WHAT IS EQUAL - WHAT IS NOT

By Dietz Ziechmann
February 13, 2022 · Cleveland Heights, OH


YETZER RAH AND YETZER TOV

Rabbis Marc Golub and Rabbi Spiro had a discussion rebroadcast on JBS on the nature of Jewish values.   Rabbi Spiro said that Jews sometimes often have too much of the YETZER TOV, "the good impulse", the unselfish impulse, It has sometimes not served us well, as when we have fallen for communism, social -as distinct from capitalism with a conscience, with a heart. He thinks this has also led the Jewish Left to indiscriminately support the "Palestinian" Arab cause against the State of Israel to the extent of even threatening its existence.

My mother was one of 13 children because her mother wanted to replicate the 13 of her grandmother. Thirteen children escaped from Nazi Germany, got warned to leave Europe by a telegram from FDR while they were vacationing in Belgium in 1938. got into the USA above the US German quota. All thirteen came through WWII without a scratch. My mother cratily escaped from "White Slavers" in Rio de Janeiro by feign to not understand Portuguese. She avoided being sexually assaluted by a priest on the Italian liner; she crossed the Atlantic from Genoa. She got a visa from the German consultate in Rio and travelled on a Nazi passport from Rio to NYC in 1949, even though her father had personally defied Hitler, and his wife's estates in Germany had been confiscated by the Nazis a few years before. My mother had no papers to leave Germany in 1934 when the SA police auxiliary checked for them on the train taking her and her sisters to Lucerne, Switzerland. ("Oh, they're just kids.") What strokes of "luck"!

In 1940, my uncle Gerhardt lent money as representative of the Chemical Bank (of NY), the Oyster Bay Roosevelts' Commercial Bank, arranged  for the lending of money to the French de Rothschilds, Guy and his first cousin Alain, who were also house guests of my maternal grandparents, at their Managgatan apartment, perhaps their town house in Pelham, and their summer home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Who lends money to the Rothschilds?  They did not have domestic use of their French bank because of the Nazi occupation.


What is Equal. What is Not.

The situations of the "Palestinians" and African-Americans are often indiscriminately paralleled. They are not. But making those distinctions in group status takes a sophisticated background in the actual basis of differentiation, not the emotional impulse, which does harm to the groups involved.

To start with, as Mordecai Kedar and some Zionist scholars (Zion means "Elevation") have pointed out, the ancient Roman occupiers called  the whole of the land once called Canaan ("the lowlands") "Palestine" (otherwise "Philistia", "the land of the Philistines") to diminish the psychological attachment of the ancient Israelites to the territory.  The ancient Philistines, a seafaring people had already been assimilated by the Israelites.

The mixed multitudes known for convenience sake as Palestinian Arabs ("arab" means desert dwellers), "Palestinian" was simply in this instance, a highly misleading holdover term from the days of the British Mandate. There has never been an independent "Palestinian" since at least the time of the Roman occupation, and before that only a small fragment of land along the Mediterranean coast. Thus the so-called "Palestinians" do a proper and legitimate historical claim to all or most of the land. The Palestinians do not even have a genuine nation identity, despite much of what has often and inaccurately been asserted in English and other non-Arabic languages. "Palestinian" identity is tribal, not national. The two tribes in Gaza represented by Hamas, do not intermarry with the tribes in the West Bank, represented by Fatah and the "Palestinian Authority" seldom cooperate with one another. Most Palestinian Arabs practice an authoritarian religion (Islam or one of the authoritarian versions of Christianity).  

History has shown that where people follow an authoritarian ideology, what we call democracy, or even protection of the individual and individual rights doesn't exist. That is why one group of people get represented by suicide bombers and implacable politicians and the other lawyers and other reasonable negotiators.

African Americans, for the most part, exceptions exist, such as "the Nation of Islam", strive to obtain individual civil and political rights, they don't strive to replace the USA with an authoritarian state. The Palestinian Arabs do wish to replace the entire State of Israel with an authoritarian state. They haven't made anything useful out of Gaza, instead have made it a launching pad for incessant attacks upon Israel.  Misinformed and misguided generally liberal activists simply have not been able to see the situation in its true colors, and thus delay and obstruct a proper and just solution to the regional problem, instead of contributing to that solution. There is a fundamental difference between just and unjust discrimination. The very word has lost its proper applications in the world of stereotypical and surreal politics.

Feb 23, 2022 Note:
The Torah recognizes God as imperfect and susceptible to being legitimately argued with.


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