“…Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years….As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.” ― Hồ Chí Minh
Flavius Josephus
My fellow Jews, don’t you remember your history? Of course not. You read the history that was written by those of our people who were self-serving and not those who were reasonably objective or those who had alternative opinions to the mainstream, like Josephus. You read what the rebels against Rome wrote and never consider the Roman point of view or what other historians wrote at the time.
You listen to Christian fanatics who “love Israel” because they’re motivated by the insanity of a literal reading of Revelations and ignore the history of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire or the King of Morocco who welcomed and protected our Sephardic brethren when they were expelled from Spain.
This is not the first time that fanatics in Israel fucked up stuff for the rest of us living in the Diaspora. As for me I prefer and demand that you make peace with our Palestinian cousins and treat them as the Torah commands, NOW! The alternative is that Jews like me will live in fear for the next couple of centuries.
“I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” President Dwight Eisenhower
Radio and Television Broadcast With Prime Minister Macmillan in London, 8/31/59″
Jews, who numbered around 10,000,000 throughout the Roman Empire, had a better deal than any other minority group. If you don’t believe it, read The Jews in the Roman World by Michael Grant [Macmillan Pub Co, August 1973, ISBN-13: 978-0684133409]. When Julius Caeser landed in Egypt to confront Pompey during the Roman Civil War, he was outnumbered until Herod the Great sent a Jewish Army to back Caeser’s play. As a result:
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Herod was confirmed as King of Judea
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The Jewish authorities in Jerusalem got to use the Roman tax system to collect from the 10,000,000 Jews throughout the empire for the Temple in Jerusalem, an enormous economic benefit for the homeland -
Herodian Coinage
Judea got to mint its own coinage without the”graven image” of the Roman emperor (who was deemed a god) for use by Jews and to pay the Temple taxes (what Jesus was talking about when he says “render unto Caeser that which is Caeser and to God that which is God” he’s referring to Roman coinage and Judean coinage to pay Roman taxes versus Temple taxes)
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Caligula
Later, when Caligula was Emperor, he arbitrated in favor of the Jews of Alexandria in a dispute with the Greeks of Alexandria even though he opined that they were “insane” for not believing that he was god.
The Jews who revolted against the Romans, who were very likely a minority of 30% of the Judean population, screwed this all up for the other two-thirds living there and the rest of the 10,000,000 living outside of Judea.
Does any of this sound familiar? How about the nuts and fanatics who want to establish “Israel on both sides of the Jordan” who refuse to accept international law and insist on stealing Palestinian land in the name of God? See http://janbtucker.com/blog/2011/05/18/words-actions-in-international-relations/ on that point.
I will pose to you a question that deals with the role of Jews in the world and an aspect of what it means to be Jewish.
It is said that Jews are the Chosen People. Does this mean that we are God’s favorite people? Does it mean that we are somehow entitled to special privileges? These ideas are common misconceptions of both Jews and non-Jews who have never had the concept explained to them.
The concept of the Jews being the “Chosen People” means that they were chosen by God to bring justice to the Earth and all its people. If we do not, then as the Book of Amos states: “Amos (3:2) “You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth - that is why I will call you to account for your iniquities.”
Genesis 25:9
On September 2, 2010, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of how two brothers, Isaac—the father of Israel—and Ishmael, the father of the Arabic people, came together to bury their father Abraham. So I pose the question, what are the obligations of the Jewish people, to our cousins, the Arab and Palestinian people?
Leviticus 19:33
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.”
Leviticus 19:34
“You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Haplogroup G according to my genetic cousin and Geneticist Ted Kandell
Since the Bible teaches us that the Arab people are our cousins, the Children of Abraham as are we, we should treat them as family. For some of us who have had our DNA tested as I did, we know this to be literally true: my Y chromosome is Haplogroup G, subclade G2b, making me related to about 8% of Jewish males…and 76% of Palestinians. Given the scientifically suspected origins of Haplogroup G and the professed origins of Abraham, Ur Kaśdim (Hebrew: אוּר כַּשְׂדִים ’Ūr Ḵaśdîm), commonly translated as Ur of the Chaldees [See Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_Ka%C5%9Bdim], we of Haplogroup G may be the most authentic descendants of Abraham if he indeed existed!
THE UNITED NATIONS IS NOT THE ENEMY
Before the recent Security Council Resolution pointing out the simple truth of international law that settlement activity in land under military occupation is illegal, Israeli government propaganda relied on the fact that most Jews, like most other people in the world, are not political scientists and don’t understand the technicalities of diplomatic language, to condemn UNESCO for a resolution adopted on Israeli government policies on religious institutions. Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on Facebook that:
“To say that Israel has no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall is like saying that China has no connection to the Great Wall of China or that Egypt has no connection to the pyramids. By this absurd decision, Unesco has lost what little legitimacy it had left.”
The UNESCO Resolution says no such thing and you should read it for yourself [http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.747982]. Here is an email that explains the problem that I posed to a friend who’d fallen for Netanyahu’s nonsense:
I’m attaching the UNESCO resolution you denounced on FB. I’m assuming that you took at face value the Israeli government’s characterization of the resolution and didn’t read it.
If you did read it, consider it from the following perspective:
1. Did you take an undergraduate course in international relations? If not, do you actually understand the diplomatic technical language used by the resolution, including the technical use of punctuation such as “quotation marks”?
2. Do you have a thorough understanding of the terminology used for the sites discussed in the resolution?
3. Are you familiar with the international law and treaties that govern what an occupying power is allowed and forbidden from doing?
4. With those considerations what do you see in the resolution that is objectionable? What do you see that isn’t clear and which raises questions for you?
Now my fellow Jews, remember that we are culturally supposed to be pre-disposed to take nothing at face value and to question everything: as the old joke goes, a Gentile asks a Jew “Why do you people always answer a question with another question?” The appropriate response “WHY SHOULDN’T WE?” (It also sounds better as a joke told in dialect with a Yiddish accent: “Vy shouldn’t ve?”). See https://stuffjewishpeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/answering-a-question-with-another-question/ if you think I’m making this up. The fact is in Yeshiva they actually teach you this practice down to the sing-song way to use your discourse with the Rabbi-teacher going back and forth with questions, answers, further questions ad nauseum.
So following your questioning of the Israeli government line on the UNESCO resolution, lets look at whether the Israeli right and religious fanatics give a shit about American Jews and their own well-being or values. First, review my blogging about Donald Trump’s relationship with the freak he has nominated to be Ambassador to Israel: http://janbtucker.com/blog/2016/12/18/david-friedmans-policy-of-jewish-lebensraum/.
Friedman’s only apparent qualification to be an Ambassador is that he represented Trump in his Casino bankruptcies in Atlantic City that enriched Trump and ripped off workers, small businesses and institutional creditors. Note also that Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Danny Danon, is also tight with Friedman. Right after I posted the above blog, Danon appeared on MSNBC defending Trump’s choice of Friedman and unfortunately MSNBC hadn’t done its homework: they never confronted him with the fact that along with John Bolton he’d been Friedman’s other keynote speaker at his fundraising dinner for West Bank Settlement Bet El on December 4, 2016. Conflict of interest par excellence!
Before you even consider the most recent UN Security Council resolution, consider Resolution 446 passed and in effect since 1979:
The Security Council,
Having heard the statement of the Permanent Representative of Jordan and other statements made before the Council,
Stressing the urgent need to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East,
Affirming once more that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 1/ is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem,
1. Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East;
2. Strongly deplores the failure of Israel to abide by Security Council resolutions 237 (1967) of 14 June 1967, 252 (1968) of 21 May 1968 and 298 (1971) of 25 September 1971 and the consensus statement by the President of the Security Council on 11 November 1976 2/ and General Assembly resolutions 2253 (ES-V) and 2254 (ES-V) of 4 and 14 July 1967, 32/5 of 28 October 1977 and 33/113 of 18 December 1978;
3. Calls once more upon Israel, as the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to rescind its previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories;
4. Establishes a Commission consisting of three members of the Security Council, to be appointed by the President of the Council after consultations with the members of the Council, to examine the situation relating to settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem;
5. Requests the Commission to submit its report to the Security Council by 1 July 1979;
6. Requests the Secretary-General to provide the Commission with the necessary facilities to enable it to carry out its mission.
7. Decides to keep the situation in the occupied territories under constant and close scrutiny and to reconvene in July 1979 to review the situation in the light of the findings of the Commission.
Here is the recently passed Resolution 2334:
So if you believe in peace and fairness, what exactly is wrong with this resolution? Benjamin Netanyahu says is complicates the peace process: only I you think that Israel has the right to start negotiations by adopting a position in which might makes right that flouts longstanding and legitimate precepts of international law.
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