Chapter 2 Palestine

Palestine was still just a word used to refer to the "Land of the Jews." The Europeans had expanded it to include other territories, but by 1917, eight and a half percent of Palestine, basically the 10% they wanted, had been BOUGHT AND PAID FOR by Jews! The rest, including the unoccupied Sinai desert, was spillover from the land owned by the Ottoman Empire. We got the unoccupied Sinai portion of that -(THREE TIMES so far.)

In the interest of an unfolding destiny, the God Abraham had sought so earnestly; a God now in the process of perpetuating him so he can be around when there might be enough knowledge for him to understand an answer, seems to have dispersed the exiles all over the globe so they could keep up with the knowledge that would lead Abraham's perpetuation to enlightenment. To make sure we shouldn't forget who we were, God had to fence in the children of Israel with haters who would never let us forget.

Because God had promised to make of Abraham a mighty nation, for some reason that nation had to retain its identity. Hate is an effective way to isolate people if you don't want them to forget who they are. We were "set up." Jews frequently puzzle over why those who profess to revere Abraham are so determined to destroy his immortality. Jew haters give each other all kinds of reasons, but when I was young and didn't look Jewish, I heard enough to realize--we're really hated because "they" think we're too damned smart. Where'd they ever get THAT idea?!!

Well,--it seems that while in Midian, Moses married Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro. The Midianites circumcised their boys in their thirteenth year. When Zipporah gave birth to their son Gershom, Moses was content to leave the child to the mother's care - UNTIL-he got deathly ill Convinced that God was punishing him for ignoring the commandment of the Covenant ("Éin the eighth day, every male among youÉ") Zipporah quickly grabbed a knife and did the honors. (proving Moses WAS Jewish, and he KNEW it).

When Moses started putting his laws together, knowing he would need more than a few readers to KNOW the laws, he gratefully repaid Zipporah for saving his life by substituting the bar mitzvah for her traditional circumcision. No one ever said sisters couldn't sit in on the tutoring, so down through the ages you had all these literate people living among the illiterates.

Of course humans need a nicer excuse for hating others than just because the others are smarter, so-accessible religious heads that opened up to the spirit were filled, manipulatively, with one reason or another for doing the hating. Ego is the secret of life, so to keep the Jews from hating themselves, the reasons for the hatred had to be always unbelievably ridiculous.

So ridiculous, in fact, that it was impossible for your average Jew to grow up without an obnoxious superiority complex, making it even easier for others to hate us without reason.

How do I know all this? Abraham, who rejected his father's idols, was more likely chosen-not for his faith, but-for special reproduction of some advanced characteristic in the interest of evolution. Of course Abraham was not the only one so gifted, and by now, enough Jews have passed into society to spread the genetic quality, whatever it was, throughout the world. We don't have a monopoly by any means.

Nevertheless, to be a Jew was almost never so attractive as to overwhelm the bloodline with converts unless they bred within the clan. Hitlers always know who has a forgotten Jewish great grandparent. Every biological Jew is a marked carrier of the seed of Abraham. What was reproduced was more likely the open-minded outreach. Religion does not make the Jew. It's Abraham's perpetuated outreach that makes religion.

As every artist knows, the language of Creation has to be "abstract". It gets translated within the context of the mind it passes through, but even if the mind puts words to it, communication that comes from outer space must come as an abstract thought. It's unlikely that God speaks in any mortal tongue. (Not even Hebrew)

While the ability to think in the abstract is by no means limited to any single nation, in every field where that ability is imperative, Jewish names do predominate far in excess of the zero point zero, zero, maybe one percent of Jews in the world's population, suggesting that's probably what it was that Abraham had to pass on. Believe it or not, as a silly old Yidisha Yenta, but an artist so endowed- even I often know things I have no way of knowing.

Actually, when the Arabs were driving us out of the Land of the Jews, and we were looking for a place to resettle, the King of the Khazars, a Mongolian tribe, took us in hoping that we would teach his ignorant tribesmen to read and write--and get rich. I say us, because families that name their first daughter Tammara in honor of the beloved queen of the tribe that gave us sanctuary are descended from the grateful Jews of what, for a hundred years or so, was called the Jewish Kingdom or the Jewish Empire.

My grandfather's grandmother was a Tammara, as are many cousins. My grandmother got the oral history from her mother-in-law, who, in turn, got it from HER mother-in-law.

The Communists pretty much wiped out all religious memory in the last century, but I'm still alive, and, listening to my grandmother when I was about nine, ten, and eleven or so, I got much of the oral history--even going back to the wars with Rome, I still have one old yellowed notepaper on which I had written what she told me, including that her mother-in-law, my great grandmother, lived to 104. (I'm working on it.)

The Arabs would like the world to believe we are European converts from the Khazars; phony imposters who have no claim to any part of their Arab land. Jews who wish they could get out of being Jewish, would love for it to be true. Repeatedly, the pattern in Jewish history has been-some leader invites them into his country, hoping they'll teach his subjects to read, write-and get rich. Subjects don't learn any of it. Jews advance to the top. Locals get resentful. Some ambitious militant stirs them up, takes over the leadership and starts a revolution.

The fact is that half the Khazars were Christians and half were Muslims and the Royal family chose to convert to Judaism to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Having opened his door to a flood of persecuted Jews fleeing from all over, his little country was soon taken over. Continuing the pattern, the resentful tribesmen never converted, nor did they try to learn anything. Jews have fled and mated all over the world, but to find Jews with anything like Mongolian features, you have to go to the Orient.

Having been given 80% of Palestine, King Abdullah began rebuilding the devastated land. He had a Jewish carpenter with Jewish helpers who impressed him with the difference between industrious workers, and his woefully indifferent Arab workers. He, and many neighbors of Zionist pioneers, watching the Jews work, were looking forward to participating in, learning from, and enjoying the benefits of what they could see being accomplished. I don't know how the opposition developed--probably the same jealousy that had plagued the Jews throughout the centuries--but whatever, Abdullah was assassinated for his lack of animosity. Others of like mind were assassinated, and the reeducation began.

It boggles the mind to think of what the past five decades might have been like for the Arabs if, instead of running to Germany to direct the collaboration of his Bosnian Muslems, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, had turned to his people and said "Look. Our cousins are in trouble. Open the door and let them in. We lost half the nation created by God from the seed of Abraham! The still empty land purchased by Jews was more than enough to save lives. Can anyone doubt the unlimited gratitude the Jews of the world would have showered on the Arabs, had they been friendly? Even Abdullah was opposed to a Jewish state, but the Jews, who were always eager to SHARE with the Arabs, would have been perfectly satisfied with a joint state as a refuge from outside haters. The Arabs, having become inside haters, wanted absolutely no sharing, making coexistence impossible.

In 1948, after watching boatloads of Jews fleeing for their lives, refused permission to disembark even in ALASKA-forced to return to Germany and the death camps-it was no longer an option for anything but a state where persecuted Jews in the next holocaust could run for sanctuary. The United Nations inherited this problem.

Except that now the land was rejuvenated. Now they had Arab migrants who had flocked to Palestine for the better living conditions created by the Zionist pioneers. Now they had a religious Jihad to rid the world of Jews--a cause that had a major cheering section in the United Nations.

We don't know if there's a devil, but we do know anyone wanting to start a war comes as close as one can get. The Arabs, who drove the Jews from Palestine so THEY could get to be the ones who made the Holy land holy, have been trying to rid the world of Jews since long before Hitler. For the past century, they have been waging a war of terrorism that now and then threatens to spill over. The Gulf war saw how willing they can be to destroy the planet if they don't get their way, and how little they care about their own people, let alone the rest of us. It should be clear to everyone by now that the Israelis, and ONLY the Israelis, have gone all the way to try to meet the Arabs in the Peace Process. The present generation thinks what they see today is what was stolen from them. They HAD the land. They ran it into the ground with neglect and abuse. They never loved it until somebody else had it.

The Covenant to drive out all the Jews can only be changed by a 2/3rds majority of the Palestine National Council. Did the council really meet? Did 2/3rds majority vote to change it? Or was Arafat only pretending that it was changed. Half the Israelis and older Jews (including myself) were aware, from the outset, that the Arabs saw the peace process only as a means to gain concessions until they could get a stronger situation from which to launch their next all out attack. We hoped we would turn out to be mistaken--that the gamble would pay off--but the long prepared recent insurrection was in the works for months before they found Sharon's visit to be a fortuitous provocation. Even back in 1994, a letter from Israel complained that the peace process was merely covering up an increase in terrorism.

As the response to each Israeli compliance with Oslo seemed to be an act of Arab violence flouting the message "NOT ENOUGH!" it was increasingly apparent that there would never be enough. The false and trivial provocations cited each time disturbingly demonstrated how little it would take to continue the violence even IF an agreement should ever be reached.

The irrelevant destruction of the Tomb of Joseph during this insurrection should tell you that. When the Arabs held Jerusalem, they committed all sorts of disrespectful offenses against places sacred to Jews, from building a Mosque on top of the Temple Mount to converting gravestones into latrines. Perhaps the most emotional film out of all the wars was the scene of victorious Jews embracing the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of Solomon's Temple from which they had been banned throughout.

When Jerusalem was recaptured, Israel had EVERY RIGHT to retaliate; to get rid of the intrusive Mosque. Instead they had the reverence to let the Arabs keep their house of prayer. The reaction of the Arabs was to take exclusive possession of the temple and the entire area around it. When Netanyahu tried to enlarge an exit a football field away to facilitate tourist trade for the Arab shopkeepers-they used it as an excuse to riot.

The media keeps blaming Sharon for the present insurrection. He was where he had EVERY RIGHT to be-nowhere near the entrance to their Mosque. If Sharon could guess what would happen, he went with it so everyone SHOULD SEE what these people are like. Unfortunately, he overestimated the intelligence of those he thought would be doing the seeing. How can anyone expect Israel to open the door to Jerusalem for all these terrorists. When the chips are down, even the Israeli Arabs who complain of being treated with suspicion, rush to prove the suspicions are warranted. Peaceful coexistence is not possible with people who want it all.

ARABS CAN STOP DYING ANY TIME THEY CHOOSE TO STOP KILLING This was clearly spelt out in the Oslo Peace Process. Israel to give up their land -- Arabs to stop terrorism.