Jonathan Pollard -1987

RABBI MEIR KAHANE

On Jews and Judaism

 

Jonathan Pollard

19 Adar 5747 – March 20, 1987

As the storm over Jonathan Pollard swirls about nervous Israeli and American Jewish heads and both look warily over their shoulders, the Israelis watching for Weinbergers and the American Jews for less famous though far more numerous, hostile types, the time has come for normal Jews to spread a normal view of the affair.

The time has come to put to an end both that acute manifestation of Jewish “AIDS” – guilt – and the despicable calling for Pollard’s head by American Jewish leaders, whose fear of anti-Semitism makes them hope to deflect Jew-hatred by being more patriotic than the patriots, more American than all the rest.  Let us get certain things clear!

1)  I am convinced that high military and political circles in Israel knew of the affair and I wish that the Israeli government would stop treating both the Jews and Americans as if they were imbeciles.  No such matters would ever by handled by lower echelon levels without consultation with top Israeli officials.  Certainly, a disciplined military man like Aviem Sella would never have decided to run a “rogue” conspiracy.  There is no one who believes the absurd protestation of the Israeli government, any more than Americans believe the initial nonsense spouted by the President and Administration officials in Washington over the Iranian affair.

2)  Having said that, and calling on the Israelis to be frank and open, the more important point is there is nothing for the Israelis to feel guilty about except an enormous, horrendous stupidity.  All the guilt and hand wringing and investigation and charges and counter charges are absolute madness.  All countries spy and all countries spy against any country from which they feel it would be in their interest to get information.  There have been a number of instances in which U.S. diplomatic personnel have been caught spying in Israel and the pity is that Israel, through fear of offending American (sic) – fear of the shtel baron – simply closed the book on the incident, quietly.  Had Israel made the proper fuss and noise, the Pollard affair would have assumed a very different character.

And so, while Israel’s action falls not one whit from those of other countries, what is different about the affair is the incredible stupidity of the Israeli decision to spy on a country that is, at the moment, its closest interest. (I make haste to point out the use of the word “interest,” because in the real world of realpolitik there are neither real “allies” nor “friends”.”)  What in the world could Israel have gotten through Pollard that was worth jeopardizing the present relationship between her and the U.S.?  If there would be a tribunal of judgment for Israel, the Jewish state would be guilty, not of all the wild charges made by less-than friendly American types, but of the most basic and most amazing form of crude stupidity.

But that is a form of political disease that the Americans, certainly at the particular stage of world affairs, would be well-advised not to raise.  People who live in stupid glass houses of their own should certainly not throw rocks at the same inane, gross weight.

3. The overwhelming difference between Pollard and the whole host of recent spy revelations in the United States lies in the basic and fundamentally important fact that, while all the others spied for nations essentially hostile to America – states that are essentially enemies of the United States – Pollard spied for a country that is close to America, shares basically the same interests and that would never harm the U.S. in any substantial manner.  In a word, the other spies that have been apprehended over the years were spying for the enemy and against the U.S.; Jonathan Pollard would never have dreamed of spying against America – his sole purpose was to aid Israel, a country he saw and sees as her ally.

4. Because of that, the life sentence and the orgy of vicious attacks on Pollard are outrageous.  Of course, Pollard should have been given a jail sentence, and a harsh one.  He is an American citizen and revealed his country’s secrets to Israel.  That is a crime in America and one that should be punished.  But life imprisonment!  For a man who never gave secrets to an enemy state?  Who never intended to harm America?  Whose primary motive was concern for Israel’s security?  Should those things not have been taken into consideration?  And had they been, would Pollard have ever received the horrendous sentence that he did?  Of course not.

5. And that leads, inevitably, to the next point.  The entire Pollard affair is pregnant with hostility to Israel and with anti-Semitism.  The news media comprising so many cultural anti-Semites of the Fifth Estate (whose aberration stems from a deep, seething jealousy of the number of Jews who are in the journalistic and literary world) saw in the Pollard affair – as in the Lebanon war – an opportunity to safely give vent to their hatred.  There was not even a modicum of the same venom against those like the Walker family and others who spied for the Soviet Union and China.  The reason is all too obvious.  

6. Aviem Sella was given the job, ordered to work with Pollard.  He is a soldier and a good one, who carried out the orders of his government.  There is no conceivable way that his career should be ruined and he made scapegoat for the crudity and stupidity of the Israeli government.  It is up to the Israeli government to admit to its mistake, to its stupidity, to regret that the action was ever taken and to regret that it was discovered.  And then?

And then, promote Sella, who is a good and brilliant soldier.  America will be upset?  Perhaps.  But by the same token, Sella was never as dangerous to America as Weinberger is to Israel, and I have yet to hear Israel express its dismay at Weinberger’s continued promotion.

7. And, finally, Jonathan Pollard spied for Israel and revealed American secrets.  For that he should be punished, fairly and without malice.  But he acted for Israel and on its behalf and out of support for the Jewish state.  For that, Israel owes him something.  That something is called loyalty.  A state does not throw over and turn its back on someone who sought to help it and who, indeed, was guided and directed by it.  Israel should have helped Pollard before this and it should not throw him to the sharks now, no matter how upset this may make American non-Jews or Jews, of the Establishment persuasion.  I happen to think that while Pollard behaved as a bad American – and for this he should be punished fairly – he acted out of motivation of a good Jew, no matter how misguided he was.

Indeed, I think he is a much better Jew than the impossible executive director of the impossible organization known as the American Jewish Congress.  That gentleman, by the name of Henry Siegman, exploded in wild attacks on American Jews who seek to explain Pollard’s side of the affair and, thus, mitigate the circumstances. Siegman (who, incidentally, is a yarmulke wearer, Heaven help us) said, concerning this, that he was “disturbed.” I could not have put it better.

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Forty Years Of The Jewish State - 1988

“K A H A N E”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

July-August 1988      Tamuz – Menachem Av 5748

Forty Years Of The Jewish State

A State Of Confusion (excerpts)

Rami Huri, and Israeli Arab who is a member of the city council of the northern Israeli city, Acre, announced on the eve of Independence Day, that he would refuse to participate in the torch-lighting ceremony, celebrating Israel’s 40^th anniversary.  His reason?  The official invitation spoke of  “40 years since Acre’s liberation.”

Just two months, earlier, at an Acre City Council meeting, Israeli Arabs refused to rise to sing the Ha’Tikva, the national anthem of the Jewish state, “liberated” by the Jews.  Two clear political statements by the Arabs of the Jewish state called Israel.

On the other hand, there was the Jewish citizen of Israel named Reggie Peralson.

The Independence Day issue of the Palestine (a.k.a. Jerusalem) Post ran a story about a kibbutz and an Arab Beduin village in the Upper Galilee.  Clearly, the purpose was to show the fraternal ties that bind Arab and Jew in the state of schizophrenia.  The kibbutz is Kfar Hanasi, founded in 1948 by some 100 Jews, mostly from Britain (a point to consider carefully in analyzing what I am about to write).  The village is Tuba, and its 5,000 residents are quite aware that they live in a Jewish state, with all that that implies.  Not so the Jewish heirs of Rudyard Kipling who manfully carry the “Jew-man’s burden of dispensing civilization to the native along with massive doses of condescension.  Thus, Reggie Peralson, a female kibbutznik from Kfar Hanasi, eagerly tells the Post reporter that she makes it a point to visit Tuba “at least twice a month”, and attends Arabic classes given by a Tuba resident, Mohammed Abu-Yussuf.  And thus speaks a daughter of benevolent Jewish imperialism:

“I feel a real need for contact.  I think every Israeli Jewish family should “adopt” an Israeli Arab family to help coexistence.  I just like the Beduin.  I love sitting on their mattresses, drinking their coffee and eating their labane.”  Spoken as a true Victorian!  How they loved little children and little natives… And how the natives – and Arabs – love the Jewish Kiplings of our time…

The difference between the clear-thinking and rational Arab and the muddled, confused Jewess is a mirror of the reality of Israel, at 40.  The Arab firmly believes that he is a “Palestinian”, and that the country was taken from the “Palestinian” majority by the Zionists.  He understands fully that the issue in Israel is not “co-existence” or the disgusting condescension on the part of British-born (or any other kind of Jews, that sees them gushing over the quaint natives and their mattresses and labane.)  He knows that the issue is Jewish sovereignty in a Jewish state that must, by its very nature, make the Arab – at best – a second-class citizen.  He knows that the issue is whether the law of return of Israel which limits the privilege of automatic immigration and Israeli citizenship to JEWS, will remain as is and thus continue to symbolize the JEWISHNESS and ZIONIST character of the state.  He knows the issue is whether Jews will ever agree to the Arab right to peacefully and non-violently become a majority which can then control and direct the state as they see fit.  He knows that “coexistence” and “tolerance” and “love” are frantic liberal-devices to avoid having to think about and deal with the most frightening contradiction of ideology and soul imaginable for a western oriented, liberal, progressive Jew.  He looks with contempt and hate on the Reggie Peralsons of Israel and she (if she would only admit it) hates the Arab with an even greater passion for being there and forcing her, daily, to wallow in a guilt from which she flees as it turns into a cancer of self-hate.

The irony of ironies is that the greatest ideological and spiritual mental problem facing the secularists of the State of Israel, THE JEWISH STATE, is the “Jewishness” of that state, which must by its very definition, contradict its “Israeliness”  The “Jewishness” of the state both widens its proprietorship and right of title to all Jews, no matter where they live, both in and outside the country, while denying it to the Arabs, the non-Jews, who are nominally citizens of it.

It is forty years; that Biblical two-score years that, again and again, reoccurs as a symbol of sin and punishment.  In this, the fortieth year of its existence, the State of Israel becomes less and less the Jewish State, and more and more a state of confusion, in deep need of a national couch.  The state that was created by the secular founding fathers and mothers of secular political Zionism is far less a Jewish state than a state of schizophrenia, a state hovering on the verge of ideological-mental collapses.  It is ripped by Jewish-Arab struggle; it is torn by Jewish self-hatred.  It has an identity crisis of stupendous magnitude.  If it were an individual, it would certainly be looked upon in psychological circles as a fascinating case study of complexes galore, of schizophrenia of identity that has resulted in no identity, and of terrified flight from reality that is the result of deep and abnormal guilt and self-hate

For those who can and who wish to see beyond the simplistic issues – “occupied territories”, national determination for the “Palestine people”, equality of economic and social conditions for the Arabs of Israel – the real and central and insoluble issue rears its terrible and frightening head, casting an ominous and chilly cloud over the fortieth year of a state called Israel, an issue that sends real fear and terror into the hearts of liberal and western-oriented Jews, an issue that demands to be addressed and met and a choice made Now, before it is too late

Now, before it is horribly late, too late, is the time to reject the thousand-and-one frauds of Jews who invent them so as to enable themselves to flee from the excruciating painful reality of the immutable and inexorable contradiction and ideological war between the basic definition and concept of a Jewish State and its conceptual opponent, western democracy.

Rami Huri and all the Arabs of Acre understand it.  And all the “simple” Beduins of Tuba understand it.  And the Arabs of Nazareth and Haifa and the Galilee and Um al Fham and Taiba and the triangle and the Beduins of Rahat and the Negev.  They all understand the contradiction.  And they all understand the condescension and fraud on the part of the guilt-stricken, guilt-ridden and self-hating Jews, who are compelled to visit them and “love” them and deceive themselves.  How the Arabs love them, the liberal and progressive Jews! How much better off are “our” Arabs than those in Syria and Iraq!  How just a little “good will” will persuade them to accept the Jewish state.  How happy and content will be the natives who live in a Jewish state in which they – the natives – were once the majority before the English came to Kfar Hanasi to rule over them and to patronize them by eating their labane.

If only Reggie the British Jewess knew how the Arabs of Tuba despise her!  But surely even she, deep in her British heart suspects it and is terrified by it and is driven, therefore to visit them and demonstrate her “love” for them.  Of course, they will have none of it.  She is a Jewess and a foreigner who took their land.  That is how the Arabs of Israel see it.  And deep in her complex set of complexes, one fears that so does Reggie, heir of Kipling, but without his ability to accept the lordship without a trace of guilt.

In this fortieth year of a Jewish state that opens its doors freely to Jewish immigrants, and that breathes Jewishness, whose national anthem speaks of the soul of a Jew yearning”, whose Independence Day celebrates Jewish liberation of the country from Arabs, and which was created for the Jewish people – not one Arab feels that it is his state.  But each and every one of them feels that it is his land and all dream of the day when they will change the reality of today.

In this fortieth year of schizophrenia, not one Arab believes the hypocrisy of “equal rights for all its (Israel’s) citizens”, as pledged by the Declaration of Independence, itself a mode of schizophrenia, as it simultaneously proclaims the establishment of a “Jewish State”. In this state of confusion, every Arab knows that Zionism and its offspring, a Jewish state, are incompatible with western democracy that rejects a “Jewish” or any hyphenated state and that demands that Arabs be exactly equal to Jews and that the state be open to all citizens to have control over it.  In this fortieth year of a state called Israel that lies on a national couch, it is clearly the Arabs who are clear-minded, sane, and rational, as they articulate the contradictions of a state, which from birth, was a confused attempt to flee from the truth.

And the Jews?  Or rather say “the Israelis” whose secularism inexorably led them down the path of schizophrenia?  Not one of them does not know in his pain-racked soul, the truth of the contradiction and intellectual antagonism between the Jewish state he proclaims and the western democracy that is so close to his soul.  For decades and until this day, the secular Zionist has suffered from an agonizing malignancy of soul; had lied to himself, deceived himself, deluded himself, fled from himself – in awesome effort to escape having to face the agony of truth, a truth that destroys his very ideological basis, his very reason to live.

The secular Jew – in Israel and without – knows that western democracy and a “Jewish state” are things than can never meet except in deadly battle.  He knows that if he is to preserve a Jewish state for himself and his children he must deny the Arabs equal political rights and, above all, the basic democratic right of being the majority and thus controlling the state. He knows that he has lived a lie; that he lives a lie.  He knows that

time is running out for him – and he must soon make that terrible Hobson’s choice from which he and Ben Gurion and all the schizophrenic dishonest secular Zionists fled, for decades.

And more, in his secular, non-religious bones, he fears that perhaps the Arab, who shouts at him: “You are a thief,” is right.  He, for whom G-d plays no role and who thus, must rest his Zionist case on the fact that Jews “once lived here,” feels his ideological knees buckle and turn to water as he thinks the heresy of “perhaps they are right; perhaps we are indeed thieves…”

And so, the Jewish master of a thousand complexes wanders about, wallowing in self-hate and desperately supporting the Arab right to a state in “Palestine” Anything to let him escape having to face the terrible suspicion that his kibbutz in the Galilee and his home on the Sharon plain, and his Israel within the Green Line are also “Arab” in the eyes of the “Palestinians”.  And so he supports the Arab cause on each and every issue, in the desperate gasping hope that he will thus win a crumb of Arab forgiveness and love that will allow him a brief respite from his guilt over his kibbutz and his villa and his city that is as much “Palestine” as are the “occupied territories”.

The illness is deep and vast; the spiritual and mental and ideological disease, pain and anguish, awesome. The incurable disease or contradiction between a Jewish state and a western democratic one.  The incurable disease of contradiction between a Jewish state and an Israeli one.  The Jewishness of the people and of the state, an unbridgeable barrier to the creation of a “normal” modern one.  THAT IS THE AGONY OF THE SECULAR ISRAELI!

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Faith In G-d And Samson's Weapons - 1977

“K A H A N E”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

Nissan -5737   April-1977

FAITH IN G-D AND SAMSON'S WEAPONS

The men of little faith fear Washington far more than the All Mighty.  The descendants of the Jews who turned in fear and prostration to Egypt to save them from Assyria and who turned as some beggar standing in a doorway to Assyria for succor from Babylon, today raise their eyes unto Washington and from Plains, Georgia shall come their salvation…

The key to the Jewish redemption lies in the deep and abiding faith in G-d that is as strong as the situation is bleak.  In the face of darkness and danger, the Jew trusts all the more in the All Mighty and the threats of finite flesh and blood fade into insignificance if trust in the infinite King of the Universe is real and unbending.  “Israel, trust in the L-rd,” is more than a topic for a temple rabbi’s sermon.  It is the foundation of Judaism, that upon which rest all the 613 commandments.  “And the righteous shall live by his faith.”

What does a Jew do when the United States attempts to strangle Israel by demanding betrayal of the land to the Arabs or risk losing American weapons and support?  He first prays to the All Mighty and affirms his faith in Him.  He vows not to violate the commandment that forbids giving up Jewish land.  He realizes that retreat is insanity and that it will lead not to peace but to disaster.  He knows that each bowing to Washington will lead only to more demands.  And so he prays and has faith.

And then he turns and says:  You have the choice of selling us conventional weapons (and what a ludicrous term that is and when did cluster bombs and missiles and napaim become “conventional”?) or not.  But know that if you do not, we will develop and if need be use the unconventional nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that can destroy not only Arabs but their Soviet allies.  And then he opens the New York Times and Washington Post of March 21 and reads:

“The Pentagon is quietly upgrading its ability to wage war with nerve gas, a weapon that can cause agonizing death from spasms and convulsions if only a drop or two gets on a person’s skin. The reason is a growth in the Soviet Union’s chemical warfare capability… ‘We underestimated the threat and it got us into trouble,’ said a chemical warfare expert.”

And the same day the times quotes Dr. Alexander Langmuir, the former top civilian epidemiologist as saying that he devoted one fifth of his time to military biological warfare studies “because he regarded biological warfare as a serious threat to the United States.”

The United States is permitted to develop biological and chemical weapons because it is threatened.  Israel is not?  The United States is allowed to have an atomic arsenal that is awesome and can destroy the world many times over, because of fear of the Soviets?  Israel – threatened daily with extinction by the Arabs – can do no less.  Faith in G-d and fear of neither enemies nor allies.  That is the Jewish way.

Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:  BarbarAndChaim@gmail.com 

Default - NYCity Is Dying - 1975

Meir Kahane Writings

5734-5-6    1974-1976

DEFAULT

October 17, 1975

Men are remarkably strange people who delight in frantic, frenetic and agonizing games aimed at deceiving themselves so that they might not have to think clearly, logically and painfully and so that they might not have to take the difficult and agonizing steps that might save their lives.

New York City is dying.  It is a coach filled with people and the horses are racing crazily toward the abyss.  The coachmen are helpless and the abyss comes closer.  And the passengers?  The passengers watch nervously, anxiously, discussing various illusions and delusions that will save them at the last moment.  But it is all a charade and there is not one traveler who does not see the edge of the chasm approach and who does not realize that all the clever plans and proposals are sound and fury signifying nothing.

Consider the past year.  The lies, the denials, the efforts at covering up the true extent of the deficits and the refusal to face up to a past of politically motivated economic deception.  The frantic and frenzied attempts to raise money to pay off debts due in July or payrolls demanding satisfaction in a given week.  The excruciatingly complicated plans, the haggard, nerve-wracking meetings, the physically debilitation conferences and each time, “victory”.  Victory in the form of success at convincing creditors to purchase bonds that pay exorbitant, usurious rates that must be repaid by New York and that will merely cast more earth on the city grave.  All the frantic activity, all the hopeful and hopeless illusions.  Nothing can save the city from putting an end to the kind of good life its inhabitants insisted on giving themselves regardless of their ability to create or inability to pay it.

New York is a coach, its horses run amok and its citizens in for a terrible crash.  And New York follows Newark and Detroit and in its wake will come Buffalo and Cleveland and a host of other urban centers as the economic blight – and truth – grips them.  New York City will writhe in agony and call for help from the State.  The laugh is on both for who will save the State?  Who will save the State that is but a few steps away, having walked the same proliferate path of its famous municipality?  Does anyone ever bother to think of the precarious plight of New York State and the awesome debts it has piled up, debts which it really cannot pay?

The federal government!  Yes, the financier of the last resort.  The federal government will save us.  But who will save the federal government?  It, too, survives on the slight-of-hand trickery of borrowing today to pay the debts of yesterday and tomorrow to pay those of today.  But here, too, there will someday be no tomorrow and the federal coach, also, will lurch wildly to the chasm.

It has all become one nightmarish delusion, the sometime dream of materialism, the good life, the never-ending money and enjoyment of flesh.  People borrowed to satisfy their lust for more and when there was no money left but a great deal of  ‘more’ to be yearned for, they borrowed again.  Until today individuals and corporations owe some two TRILLION dollars to their creditors.  What will happen on the day when the balloon burst?  What will happen when a million worlds go up in smoke as their pension plans prove to be nonexistent and their nest eggs are eaten up by mad inflation.

What will happen as the coach careens over the edge?  We know what will happen.  The passengers inside, shaken at the final moment from their long flirtation with delusion, will lash out at the nearest enemy, will seek the nearest ally.  The nearest ally will be the cleverest demagogue, the wiliest extremist, the most dangerous totalitarian.  Democracy is a fragile myth, at the mercy of every runaway coach.  Those in the urban centers of America who enjoyed the good life for decades will not willingly allow it to slip into history.  They will shriek and strike out and grasp any and every brutal and authoritarian ideology that promises them to seize the horse’s reins and stop the fall.

Man is as good as his self-interest dictates and is decent as long as he is not afraid.  America is an historically good and decent country because more than any other, it had the kind of national life that did not induce fear or desperation.  Because it has had, more than any other empire in the history of the world, an era of peace and the good life.

But today this is ending and default looms on the horizon.  It is a default induced by the change in the essential condition of the American people today.  For the first time in the brief history of the nation that regularly paid the payments due on the notes of democracy, the American is frustrated, weary, anxious, angry, afraid and hating.  Above and beyond the political crises that pushes the United States into a position of weakness and danger and above and beyond the social crisis that tears at long-held values and destroys the sure roots and foundations that every man must have in order to march forward with equanimity and confidence, there is the shattering psychological crises that grips the nation in a deadly embrace.  For the first time the American has lost confidence in his nation and in the great American democratic process.  For the first tem the great American Manifest Destiny is questioned and Vietnam and the Watergate scandal join with the cancer of flabby morality and ethics and enslavement to materialism, to create a rootless and spiritually terrified society.  

America no longer believes in itself and the economic crashes will prove to be the final blows to an already disastrously weakened body politic.  The Jew sits on the volcano that is America, threatened twice over.  Once as a citizen like all the rest and second because he is not like all the rest.  Because he is a Jews.

Default is coming and with it the ugliness of the human being that is unparalleled in all the animal world.  And the Jew will feel its horror as no other.  Default is coming.  Not only in the cities and in the world of economics.  Default is coming to the notes of democracy.  The debtors – the citizens of the United States – no longer give it full faith and credit.  Its value is plunging.  There are fewer and fewer buyers.  Jew, it is time to go home, to the only place where default does not automatically mean –“the Jew!  Let the Jew pay.”  It is time to go home to the Land of Israel before there is no chance to go again.

Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:  BarbaraAndChaim@gmail.com