have them, like France and the United States where they rebuilt their lives from scratch, founding thriving and bustling new Jewish communities, but never forgetting what the Muslims robbed them of.

Thus, as examples, tragedy and loss surrounds the migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel, migration of Algerian Jews to France, migration of Tunisian Jews to Israel, migration of Iraqi Jews to Israel, exodus of Iranian Jews and many more similar cases in Arab and Muslim countries.

That Jihad, or "Holy War" in Arabic, will free Palestine from the Jews:

While Islamic "Jihad" or "holy war" may have worked in the past in favor of Islam and the Arabs it ultimately fails miserably against the Jews and Israel because in the long and short run, as well as in fact, truth and reality, God is on the side of the Jewish People and Israel.

In order to avoid the first mistake the enemies of the Jews make, and in this case it includes Jews who are ignorant of the Torah or Hebrew or Jewish Bible, is that they should all buy and then seriously read and understand that the Torah, Hebrew Bible, states emphatically that God is on the side of the Children of Israel who are the Jewish People.

The Christian New Testament and the Muslim Koran are books that were written a long time after the Torah yet while they are inferior theological texts compared to the original Torah, they claim to displace their own source book which is the Torah itself. Without the Torah there is no New Testament and no Koran and without Judaism there cannot be Christianity or Islam. The Jews are the only upholders of the original Torah, and for good reason, it is because God favors the Jews, or as that old saying says amusingly: "How odd of God to choose the Jews"! And the equally famous answers, one of which is: "It wasn't odd, the Jews chose God."

Any honest person and seeker of the truth will want to know what the Torah is and says as the foundational and fundamental source book for both Christianity and the New Testament and Islam and the Koran. Without that both Christians and Muslims are flying blind missing most of their foundational axioms and raison d'etre and the reason they came to be and exist in the first place.

As far as Judaism is concerned, Christians and Muslims and not to mention Hindus and other religions miss the mark and are basically all out in left field and in the dark when it comes to knowing and believing in the true God and what His plans are for the world and Israel and the Jewish People. as central players in God's ultimate plans for the world and humanity.

Study the Torah and its commentaries and you will see that starting a long time ago, it too teaches the Jews about holy wars to conquer the corrupt Land of Canaan inhabitat by pagans and turn it into the holy Land of Israel, something they successfully did. They lived on the land for well over one thousand years until exiled by the Romans roughly two thousand years ago. Even then, some remained.

The problem is that for two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the exile of almost all of the Jewish People from Judea by the Romans resulted in a two thousand year exile wherein Jews had to rely on their own wits, the grace of foreign rulers and the protection of God to survive.

With the return of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel in modern times they have once again had to learn the art of war and defending their own land by themselves. And they have! That is why Israeli Jews fight well and determinately to defend and protect the Land of Israel and Jewish people of Israel today and why any form of gentile "Jihad" against the Jewish People will fall flat on its face and fail miserably!

To be continued.

Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College–Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach Kiruv Rechokim. He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at[email protected]