shabbtai.com
Israel
And it will be, when you come into the land which the Lord, your God, gives you for an inheritance, and you possess it and dwell therein,
:וְהָיָה כִּי תָבוֹא אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לְךָ נַחֲלָה וִירִשְׁתָּהּ וְיָשַׁבְתָּ בָּהּ
- Deuteronomy 26:1
"In Basel I founded the Jewish state."
- Theodore Herzl, 1897
"We…hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel."
- Jewish People’s Council, 1948
Israel is a theoretical and moral litmus test for sociology, liberal democracy and Jewish nationalism. All lines converge here. In a modern complex global world most issues are tradeoffs, replete with shades of grey. Israel’s situation is one of the few whose understanding and resolution are fairly simple, more white and black than grey, though the consequences of telling the truth and acting on it are not pretty.
Israel is locked in a death struggle with the Arab and Muslim world. The former seeks peace and compromise, promotes understanding of the other, and presumes there is something it can do to bring the other side around. The latter seeks the liquidation of Israel, promotes blood lust and Jew hatred, and denies any legitimacy to Israel’s national right. Under such conditions any talk of a peace process or a two-state solution is theoretically incorrect, politically suicidal for Israel and morally indecent for the West.
In this section you will find any number of essays dealing with all these aspects of this question. Here you will read to some extent what others who see the situation equally clearly have written, though none dare put the choices so starkly. None link the morally retrograde position of western governments and many of its populaces to the cognitive failure of educated elites to read the situation properly, and this in spite of the many historical chances to have done so. Nor do any link this cognitive failure to the theoretical pablum offered up by the social sciences in the western universities that peddle this political and moral twaddle.
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
- British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour, 1917.
The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people
- San Remo Treaty, 1920.
There are essays in this section which comment on Palestinian words and deeds. There are essays that deal with the West’s cognitive and moral blindness. And there are essays which explore the Jews’ perennial inability to assume the mantle of national sovereignty and carry it to a successful and permanent conclusion.
Interested readers will therefore find themselves going back and forth from one section to the other, from Israel to sociology to the Hebrew Bible, even if my primary focus in this section is to encourage Jews to re-evaluate their understanding of Israel’s predicament and re-direct their energies to political solutions that have a chance of working. To put it starkly, Israel has to recognize it is at war with a ruthless and relentless enemy and take appropriate steps to defeat it.
As a Zionist I firmly believe in the Jewish national right to the Land of Israel. I find it intolerable that Jews should be attacked and murdered in Israel simply because they are Jews who dare to live in their sovereign state. I find it disgusting that the world tolerates this and that Jews are prepared to live with it. Something can be done to put an end to this. It is beyond left and right. It will not be pretty. But it can be done; and both Jews and the world will be better off for it. Read the essays in this section. Invite me to speak to you and your friends. Like-minded people, get in touch.