"(...) The United States desires the strength and wealth of Western Europe and Japan, (...)" You lost me here. If one thing is clear to us european citizens, it is the the US want us as vasalls and are not interested in our well being. The proxy war the US are waging in Europe is IN Europe, not in the USA.
The US want to prevent the understanding between - foremost - Germany with Russia, the US want to divide.
As I did not read it all - perhaps you adressed it - one thought about 'balance'. Watching the images of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, even assuming oct 7th was no inside job, there is no equidistance, and no balance at all. And besides, balance in retaliation is not desirable, either.
I am not sure America wants or needs the strength and wealth of Europe and Japan. They want their "buffer zone" to be strong, and they want the wealth to migrate to America.
How did I lose you here? (These are not my opinions, but ones I copied from a Jewish intellectual.) This is what is written in the article, do they make sense?
-Jewish impotence created the illusion that the essential attribute of independent national existence is military might. It also fostered the view of Zionism and the state of Israel as a historical revenge rather than as a means of becoming integrated as equals in both history and the family of nations.
The thinking of the messianic Right in Israel imagines Israel's existence not in the world as it is, but only in the Jewish world. The Jewish world (Diaspora) is supposed to provide a sort of a protective envelope around the state (in an ironic reversal of the Zionist original aim of providing protection for the Jewish people).
-Israel is located in an area that has been heterogeneous since the dawn of history. The ethnic homogeneity of areas such as Northern Europe, with their roughly uniform cultures and ethnic origins, cannot be duplicated in the Middle East. It cannot be duplicated even within the Jewish population of Israel. Since the region has always been a complex mosaic of ethnic and religious groups and since Israel is a mosaic itself.
-No armaments can prevent a social and economic decline or political disintegration, as has been amply demonstrated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Israel's weakening will undoubtedly be accompanied by a brain drain to countries where economic and professional opportunities seem more attractive. And if the country does not change its definition, character, and structure in the directions here indicated, it is reasonable to assume that it will eventually become one of the ethnoreligious minorities in the region.
What will happen to Judaism as a result of the Israeli experience, the effect, that is, of the existence of the state on Judaism, particularly if the state deteriorates as envisaged here? What does and what will the state do to Judaism? ?? With non-Orthodox Jews, their courses of development are quite familiar. Various forms of Reform Judaism—through to the ultimate blurring of religious and communal identity within the Unitarian Church, which comprises Jews and Christians without distinction
-There is a spiritual barrenness of contemporary Judaism. And Orthodoxy remains petrified within its strictures and obscurantist world view, unable to offer any spiritual sustenance or answer to the problems of modem man, except "penitence". It is nothing but intellectual suicide, a frightened sheltering behind dead ritual formulas, not a creative encounter with the human-historical situation. The willful ossification of Judaism, then, has resulted in its having no answer to the existential problems of modem man.
-For many Jews, the Holocaust is now the only meaning and content of Judaism and the very basis of their IDENTITY AS JEWS. Theirs is not a positive identity but derives from their experience of the COMMON HORROR of being Jewish. This is a paranoid basis that can only breed hatred and desire for vengeance against the rest of the world. It leads to a doctrine of a difference in kind between Jews and the rest of humanity—which is basically the photographic negative of Nazi doctrines. It is the continuation of Jewish seclusion from the rest of humanity, though in a separate state, instead of the return to history that is the basis of political Zionism.
-The conclusion which classical Zionism drew from this grim chapter of history was that if the Jews were assembled in a state of their own, their social and political conditions would change accordingly and so would the attitude of the surrounding world. This, in addition to their acquiring a military-political might of their own, would prevent another Holocaust. If the establishment of the state has not been able to solve the problems of anti-Semitism and the persecution of even those Jews living within the state, people who are now outcasts not as individuals but as a political whole, and who are now in danger of a collective (state) Holocaust; if Jew hatred is a kind of a metaphysical datum, plaguing the Jews from time immemorial like a mark of Cain (as argued by the early church and maintained until quite recent times)—then their ingathering in a state of their own does not solve the problem of Jewish survival but only puts it in a new form, and in a way even aggravates it.
-The Jews coming to Israel are not offered a safer, freer, more pleasant, or more civilized life. But if that is so, there would be few Jews in free countries who would want to come to Israel. If it is true that the only element unifying Jews as Jews is the permanent danger of annihilation that hovers over them, it is reasonable to assume that all sane persons would try to divest themselves, through assimilation or conversion, of this identity.
-Most Jews in the world have no intention of emigrating to Israel, but many of them have developed an intense affinity to it, supporting it unconditionally, whatever its policy. Thus, has it come to pass that the very Jewish public that in the past was supposed to keep faith with a religious or a moral scale of values, today is loyal to Israeli power politics, which are by definition amoral, and defends them by inventing excuses and apologies of a moral nature. The Jews themselves may then reach the conclusion that the cult of the Jewish state has seduced them to whore after strange gods, that the moral identification with power politics is tantamount to idolatry.
"(...) The United States desires the strength and wealth of Western Europe and Japan, (...)" You lost me here. If one thing is clear to us european citizens, it is the the US want us as vasalls and are not interested in our well being. The proxy war the US are waging in Europe is IN Europe, not in the USA.
The US want to prevent the understanding between - foremost - Germany with Russia, the US want to divide.
As I did not read it all - perhaps you adressed it - one thought about 'balance'. Watching the images of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, even assuming oct 7th was no inside job, there is no equidistance, and no balance at all. And besides, balance in retaliation is not desirable, either.
I am not sure America wants or needs the strength and wealth of Europe and Japan. They want their "buffer zone" to be strong, and they want the wealth to migrate to America.
How did I lose you here? (These are not my opinions, but ones I copied from a Jewish intellectual.) This is what is written in the article, do they make sense?
-Jewish impotence created the illusion that the essential attribute of independent national existence is military might. It also fostered the view of Zionism and the state of Israel as a historical revenge rather than as a means of becoming integrated as equals in both history and the family of nations.
The thinking of the messianic Right in Israel imagines Israel's existence not in the world as it is, but only in the Jewish world. The Jewish world (Diaspora) is supposed to provide a sort of a protective envelope around the state (in an ironic reversal of the Zionist original aim of providing protection for the Jewish people).
-Israel is located in an area that has been heterogeneous since the dawn of history. The ethnic homogeneity of areas such as Northern Europe, with their roughly uniform cultures and ethnic origins, cannot be duplicated in the Middle East. It cannot be duplicated even within the Jewish population of Israel. Since the region has always been a complex mosaic of ethnic and religious groups and since Israel is a mosaic itself.
-No armaments can prevent a social and economic decline or political disintegration, as has been amply demonstrated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Israel's weakening will undoubtedly be accompanied by a brain drain to countries where economic and professional opportunities seem more attractive. And if the country does not change its definition, character, and structure in the directions here indicated, it is reasonable to assume that it will eventually become one of the ethnoreligious minorities in the region.
What will happen to Judaism as a result of the Israeli experience, the effect, that is, of the existence of the state on Judaism, particularly if the state deteriorates as envisaged here? What does and what will the state do to Judaism? ?? With non-Orthodox Jews, their courses of development are quite familiar. Various forms of Reform Judaism—through to the ultimate blurring of religious and communal identity within the Unitarian Church, which comprises Jews and Christians without distinction
-There is a spiritual barrenness of contemporary Judaism. And Orthodoxy remains petrified within its strictures and obscurantist world view, unable to offer any spiritual sustenance or answer to the problems of modem man, except "penitence". It is nothing but intellectual suicide, a frightened sheltering behind dead ritual formulas, not a creative encounter with the human-historical situation. The willful ossification of Judaism, then, has resulted in its having no answer to the existential problems of modem man.
-For many Jews, the Holocaust is now the only meaning and content of Judaism and the very basis of their IDENTITY AS JEWS. Theirs is not a positive identity but derives from their experience of the COMMON HORROR of being Jewish. This is a paranoid basis that can only breed hatred and desire for vengeance against the rest of the world. It leads to a doctrine of a difference in kind between Jews and the rest of humanity—which is basically the photographic negative of Nazi doctrines. It is the continuation of Jewish seclusion from the rest of humanity, though in a separate state, instead of the return to history that is the basis of political Zionism.
-The conclusion which classical Zionism drew from this grim chapter of history was that if the Jews were assembled in a state of their own, their social and political conditions would change accordingly and so would the attitude of the surrounding world. This, in addition to their acquiring a military-political might of their own, would prevent another Holocaust. If the establishment of the state has not been able to solve the problems of anti-Semitism and the persecution of even those Jews living within the state, people who are now outcasts not as individuals but as a political whole, and who are now in danger of a collective (state) Holocaust; if Jew hatred is a kind of a metaphysical datum, plaguing the Jews from time immemorial like a mark of Cain (as argued by the early church and maintained until quite recent times)—then their ingathering in a state of their own does not solve the problem of Jewish survival but only puts it in a new form, and in a way even aggravates it.
-The Jews coming to Israel are not offered a safer, freer, more pleasant, or more civilized life. But if that is so, there would be few Jews in free countries who would want to come to Israel. If it is true that the only element unifying Jews as Jews is the permanent danger of annihilation that hovers over them, it is reasonable to assume that all sane persons would try to divest themselves, through assimilation or conversion, of this identity.
-Most Jews in the world have no intention of emigrating to Israel, but many of them have developed an intense affinity to it, supporting it unconditionally, whatever its policy. Thus, has it come to pass that the very Jewish public that in the past was supposed to keep faith with a religious or a moral scale of values, today is loyal to Israeli power politics, which are by definition amoral, and defends them by inventing excuses and apologies of a moral nature. The Jews themselves may then reach the conclusion that the cult of the Jewish state has seduced them to whore after strange gods, that the moral identification with power politics is tantamount to idolatry.
.
Hello, Librarian. I wanted to let you know I published an episode on our conversation: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/yahchopeeps