Hamas doesn't need to wage a media campaign, because the
West is doing it for them.
For decades now the air in Israel has been fairly ringing with lament for the poverty of our media campaign against the ideological assault on our country’s policies, intentions and existence. After decades of global bias and political and social activism against the Jewish state, our failure to effectively push the case for Israel has entered a sort of axiomatic idiom. It has become a mantra that the other side is more clever, persuasive and masterful in winning the hearts and minds of the West. Woe unto us, goes the refrain, for there’s nothing new under the Levantine sun.
The solutions even less audible, and whatever rhetorical gains seem to have surfaced lately in the ongoing Gaza war belie a perpetuity of failure. The riposte that rings loudest from the Zionist camp today is hardly original and even less genuine, amounting to little more than a cheap trick: twisting the pointed finger away from us and onto our neighbors in Syria and Sudan and wherever else in the world chaos and murder define the norm. “But officer, what about all the other regimes committing genuine atrocities?”
The deflection of blame may happen to be the flavor of the month, but it shares attention with a roster of weak-kneed arguments.
There’s the beauty contest gambit: “But look how we made the desert bloom.”
There’s the solidarity-pandering approach: “But we’re an island of democracy in a sea of savagery.”
There’s the justification of guilt: “But what can we do? We need to defend ourselves.”
Then there’s the slightly cynical alternative-scenario argument: “But do you expect us to give in and disappear?”
And finally, lurking behind the last two, barely uttered and confronted even less, the tragically desperate last resort of the victim: “But don’t you think we have a right to exist?”
The root of the problem with all this should be painfully obvious, but the pain of the truth still seems to prevail over the cost of ignoring it. The word hasbarah, Hebrew for “explanation,” is the term used to refer to the public relations campaign conducted by supporters of Israel, a semantic that embodies everything wrong with our approach to the watchful eyes and skeptical ears of foreign media as well as the doubters in our own midst.
What these messages have in common is that they all begin with the word “but.” Our arguments are defensive and explanatory, while the pronouncements of the Arabs are offensive and assertive. The mere act of explaining our position acknowledges that our opponents are right to propound theirs.
King David did not become the hero of his Goliath encounter because he was weak. Those who understand the Biblical narrative know that David’s strength and cunning prevailed over that of his enemy, that had he been weak, had the Bible presented a different denouement to the standoff in which God would have had to step in to save the future king, there would have been no king and no future for the Jewish people.
David was the hero because the real victory was that of his strength over his size and his circumstance, and it is this literary tension between true and apparent power that gives the story its appeal and its enduring message of faith. Israel today sees itself as a David facing an Arab goliath, but it forgets that the underdog is only favored when his strength verges on toppling his larger adversary.
The modern march of radical Muslim ideology is a protest movement making inroads with the secular West, precisely because it presents itself as a cause, a strident innovation against the status quo, an opposition to something perceived as stronger and more entrenched. And every cause is just and compelling only so long as it burgeons, so long as it credibly threatens to overturn the prevailing power dynamic, so long as it can put the temporary prevailer on the defensive.
Following the Six Day War, the world fell over itself in the rush to rally around a thunderingly victorious and expanded Israel, in stark contrast to the grim silence preceding the war when the tiny Jewish state faced the prospect of annihilation. The war’s lesson that it is strength, and not vulnerability, that inspires international support should have been a lesson to remember for Israel’s leadership.
But the 1973 near-disaster following the short-lived euphoria years shook its resolve and returned the Israeli psyche to the cult of susceptibility and the ancient Jewish tradition of political bargain-hunting.
In the end, the ideological battle between Israel and Hamas is not a military or political one. It’s a war of spirit, and in our attempt force a victory of reason and rationality, we are undermining the spirit of our cause.
The media campaign for Israel is waging battle on a plane of logic and moral mathematics, and in that sense the hasbarah movement is a race against an opponent that never left the starting line. The Arabs don’t rely on logic to propel their cause, because they’re smarter than that. They don’t bombard the West with arguments and facts, because they know that the West has no lack of them, because they are properly aware that secular Western democratism is in fact an ideology overeating its way to the grave on a diet of rationality and reason.
What is saving the West from spiritual suicide today is precisely the anti-logic of the Islamic thrust, the fanatical spirit underlying the lack of sophistry and the preponderance of short and brutal images, reflexively polemical messages and a call of mission from beyond this mortal world. Faced with an ideological onslaught like radical Islam, the peoples of the West can either resist the juggernaut by rediscovering their own Christian roots or allow themselves to be swept up in the anti-euphoria of jihad, but willingly or otherwise the confrontation will reignite their long-buried relationship with matters of the spirit.
Last week, Hamas’s military wing posted the following tweet: “We are continuing our struggle. ALLAH IS OUR GOAL, THE PROPHET IS OUR LEADER, JIHAD IS OUR WAY, AND DEATH FOR ALLAH IS OUR MOST EXALTED WISH.” Indeed. The logic of zealotry has no logical response, and the rational West is left with its mouth hanging wide open.
By showing the West an awe-inspiring show of force and a passionate alternative to the dreary diet of secular detachment, cyber-Jihad is winning ideological converts without exerting a single moral or intellectual muscle. Mired in the spiritual vacuum of the post-Christian age, much of Europe has become a captive audience, nodding along to the hypnotic spectacle of radical Islam’s violent death-march.
In the end, Islamic movements like Hamas don’t need to scramble for reasons, justifications or explanations, and they don’t need to canvass the West and scramble as Israel does to recruit moral support for its cause. They don’t need to because by this point the West is doing their hasbarah for them.
Like any collective social behavior, the spread of political movements is much more about emotion than reason, no matter how many empirical arguments may be packaged into the propaganda. The momentum of any social thrust is proportional to the conviction of its apostles, and most trends are carried by the simple human desire to mimic enthusiasm no matter what its object happens to be at the moment.
As the Arab saying goes, if you repeat a mantra enough, it becomes truth. The anti-Israel mantra of the Muslim-Arab nation, and its breathtaking embrace by the world in direct and insistent opposition to any sort of logic or recognition of reality, is a sign that the nations demand something deeper from us than what we have been giving them. It is a clear parable for the Jews that we must counter with a message even more powerful, inspiring and irrefutable than that of our opponents.
So here is a humble suggestion for what should be the mantra of the Jewish people, what may be the only worthy and effective response to the global offensive on our identity and our national prerogative:
“We have survived the Egyptians, we have outlived the Babylonians, we have outlived the Romans, we have outlived the Nazis, and we will certainly outlive those who seek to destroy us today. We will continue exhume and reanimate the devotion of our martyrs and the strength of our heroes so that we can continue to spread kindness and justice and the light of truth to the world. For this purpose, without which the world would disintegrate, G-d has sustained us beyond all historical logic.
“Everywhere we have been pushed by the vicissitudes of time, in every corner of the earth where the Jewish people has sought refuge, we have ended up bringing commerce and science and music and the spiritual illumination that, for over 3,000 years, has endowed the world with a conscience and a compass and has elevated the status of mankind.
“We will continue to defeat the laws of historical physics and to thrive until the end of history despite the best efforts of the nations to wipe us from their conscience, and we will continue to enrich the existence of all peoples until we finish our utterly unique task of redeeming the world. The people of Israel will prevail and bring a lasting and just peace into the world no matter how violently the nations may resist us, and when the mask of history falls we will be recognized and exalted by the world for the blessing that we are.
“In the meantime, to those in the Muslim world who strive against our existence, we have one word of caution: You do so at the detriment of every grain of truth in your religion and your existence. Without the Jewish people your spirit and your book would never have entered the world, and in the deepest recesses of your collective subconscious you know with perfect understanding that it is only our unique and eternal status as the ambassadors of G-d that enables you to survive every day.
“But remember–if you continue your struggle to denigrate the Jewish people in body and spirit, your own nation will one day join the vast and dusty bookshelf of civilizations as it too crumbles from within.”
Shavuot: From the Depths of the Sea to the Top of Sinai
Rosh Chodesh Sivan, 5773
We know that prior to the redemption from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, the nation of Israel had sunk to its lowest level in history, the 49th level of tumah. We also know that it is from that lowest of lows, from the bottom of a split sea, that we were catapulted to the highest level of prophecy, the experience of revelation of G-d's will to the peoples of the earth.
We are all afraid of the deep and the dark. We tend to think of that which lacks light as something to be avoided or destroyed, but it is in the deepest and darkest parts of our souls, in the most painful moments of our lives, and in the most catastrophic events in our history that the truth hides.
The reason that we call the deep and the dark by those names is simply because they elude our senses. We don't understand those places because they conceal the eternal truths under a surface which is more clearly visible yet much more confusing and painful.
In the darkroom of our doubts, everything that we encounter seems to us an obstacle, a setback. We look back on the Holocaust as we do on the Egyptian catastrophe that claimed most of our nation, as unmitigated disasters.
But faintest flicker of light is enough to begin to recognize the outline of those objects, and when the light of Torah burns bright, we can fully expose the blessing and appreciate the indispensability of the challenges before and behind us.
When we let a sense of divine perspective illuminate our history, we see that the furnace of Egyptian bondage forged our nation, and that a Jewish state sprouted in the ashes of Auschwitz. As history has proven to us many times, the seeds of catastrophe are also the seedlings of redemption. For we could not have come to where we are are, nor proceed to where we are destined to go, without the hardships to guide us. It could not be any other way.
The "Sin" of David haMelech
What applies to the history of the world applies to each of us as individuals. David haMelech, the most exalted king and grandfather of the messiah, provides a striking example of how G-d buries his truths behind some of our most confusing and painful episodes. On the surface, David haMelech wrote the book on corruption--the use of political means for personal ends. David sends a man to his death in order to take his wife. It doesn't get more political or more personal than that. And on the surface, David spends the rest of his life in heartbroken repentance and ceaseless calamity. Yet the gemara says that "he who thinks that David sinned, is mistaken."
But under the surface of that seemingly heinous crime was a tikkun, a rectification of a much more heinous crime that goes back to the beginnings of history. In the first war mankind wages, Cain kills his brother Abel, ostensibly for the right to sow the land. The midrash tells us that the "land" actually refers to their sister, who, in a time when the entire human genome is sharply divided among three people, is the only one through which they can populate the earth. Just as Adam sinned by not waiting for Shabbat to eat from the fruit, Cain sinned by not waiting for his turn to mate with their sister, and forced G-d's hand by killing his brother. This midrash tells us that David is the reincarnation of Abel, Uriah the Hittite is the reincarnation of Cain, and Bathsheba is the reincarnation of their sister. David/Abel, in his prophetic vision, sees that he needs to "kill" Uriah/Cain and take Bathsheba/the sister in order to rectify the sin. Moreover, haShem arranges for this to happen in a kosher way--he has Uriah sleep at the gate of the David's palace, despite orders from the king to go back home to his wife. In doing so, he incurs the death penalty that devolves on anyone who violates the king's command, and based on this transgression David is morally justified in sending Uriah into a battle that the king knows will kill him. As Uriah leaves for war, he issues his wife Bathsheba a conditional get, freeing her to marry someone else--i.e., David--if he does not return. David is thus exonerated even on the surface of history as he corrects the first injustice perpetrated by man. In the story of David, two layers of truth and judgement can be peeled apart and exposed, one a surface truth according to which he sinned and repented, and another, deeper truth, according to which he righted the earliest and most catastrophic wrong since we left Eden. Thus a negative or evil element, once returned to its context, becomes the fulcrum against which wrong becomes right.
Threads in the Fabric
So what was David's sin in the end? Why did he need to repent at all? The answer lays, once again, in timing. Just as Adam did not wait to eat from the fruit, just as Cain did not wait to lay with his sister, so did David not wait until the moment of Uriah's death to take Bathsheba. And for that he incurs the rebuke of his friend Natan, the mortal dread of which haunts him for the rest of his plague-ridden life, while out of the depths of his despair he calls out to G-d--"Mima'amakim karaticha haShem"--as his ineffable remorse for the sin raises him to the heights of human expression and national redemption. So even here, in David's "sin", sprout the seeds of our national power, descended through the house of David to our final redeemer. In fact we see several strands of these apparent wrongs, these half-truths, woven together in the lineage of King David to a glorious culmination. The matings of Lot and his daughters, Judah and Tamar, and Yishai and Nitzevet, all tainted with sin, are mixed into the pure seed of Jacob, and elevate and complete it, just like the pungent, musky Chelbona, when added to the pure ketoret, is precisely that which gives the incense its heavenly essence. Likewise we know from the dirtiest, most pestilent substance, earth, comes the highest expression of nature--food, more exalted than all of the animal sacrifices, loftier than the ketoret, because it is what enables the human body to perform the highest mitzvoth.
The Other Side of Greatness
"Mima'amakim karaticha Hasehem." From the depths of David's depression our king was inspired to write the most beautiful poetry in our history and lead our nation to some of its most glorious moments. The example of David teaches us that it is precisely from the deepest, darkest moments of our lives that the strongest light can emerge. Surface-oriented thought tends to regard depression as something bad, something to be avoided, analyzed or medicated away. The deeper truth is that psychologists have only now begun to understand the vital role that depression plays in civilization. We now know that depression, can be the springboard for the loftiest and most inspired moments in our lives, as we have always known that without pain and discomfort there is no growth or progress. And we know that the creative fires of the most brilliant people are driven by the deepest and darkest currents in their characters, for the same gifts that elevate and expose great men are the very ones that must sometimes weigh them down and isolate them.
The Surface and the Depths
There is a saying that still waters run deep. When we think of the power of the ocean, what image comes to mind more than any other?? Waves?? Wrong!! Waves are only the surface, and much more powerful than any tsunami are the slow, massive currents that turn in the depths our our oceans and generate all of the world's weather patterns. The surface of history is that of the stormy ocean, with with waves and hurricanes sweeping empires and ideologies one after another. Our oceans and the weather they generate seem to move in a random, chaotic way, but in fact they are driven by the deepest, most silent, ponderious and powerful forces. In the deepest, darkest recesses of our planet lie the greatest mysteries that drive the forces of natures, and so too is history moved by ponderous and all-reaching forces directed by G-d.
The Small and the Great
"And the spirit of G-d hovered over the surface the deep." It's a common saying that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the ocean bottom. Our knowledge of the physical world is that of microscopes and telescopes. Science, technology and the arts tend towards particularity. Modern civilization focuses increasingly on tinier particles and narrower avenues of thought, inquiry and expression, like the teasing out of ever tinier and thinner threads from the surface fabric of reality. In astrophysics, they even have a name for these threads, called superstrings, that we now believe tie the universe together. But how all of these strands connect, how all of the minute particles of human experience and history are woven together, is a secret that only the Torah can reveal in full depth and truth. Just as the threads of David's ancestry are woven together to a kingly culmination, so too will the depths behind our time on this earth be illuminated in the climax of history.
"And the spirit of G-d hovered over the surface the deep." There will come a day when the microscopic strings of our knowledge and our history will tie back together before our eyes. As we receive the final revelation of G-d, the sea will split once again, the deepest currents of history will well up to the surface, our most painful episodes as a people and as individuals will be illuminated, and the tikkuns of the past will bear their fruit and shine their light onto the future redemption.
This is not an apologist piece for the attacks on the World Trade Center. As a new citizen of the Jewish State and a one-time emigrant from the totalitarian Soviet one, I am no more sympathetic to the genocidal and life-denying ideology of Jihad than to any other modern form of idolatry. Most of all, I carry the burden of sympathy for the families of those killed while at work in those towers, whether they were members of my people or those of the family of nations. Indeed the victims were doing nothing more than trying to keep on building the American way of life.
But this was precisely their crime. And in some way or other, whether these accountants and architects and janitors and attorneys and marketing executives and window washers and investment bankers knew it or not, in committing it each of them collaborated in charting the path to their own spectacular demise and proved that ignorance can only masquerade as bliss.
This is the story of how the American public, led by its own ignorance and naivëte into suicidal self-deception, unwittingly brought on the death and destruction of the 9/11 attacks, and how America, unless it learns what it today seems unwilling to learn, will very soon destroy itself.
It’s also a story of how the attack rang a little-heard alarm bell for one young man and led him to escape the nightmare fantasy mistakenly referred to as the American Dream, and in doing so help redeem several generations of his family from the cultural, intellectual and spiritual Holocaust of the last century, a Holocaust whose seeds were planted, and which continues to be cultivated, by his fellow Jews.
Finally, it’s a story about why every Jew, in America and around the world, who has even a drop of Jewish pride and Jewish guilt and Jewish soul, must plumb the depths of his conscience and to try to find in it the seeds of his own redemption as nothing more and nothing less than a Jew, and the true reunification of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
San Francisco, September 11th, 2001, some time before 07:00 PST
I awoke to the voice of Karen speaking to one of our friends on the phone. It was Ari calling. It seemed there was another “bombing” of the World Trade Center. Great, another terrorist attack to start my day, I thought. I took grim consolation in the thought that at least this time it wasn’t our people in Israel getting killed. The Al-Aqsa Intifada had already jaded me, and perhaps it was more than a rumbling of discontent with my identity as an American that made it shockingly hard for me to feel genuine anguish over something that, had I decided to go East rather than West, would have happened in my backyard.
I looked for a moment outside the window. Twin Peaks was still there, Sutro Tower proudly showing off its coat of red and white paint for yet another day of sparkling Northern California sunlight.
I got up, brushed my teeth and shuffled over to the living room, where the images from the television screen told a different story. I watched one tower fall, then another. I felt a mix of shock and awe, the mantra employed so effectively less than two years later by George W. Bush in his campaign to impose democracy on a reluctant Middle Eastern country. I was morbidly but genuinely transfixed by the magnificent horror of the attack - like Hitler’s continental inferno, it seems that 9/11 is an event that will remain seared into the occipital lobes of all who witnessed it and survived, which that day included most of the American public.
The attack on the Twin Towers did not come suddenly from the skies. It was almost a century in the making, and the actors in the drama, from assimilationist Jews in America to Muslim fanatics on the Arabian peninsula, have played a much larger and more important role in this process than perhaps they themselves understand.
It pays to observe an little-understood but telling twist of historical irony: The great villain of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, left this world by subjecting himself to the same fiery end that engulfed his victims – no longer able to constrain the energy of his own destructive power, the mad chemist of the Superhuman turned his pistol on himself, but only after ordering his staffers to burn his body in a bomb crater, becoming the final and most infamous victim of his Holocaust.
American society is perpetrating a different kind of mass killing, and a much more frightening, well- conceived, and complete one than even the Fuhrer could have imagined: Whereas the Third Reich aimed for the physical death of its enemies, the unstated and perhaps unconscious goal of the American global media empire is nothing less than the worldwide annihilation of the soul.
In a process that even its perpetrators are not entirely aware of, through its technological and corporate contingents around the world, the United States of America is slowly but surely eroding the fabric of the world’s quilt of cultures and societies.Through the hypnotic and intensifying-ly global reach of film, television, music and the Internet, America and its Western partners/rivals are succeeding in the goal of taking over the world, by destroying its cultural and spiritual roots.
And this assault, far from coming from an enemy of the Jews, comes from the Jews themselves.
Let’s turn back the clock: In 1910, almost exactly 100 years ago, the first film was produced in Hollywood, California. Almost immediately, a host of Hollywood production studios sprang up, almost all of them run by Jews. Seven years later, the same year that the predominantly Jewish Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the first true multimedia experience was created: A moving picture with sound, carrying with it the irresistible lure of an alternate, more beautiful and more perfect universe that flickered somewhere between the screen and the viewers watching it. “The Jazz Singer” was a Jewish production from start to finish, and its very plot line – a nice, religious Jewish boy abandons his forefathers to become an entertainer to the Gentile world – smacks of the same guilt that the filmmakers must have felt about leaving their world of ghettoized Torah, the perfect suicide note for Hollywood's Jewish past.
The Jews of Hollywood, thus having shed over 3,000 years of uncomfortable differentness, seized upon the ideological force of post-religious modern internationalism, just like their Bolshevik cousins, and like them, created an alternative religion.
From that moment onwards, Jews dominated Hollywood and turned it into something much greater than an entertainment institution. By giving substance and form to a media empire that later branched out into and intertwined film, television, radio and newspapers, Jews in early 20thcentury America would end up succeeding where Jewish communists in Bolshevik Russia ultimately failed: Creating a new, global ideology and a new world order.
Catching on quickly to the rising need for people all over the rapidly industrializing world to fill their free time with “content” and meaning, and ostensibly catering to the belief that every man had the right to broaden his horizons, the Jews of Hollywood cleverly tied together advertising with entertainment and empowered industry to rebrand the human race into a new species: the consumer.
Just as the Soviets provided a new class of obedient role models to lead their masses into unquestioning compliance, the burgeoning Hollywood empire created its own pantheon of screen gods, not coincidentally called idols. After thousands of years of supposed civilization and ethical progress, Western man was back to worshiping stars. Members of the same Jewish nation that brought the idea of one G-d to the world, that fought so hard to establish the reign of ethical monotheism, now abandoned their belief and created the most pervasive form of idol worship in history.
Globalization cannot occur without an ideological life force to unite the nations under it, and in delivering the new mantra of the globalized world, Jews were instrumental in erecting an idolatry of the most insidious kind: the worship of the self.
From the simple dance clubs of Accra to the dizzying oblivion of Madrid’s nightlife, from the pulsating electronic billboards of Tokyo to the mind-numbing rhythms on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the drumbeat of self-annihilation calls to its listeners: surrender to yourself, to us, to the brave new world. Under the cover of night and the fictions of disposable time and income, globalization, as invented and propagated by American pop “culture”, has been eroding the institutions of traditional culture and nationhood of every country in the world, while America proudly affirms the freedom of every individual to create his or her own reality by destroying all others.
As an ever-larger part of the average daily person’s life is dominated by global brands, fueled by merger upon merger of the world’s largest companies where corporate sponsorship deals decide who is exposed to which message and when, there is an inevitable loss of self and the dissolution of familial and national bonds. The news media, while purporting to serve as the sober eyes and ears of the world, play the biggest role of all of these bodies in defining what is important for people to see and hear and of propagating and accelerating the very notion of that importance. Using the smokescreen of the public’s right to know about every detail, the media outlets become the mouthpieces for whichever advertisers pay the most to have their products publicized, in the process playing directly into the hands of government leaders and the corporations that wield an exponentially growing influence over them.
While the growing barrage of advertisements calls out for viewers to identify with a corporation, to create a new reality in which his fellow man is minimized, the corporation becomes teacher, parent, friend, lover and G-d.
In the end, modern man’s constant demand for information, fueled by his desire to believe and connect with something greater than himself, furnishes his descent into the abyss of consumerism.
Thus dispossessed of their cultural traditions, their spiritual compass and their sense of belonging, the masses throng to the worship of media idols and blind adherence to the spiral of material consumption that will itself consume the world’s physical and spiritual resources.
The question is when this new cultural Reich will, like Hitler’s, consume itself, and who will be left to deal with the remains.
The World Trade Center was the symbol of America’s economic domination of the world. In the end, as all empires fall, so will the American corporate one. But the global media machine that was given its ideological roots by Jews in Hollywood and sustained with Jewish money and Jewish brainpower will continue to spread in an earth-consuming chain reaction.
So the towers in New York fell, and yet America continues to rebuild and move on, as if nothing happened, unaware even of the startling fact that the American government can no longer guarantee the safety of its citizens from foreign attack or its tenure as the dominant world power.
The shock and outrage, for the short time the media allowed it to last, was first directed at fanatical Islam. Muslim terrorism on American soil! And on such a scale! It was the perfect sensation piece, photographed, filmed and replayed thousands of times on televisions all over the world. Yes, it seemed for a brilliant, blinding flash that the unbridled evil of Islam, let loose on its most savored prey, struck a victory for the forces of Jihad.
But very few people seem to understand or even really care about what drives Jihad and what is fueling Muslim fundamentalism. Why, exactly, is the Islamic world at war with secular, Western civilization? Why are some devout Muslims willing to send their children to their deaths, and hundreds of millions of others cheering them on, in order to fight the proxy war against tiny Israel?
And why are the Jews once again facing the fury of a nationalist ideology aimed at taking over the entire world?
The Jewish sages say that G-d raises the hand of our enemies above us in order to reprove us for our misdeeds, to remind us of who we are supposed to be, to draw out those qualities within us that are lacking and force us to strengthen them. What, then, could we as liberal, enlightened, universally tolerant Jews possibly learn from a bunch of rifle-waving fanatics willing to die a thousand deaths if only to bring the rest of the world down with them?
The answer is actually quite simple: Belief in something greater than this world, beyond the here-and-now. What the Muslims are brandishing with the sword of Jihad, what each terrorist explosion loudly proclaims, is precisely that which the Jews themselves gave them but now stubbornly keep denying – The ultimately fanatical belief in one creator and one judge who created this world and who exists far beyond it.
Anyone who thinks that a whole generation of young Arabs in Nablus and Jenin can be raised to kill themselves to make a point in a land dispute, anyone who thinks that suicide bombings and the “Palestinian” resistance and the war on the West are all for the sake of liberating a tiny strip of sand almost completely devoid of natural resources, needs to look much deeper for an answer that makes even remote sense.
What the young Muslims in the West Bank are dying for, and what their supporters all over the Jihad-ridden Muslim world are cheering for has little to do with land. They have no reason to feel insecure in Islam’s triumphant march across Africa, Asia and now Europe. It’s certainly not about money – while the West continues its spiral of consumption, oil-rich Arab states will stay that way. And, contrary to what so many fervent Leftist activists, writers, professors and students in the West are fooled into believing, the Intifada is not a struggle against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel and has precious little to do with a “Palestinian” state.
What is Intifada-global Jihad really fighting for? What do nearly two billion Muslims want more than anything else in the world, even more than eternal life in a hereafter? One thing and one thing only – the complete restoration of the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel.
As so often happens, what seems to be case on the surface is the exact opposite of what really is.
When a young Muslim man or woman in Jerusalem straps on a suicide belt, swallows his tears and his love for his family and presses the button, that young Muslim is, knowingly or not, aiding and abetting his Jewish enemy in a struggle not over land, but over the soul of this world.
For that which makes radical Islam radical is a struggle for those very same things that the Jewish nation was sent to this earth to fight for and establish – the restoration of the reign of G-d in the universe.
The cancer of materialism, greed, and worship of the self that Jews, unwittingly or otherwise, unleashed on the world is finally being met by a power that it can no longer ignore. Radical Islam, the phenomenon that many Western conservative cynics and my own Zionist colleagues trot out in order to flay as the “cancer” afflicting Western civilization, is in fact its cure.
The standard-bearers of Jihad, from bin-Laden to Nasrallah to Ahmadinejad, are very clear about what the enemy represents to them. They proclaim, openly and unequivocally, their aim of uprooting the destructive lie behind the American-born, pan-global, post-religious lie of G-dless materialism and selfishness. You don’t need to read too deeply between the lines of their polemics to understand what they are fighting against and struggling for.
In sermon after sermon, the leaders of the Muslim people call out for one thing above all else, and that is simple, honest submission to a higher power and the acknowledgement that people are servants to G-d and to nobody else.
Sound familiar? It should – Muhammad, son of Abdullah (Ovadia in Hebrew) took the heart of his faith from the Jews, and although he combined Judaism’s ethical monotheism with Christianity’s crusading desire to spread the new doctrine of Islam through conversion and coercion, and although he killed thousands of Jews who refused to accept his prophecy, he accepted the Torah’s teaching that the way to bring the world to perfection is to recognize the Creator. The difference is that Torah commands Jews to emulate the deeds and attributes of their Commander-in-Chief, to walk humbly in His ways and to bring salvation to the world by perfecting ourselves rather than trying to convince others that we're right, whereas Islam is dominated by an overarching dogma of unqestioning submission and global coercion: any part of the world that is not Dar-el-Islam (the "realm of Islam") is Dar-el-Harb (the "realm of war").
Meanwhile, the post-Christian secular West is preaching and propagating the submission of G-dliness, the very negation of G-d's presence in this world and of the divine consciousness that can only come from thousands of years of continuous and shared belief and shared identity, in favor of a neo-Hellenist/humanist religion of "individuality" where each person is a completely sovereign, perfect and independent entity, his own G-d in his own universe. And Islam is the precise antithesis and the antipodal force opposing the "anything-goes" of modern secularity and moral relativism. Both represent the warring extremes of the human condition, and both have their place in the landscape of Torah. But in an age where Jews have distinguished themselves in shifting the world to one extreme, Islam fights back on a global scale to bring it back to the center, even if it means taking the other extreme.
When the Muslim world began its modern fight against Western cultural imperialism, it also launched a Jihad against the very same unholy cultural vicissitudes that the 20th century Jews brought into the world. When a Muslim suicide bomber massacres a busload of Jews in Israel, just as when Muslim hijacker-pilots slam a pair of super-technological jet airliners into two monumental towers of unbridled capitalism, Islam attempts to strike another blow against the very destructive human forces whose spread was enabled through theglobal media empire largely established, and to this day directed and championed, by Jews.
Is it any wonder, then, that we as Jews living in the State of Israel, smack in the middle of the Muslim world, are bearing the brunt of the fury of Jihad? It would indeed be puzzling if the Jewish State were indeed Jewish, but ask a sensitive and devout Muslim what he hates most about Israel, and he may tell you that the modern State of Israel represents an abomination to everything that both he and his Jewish neighbors are supposed to believe in.
In fact, the State of Israel, or at least that part of it which strives to become a bulwark of the West against the traditionalism of the Muslim East, all the while priding itself on its struggle to become a post-modern secular nation just like all the other nations, represents the exact opposite of what the Torah commands of a Jewish nation. By trying so desperately to cling to a vision of Israel as the global capital and glittering showcase of wine connoisseurs, globetrotters and avant-garde intellectuals, of Bacchanalian trance party-goers, slick, bald-shaven young corporate executives, scantily clad young grandmothers and the loudest and proudest homosexual paraders in the world, avowed secularist Jews in the Holy Land are desecrating its holiness and drawing the full ire of the Muslim world that knows, in its heart of hearts, that the Jews are supposed to be a humble and G-d fearing nation.
So, far from being the Chosen People, we have chosen to become little more than sophisticated animals, and, in doing so, have come straight into the Muslim heartland as emissaries of the globalist lie, to represent that which the Muslim world detests the most.Is it any wonder, then, that we here in Israel are suffering more than any other people in Islam’s war on the worst aspects of modern life?
There is no doubt that on a subconscious level, the devout core of Muslim believers and propaganda-makers, as the representatives of a faith that is spiritually very close to the heart of Judaism, are also motivated by a creeping, immutable awareness of exactly who the Jewish people are and the catastrophic blow they represent to the pretensions of human history. The sudden rebirth of the State of Israel in the middle of their land, especially coming right after the Holocaust as it did, was to them resounding, shattering evidence - that they could do anything but acknowledge - of the supernatural existence of the Jewish nation and the immortal, divine power they radiate. They know what is happening in the Land of Israel and they are rightfully intimidated.
However, the Jews in Israel are indeed oppressing the Muslim population. While we have a historical and divine imperative to settle and strengthen the Jewish population throughout the entire Land of Israel, we cannot do so at the expense of the spiritual devastation we are causing them. Far beyond the undesired necessity of checkpoints and armed operations and collective punishments that bring ceaseless condemnation from the world, Israeli Jews are oppressing Muslim Arabs in a much more devastating way, in a way that erodes the very values they are raised with.
I am not an apologist for radical Islam, neither for the way it treats women nor for the self-suffocating tentacles of a mindlessly fanatical creed. But Islam is radicalizing not out of some innately perverse drive toward masochism and the denial of life. Students of history cannot deny that, at its zenith, Muslim Spain was the flower of Western civilization, the lone bright spot in the otherwise Dark Ages that shrouded Europe in superstition and ignorance. Islam is reacting today by distancing itself from its once relatively tolerant virtues of moderation, those that enabled it to embrace scientific and artistic progress and the creative endeavors of its Jewish subjects.
Jews are oppressing Muslims in Israel for the same reason and in the same way that we are oppressing ourselves: By abandoning the faith of our forefathers as it was meant to be practiced. Faced by the menace of a secularizing world, Arabs from the Jordan to the sea are joining their brothers in the struggle against us, not for being Jews, but for trying to be everything but Jews.
The obvious solution, of course, is for the Jews of Israel to unify under the banner of Torah and the ideals it represents. But the reality on the Israeli street is one in which the majority of Jews prefer to cling to any kind of lifestyle and ideology, whether it be European Epicureanism or radical socialism or radical capitalism, other than the one institution and way of life that unswervingly promises to create a true heaven on earth.
So why are most Israelis so resistant and rebellious toward the very Torah that is designed to redeem not only them, but the rest of the world that they once cared so passionately about as Labor Zionists and have since become so disillusioned with? Why do the majority of Israelis, who live in a country that has become a nexus of Torah study and practice, reject the way of life of their Torah-observant counterparts, thereby contributing to the onslaught of the global media machine in the one land that is supposed to be untainted by it? The problem and the solution can only come from within the “religious” population itself.
It is no secret that the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli population is also its most exclusionist. The ultra-Orthodox, who will, in a few generations, dominate the religious landscape of the country, represent the most reactionary element in Torah, and, from their perspective, for good reason: The government has followed a clear agenda of preserving a strong secular pedigree among the ruling classes, and the cultural encroachment of so-called “nightlife” into the physical and cultural domains of ultra-Orthodox communities is a genuine threat to their way of life.
The ultra-Orthodox represent the same stream of Torah that 100 years ago rejected the settlement and foundation of a Jewish state, and many among them continue to do so, because, in their view, it has little to offer them and much to take away. So rather than entering Israeli society, many of the ultra-Orthodox continue to shelter themselves and their children from the pernicious influences of the secular State.
As noted by leading writers and rabbinical figures, the destruction of European Jewry and the rise of the Jewish state, the same exilic parochialism of a Judaism devoid of spirituality that caused so many Jews to embrace the secularity of the Enlightenment also led most of the religious leadership in Europe to reject Zionism. One famous rabbi, months before his capture by the Nazis, belatedly decried this rejection by himself and his colleagues, and went so far as to suggest that the blood of millions of Jews who could have been saved was on the hands of the religious leadership that refused to recognize Zionism as the life raft it could have been.
There is, of course, a flourishing Religious-Zionist movementin Israel, strongly opposed to the ultra-Orthodox, that claims to carry both banners: Jewish nationalism based on building the land and strengthening the economy of the state, and the development and propagation of a Torah-adherent lifestyle as the ideological foundation of the Jewish State. However this group has begun to fail in both aims, as it, like the rest of Israeli society, splits into the mutually exclusive poles of the material realm and the spiritual realm. If one is to take the Religious Zionists as the heart and soul of “true” Torah Judaism, or at least its most holistic variety, we can see in their society the center point of the rift that is spreading throughout the Israeli public and the Jewish world.
Faced with the ethical and religious dilemmas of loyalty to a government that is trying to uproot much of the settlement movement, confronted by what they see as the disengagement of the Israeli public from their interests, many in the Religious-Zionist world are rejecting the authority of the state and their responsibility toward it. By removing themselves from the physical world and the organs of society, they are essentially adopting the same ultra-Orthodox stance they once viewed so critically.
These are just two examples of how the Jewish people, while reuniting geographically in its ancestral homeland, is in fact split at its very heart. The myriad flavors of Orthodox religious Judaism, and each groups’ version of daily Jewish law and practice, have made precious little progress in coming together from the exile into cohesive whole. One rabbi from one community rules one way on a very important topic, while another rabbi upholds his belief that a different way is correct. While Torah was never meant to be practiced uniformly, the continued development of religious life in Israel is undeniably crippled by an utter lack of any desire to reconcile widely contrasting practices and approaches. Is it any wonder, then, that a non-observant Jew in Israel, faced with such a bewilderingly fragmented Torah, sees something little more than the sum of very limited parts, rather than the universalist, all-embracing doctrine that it is supposed to be?
The Jewish religious establishment has so far failed in its mission to engage the world, thereby alienating secular Jews and perpetuating the very same desecration of G-d that the so-called “cancer” called radical Islam is struggling murderously against.
In order to save Israel, in order for the Jewish people to manifest their destiny in the world and to battle the encroaching consumption of culture and memory and identity, in order for the Jewish nation to undo the damage it has brought into the world in the guise of Hollywood, the religious communities of Israel must and will bring themselves together and show the rest of their brethren a way of life that will make them flock to be a part of it.
I didn’t appreciate it then, but now I can look back at that sunny morning in San Francisco and see in it the seeds of my own redemption. The attack on the World Trade Center was a wake-up call for me. Never having felt completely at home in America, 9/11 forced me to confront my true feelings about my adopted homeland.
For over a year after the attacks, I struggled to suppress a renewed feeling that I was not where I belonged, but finally the realization came to me that my destiny as a Jew could only ever be in the Land of Israel.
Unfortunately, it seems that the cataclysmic lesson of Nazi Germany has been lost on the vast majority American Jewish public. American Jews, just like their German co-religionists, are certain that nothing bad could happen to them in the most materially and culturally comfortable place for Jews to be in the world.
Nobody can foretell when and how exactly the downfall of the American empire will come, but like all empires, the United States has a natural, historical lifespan. When the end does come, it may well bring with it a wave of physical destruction to match the spiritual destruction already underway, that will swallow those Jews who most contributed to the country’s development.
A Jew simply has no business feeling comfortable in America or any other place outside his historical and G-d-given homeland, and when the global corporate media machine headquartered in the U.S. exhausts the world’s resources, the Jews that contributed most to its rise will experience a seismic uprooting and destruction of their community in that part of the exile.
9/11, in its own way, saved my life. Likewise, every suicide bombing in Israel, every death of an innocent Jew at the hands fanatical Islam, woke up another part of my Jewish consciousness and brought me that much closer to Israel and its Torah.
I therefore call on every Jew with a listening heart and with even the tiniest flicker of Jewish identity to take a hard look at his life in America and that of his fellow Jews, and to unite himself with the incomparable destiny charted for his people in their homeland. As we learned in this week’s Torah portion, when G-d spoke to Abraham, he simply told him to go to the land that He will show him, and it is with the same leap of faith that every Jew in America and around the world will one day have to leave his old life behind to rejoin with his future.
Just like Abraham, it doesn't matter that you don’t really know where you’re going or what to expect when you get there. But one day, whether by choice or otherwise, go you will.
