Everybody wants spirituality. To be a good person means to walk in G-d's ways. How does that translate to reality? The only guidebook to spirituality that has stood the test of time is the Hebrew Bible. The Bible says that the Jews will be a light onto the nations. But if you are not a born Jew, you have to convert, which is not so easy!! If you do convert, it is a lot of work to be a Jew (three times a day prayer, keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath).
This blog will show you how to be Jewish without the work!!
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Art exhibition of Russian-speaking olim highlighting the beauty of the Holy Land opens at the Jerusalem House of Quality (organized by Skizza) starting October 20. and Israel, Wake Up! By Vic Rosenthal and Melanie Phillips The false accusation of ‘Israel apartheid
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Art exhibition of Russian-speaking olim highlighting the beauty of the Holy Land to open at the Jerusalem House of Quality (organized by Skizza) October 20.
It explains how they will variously slaughter, dispossess, or enslave the Jews of Israel, and acquire their property. "This is an issue that requires deep deliberation and a display of the humanism that has always characterized Islam," they write. Indeed.
This is not a hoax or a propaganda stunt. It is a serious document which tries to grapple with the very real problems that the new regime will have to solve if it is to inherit the land and the wealth that is in the hands of the despised Jews today. It was created by a committee appointed by Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar. The translation to English that is linked above was carried out by the highly reliable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), who summarize it as follows:
The conference published a concluding statement listing "ideas and methods of operation [to be implemented] during the liberation of Palestine" after Israel ceases to exist. This list included, inter alia, a call for drafting a document of independence that will be "a direct continuation of the Pact of 'Umar Bin Al-Khattab" concerning Byzantine Jerusalem's surrender to the Muslim conquerors which took place apparently in 638; a definition of the leadership of the state until elections are held; recommendations for engagement with the international community and the neighboring states; a call for preparing in advance appropriate legislation for the transition to the new regime; a call for establishing apparatuses to ensure the continuation of economic activity once the Israeli shekel is no longer in use and to preserve the resources that previously belonged to Israel; and a call for compiling a guide for resettling the Palestinian refugees who wish to return to Palestine.
The conference also recommended that rules be drawn up for dealing with "Jews" in the country, including defining which of them will be killed or subjected to legal prosecution and which will be allowed to leave or to remain and be integrated into the new state. It also called for preventing a brain drain of Jewish professionals, and for the retention of "educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry… [who] should not be allowed to leave." Additionally, it recommended obtaining lists of "the agents of the occupation in Palestine, in the region, and [throughout] the world, and… the names of the recruiters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the country and abroad" in order to "purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of this hypocrite scum."
These are the minutes of a latter-day Wannseekonferenz. And they must be taken seriously, just as Hitler should have been.
I am overreacting, you say. We could turn Gaza into a parking lot in ten minutes. Hamas is a joke and Yahya Sinwar is its punchline.
Well, yes and no. Of course we could turn Gaza into a parking lot; but will we? Sinwar and other Palestinian Arab leaders – like Marwan Barghouti, who is living comfortably today in an Israeli prison, but who could become the next President of the Palestinian Authority – are not expecting that Hamas could successfully conquer Israel by itself. What they are waiting for is the next regional war, when Israel finally confronts Iran and Hezbollah. In the chaos resulting from thousands of rockets falling on Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and perhaps Iran and Iraq – including rockets with precision-guidance systems and armed drones – along with a probable invasion by Hezbollah in the North, the situation will be out of control. At that time, uprisings in Judea/Samaria, human wave attacks from Gaza, and an intifada by Arab citizens of Israel, could bring about a military and social collapse.
Our government is a sharply divided coalition which includes an anti-Zionist, Islamist Arab party as well as one that represents the extreme Left. Although the majority of Israelis hold right-of-center ideologies, the right is split over the personality of Binyamin Netanyahu, and there is no popular figure for it to coalesce around.
But the loss of vitality is not only political, it is physical and spiritual. Today, Israelis are fat, with 26% of them obese (although not as fat as Americans, at 36%). Virtually all construction workers are Arabs. Agricultural workers are Thai, Filipino, or Arab; the sunburned kibbutzniks of the early years, who also comprised most of the IDF's special units, are long gone. Today about 12% of Israel's population are Haredim, who are in poor physical condition and don't serve in the army. The word "Zionism" is most commonly used ironically. In the days of Ben Gurion and Rabin, the Zionist Left was well-represented in the fighting units of the IDF. Today's post-Zionist Left, which dominates our media, academic, and legal arenas, often advises young people to avoid the draft.
Israeli Arabs hold the Jewish state in contempt. In a recent incident several Israeli policemen were beaten by members of a private Arab security company. During the riots (which many called "pogroms") in mixed Arab/Jewish towns that took place in May during the most recent conflict in Gaza, Jewish homes and businesses were burned, Jews were beaten and even murdered. The police were unable to control the Arabs, and in many cases were nowhere to be found. The foreign and left-leaning Israeli media focused on a small number of Jews that responded violently, and presented the events as "Jewish-Arab clashes." They were not. They were anti-Jewish riots.
Is there any wonder why Arabs, both in the territories and among our citizens, believe that our days as rulers of this land are numbered?
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have been preparing their people for conflict since their establishment. Their educational, cultural, and religious systems all send the same message of grievance and loss of honor, as well as vicious antisemitic hatred. The number of young Palestinian Arabs who are prepared to risk death or imprisonment to murder Jews at random is a testament to their success. "Palestinian refugees" in several countries receive similar messages from UNRWA schools.
Israeli Arabs do not receive similar indoctrination, but virtually all of them share a sense of grievance and dispossession that alienates them from the state. As the May riots showed, many of them are prepared to act violently on behalf of their beliefs, even when the country is only involved in a minor military confrontation. What could happen in a regional war?
In the case of simultaneous massive rocket attacks, invasions, and insurrection, IDF ground forces and police would have to protect the Jewish population as well as fight our enemies. But some doubt that they are prepared even for their traditional task of repelling enemy armies. The former IDF ombudsman, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick, produced a report in 2018 that was highly critical of ground force preparedness and capabilities. IDF officials dispute his charges, but the controversy continues.
Israel is a small country. The scenario in which she could be overwhelmed is not impossible, even by technologically inferior enemies. There are plenty of examples in which powerful Western armies have been defeated by determined third-world opponents. And they are determined, while we are conflicted.
Throughout history, there are examples of conflicts between cultures over a particular land. One side always wins; and through dispersal, murder, slavery, absorption, or all of these, the other one disappears. In this case, Hamas has explicitly expressed the will of the regional Arab Muslim culture to displace the Israeli Jewish one. This will is not likely to be dissipated by concessions on the part of the Jewish culture. Such concessions only increase the contempt in which it is held.
The struggle between cultures for Eretz Yisrael has been going on since roughly the beginning of the 20th century. The Arabs have always understood its elemental nature, but many Jews have believed that the conflict can be "solved" so that the cultures can coexist. That would be like "solving" the geological phenomenon of tectonic flow. The struggle will continue until one of the cultures disappears from the land, possibly in a final military confrontation as Yahya Sinwar hopes.
The Arabs have a vision and have never stopped aggressively fighting for it. The Jews, on the other hand, seem to have lost theirs – it was called "Zionism" – because, in part, they do not recognize the struggle for what it is: a zero-sum conflict over every inch of our homeland. They do not understand that it will not be resolved in the UN or Washington or Brussels. It will be decided here, on the land, in Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, Gaza, Tel Aviv, on the Temple Mount, in Sheik Jarrah, Khan al-Ahmar, the Galil, the Negev, Lod, Acco, Yafo, and everywhere else Jews and Arabs face each other over the question "whose land is it?"
Military power is necessary, but not sufficient, for victory in this struggle. First we need to wake up and see it for what it is, in all its savagery; and then we need to start fighting to win, at every point of contact. Our enemies already are.
The smear triggers emotions of deep anger and disgust among the shallow and ignorant, whose knowledge of the Jewish state is entirely drawn from malicious propaganda that misrepresents Israel's defensive measures as racist aggression. The campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel has recently moved into a higher gear with the increased use of one, particularly vicious falsehood.
This is the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
The claim is as fatuous as it is pernicious. Apartheid was the name given to South Africa's systematic oppression of its black inhabitants, who were denied political, civic and human rights.
By contrast, Arab Israeli citizens have fully equal rights. They study in Israel's universities; enjoy Israel's beaches and parks; receive equal treatment as patients in Israel's hospitals, and work there as doctors and other medical staff; serve as members of the armed forces and as judges; and are represented by members of Knesset who are currently lynch-pins in Israel's governing coalition.
Those Arabs who live in the disputed territories don't have Israeli rights—for the very good reason that they aren't Israeli citizens. They have no civic entitlements purely because the status of those territories remains unsettled as a result of Palestinian Arab rejectionism and violence—and because Arab states regard them as a nuisance preferably to be ignored.
The "Israel apartheid" smear, however ludicrous, isn't new. It has its roots in the infamous 1975 "Zionism is Racism" U.N. resolution. Although that was revoked in 1991, it was resurrected at the scarcely-less infamous U.N. conference in Durban in 2001.
At that anti-Jewish hate-fest, the NGO forum referred to "Israel's brand of apartheid and ethnic cleansing methods" to justify advocating "a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel." This spawned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and launched a propaganda campaign against "apartheid Israel," resulting in grotesque campus "Israel apartheid" weeks.
But while this particular smear has a long history, its deployment has recently ratcheted up.
A week ago, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) called Israel "a violent apartheid system." Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) called Israel an "apartheid state," as did Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in May.
That month, Rutgers University hosted an Israel-bashing teach-in spewing Hamas propaganda. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, told the meeting that Israel's image today had a "very clear focus on the apartheid, on the ethnic cleansing, on the land theft, on the war crimes, and over the past 10 days the indiscriminate and deliberate bombardment of the population in Gaza."
In the same month a teachers' union, the United Educators of San Francisco, called on the Biden administration to end all aid to Israel because, the union claimed, this involved "directly using our tax dollars to fund apartheid and war crimes."
In June, John McDonnell, the British Labour Party's former deputy to the party's ousted hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, made a speech to a pro-Palestinian rally in London in which he repeatedly referred to Israel as an "apartheid" state, and called on bankers and the City of London to "stop funding the apartheid regime in Israel."
This week, the Labour Party's conference—while congratulating itself for seemingly drawing a line under the appalling anti-Jewish activity in the party under Corbyn—passed a motion accusing Israel of "practicing the crime of apartheid as defined by the U.N." and urged support for the international trade union campaign to "stop annexation and end apartheid."
The "apartheid" smear was given fresh impetus in April by a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report entitled "A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution."
This claimed that Israel had "demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians" in Israel, the "West Bank" and Gaza, coupled with "systematic oppression" and "inhumane acts." "When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid," it said.
HRW's obsessive slanders and falsehoods about Israel are its stock-in-trade. But as NGO Monitor has observed, over the previous 18 months, at least 15 political non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in anti-Israel advocacy, as well as their U.N. allies, issued publications accusing Israel of "apartheid."
In January, the Israeli NGO B'Tselem, which has developed from campaigning against Israel's alleged human-rights violations to challenging the legitimacy of Israel's very existence, launched an international campaign under the headline, "A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid."
As NGO Monitor commented, B'Tselem's rights advocacy has been replaced by a new strategy of lobbying against Israel in Europe and the United States while forming partnerships with repressive regimes to demonize Israel at the United Nations.
HRW and B'Tselem are repeatedly referenced by the Israel-bashers. When Rep. Ted Deutsch (D-Fla.) condemned Tlaib's "apartheid" remarks, rightly asserting that she was not telling the truth about an American ally, her adviser Rasha Mubarak tweeted that Tlaib had underscored "facts also made by Human Rights Watch & B'Tselem—Israel is indeed an apartheid state."
And in Britain, the Labour Party's Israel-bashing motion similarly noted the 2021 reports by B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch "that conclude unequivocally that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid as defined by the U.N."
A further possible linked development is this. In May, the U.N. Human Rights Council launched a commission that potentially may go even further than previous hostile U.N. initiatives against Israel. This commission is to investigate and issue annual reports on alleged Israeli offenses against Arabs not just in the disputed territories but also—just like the HRW report—within Israel itself.
Moreover, its remit goes beyond the usual claims of human-rights violations to include "all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity."
With the three members of the commission each having a record of hostility towards Israel, this remit has prompted fears that the commission is a stitch-up designed to tar Israel with the crime of apartheid—thus producing a kind of HRW report on steroids and with the imprimatur of the United Nations.
However that commission may develop, there seems little doubt that the recent blizzard of "apartheid" smears is the result of an organized strategy. And it seems likely that the source of this strategy is the Palestinian Authority.
In a speech to the United Nations last week, P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas not only stated that "Israel is an occupying power, practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing," but also made no fewer than five further references to Israeli "apartheid."
Two years ago, a report by Dan Diker and Adam Shay for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs revealed that the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was not, as was widely believed, a network of local grassroots human-rights groups advocating BDS to establish a peaceful Palestinian state next to Israel.
It was instead run by the P.A. in Ramallah to direct, mobilize and coordinate global political warfare campaigns with the goal of isolating, delegitimizing and ultimately dismantling the State of Israel. The current "Israel apartheid" chorus is almost certainly the product of the latest such campaign.
The "apartheid" libel is a potent weapon because it is unlike claims that Israel is practicing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians that are demonstrably fatuous (the number of Palestinian Arabs has at least tripled since Israel's creation).
By contrast, the "Israel apartheid" smear triggers emotions of deep anger and disgust among the shallow and ignorant, whose knowledge of Israel is entirely drawn from malicious propaganda that misrepresents the defensive measures of the Jewish state as racist aggression, but which they believe as unchallengeable truth.
South African apartheid was a system as unique as it was evil. The "Israel apartheid" libel is an evil that once again singles out the Jews for a unique level of persecution.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for "The Times of London," her personal and political memoir, "Guardian Angel," has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, "The Legacy." Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.
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