Josh Nathan-Kazis, flashing his shoeleather, posts this astonishing passage from Michael Oren’s speech to a Conservative Jewish audience last week. It reminds me of why Shlomo Sand’s book is so necessary and important right now. Sand demonstrates how Zionism–Jewish nationalism–took biblical myths and made them into an ideology of Jewish race and nation. Oren, who is not nearly as critical or intelligent as Sand, has swallowed that ideology but does us the service of exposing its religious basis:
A God who fixes laws throughout the physical space can also intercede through the course of human history. Perfectly logical. To believe in the God of history is to believe in the reason why a tiny remnant of [the Jewish] people, rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, returned to [Israel].
… To believe in a God who cares about history leads one to assume that there is a reason why, some 3,00 years ago, this obscure group of nomads, wandering somewhere around the Middle East, came up with these extraordinary notions of a single God, and the extraordinary notion of universal morality. And there’s a reason why that faith enabled that people to survive as a people when so many other peoples have vanished, in spite of expulsions, inquisitions, and massacres. And there’s a reason to believe why this people was given a land in which to realize its national destiny, and to understand why that people, bound by its faith, longed to return to that land, even when that people was exiled.
The German regime in the Nazi period (and with intellectual roots before) came up with the same rational. The only difference is that the Germans already had land, where the
Jews had none where they controlled everything for, thousands of years. This POV at least shows the long-term strength of an ethnic-religious stance–in the case of Germany, it was supported by military and economic superiority compared to many. In the case of Israel, both its military and economic superiority is MUCH less independent. In other words, while Germany was strong independently of its diaspora; Israel is strong solely because of its diaspora. Germany fought the combined strength of the Allied powers and many say there were many times it could have won with it’s 2 front war except for the circumstances of luck/fate. Where would Israel be today, and what harm could it do, without the Jewish diaspora? The key to the problem is that
the German American bund never had the power of AIPAC, despite the fact German Americans were then, and are now still a major demographic of the population. In short, the difference is in how and how much any 5th column in the host country, in this case the USA, is able to manipulate public opinion via essential control of the USA congress and Administration. Money is everything.
Citizen, did you miss the post where it was explained how Zionism has also become a tenet of many Christian denominations in the US?
But then again, if I thought your anti-Zionism was anything more than second-hand anti-semitism and so very revealing of your passive-aggressive and petty zero-sum approach to everything, I might take it seriously.
And man, you Gentiles are so easy to manipulate, huh? All a Jew has to do is say it with a straight face and maybe a reference to the six-million, and you guys’ll swallow anything, huh? Must suck to be that stupid.
But you are braver than me, Citizen. If my opinion of Gentile intelligence was that low and my estimation of their credulity that high, I would keep it to myself.
Amazing how a small proportion of the Jews keep you Gentiles in thrall, and steal your women, to boot! What’s next? Legalised circumcision?
Mooser, I seriously doubt that Zionism is a tenet of many Christian denominations. Many Christians have an affinity for the Jews of the Old Testament, but I believe it’s more likely that the old cycle of wearing out the welcome is more likely than any wide-scale embracing Zionism. It’s also doubtful that many modern Westerners are likely to buy the claims that Western Jews are descended from the Jews of the Bible. It could be that the game is up for good.
Btw, history is full of cases where small groups worked their way into power for short periods of time. Thirty or forty years does not permanent overlords make.
Actually, Mooser, legalized circumcision; that is, turning it into (profitable) custom, arrived on the heels of WW2; the very influential Jewish members of the relevant USA medical community were all for it (so nobody could tell who was a Jew by making them drop their pants); Europe never bought this routine (and very profitable) circumcision; in Fact (despite romanticizing the cut dick, in BS post WW2 medical journals and via MSM e.g. Seinfeld show), beginning in the 1970′s the AMA
et all have gradually declared getting the baby cut does not cure masturbation, nor is it more healthy, although it does cause trauma in the infant and deprive the cut adult
of a ton of erotic nerve endings.
And, you really don’t fool anyone, Mooser, by collapsing historical time lines when you refer to the Hagee cult.
Further, you confuse keeping the working masses uninformed with their mental agility if they were informed. All elite regimes through history have valued propaganda–both semitic and not. Bernays and Goebbels are one. My gosh, look at the Israeli settlers, and those that attacked by HAMAS rockets–are they showing a high IQ, or merely (manipulated) ignorance? OTH, what you say is true; Christian Gentiles
do value turning the other cheek; and with it, giving the benefit of the doubt–such
values as we all can see are always taken advantage of…
There is nothing in that quote that I find “exceptional”.
“God is involved in our lives” is universal to those that believe in God.
God giving a people a land that is inhabited by other people is something very exceptional.
Not even the notion of a people chosen by G-D among all other peoples of the earth? No exception there, huh? You must have been a most useful accountant for your paying clients.
Ordinarily, when people come up to you saying God just told them to kill an entire nation, down to the last woman, child and goat, we lock them up in a place where they keep the criminally insane.
Israel is criminally insane but somehow expects everyone to think they’re God.
The idea of ‘one/only God’ is plausibly attributed to the Egyptian King Akhnaten or to the intellectual circles that influenced him and also influenced Moses, presumably an Egyptian. There is a certain literary connection between Akhnaten’s ‘Aten Hymn’ (see Assmann’s interesting Moses the Egyptian) and Psalm 104, that notable poem.
The idea of ‘God Most High’, which may not be quite the same as ‘only God’, is said by the Bible (Gen.14) to have existed before Abraham in Canaan, whose senior King, Melchizedek, was also God’s priest, the forerunner of the priests and kings of later days according to Psalm 110.
It is not really clear that Judaism believes in a morality that is completely universal. The 10 commandments apply to those of the Jewish faith, but for others the Seven Noachite Laws are often said to be enough.
The idea of a completely universal morality in the sense of a set of moral laws whose transgression God would punish in the afterlife was really the achievement of Plato, maybe drawing on traditions which since they were Greek, in some sense Cretan, may have been known to the despised Philistines, who are said to have had connections with Crete, before they were known to the Israelites.
I often think that fundamentalists don’t read their Bible much and certainly don’t pay much attention to theological studies.
Jewish secular society, huh.
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