I AM A JEW (Part I)

I have announced my retirement from blogging time and time again. This results from my frustration from the lack of feedback from my assumed readers. This lack of feedback makes me feel that I am talking to myself and that I have, at best, a dwindling audience, if any. When I started my blog many years ago, I had hoped for an ever-increasing one.  

But as I return to writing again and again and I realize that I write because I must. The thoughts swirl! The indignation increases. I have things to say! They need to be said.

And so let me say that I am a Jew! I am proud to be a Jew! We are a tribe that, small as it is, has survived persecution for 5,774 years. That alone is an achievement that few other cultures have achieved. I say cultures, because Judaism is at least as much a culture as it is a religion, and to me it is primarily a culture, for I am not a believer.

But I am proud to be a Jew!

Long ago, not long after the death of Christ, who was a Jewish priest, Jews gave up having priests. Instead, Jews substituted Rabbis for priests. For the uninitiated, that is a significant difference, for Priests preach. Rabbis read and study and teach. The Ten Commandments were handed down by Moses in writing and the holy scroll, the Torah, has been read by Jews for millennia, and thus Jews have often been described as the people of the book.

That is of vital importance for it means that Jews value education above all. It is what, in my opinions, makes them what they are. The people of the book.

Every time I see some prominent person, who I never knew was Jewish, described as Jewish I swell with pride. Sometimes I exclaim, “Is everybody Jewish?” Most recently I felt that way when Lauren Bacall died. I never knew she too was Jewish.

I suffered, like so many others for being a Jew. My father saw the insides of Dachau and Buchenwald and I and my brother fled for our lives, to find a haven here in the US, as eventually did my parents.

But there is another aspect of being a Jew. We have been called: “ The Chosen People”. Chosen for what? I believe to bring to the world righteousness and charity. We may often be oppressed, but are never, never to be the oppressors.

“The LORD works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed”. (Emphasis added) - Psalm 103. See here.

I used to be a Zionist as was my father. After so many Jews died who could have been saved, not because Hitler wouldn’t let them flee, but because the world turned its back on them, (just as most of the world doesn’t want to open its doors to the oppressed today) I, and countless others, concluded that we, the Jews, needed a homeland where we would always be welcome, a country that would never turn its back on the Jewish diaspora. That country was and is Israel.

But I never had any illusions. When Theodore Herzl in 1903 founded Zionism, he advocated for a Jewish homeland, but Palestine, was only one of many locations. He even talked of Africa as a possible place for the new Zion. See here.

But does anybody think that the people of that region, with there own aspirations for statehood, would have welcomed a Jewish state carved out of their entity? Would the US have been willing to cede part of its territory for such a state? Would any of the colonies of the British Empire have been willing to welcome such a state as part of their liberation from their colonists?

Why would anybody have expected the Arab colonies to react any different from any other colony or state. When Israel was founded in 1948, by a vote of the UN in 1947 by a vote of 33 in favor to 13 opposed, with 10 abstentions  “the Arab leaders and governments rejected the plan of partition in the resolution, and indicated an unwillingness to accept any form of territorial division. Their reason was that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny." Was that a surprise? Should it have been? Is there any other nation, territory or political entity that would have reacted differently?

This is very important, because there has been a tendency to paint the Arabs as evil anti-Semites. Were they? Many were. Famously, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem established himself in Italy and Germany. During World War II he collaborated with both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy by making propagandistic radio broadcasts and by helping Germans recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS. But even this has to be understood by the axiom, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and he hated the colonials, and he hated the Jews, who he saw as people who wanted a piece of the Arab homeland.

But while Jews paid huge sums to buy land in Palestine, and the Arabs gladly sold it to them, that does not mean that they concurred with the idea that these settlers, instead of becoming citizens of the new Arab states to be created with the end of colonialism, would carve out an alien non-Arab entity. In other Arab countries after all, Jews lived in their midst as citizens of those countries and they did not agitate for independence.

Thus their unwillingness to accept the new Jewish state in their midst, should not be seen as something evil or surprising, but the natural reaction of any people and particularly aspirational people just coming out of the oppression of colonialism.

Two wrong don’t make a right. But neither do two rights make a wrong.

The Arabs attacked, as the Jews knew they would. But the Jews were ready. They defeated all the Arab armies combined, and with the playing of the Hatikvah, declared the new nation into being.

The Jewish state was a fait accompli under the biblical name Israel. But it was a very small country.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library:

“…the Jewish State was to be comprised of roughly 5,500 square miles and the population was to be 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. The Arab State was to be 4,500 square miles with a population of 804,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Though the Jews were allotted more total land, the majority of that land was in the desert. 

“Further complicating the situation was the UN majority's insistence that Jerusalem remain apart from both states and be administered as an international zone. This arrangement left more than 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem isolated from their country and circumscribed by the Arab state.” 

A map of the Israel mandated by the UN is shown below:

I write this because without a clear understanding of the facts, no valid opinion is possible. And at least for me, a clear an understanding of the history, the rights and the wrongs, and above all the facts must be established and understood.

To my readers I suggest that they read each installment, and then the whole. Whether it changes any opinions or not, I trust that a clear understandings of the dynamics and the facts, the facts and the FACTS, will make whatever opinions my readers, or for that matter me, may have, to be based on the history and a true understanding of the underling conflicts and myths.

Please hold your comments, if any, until the end of this exposition, unless you feel that you have something to add to a particular portion, rather than to the whole.