... leave a light on.
And Other Lamentations.
Who can sleep on a night like this? Last night my friend Shirl sent me a slide show of the synagogues of Gush Katif, before and after. You know, beautiful shots of the buildings Jews built with their hands, with love and awe of the Gd of Israel, with holy kavanah (intention).... You see the arks holding the Torah scrolls, holy books, seats, benches, tables and more books. So many books. And then the terrorists burning the empty buildings, marked "Holy Place" in three languages, so they would know to have respect... Hamas scum praying there to the god in obedience to whom they send children to be bombs (when an inanimate bomb might do just as "well"?) ... Burning, Looting, Smoldering Rubble. I think the music (and chanting) is Kol Nidre -a prayer btw for which Jews are hated -
THE "Kol Nidre" Prayer is a "License" for the Jews to deceive and cheat Christians and non-Jews for the next year, as they have obtained forgiveness in advance from "their" god to lie, cheat, steal and deceive. -- Rense dot combut it might have been anything for all that I could hear it.
Then so simultaneously that I hardly know which came first, I saw the news: Bush Supports Withdrawal on the West Bank
WASHINGTON -- President Bush, meeting with new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the White House today, endorsed Olmert's plans to abandon some of Israel's settlements on the West Bank.Some settlements. Some Jews. 60-70,000. Scheduled for departure.
And still the LA Times staff writers need to whitewash Hamas?
Hours before the start of the Bush-Olmert talks, Israel announced that it had captured a senior Hamas commander linked to a string of attacks that killed nearly 80 people, including five Americans, in a July 2002 bombing at Jerusalem's Hebrew University....The Hamas shows incredible restraint, but "the army said..." That army with the massive bulldozer...Hamas has not carried out a suicide attack inside Israel for more than a year, but the army said Hamed masterminded many deadly attacks in the course of the Palestinians' five-year uprising, or intifada.
Hamed emerged from his hideout after troops used loudspeakers to threaten to demolish the building with him inside, a tactic it has often used when suspected militants refused to give themselves up. A massive army bulldozer was standing by.
Meanwhile the murderous scum (activists) don't really want to kill Jews, but they must. How else are they to rid the Middle East, the world, of Jews? How else can they get what they want, what they must have, what they demand? They certainly can't be seen to sit at the table with Jews, to negotiate with Zionists. poorpalestinians... forced as they are into revolution, intifada, for liberation... they crave nothing less than those skyscrapers in Tel Aviv for their very own... They think they deserve whatever they desire.
Because they are ashamed that they fled.
"The first group of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere. . . . At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle." - Ash Shalab (Jaffa newspaper), January 30, 1948
"The Arab streets are curiously deserted and, ardently following the poor example of the more moneyed class there has been an exodus from Jerusalem too, though not to the same extent as in Jaffa and Haifa." - London Times, May 5, 1948
"The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile." - Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, in the Beirut newspaper Sada al Janub, August 16, 1948
"Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the -Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit.. . . It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades." - The London weekly Economist, October 2, 1948
"It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem." - Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949
"This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country." - Edward Atiyah (then Secretary of the Arab League Office in London) in The Arabs (London, 1955), p. 183
"The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by order of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city...By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa." - Time, May 3, 1948, p. 25
The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea. - Kenneth Bilby, in New Star in the Near East (New York, 1950), pp. 30-31
I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing Partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem, - Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, in the Beirut newspaper, Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948
The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies. - Falastin (Jordanian newspaper), February 19, 1949
We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down. - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, quoted in Sir Am Nakbah ("The Secret Behind the Disaster") by Nimr el Hawari, Nazareth, 1952
"The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in." - from the Jordan daily Ad Difaa, September 6, 1954
"The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, THEY ABANDONED THEM, FORCED THEM TO EMIGRATE AND TO LEAVE THEIR HOMELAND, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe, as if we were condemmed to change places with them ..."
- by Abu Mazen, from the article titled: "What We Have Learned and What We Should Do", published in Falastin el Thawra, the official journal of the PLO, of Beirut, in March 1976
AND WHAT OF THE JEWS? The children of miracles, Oprah's trophy.
"... skilled in the practice of denial and avoidance, habits that seem to have blinded them ... Rather than mounting a campaign of armed resistance or pursuing strategies of escape, they continue to trust in the underlying goodness and rationality of humanity. The suggestion seems unmistakable that an irrepressible aptitude for hope has historically bred a dysfunctional passivity. . . .
The Jewish people obviously play a particular role in the world, a role not assumed by us as individuals and one aqainst which we frequently rebel. Chosen, they say ... but for what? Beyond the manner in which we treat one another, from which many of our troubles come, it seems that as a collective we function as a mirror so the world can see itself.
.... the Holocaust, in and of itself, tells us nothing about Jewish identity. It only tells us about the rest of the world....The group that really ought to be taking the Holocaust to heart is not the Jews, but the Europeans who two generations ago descended to the depths of human depravity by either conducting the extermination of European Jewry or enabling it.
Sadly, Europe has avoided serious self-examination and instead has turned the Holocaust into a fetish.
If the world is blind, what good is a mirror? And if the world is not blind, what if they don't like what they see?
Either way, Jews are a painful reminder. We are resented, and must depart.
Forcibly deported departed from Eretz Yisrael to Babylonia in 597 BCE, the first Zionists were homesick. "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion" (Tehillim/Psalms 137).
We departed from Rome (expelled by the emperor Claudius) in 49 AD and from the Holy Land again in 137. We departed from Spain for the first time in 694; from France on six different occasions, from Switzerland, four. In 1492, we departed from Sicily, Sardinia, Lithuania and Spain again.
There was not another native Jewish child born in Spain until almost five hundred years later, in 1966.
In the 15th (or was it 16th?) century we were asked to depart from Arles, Italy, Carinthia, Austria, Portugal and Nuremberg. Later, from Brussels, the Ukraine, Little Russia, Great Russia, Prague, Bohemia, Moravia and Warsaw. In 1862 Ulysses S. Grant arranged for our departure from what is today northern Mississippi, Kentucky and western Tennessee. The Turks had us depart from Tel Aviv in 1914 and 1917.
Since we were slaughtered during Arab riots in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39 in the Holy Land, the British thought it would be best if we were to depart ... from Hebron.
Then came the departure of The Six Million from this world. The sheer magnitude of death -two of every three Jews in Europe- constituted quite a mirror. The world was momentarily both grotesquely fascinated and appalled by its reflection.
In that moment, a remnant of Zionists - the embodiment of the Jewish will to live - saw the opportunity to secure for the Jewish people a tiny state, a safe haven -- from whence we had come and from which we would not depart.
... except all the Jews from the Sinai in 1975
and all Jews, even the dead, from Gaza last summer
... and now, supposedly, 60,000 or 70,000 Jews, give or take a few, are to depart from Judea and Samaria in the not-too-distant future ... so that Hamas can have more. More land free of Jews.
I'm going to cry that this particular happening makes no sense? When none of this has ever made sense? I'm going to cry that Oprah is sneaking a peak at dead Jews in the mirror in Auschwitz, but is blind to living Jews from Gush Katif and Hebron? ... I'm going to cry for Jerusalem?
You betcha.
It's like this. When Frodo said, "I wish it need not have happened in my time," Gandalf replied, "... And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
I have decided to be a Jew in the time that is given to me, and am trying to be a good piece of the puzzle of the Jewish people, a puzzle that may ultimately be a mirror, or at least work as one. In my life, Hashem has the puzzle box and all I can do is clean my piece, to make it as clear and free of distortion as I possibly can. In a blog, in a rant, in despair if I have to.
I told Hashem this morning, before the sun came up, that I'm going to believe in Him, no matter what George Bush says or Ehud Olmert does, through all the UFB news, to the bitter end... because without Him, there is nothing and I am bereft.
Posted by: benning | Wednesday, 24 May 2006 at 02:04 PM