“ K A H A N E”
The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea
Tevet 5737 January 1977
THREE TRANSGRESSIONS
Part one
“For three transgressions of Judah…” (Amos 2)
And so it begins and 1977 comes early. We are a people that dearly loves to fool itself and we look away from reality in the hope that it will go away. But though we look away it will not go away and illusion is but the father of delusion and myths are no substitute for answers to reality. The irony is that every time a Jew speaks up as a Jew and discusses the issues in Jewish terms and Jewish solutions, he is derided as “mystical,” and “impractical,” and “unrealistic.” We are at that unprecedented age when the Jew who speaks of history and events in terms of G-d and Divine direction, is mocked and looked upon as an embarrassment or worse. Non-believer and “religious” believer, alike, become diplomats and geopoliticians and the one never thinks of G-d while the other leaves him behind in the synagogue where he “belongs” since, when it comes to politics, we must be “practical.”
Well, 1977 will show just how impractical and absurd are the secularists and the “religious” allies who reject the mysticism of the truly religious and turn with “cleverness” and “cunning” to Washington, F-15 planes, Lebanese Christians and other “practical” allies and saviors. Those who trust in Man and mock the unrealistic Jew who follows the ancient and time-honored Jewish way of faith and self-help will learn quickly enough who is the truly practical and who the absurdly ridiculous fool.
We may struggle against wanting to see the truth and we may twist and turn our heads from looking at it, but the realities will never go away and we had best understand them even as they move ominously closer and closer with their threat to Jewish survival. The realities cannot be denied and they are, starkly and simply:
For Israel, no change. There remain tens of millions of Arabs, all dedicated to one thing: The elimination of any Israel, of any size or shape. There are no moderates – there are only Arabs like Sadat who are cleverer than those others who openly say what Sadat means. And so the Egyptian meets Congressmen and piously speaks of “peace” and “justice” if only Israel will retreat from the lands which Egypt had in its possession in 1967 and which did not stop her from going to war anyhow – for what purpose??? And the pathetic Ribicoffs stand and praise him as a man of “courage and peace” (as did so many Jewish and Israeli leaders in 1975) and the Arab deserves a medal for holding back his laughter…
And the reality remains. A United States whose interests are so different and so opposed to those of Israel and a Carter and a Ford differ only in accent, as far as Jews are concerned. America seeks oil, Arab business offers, Arab investment and non-involvement in any confrontation in the Middle East in this post-Vietnam era. America seeks to continue the very successful (from its point of view) Kissinger policy. The German Jew (Kissinger) was a tragedy for Israel, but for the United States – he drove the Russians out of the Middle East influence they once had. And this was done only by promising the Arabs that Washington could do for them, which Moscow could not – force Israel to retreat. If Carter does not do that, the Russians will return and American materialistic interests will be threatened. Only the “practical” fools, the gentilized Jews, prefer to believe that America will support Israel because it is a “democracy.” (Of course, America’s yardstick for supporting nations is whether they are democracies, witness Franco Spain, Salazar Portugal, Greece’s Colonel, South Korea…). American policy is and always has been the Roger Plan, total Israeli retreat from ALL the liberated lands in return for an Arab piece of paper. THAT IS THE REALITY for all the gentilized Jews of “practicality.”
The reality is that the sudden burst of Sadat “moderation” and PLO “change of heart” concerning a “Palestine” state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are both aimed at making things easier for America to abandon Israel. Indeed, Washington has long pleaded with the PLO to make “de facto” moderate statements so as to allow Washington to support the “Palestinian” cause without seeming to abandon Israel. We are seeing a coordinated Egyptian-Syrian-PLO-Washington plan to get a Geneva Conference that would set the ground for an overall “Peace Plan’ that would demand from Israel complete retreat from the liberated lands and place the onus for further Mideast conflict on Israeli “stubbornness” and “intransigence.” It will set the stage for more American “reassessment” and delay in arms and money shipments. It will set the stage for serious and permanent change in American policy towards Israel with a “clean conscience” and a massive sigh of relief from American leaders and people alike.
The reality is Israeli total isolation in the world as it joins South Africa and Rhodesia in the “pariah” class. And the irony will be that those who so derided and scorned Jews who said to trust alone in G-d will be left with neither G-d nor the Man they so avidly wooed… The reality is a retreat from lands on which a “Palestine” will be built that will sit a few miles from Israel’s heartland with its missile covering Israeli air space and “volunteers” from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Pakistan and North Vietnam moving up to the shadow of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
All this is the very real and practical result of the policy of the gentilized Jews who run both Israel and American Jewry. The ones who never allow the name of G-d to pass their lips, the ones who mock the truly religious, the ones who pompously pontificate on the need for practical thinking and allies. Well, there are no allies and the Jew who is “practical” today in the same un-Jewish sense that his forefathers were when they scorned the impractical Isaiahs and Hoseas and Jeremiahs and turned with fawning and flattery and prostration to Egypt and Assyria – will find that Assyrians and allies of our time will betray him as swiftly as they did in times of yore.
And the reality for American Jewry is that the Galut, the bitter exile of the Jewish people, did not stop at the western shores of the Atlantic and was not barred from entering the United States. The exile – that bitterest of all curses, punishments and sins – cannot and will not ever be a sweet refuge.
(conclusion next week)
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