In the Haggadah, we are told to look at what Laban the Aramean, father-in-law of our Father Jacob, tried to do. Because Pharaoh tried to kill all of the Jewish males, while Laban wanted to uproot us all.
It’s a very evocative turn of phrase. Not “kill us all”, but “uproot us all”. Laban didn’t want our lives. After all, the children of Jacob were his grandchildren. What he wanted was for us to stay in Syria and for us to become Arameans like him. To uproot us from our understanding and convictions about God.
And Laban was wise. He knew that once a nation is established in its own land, its connection to its beliefs can only grow. Take the Jews, for example. For all that our ancestors had a really difficult time getting over the temptation to worship false gods along with God, they never stopped worshipping Him. How could they? With the land around us, which He gave us, as a constant reminder?
But we didn’t get over that temptation to worship idols, so God exiled us. And He says himself, when speaking about why He’s going to bring us back to our land:
And I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries… and when they came to the nations to which they came, they desecrated My Holy Name, in that men said of them, “These are the people of God, and are gone forth from out of His land.” —Ezekiel 36:19-20
But it wasn’t merely our being there which desecrated God’s Name. It was, at first, but when finally, the nations of the world allowed us out of our ghettos, where we had been able to maintain a cohesive community, a vast number of us abandoned the core of our national being: Our relationship with God and His Torah.
The loss of that relationship was more than simply a religious wrong. It opened up a vacuum in the Jewish soul. A vacuum that was soon filled with utopian schemes unanchored in reality. Marxism. Socialism. Wokeism in all its pernicious forms.
And don’t delude yourselves: the gentiles have not been blind to the overrepresentation of Jews in the leadership of these nihilistic and delusional movements. This has created a hatred of Jews which is, fundamentally, a desecration of the name (reputation) of God, whose messengers we are in the world.
Ezekiel’s prophecy continues:
So say to the House of Israel: Thus says the Lord God: I am not doing this for your sake, O House of Israel, but for My Holy Name which you have desecrated among the nations you have come to. And I will sanctify My Great Name, which has been desecrated among the nations, which you have desecrated among them, and the nations will know that I am the Lord God, when I am sanctified through you before their eyes. Because I will take you from among the nations, and gather you out of all the countries, and bring you into your own land. —Ezekiel 36:22-24
Had you asked gentiles throughout history if it was possible to break the Jews of their connection to God and His Torah, they would have laughed at you. Even those who hated us knew how unbreakable that bond was. They knew that it is the core of who we are.
What they didn’t realize was that dispersing us — truly dispersing us; not merely scattering us among various nations, but breaking up our society within those nations — was the one thing that could do it.
The lesson we need to learn from this is fairly obvious, right? We need to return to our roots. And here in Israel, that’s happening at an accelerated rate. Even as the opposite continues in the rest of the world.
But that’s not the lesson I wanted to write about here.
The “Palestinians”
One of the most overused tropes in fiction is the “evil twin”. Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre that what is always the most horrifying to us is that which is like us, but wrong. The Creature from the Black Lagoon will always spook us more than The Blob, because it’s humanoid. It’s like us, but wrong.
The relationship of Christianity to Judaism throughout the centuries has been in the model of the evil twin. Hinduism may be much more obvious in its idolatry, but it’s so foreign that it doesn’t create the visceral horror Christianity does (and which Judaism inspires in so many Christians). But today, our evil twin is something else. Something that God predicted millenia ago:
They have acted zealously against me with “no God”; they have angered me with their vanities. And I will act zealously against them with “no nation”; I will anger them with a nation of idiots. —Deuteronomy 32:21
When we came back to Israel, we were led by socialists. The very Jews who had been destroyed spiritually by the dispersal of the Enlightenment. But from the start, the newer generations of Israelis started gravitating to our heritage. How not? We were back in our land, back together as a nation. That is enormously healing
And God showed us signs and wonders. He granted us victory against seven Arab armies in 1948. Outnumbered and subjected to arms embargoes by the United States and others, we struck down their armies and established a State. And in 1967… most people don’t realize the extent of the victory in the Six Day War. Oh, they know we liberated the lands of Judea and Samaria, held captive by Jordan for 19 years, and the Gaza Strip, held captive by Egypt for that same time. They know that we captured the entire Sinai Peninsula, a piece of land fully twice the size of the rest of Israel, and the Golan Heights, which looks down over the entire Galilee from Syria.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that we didn’t stop until we reached the outskirts of Cairo. Of Damascus. Of Amman. That we could have taken the capitals of Egypt and Syria and Jordan had we desired it. That it was only by our choice that we didn’t do so. As it was by our choice that we gave away the Temple Mount to the Muslim Waqf.
It’s no surprise that the rise of “Palestinianism” — the delusional claim that there is a “Palestinian” nationality that existed prior to that time; prior to modern Zionism — happened just as we spat in God’s face and told Him He could keep His miracles.
Worse: we boasted about our military superiority, as though that was some explanation for us wiping the floor with three vastly larger enemy countries in the midst of an arms embargo.
Our offense against God with our “no God” philosophy led directly to God smacking us upside the head with a “no nation”. A false and counterfeit nation of “Palestinians” claiming ownership of the land God gave us.
The Core of a Counterfeit
Just as the core of Jewish nationhood is our covenant with God, the core of “Palestinian nationhood” is the negation of our ownership of the land God gave us. The idea that our establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 never really happened. That it is a transient “burp” in history. A mistake which needs to be rectified, by any means necessary.
They have created a special “refugee” status for themselves which allows even those who have settled elsewhere in the world, taken on other citizenships, and even become millionaires, like the Hadid family in America, to still be considered “Palestinian refugees”. They have rejected any political settlement, even up to half the country, so long as it leaves any sovereign Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.
There are people who reject the fact that the “Palestinians” are utterly and monomaniacally obsessed with the end of Israel, and insist that they merely want a state of their own. They insist on this despite decades of openness by the “Palestinians” about their actual aims. They reject the reality because they can’t wrap their minds around a people so fundamentally perverse that they would happily suffer and die, if by doing so, they can ensure that the Jews will suffer and die as well.
But there are others who realize the extent of the “Palestinian” psychopathy. Many of them rail against it, and demand that people recognize it, and engage in various techniques to remediate it. “Denazification”, such as was done successfully with Germany after WWII. Occupation until they “grow out of” their monomania, or at least until we can establish some sort of puppet leadership that will wean them away from their hatred.
And what these last don’t understand is that you can’t uproot the core of a nation, even so fake a nation as the “Palestinians”. Not while they remain together, in a cohesive community, in a place they consider their own. It cannot be done, any more than Jews could have had our connection with God broken while we remained in our land, or at least in cohesive communities in our exile.
No. There is only one way to “uproot it all”. To rid the world, the Middle East, Israel, and the “Palestinians” themselves, of the madness they have been raised to believe for generations. And that is dispersal.
“Let Their People Go”
Whenever I raise the option of removing the “Palestinians” from Judea/Samaria and Gaza, there’s always someone who will challenge me, saying, “So what are you suggesting? That we pack them into buses and herd them… somewhere?” But of course that’s a childish idea right now, and an unnecessary one, as well. So very many of them want to emigrate, that all we have to do is help them. If Israel can afford generous immigration packages for Jews moving to Israel, we can even more easily afford to offer generous emigration packages for “Palestinians” wishing to leave. More easily, because for every one of them who leaves the area, our security costs will drop. Security costs that no other nation on earth has to pay. Security costs that are an ongoing drain, both on our economy and on our national nerves.
Ask yourself why anyone would object to financial and diplomatic assistance for those “Palestinians” who want to relocate? Perhaps it’s connected to the similar objection to allowing “Palestinian civilians” to flee the field of battle in Gaza, something unheard of in the rest of the world. Syrians get to flee. Iraqis get to flee. Everyone gets to flee except for “Palestinians” who want out.
But the one thing we can learn from history, specifically Jewish history, is that the only way to uproot the fundamental core of a society is to break up that society. To disperse them and scatter them. To allow them to assimilate and acculturate in societies that have different values. Almost every “Palestinian peace activist” who actually rejects the “right of return” (the “right” of almost six million “Palestinians” to flood into Israel and take it over) is an ex-pat. Someone who has grown up in a more civilized culture than the “Palestinian” one.
The Greeks tried to occupy us and to crush the Torah and God out of us while we lived in our land as a singular nation. We celebrate their failure every year on Hanukkah. The Romans tried to occupy us and to crush the Torah and God out of us while we lived in our land as a singular nation and found that it was impossible, so they exiled us.
No amount of occupation or denazification or fostering of “moderates” is going to change the monstrous “evil twin” living beside us into a society of people willing to live in peace with us. Millions of us will die (God forbid) if we are ever to be so foolish as to allow them to have a state here.
There is only one solution. And the first step to that solution is a fundamentally non-coercive one. A compassionate one. One they do not deserve, but which serves us and them. Assistance and facilitation of emigration for all those who want to leave. I believe that this will cut the “Palestinian” population of Judea/Samaria and Gaza in half, at the very least. But even if I’m wrong, it will help those who we help. No one can be harmed by it in any way, other than those who desire endless war
.