Poll: Rational criticism or anti-Semitism?

That is not the case. Israel is nothing like China or Japan. The Chinese do not accommodate any ethnic Chinese who wish to return to and China’s legal system and economy do not recognize any difference between ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese. Japan is closer because of its curious nationality laws but that is the limit of the similarity.

Perhaps not China or Japan but many countries give favored treatment for residency and citizenship to the direct blood descendants of residents/citizens of those countries. In the recent Olympics a number of American athletes represented other countries that had granted them citizenship based on ethnicity.

It works the other way too. A college friend of mine, Tim Kalaris, was 100% Greek, all four grandparents. His parents were born in the United States (as he was) and his dad was a high level spook for the CIA (Manilla station chief, & later director of counter-intelligence). After Tim turned 18, he could not visit his relatives in Greece because the Greek government considered him Greek and would have drafted him into the Greek army.

The problem with Israel and anti-semitism has to do with the Jews being a religionation, a nation that defines itself by religious criteria.

Jews are as much of a nation as the Japanese. While Japan has had a variety of governments over the centuries, nobody would say that how the Japanese government is structured changes Japan’s existential reality as a Japanese country. The same is true with Israel. Israel is a Jewish country just as Japan is a Japanese country. How little or how much Israeli secular law respects or is bound by traditional Judaism is as irrelevant to Israel’s status as a Jewish state as whether or not Japan is ruled by an emperor considered by Shintos to be divine or by a parliamentary democracy has anything to do with it’s status as a Japanese state.

rokemronnie on March 26, 2009 at 10:28 PM

And we know that most Jews in America do not side with Israel with regard to this Gaza thing.

I don’t think that’s accurate. While most American Jews reflexively tilt left politically and vote Democratic, the fact of thousands of missiles shot at Israel forced all but the most self-hating Jews to support Israel during the latest go-round in Gaza. Some may have wrung their hands or mentioned a lack of proportionality, but when push come to shove, the vast majority of US Jews considered Israel’s actions in Gaza to be justified.

rokemronnie on March 26, 2009 at 10:33 PM

I’m thinking about finding a way to return to reformed(as a conservative I know I’ll be lonely) Judaism so m-i-l and I had an interesting chat this week.

annoyinglittletwerp

Actually, not all Reform Jews are politically liberal though the vast majority are politically left of center. It’s probably about an 80/20 or 90/10 split, enough to make political conservatives keep their politics to themselves, but there are indeed politically conservative Reform Jews. Ironically, a lot of the high profile politically conservative Jews, like Bill Kristol, or David Frum, are not active Jewishly as far as I know. John Podhoretz is observant on some level, but I think he’s an exception on the national scene. I think the Rep. Eric Cantor is active in a Conservative synagogue.

In the Conservative (synagogue) movement, you’d also find a liberal tilt, though not quite as pronounced as in the Reform movement.

Orthodox Jews in the US tilt right politically, my guess is the split is 60/40 or 70/30, not as monolithically conservative as the Reform movement is liberal, but yeah, you’d probably feel more politically comfortable in an orthodox shul. Religiously, my guess is that at least 50% of Jews who belong to Conservative synagogues are indistinguishable from Reform Jews in terms of religious practices and beliefs.

If you’re serious about returning to Judaism, I think you’ll find that there are many Orthodox Jewish outreach organizations that will be happy to help you while still being sensitive about your family situation. To be sure that’s not true of all Orthodox groups or Orthodox Jews, who admittedly can be insular, but if you drop me an email I can probably help you find an organization in your area that can give you resources.
rokem@netzero.net

rokemronnie on March 26, 2009 at 11:13 PM

unclesmrgol,

Such a lover of Israel and the Jews!

This proves that the IDF is a moral army. Like the misdeeds at Abu Ghraib, this came to light because of an internal investigation. If crimes were committed and rules of engagement abused, soldiers will be punished. The Israelis take the concept of Tohar Neshek, purity of arms, what the US armed forces call battlefield discipline, seriously.

Armies that routinely commit war crimes don’t investigate and prosecute soldiers like the IDF does. This investigation has caused serious debate within Israel over moral conduct during war. Doesn’t that tell you something? What other countries in that part of the world (or the rest of the world for the matter except for the US and a handful of countries) ever have serious debate over moral conduct during war?

Are Gazans debating the ethics of shooting missiles into civilian areas? Is Islamic Jihad questioning the morality of suicide bombers?

As for your fantasy that rabbis were exhorting Israeli soldiers to kill women and children, that’s your own desire to demonize Israelis (and rabbis), woven out of the San Francisco Chronicle’s (no friend of Israel or traditional Jewish or Christian faiths) account of an AP (ditto) take on Ha’aretz’ reflexive anti-religious editorial and news stance, of a secular (and from the sound of it anti-religious) Israeli soldier’s paraphrase of inspirational religious literature.

Even looking at the soldier’s remarks:

“Their message was very clear: ‘We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,’ “

is a long stretch from your statement that “rabbis were exhorting troops to kill innocent civilians in the name of Eretz Yisrael.”

rokemronnie on March 26, 2009 at 11:40 PM

The founding of the State of Israel is steeped in the Zionist concept of Eretz Yisrael,

Please explain what the “Zionist concept of Eretz Yisrael” is and provide citations. Please also explain how this concept differs from the traditional Jewish concept of Eretz Yisrael.

Eretz Yisrael means The Land of Israel and is a phrase that predates the modern political Zionist movement by at least a couple of thousand years. The term HaAretz, the land, is also based not in modern Zionism but traditional Judaism. The boundaries of Eretz Yisrael are defined in Torah sources.

The Nazi concept of Liebensraum, living room, was based on the notion that Germany was overpopulated and needed room to expand. Eretz Yisrael is a concept introduced in the Torah by God who promised it to Abraham in return for his family’s faith in Him. If you think there’s any comparison between the two, it’s a free country, and if calling Jews Nazis gives you a hardon, like it does Oliphant, that’s your problem.

rokemronnie on March 26, 2009 at 11:52 PM

Paleo-conservatives suck a big one.

Hilts on March 26, 2009 at 4:31 PM

Step 1: make your adversary less than human.

unclesmrgol

How does “suck a big one” = < human?

Paraphrasing Lenny Bruce when he was on trial for using a ten letter word for oral copulation, the term refers to any woman that I’d consider dating.

rokemronnie on March 27, 2009 at 12:13 AM

M-14 2go on March 26, 2009 at 6:32 PM

+11

rokemronnie on March 27, 2009 at 12:24 AM

In other words, Israel is like the USA in the late 1950’s, with an apartheid policy tacitly

You mean in the 1950s, about 10% of the members of the US Congress were black and some of them collaborated with the USSR?

While the status of Israeli Arabs (many of whom identify with Israel’s enemies, understandably) may not meet the PC multiculti standards of 2009 America, by the standards of the region they are positively enlightened. How many Kurds who call for a dismantling of Turkey are in the Turkish parliament? You complain about covenants, deed restrictions and JNF management of public domain land in Israel but you fail to mention that in the Palestinian Authority it is a capital crime to sell land to a Jew. Jews, by the Jordanian constitution, may not be citizens of Jordan. Jews, who lived on the Arabian peninsula before the time of Mohammed, are virtually prohibited from entering Saudi Arabia.

The truth is that Israeli Arabs, Muslim and Christian (though the Muslims are forcing the Christians out and taking over Nazareth), have more legal civil and religious rights than most minorities do in the Muslim world.

If you’re going to simultaneously hold Israel to a high standard of civil rights for minorities, will ignoring how minorities are treated by Israel’s enemies, well then, that’s called a double standard. As Natan Sharansky, a man many times your moral superior, has said, holding the Jewish state to a double standard is a form of anti-semitism. Sharansky went nose to nose with the KGB and refused to back down. If it was you, the KGB would turn you like a cheap whore.

rokemronnie on March 27, 2009 at 12:38 AM

Now, O those who think I know nothing about Israel — is Eliyahu a minor bit player whose words mean little?

Actually, he is a relative bit player and your knowledge is less comprehensive than you think it is. There have been a bunch of chief rabbis and in many ways it’s more of a political than religious position. Few orthodox Israeli Jews consider them authoritative, though they have all been great scholars, since most orthodox Jews follow the rulings of their own rabbis, either personal or communal. No disrepect intended to the chief rabbis, but in general the most respected rabbinical scholars have declined the position, either over religious unease with the secular Israeli state, or because of the potentially corrupting influence of politics on religion. R’ Ovadiah Yosef, a former Sephardi chief rabbi, is generally considered the most authoritative of Sephardi rabbis in Israel today, not because he was chief rabbi, but rather because of his reputation as a scholar. I’m sure that R’ Yosef has said stuff about Arabs that bothers you too. Ain fercockte kleinekeit (since you’re so culturally literate about the Jews, you probably know that is Yiddish for BFD). The Sephardim lived as oppressed minorities among the Arabs, understand their culture, and have no desire to go back to dhimmi status. If their speech offends you it is because they speak a language that they have learned to their prior detriment that the Arabs understand fluently.

Good enough yet, or do I need still more sources? If I do, then I reserve the right to treat you as the liar you believe me to be and to exact the same requests.

Sources? When you can cite Ahad HaAm in the original Hebrew, or cite Rabbis Mohliver and Kalisher, or the writings from the Chovevei Tzion, I’ll believe you have some fluency in the sources.

You’ve done nothing to establish any relationship of the idea of Eretz Yisrael to the Nazi concept of Lebensraum, and I have made no deliberate errors by which you could call me a liar. All you’ve done is cut and paste from secondary and tertiary sources and tied it together with your fantasies of Jewish boogeymen.

I live in a neighborhood that’s overwhelmingly Jewish, many of them orthodox. If you asked 100 of them what Eretz Yisrael meant, they’d say it means the land of Israel, and if you started carrying on about Greater Israel or Eretz Yisrael HaShleimah, they’d look at you like you were nuts. The same would be true of virtually all Israeli Jews, including right wing Jews, including the majority of radical right wing Jews who live in Hebron and the rest of the Gush. I can say that with certainty because I’m personally familiar with what many consider the Jewish radical right wing. I knew R’ Meir Kahane, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing and my God avenge his blood, personally and have friends who live in Kiryat Arba.

What you’re little trek through wikipedia didn’t mention was that Gush Emunim was founded by the survivors and descendants of the pre-state Gush Etzion settlements that were overrun by the Arabs in the 1948 war and liberated in 1967. Like the Sephardim, they too have some experience with Arab hospitality.

You’ve also shown how little you really know, or alternative how much you’re willing to dissemble, about Israeli politics and culture.

Once again you’re citing a source that is hostile to traditional Judaism (as is most of the MSM) citing Israeli soldiers and a hard left Israeli activist (the Israeli left is incredibly hostile to traditional Judaism and goes out of its way to make orthodox Jews look bad – I say that as someone who has been outspoken in my criticism of the orthodox community), paraphrasing rabbis to make them look bloodthirsty and yet there is still no smoking gun beyond your own delusions. Having no mercy on the enemy is not exhorting to kill innocents.

In any case, as I said before, the fact that there is debate in Israel over what is moral in war, or what the proper role of military chaplains is, shows that Israel is a far more moral country than you are making it out to be.

When you show a fraction of concern for the genocidal statements about Jews in Gaza and West Bank mosques every Friday that you do for supposedly bloodthirsty rabbis I’ll believe that you’re impartial. With folks like you, they say they are just trying to be fair but somehow they always roll around to blaming Jews for something.

Most of this bruhaha, both about abusing rules of engagement and the role of chaplains, has come out of a left-wing military institute. The Israeli hard left Breaking The Silence shows up prominently in most of your links. At the same time, according to Yediot, Israel’s other major Hebrew language daily, a large number of Israeli veterans of the Gaza engagement, from a variety of units, have said that to the contrary, they took extra precautions to protects civilians and saw only incidental violation of battlefield discipline. A reasonable person would conclude that whatever abuses of the rules of engagement or whatever militant nationalistic preaching there was done by chaplain rabbis, it was not commonplace. Do young men with guns sometimes get carried away in battle? Sure. Do religious preachers sometimes go over the top with rhetoric? Sure. Both of those are not unknown in war and an enterprising journalist can be sure to find a source or two for a story.

rokemronnie on March 27, 2009 at 2:19 AM