A POLITICAL AND PUBLIC POLICY INVENTORY, WHAT DO I BELIEVE?

It’s time I took a look at the major issues of a political and public policy nature that are currently having a profound effect on the peoples of the world and on my outlook. I can’t possible cover all the issues nor can I possibly cover any one of them in any depth in one posting, and so this will be just a start.

The first item is the State of Israel, which recently engaged in a war with Hezbollah that did not have to take place—unless, that is, the conflict was the only way for the nation’s military analysts to gage the current military strength of Hezbollah—for example, its arsenal of mobile rockets—a proposition that I doubt. Many people died in the conflict and much property was destroyed. Was all this bloodshed and all this destruction necessary? No, not in the least. The current leadership of Israel did not act with good sense and needs to be replaced.

Israel Needs to Survive

Having said that, I want to quickly add that I strongly support the State of Israel, and I strongly support its need to survive. The State of Israel needs to survive, but it needs to survive as a place where commitment to the highest ideals of humankind are exemplified and practiced. For one thing, its leaders must be vigilant about finding the moral high ground with respect to treatment of the Palestinians. In saying this, I realize that finding that high ground has never been more difficult given the current conflict between Fatah and Hamas with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas controlling Gaza.

The Jews have a right to be in the Middle East, the birth place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the founders of the religion of one God and its Patriarchs, and they need to have their own country with their own elected government. One important lesson for Jews from past history is that a minority without political status, that is, without the status that comes from having a piece of geography associated with its ethnicity is even more vulnerable than it would be otherwise. One would like to believe that the vast majority of those in the majority in any nation will always be tolerant of their minorities, but history provides many terrible lessons that contradict such a hope.

Are You Being Fair Minded?

Some of the policies of Israel with respect to the territories it annexed in the 1967 war are certainly not beyond reproach. Many instances of injustice can be found, and these injustices need to be addressed and rectified. But I ask those who have taken stands against Israel including the use of boycotts of Israeli products and services and Israeli intellectuals whether they have scrutinized their own actions to determine if they are being fair or not?

First of all, have they taken stands against all examples of what they perceive as injustices sanctioned by governments in our current world, or have they chosen to single out Israel? Do they genuinely want peace in the Middle East and in the world, or do they want peace in a world without Jews, in a world in which all the Jews have converted to Christianity or Islam or some other majority faith?

Long History of Persecutions by Moslems

At the same time, have they stopped to consider that the persecution of Jews by Moslems predates the founding of the state of Israel by many centuries? The founding of Israel gave the Jew haters in the Moslem world a new script, but that is all. The hatred was pre-existent and often virulent. Many Jews--and Christians as well--died at the hands of Moslem fanatics long before the founding of Israel or even Theodor Herzl and the birth of the Zionist movement in the 19^th century.

Hitler, Haj of Jerusalem Sign Pact

In reading a recent issue of Newsweek magazine (June 18, 2007 issue), I made this startling and chilling discovery in an article by Robert M. Morgenthau and Frank M. Tuerkheimer. “In November 1941, Adolf Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met in Berlin and reached an agreement that a German occupation of Palestine and other mandated territories would result in the annihilation of the Jewish population, adding well over half a million Jews to the 6 million European Jews to be murdered by the Nazis.”

So much for any notion that the turmoil of hatreds coming out of the Middle East originated with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Had the State of Israel not been founded, one shudders to think what would have happened to the half a million Jews of Palestine. These Jews needed the protection of their own country with its own army and security apparatus to keep them safe.

The Problem of Germany

Finally for this posting the problem of Germany or more specifically the problem of the annihilation of the Jews of Europe by the Germans before and during World War II. Though now 62 years behind us, is this matter now closed? It may be in the minds of many people, but not mine. Was justice done with the Nuremberg Trials, the executions of some Nazis of rank and the payment of reparation to some Jewish heirs of holocaust victims? Not for me it wasn’t.

The Germans murdered not just millions of Jews, but the whole Jewish culture of Europe of which just a remnant remains today. What can be done about the loss of that culture—a culture based on the language of Yiddish and including a treasure trove of literature, theatre and other performing arts, painting and other visual arts, music and a thousand years of history?

Proposed: Jewish State of Europe

The people and all their heirs who should have existed but can’t because of mind numbing German atrocities and the lost Yiddish culture cannot be resurrected, but there should have been and there can now be a better settlement than that which was initiated with the ending of hostilities in 1945. The Germans should have been forced to relinquish land toward the founding of an independent Jewish State of Europe back then, but the political realities of the time made such a solution impossible.

The Soviet Union was intent on having its piece of Germany, and the U.S. and its Allies wanted to make sure that what was left was protected from the Russian lust for a socialist empire. Hence the East and West Germany solution, a division that ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

German or Nazi, Which?

In a future posting I will treat this concept with greater detail. However, let me call attention before closing to the fact that I am deliberately using the word “German” in this posting instead of the term most often used in describing the perpetrators of the atrocities in Europe just before and during World War II, namely the term “Nazi.”

Here is the fiction underlying what many commentators on what took place have adopted as their reality and the fantasy they want others to believe: Once upon a time a group of monsters masquerading as people appeared in the country known as Germany. These monsters were known as “the Nazis.” Lead by the arch villain called Adolf Hitler, these monsters forced the German people into waging a devastating war and to commit countless atrocities that they would not ordinarily have committed.

This piece of fiction is a rationalization that lets a criminal nation off the hook and prevents us from facing what really did take place in the period 1932 to 1945 and from looking at the numerous other atrocities in human history and, ultimately, at looking at ourselves—at our many insufficiencies and failings.