Winter Patriot Community Blog

It is very good and ties in nicely with what we have been reading. It fills in a lot of the details and history. You are getting it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, as Mr. Wright was present during many of the defining moments in this story of the quest for zion.

"I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v

What has bothered me is meeting Jews who insist they are Jews - but eat ham, violate the Sabbath, prefer to live among Gentiles, and totally ignore the Hallakah - the Shulman Aruch and all the other 613 rules which have traditionally been the lifestyle of Judaism. When Moshe Sharett was asked at the U.N. in 1947 to define a Jew, he replied, "Anyone who thinks he is a Jew is a Jew - but he need not practice its rules.” Yet these same non-religious or non-observant Jews at once quote the Bible for justification of a Jewish State. In my book of rules, I cannot quote as authority that which I ignore in life. But that does not apply to Zionists. When I escorted General Patrick Hurley to meet Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) in Jerusalem, Shertok said Hurley, as a Christian, had to believe in the Biblical promises about a Restoration of the Jewish State. After we came away, General Hurley asked me what promises Shertok was mentioning? I wrote him a several page memo to try to clear up the fog in General Hurley's Biblical memory. page 42

Those who returned were led by a small elite of priests. Having seen the allure that foreign society had for Hebrews, it became the task of these priests, such as Ezra, to create a series of taboos and rules so that Jews could resist any temptation to integrate with other peoples. Under this Priestly cult, the small Jewish community in Palestine generated a whole series of taboos and regulations intended to separate them forever from all others. This period saw the development of what Biblical scholars call the Priestly Code. To reinforce the authority of these rules, they were retroactively credited to the myth of YHWH, the tribal god, speaking to Moses. Thus these priests, as they made up new forms for a Jewish lifestyle, prefaced their additions by the phrase, “And God said unto Moses.” This was of course a fraud, but justified as necessary so as to create a wall of separation between Jews and all non-Jews which would in the future assure the continuation of a purely Jewish cult forever. It was thus a “pious fraud” inasmuch as it was done for a “Holy” purpose. It was so successful that
ever since then, Jews have believed God actually spoke to Moses and hereby endowed the “Jewish nation” with divine favor making them a special people with a theocratic form of government that must resist all foreign temptations. Thus the concept of a “pure” people in a Holy Land in a divine dispensation was drilled into the minds of Jewish children with a whole series of legends, rituals, and taboos that “conditioned” them against contact with or assimilation to all other nations. All other people were followers of False Gods who had an unclean and defiling nature. (Hebrew “TAME” or “TUMAH” meaning “unclean”)
The two most prominent factors which set apart Jews from all other people were the rite of ritual circumcision as a physical sign – and birth from a Jewish mother. So the phrase “circumcision” came to denote the pure, the holy, the eternal, and the unchangeable, while the term “uncircumcised” came to be identified with all that was inferior, evil, impure, and degenerate. The idea of a Jewish mother then was written into the legend of Abraham and his wife Sarah (who presumably was a Hebrew), while his Egyptian concubine Hagar was a slave girl. Through this mythlegend the Jews were able to look down upon the other Semitic peoples of the area and think of them with contemptuous scorn. These concepts, rituals and legends served well to surround the Jewish nation with a protecting shell so resistant to surrounding cultures that they have acted so as to perpetuate “Jewishness” as a tribal entity. They have a tribal ancestry (Abraham), a tribal God who selected the Twelve Tribes as God’s Kingdom on Earth, tribal rituals retroactively assigned to Abraham (Genesis 17:9-27), and every Jewish child from the day of its birth is taught these tribal values as the sign of a separate Jewish “identity.” Any Jew who violates these rules develops a strong sense of guilt and is punished by the community as a traitor and expelled. (cherem) Modern scholarship, much of it Jewish, has been able to penetrate the myths created by these priests of the Fifth Century B.C. (See William Albright’s From Stone Age to Christianity or the many volumes of the Anchor Bible, especially the Book of Genesis by Professor Ephraim Speiser.) This creates a new peril for the survival of Judaism. It is essential for the perpetuation of a Jewish “cult” for these myths and legends to be repeated to each generation so as to keep the Jewish community separate from its surrounding Gentile environment.

I finished the book just today. I must say I particularly appreciated these insights in biblical theory.

The following quotations from an article entitled “Jews Hear Argument For Palestinian State” was written by Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff writer, in the November 11, 1974, Washington Post.

“In light of the fact that the Arab world is arming itself to the teeth,” a middle-aged woman at the Sinai Temple Social Hall said to I. F. Stone, “are you suggesting that all of the Jews march into the Mediterranean Sea?”

Stone, the venerable journalist speaking at an afternoon forum in favor of a separate state for Palestinians, folded his arms. “No…I’m not even suggesting an international fund to teach us all to swim…I am suggesting the Arab world is reconciling itself to the existence of a Jewish state.”

Stone received long applause at the end of his talk and many members of the audience stood while clapping. But most of the questions from the audience, particularly those directed at Stone, were bitter and critical. Stone told the audience that unless Jews took actions to ease the plight of Palestinian refugees confined to camps throughout the Mid-East, “everything we’re proud of, and everything the best side of the Bible and prophets stand for, we will have defamed.”

One man rose immediately after Stone’s talk to retell the biblical story of “the Jews who were told to go into Canaan and wipe out all the people in Canaan.” The man said “the Jews survived that spiritually and physically, and we’re here today and we’re still a moral light in this world.”

“I really ought to make my answer in German,” Stone replied. “The Germans would say we had to wipe out the Jews and Slavs to make a lebensraum for our people.” “Don’t call me a Nazi!” Stone’s questioner shouted back at him from the audience.

At another point, in the middle of his talk, Stone told the audience:
“If the situation were reversed, Jewish boys would be doing just what Arab boys are doing today.”
“Never! Never!” Some people shouted from the back of the room.
“They did it in 1946, don’t kid yourself,” Stone shouted back, referring to Jewish terrorists’ activities against British army units that were then controlling the Palestinian area.

Damn, 1974 was a kickass epoch. This kind of guts is difficult to imagine now.

The neurotic quality of Zionism, with its hyper-Messianic visions of grandeur and glory at one moment, is well illustrated by the experiences of Fouzi el Asmar as described in his book (pages 118-188) when the Israeli’s became aware of the “miraculous” victory over the Arabs on June 5, 1967. At the same time, the Police began wide scale use of Gestapo methods against Palestinian Arabs who did not share in the hypnotic delusions that seized the great majority of Israeli Jews – as well as the American Jewish community. Fortunately a small minority saw the danger involved in such flights from reality. Some left Israel, finding it impossible to share in the rejoicing over the dehumanization of the Arabs that followed. Others stayed in Israel, hoping to bring an element of sanity into the picture. Among the latter was Dr. Israel Shahak, Professor of Biochemistry at Hebrew University. A survivor, as a boy, of the Belsen extermination camps in Nazi Germany, he migrated to Israel and spent some time outside Israel getting his Doctoral degree, then he returned and won a position on the faculty of Hebrew University. In 1967 he witnessed in Israel much the same kind of hysterical racism and appeal to violence he had seen in Germany. To try to introduce a degree of sanity, with a few friends, he organized the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights – there being no Civil Rights laws in Israel. I had the good fortune to spend three days with Dr. Shahak in April, 1973. I had only recently debated at the Cleveland City Club with I. L. Kenan who has frequently stigmatized me as a dangerous “Arabist” and a strident anti-Semitic spokesman. But the attack against Dr. Shahak was a hundred fold more vituperative than against me. Dr. Shahak was a Traitor, would be fired from the University and efforts to expel him became a “Cause.” I discovered in him a man of prodigious memory, dedicated to seeing all people as human beings trapped in their cultural spider webs and unable to see any point of view but their own.

One of Shahak's article was appended at the end of the book. I might post it later on in the forum, because it sounds like it was written just yesterday.

Also, mcj, you're gonna have to add Fouzi el Asmar's book (To be an Arab in Israel) to the list of 'books to look out for.'