Remembering the Lod Airport massacre
The Nairobi mall attack has conjured up memories of the first terrorist attack I ever remember: the Lod airport massacre.
You may never have heard of it—or of Lod airport, for that matter, which is in Tel Aviv and was later renamed Ben Gurion Airport after Israel’s founder and first prime minister. But the Lod massacre remains one of the most terrifying in the long list of terrorist attacks that have followed, and at the time it was perpetrated (1972) it was especially horrific. Masterminded by the PLO (specifically, its hard left wing the PLFP), it was also a prelude to the much-more-famous Munich Olympics massacre that gripped the world just a few short months later.
The PLO was involved in both, but the Lod massacre featured unusual perpetrators for that organization, and that was part of its shock value: leftist Japanese gunmen. This is the way it went down:
…[T]hree inconspicuous Japanese men dressed in business suits disembarked Air France Flight 132 from Rome and strolled into the baggage claim area. After retrieving what appeared to be violin cases, the men pulled out machine guns, opened fire and threw grenades indiscriminately at the crowds of people…
The gunmen killed 26 people: 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, one Canadian citizen, and eight Israelis, and 80 people were injured…Gunman Yasuyuki Yasuda was also shot dead during the attack – it is unclear whether by his own weapon or that of his partners or security forces. The lone surviving gunman, Kozo Okomato, was injured, arrested by security forces and given a life sentence. He was later freed in the 1985 prisoner swap known as the Gibril Deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
This attack had a number of characteristics that seemed new at the time, but with which we’ve become more familiar in the ensuing years. The Japanese killers represented a fusion between leftists and Islamists that became very important later on during the Iranian revolution, and which continues to this day for the many leftists who support and make excuses for Islamist terrorism. The Lod massacre was an eye-opener that led Israeli security forces to realize a new approach was needed, one that profiled not just on nationality but also on demeanor, and that expanded its sweep to include the airport in general rather than just the airplanes.
The fact that Okamoto is still alive and well and living in Lebanon is perhaps the most shocking of all. Despite its emphasis on security, that Israel allowed a perpetrator of that magnitude to be released in a prisoner swap (details here) seems suicidal.
Some insight into the mindset of someone like Okamoto is provided by a 1976 prison interview with him that was conducted by Patricia G. Steinhoff, who was an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Take it with a hefty grain of salt, because who knows whether Okamoto was being truthful or not. But here’s what he said at the time about his motives:
One of the ambiguities of Okamoto’s revolutionary conception is that the enemy is not clearly defined. Sometimes the ordinary person living in bourgeois society is regarded as part of the enemy bourgeoisie. Yet at other times, he counts the same people as potential supporters of the revolution because they are victims of such things as pollution”¦Because he foresees total overthrow of the existing arrangements of society, he does not feel bound in any way by the moral values of the present world”¦On the other hand, he is not really certain of what society will be like after the revolution has occurred. When I asked him what kind of a world he envisioned after the revolution, he smiled and said, “That is the most difficult question for revolutionaries. We really do not know what it will be like.”
Revolution and violence for its own sake as well as to fulfill the goal of feeling personally powerful. Such a person is a useful tool for those such as the PLO, who know quite well what kind of a world they envision.
I heard of this attack before. And I was aware they were Japanese leftists who carried it out.
It is interesting to read what the surviving Japanese terrorist said. He felt he was justified in killing people to change the world into . . . whatever. Should have given him a lead pill.
I don’t know any violent revolutionaries but people I knew in college would have agreed with the overthrow the existing and worry about the next phase later.
I think it saves them mental effort.
“Despite its emphasis on security, that Israel allowed a perpetrator of that magnitude to be released in a prisoner swap (details here) seems suicidal.”
Things have only gone downhill since, with the release of over 1000 prisoners for Gilad Shalit, and the latest: 104 murderers as a gesture to precede talks with Munich massacre organizer and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas on more land concessions on Israel’s part.
“…to realize a new approach was needed, one that profiled not just on nationality but also on demeanor,…”
Of note is that profiling racially was never carried out in Israel, because many Israeli Jews (even then, and now they’re the majority) are of Arab-world extraction, rendering such profiling useless. My country therefore skipped that fruitless controversy.
Slime and member
cells of our selves
stem to our leaves
then then are fin
What Okamato said sounds about right. It’s a basic Marxist mindset.
It’s totalitarian and tribal. It’s bottom-line competitive. It’s about – and only about – whether they win or lose, not how to play the game. They’re clear about who they’re against, even if the why is illogical and gapped. Tribal loyalty doesn’t need to be logically rigorous. They know who they’re for, even if the latter ‘who’ is more emotional and gauzily defined than concrete. That’s their principle, the truth around which the rest of their reality is arranged. Cognitive dissonance is consistent for them because their totalitarian tribal competitive truth is consistent – simply, what is practically useful against their enemy will be used, no matter its sources or premises, even if their whole case contradicts itself, it will drop away what’s no longer useful, and then use it again if it becomes useful again.
Eric,
Totalitarian yes, but not tribal. Marxism and Islam are anti-tribal, cosmopolitan systems where the family-wrecking cult mentality demands giving up all the objective realities and physical interests that tie you to your community (family and nationhood) in favor of an ideology that is elevated above life itself.
It’s because the West no longer views things tribally that it is susceptible to the attacks by those two cosmopolitan, internationalist imperialisms. Were tribalism rallied in defense of the free world, the Islamic colonization of the West and unlimited construction of mosques on its soil could easily be halted and reversed on grounds of being a threat to national cohesion; instead, even on Ground Zero are demands made of the West to permit mosque construction, by appealing to the lofty ideals (“They don’t allow churches on Saudi Arabia, but we must show we’re better than them”) of free societies. Hoist on our own petards.
Tribalism, in its more expanded and civilized form of nationalism and idea that the state should be its nation’s castle, the home where the nation is guaranteed security from demographic encroachment, is what’s actually needed in order for there to be a legal justification for repulsing both Marxist treason and Islamic colonialism: A 21st-century understanding that there is no room for ideologies that challenge the primacy of ethnic-national internal peace would lead to the outlawing of subversive internationalism as a natural consequence.
Homogeneous nation-states that neither encroach upon others (the way German imperialism a.k.a. Nazism did) nor are encroached upon are the wave of the future, for the simple reason that the only alternatives to them are multicultural anarchy and superstate tyranny. Civilized, refined tribalism will be the norm once the nations throw the shackles of their unappointed R-word-flinging internationalist ruling classes.
ziontruth,
They’re tribal. They’re different kinds of tribes in description and scope, but their organizing principles are tribal.
I agree with you that in a tribe vs tribe competition, the side that loses its tribal cohesion and order is at a disadvantage.
Eric,
Their organization is decentralized, which makes them independent of a base–Nazism was vanquished once Nazi Germany was defeated, while Marxism has survived the demise of the Soviet Union. However, I wouldn’t say this decentralization aspect was synonymous with tribalism. The prevalence of Muslim converts from all over the globe in Al-Nusra Front and Al-Shabab is a mark of a supranationalism that can only be called “tribal” in the loose sense of “binding people together.”
I actually had some silly woman from Tulane tell me that none of these terror groups work together. I asked this twit where she got her info. Amazingly , she said she new from her experience in college.
Now, in my previous life, we fought these bastards, the IRA, the Weather Underground, Baader-Meinhoff and every goddamn one of these groups trained together, worked together , shared info and shared a sponsor (well the IRA had the Plastic Paddies in Boston and New York to help as well )
Not a thing has changed for these murdering bastards. We have. Now we celebrate the savages starting with Teleprompter Stalin.
seems suicidal.
The Israelis have been suicidal for a very long time now. Perhaps it is the Leftists in their midst (American Jews vote 75% Democrat, on average) or perhaps it is because they believe they are God’s chosen people so it doesn’t matter if they sacrifice a few Jewish lives.
The hard core Jewish believers probably don’t think like that, but what about their leaders? How different is a Biden, Obama, Clinton, or PillowC from the rest of us? Are we normal or are THEY Normal?
Nazism was vanquished once Nazi Germany was defeated, while Marxism has survived the demise of the Soviet Union.
Only because we hunted the members down like human pigs and butchered them or captured them.
None of that happened with Marxism.
So yes you can bomb a country and invade it, but leave the people alive to plot revenge and rebellion and the results are expected.
The Mongols had one solution for it. The Romans and Greeks had a very different solution. But solutions still work, and the West has no solutions here.
Ymarsakar,
We have a hard-Leftist MSM and Prog-infested academe same as you have, and consequently, a leadership whose policies are shaped by them–again, the same situation as besets the entire free world, from America to Europe and from Nigeria to India.
The Israeli Jewish populace is getting more religious and more Sephardi with each passing year, changes that should mean an unwillingness to make land concessions, an uncaring attitude toward “world opinion” and a lack of white guilt. But these are undercurrent changes, the type whose influence comes to full flower only after a generation or two (cf. the time it took for 1960s radicalism in America to break out into full-blown Obamunism).
I don’t know when the current surface situation will change; I can only say with certainty that it will, because the hard-Leftists have been relegated in the past few decades (thanks in large part to Arab intransigence) to a thin stratum, visible and vocal but subject to depletion. While academe is largely in their hands, Israel is blessed by having an independent education system for the Religious-Zionist faction, which, together with the higher birth rates of the observant, as well as secular Jewish right-wingers, grows the ranks of Jewish nationalists steadily.
I’m not at all happy reading the daily news in my country, and I often want to tear my hairs out at the displays of my leaders’ stupidity, not to mention the decisions of Israel’s left-leaning, pro-Arab Supreme Court (Bagatz), but I’m hopeful that change is going to come in the most thorough and peaceful way, namely, from the bottom up.
Ymarsakar:
You write–
“The Israelis have been suicidal for a very long time now. Perhaps it is the Leftists in their midst (American Jews vote 75% Democrat, on average) or perhaps it is because they believe they are God’s chosen people so it doesn’t matter if they sacrifice a few Jewish lives.”
It is the leftists in their midst, because you couldn’t be more wrong about the rest.
First of all, you are wrong about what “chosen people” means. It doesn’t guarantee survival at all.
Secondly, you are wrong about the “doesn’t matter if they sacrifice a few Jewish lives” part. That is profoundly un-Jewish. The truth is that part of the motivation is exactly the opposite. Israel is a small country with a small population, and it tears the country apart to sacrifice any Jewish lives. That is why the prisoner exchanges happen (in addition to starry-eyed leftism, at times). There is pressure to not sacrifice the Jewish hostages (usually Israeli soldiers) who have been captured. If you follow the link about the prisoner exchanges, you’ll see what I mean. Thousands of prisoners released for just a few Israelis liberated.
That is why the prisoner exchanges happen (in addition to starry-eyed leftism, at times).
That doesn’t make any sense. Israel exchanged 500 live Palestinians for the bodies of two Dead Israelis.
How does that preserve life?
They didn’t get anyone alive back.
Trading prisoners at a huge ratio instead of executing 500 and saying “you get 2 free, before we get rid of them too” might make sense, as most nations appeased terrorism that way in the past. But that’s not what they are doing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Israel-Hezbollah_prisoner_swap
These are the small exchanges, but even they have popped up.
Israeli domestic propaganda is not something I pay attention to, so I don’t know how it is they “explain these” things to their own people, except by quoting their own Torah and what not.
Of course it doesn’t guarantee survival. But in a religious country, it would be one way to control the fundamentalists and keep them in their place. Much as the Left keeps telling us to be patriotic and support the hierarchy unless the hierarchy is run by Republicans.
On the note about Japan, they are a funny country. They are so monolithic that the actions of any Japanese on the world stage is worth national attention and pride if it is good, and national shame and introspection if it is bad.
Japanese Leftism probably did not become very popular as a result of that. To the good of us all, really.
Ymarsakar:
I don’t know which prisoner exchange you’re referring to, but this is the description of the one I linked to earlier:
The Israelis were living, not dead.
The way in which Hezbollah is celebrating the return of a man whom it calls a hero because Kuntar smashed the skull of a little girl is irrelevant. To Israel, whatever is said by people whose heroes are skull smashers, who hunt women and children in order to kill them, has no bearing. What is important are Israel’s values. In Israel’s eyes, a hero is someone who fights terror to defend civilians at the risk of his or her own life. Israel’s heroes go to battle equipped with, in addition to their weapons, the reassuring knowledge that they are protecting human beings who share their beliefs and who are also prepared to pay a price in order to realize them.
They literally Do Not Care. They do not care that Kuntar will train up and probably kill more people. They Just Do Not Care.
This kind of idealism borders on religious fanaticism, but the people who ran Israeli politics weren’t fanatics at all. So I don’t believe them when they claim they were looking out for Israeli life/honor. I don’t believe. I think they were covering up some bribes from Palis or Islamic Jihad, something like that. Or perhaps a backroom deal with Democrats for weapons tech.
Mercy to the cruel is injustice to the innocent.
Allowing Palestinians to live is the number 1 cause of Israeli death. The policy does not match the propaganda rhetoric.
Ymarsakar:
Read my comment right above yours.
Ymarsakar:
Also, the policy is supposedly changing. About time.
Here is some of the philosophy behind the swaps. I assure you it is not lack of reverence for life or lack of caring:
If you think I’m so wrong, Neo, about the Israelis and their leaders needing to believe in a special divine protection to release people like Kuntar back to the Pali fold in return for dead bodies, then what’s your interpretation here? What would make the Israeli leaders and people do so?
My interpretation is that they either believe they are given special protections against such enemies or they believe that a few Israeli lives are worth sacrificing for the bodies. Cause that’s all they got, bodies.
The only other explanation is the one I offered about Israelis taking bribes, being blackmailed by Americans, or some other ulterior motive.
Neo,
“…you are wrong about what ‘chosen people’ means. It doesn’t guarantee survival at all.”
According to traditional Jewish belief, it’s supposed to guarantee the survival of the Jewish nation against the worst possible odds, as that would be the HaShem’s proof to humanity that He is true. Moses used this very concept to plead before HaShem to spare the Jewish nation after the golden calf. However, this chosenness of the Jewish nation as witness to HaShem’s existence does not mean a tranquil existence for the nation, of course.
As for the unwillingness of Israel’s leadership to sacrifice Jewish lives, I’m not sure this is always the motive. It may have been the case with the Jibril and Gilad Shalit deals, but not for the recent release of 104 Arab murderers as a peace talks gesture. Israel’s current leaders, including the prime minister, are fearful of world condemnation and the finger-wagging of international legalists. Netanyahu acts like Israel can do nothing by itself about the Iranian nuclear threat and needs the United States for salvation. “Pragmatic smarts” has been for many years the reason touted by Israel’s leadership as to why Israel must persevere with the insanity of yet more attempts at land-for-peace deals and prisoner swaps.
Between cosmopolitan, EU-funded Leftists, misguided humanists who think turning the other cheek is a Jewish value and ostensible right-wingers who let their fear of the outside world get in the way of making the requisite moves, Israel’s policies are in stalemate at best. So it will stay until the undercurrents I wrote about in the previous post finally rise to positions of power. As a first good sign in this direction, although Israeli TV is still a left-leaning monopoly, the newspaper scene is already much more diverse (thanks, among others, to Sheldon Adelson).
Ymarsakar,
The Israeli Jewish populace isn’t docile, it’s just fearful of a civil war. It is to my nation’s great credit that it’s pursuing change through bottom-up undercurrents rather than top-down revolutions. The latter seldom end well, as we all know.
Ymarsakar:
The reverence for life extends to bodies, which seems paradoxical. For example, Orthodox Jews go around after suicide bombings collecting every scrap of tissue in order to bury it (really Orthodox Jews save fingernail parings, I once read somewhere). Palestinian terrorists deface and defile bodies sometimes (I don’t have time to look up the references, but they are out there). Here’s a link to the Orthodox Jewish attitude towards bodies. Orthodox Jews also don’t ordinarily allow autopsies or embalming.
Neo,
“The reverence for life extends to bodies, which seems paradoxical.”
Most cultures have had a taboo against the mutilation of dead bodies. Recall the story in Greek mythology of how Achilles was decreed death by the gods for dragging Hector’s body by his chariot. It’s the Muslims’ desecration of dead (infidel) bodies that’s the outlier in human cultures.
Lod pissed me off, but as if it were the usual revolutionary leftism.
Two years later came Ma’alot. That, for me, was the template. Apparently it seemed like a famous victory for the bastards, as they’ve been at it ever since.
If they tried a Beslan or a Ma’alot here, a good deal of law enforcement would be involved in preventing armed citizens assaulting by the battalion.
Talking to a couple of friends about how many of out mutual friends and acquaintances have guns. Every. Last. One. And I live in western Michigan, not, say, Texas or north Idaho.
ziontruth:
The “chosen people” are not allowed, however, to be passive and just let the deity take care of their survival. It’s a two-way street. My interpretation of what Ymarsakar was suggesting was that Jews thought nothing was required on their part to preserve themselves or value their lives, because as the chosen ones they were guaranteed survival. That’s not the way I understand the “chosen” business to work; it requires extra of Jews, not less.
By the way, this report about the some details in Nairobi mall massacre (if true) is in line with the discussion above about mutilation of bodies:
Richard at the Belmont Club also notes the detail about the bodies piled against the door. Like sandbags:
“Lovely touch that. Killing civilians and using them as doorstops. That little vignette describes the earnestness of war, the dead seriousness of it; the kind of all-encompassing condition that it is. To the Shabaabs, people – someone’s wife, child or husband – were just so many sandbags to be used in a tactical situation. Their attitude exemplifies the total commitment, the mental difference between a man at peace and stone killers at war – with us.
Yes with us and make no mistake about it.”
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/09/23/the-assault-on-westgate-mall/
When I use the term “Chosen People”, I mean it in the biblical sense, not the modern sense of atheists talking about religion, theirs or others.
The Chosen of God are those with a responsibility as well as a promise of reward. But the reward was not necessarily in this world. So it’s easy if a population believes that these transactions with terrorists are a duty, a trial, set upon them by God, given that they believe their rewards are in the after life or in a future unseen by humans. So they don’t ask their government for their rewards here, to preserve their lives.
When this kind of thinking comes from the government, it isn’t an earnest or true belief. It’s a tool people use to manipulate humans into doing things that might seem insane to the rest of us.
That’s because it’s hard to say what duties, what trials, what sacrifices are required of a person given their obligation to God. Because is the person talking about sacrifices the God, the Devil, or the government?
Reading more into it, on the matter of body mutilation vis a vis Israeli concepts of life preservation, more things make sense.
Several posts above, Neo, you and I were writing responses to each other at the same time, where you posted that the prisoner exchange was for live prisoners. The one you were talking about did with life prisoners. The one I was talking about, of course, did not.
It wasn’t a minor error or discrepancy or one time deal. These were the ones Israel made exchanges.
If you believe the Israelis, whether individually or as a people, think they need “More Jews” in order to live and survive, then how do you explain this.
On February 21, 1962, Syria exchanged the body of an Israeli soldier it was holding for a Syrian soldier in Israeli captivity
April 2, 1968, 12 Jordanian soldiers taken prisoner during the Battle of Karameh were released in exchange for the body of a missing Israeli soldier. The Jordanians were supposed to have returned two more bodies, but the coffins were found to contain only dirt, and the soldiers are still considered missing.
April 4, 1975, Egypt returned the bodies of 39 IDF soldiers killed during the Yom Kippur War in exchange for 92 terrorists and security prisoners held in Israel.
In June 1975, Israel released 20 prisoners from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula. In exchange, Egypt gave Israel the bodies of Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, two Jewish fighters of the pre-state underground militia Lehi who had been hanged in 1945 for having assassinated British politician Lord Moyne in Cairo in November 1944.
On Sept 12, 1991 the body of IDF Druze soldier Samir Assad, was returned to Israel in exchange for two members of the Palestinian DFLP faction. Assad was killed outside Sidon in 1983.
Two Israeli soldiers, Yosef Fink and Rachmim Alsheich, were killed in a Hezbollah attack on an IDF roadblock at Beit Yahoun in southern Lebanon on July 17, 1986. Their bodies were retained by the Lebanese and only released on July 21, 1996 in exchange for the bodies of 123 Lebanese fighters held by Israel.[1] Hizbollah released 17 soldiers from the South Lebanon Army (SLA) while SLA released 45 detainees Khiam prison.
On May 25, 1998 the remains of IDF soldier Itamar Ilyah was exchanged for 65 Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of 40 Hezbollah fighters and Lebanese soldiers captured by Israel.[7] Among those returned to Lebanon, were the remains of Hadi Nasrallah, the son of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in a clash with IDF the year before. Ilyah was killed in a devastating Hezbollah ambush at Ansariyeh, where 12 soldiers from the elite naval commando unit Shayetet 13 were killed in Sept 5, 1997.
Over 400 Palestinian and 30 Lebanese prisoners, including Hezbollah leaders ash-Sheikh Abdal-Karim Obeid and Mustafa Dirani, as well as the remains of 59 Lebanese killed by Israel, were exchanged in 2004 for the bodies of three IDF soldiers (Adi Avitan, Benny Avraham and Omar Souad) captured in the Sheba Farms area in 2000 and Elhanan Tannenbaum, an Israeli colonel in the reserves, kidnapped by Hezbollah in Dubai in October 2000.[7]
In October 2007 Israel and Hizbullah agreed to exchange Hassan Aqil, a civilian Hezbullah member captured in 2006, and the remains of two Hezbullah fighters killed in this war and brought to Israel for the remains of Gabriel Dwait, an Israeli resident who drowned in 2005 and was washed ashore in Lebanon.
In January 2008 Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah held a speech at the annual Ashura celebration in Beirut where he accused Israel of dragging its feet in the prisoner exchange negotiations. He also disclosed that the organization, apart from the two soldiers captured, also had in its hand the partial remains of several other soldiers killed in the war. He claimed that the IDF had “lied” to the relatives when they returned supposedly intact bodies for burial.
Nasrallah’s speech aimed at speeding up the negotiations with Israel but it created a lot of bad blood in Israel, both among the relatives of those who were led to believe that their bodies had been buried intact and among Israeli politicians who accused Hezbollah of waging “psychological warfare” against Israel. Several ministers called for the “elimination” of the Hezbollah leader.
On June 1, 2008, Israel released the Lebanese prisoner Nissim Nasser, in exchange for which Hezbollah handed over the partial remains of up to 20 Israeli soldiers killed during the 2006 Lebanon War.
In July 2008 Israel released long time serving Lebanese prisoner Samir al-Quntar, four Hezbollah fighters captured in the 2006 Lebanon war and the bodies of 199 Palestinian, Lebanese of Arab fighters captured by Israel in the past three decades. Kuntar had been convicted for his role in the 1979 Nahariya attack, which resulted in the deaths of four Israelis, including two small children. According to eyewitness accounts, Kuntar bludgeoned a four-year-old girl to death.[15][16] In exchange Hezbollah released the bodies of two Israeli soldiers (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) captured in a cross-border raid.
Finally, we have the last exchange, which I believe you mentioned in your OP. That’s the timeline. There were plenty of prisoner swaps for live prisoners, but those were most of the ones that weren’t about lives.
So, to reply to your interpretation that the Israeli values about life extend to their dead and burial, that makes sense given the historical events at play and the culture here.
So all of the Israelis and Jews and civilians killed by the people Israeli leaders released back into the wild, are less valuable than the fact that a few families got back the bodies of their dead, so that they could send them to heaven as one whole?
One of the things I quoted is that Israeli enemies stated that the bodies the families got back were NOT whole (the Palis went to work on them, maybe had some parts for snacks) and that the Israeli government lied to the families about intact bodies being retrieved. Why would they do so?
My answer is that the Israeli government cared more about the political benefit they got from promising and delivering whole bodies to be buried INTACT, than they cared about the Israeli lives that would be lost in the future.
If you think the Left is responsible for some of these actions, can you deny my explanation in whole or in part?
The Israeli leaders valued political benefit more than the truth or saving future Israeli lives from terrorists, true or false.
The Israeli people preferred to have the bodies of their dead back, at the cost of a number of unknown Israeli women, men, and children, true or false?
Religious beliefs about the sanctity of burial and the soul, may matter more than lives. But did they really believe this or did they just use Jewish beliefs for personal gain? Because if we are talking about the soul and some Heavenly reward in the after life, this is not about Isarelis Saving Lives.
Correction: the release of Okamoto would be in 1985. The recent one was the release of Gilad.
Neo,
“The ‘chosen people’ are not allowed, however, to be passive and just let the deity take care of their survival.”
You just pointed out one of the most contentious debates in Orthodox Judaism. The Religious-Zionists (of whom I am one) mostly believe Jews should act and expect God’s help in the course of their actions, while the Ultra-Orthodox tend to hold that all the Jews have to do is keep the Torah well enough and pray hard enough and then divine help will come in the form of natural-looking miracles at the very least. Secular leaders like Netanyahu don’t figure HaShem into it at all. This is one of the reasons why Leftist governments in Israel have been able to form coalitions with the Ultra-Orthodox parties.
We’re in a jam, no question about it. I haven’t been painting a rosy picture, only a hopeful one. As things currently seem, Israel’s wellbeing is as dependent on the stupidity of our enemies as it is on the wisdom of our leadership, which leaves much to be desired. And now with BHusseinO announcing that “Israel’s existence depends on the existence of a Palestinian state,” thereby putting the existence of the Jewish state up for grabs (if only in theory) and threatening her, things are looking even worse. But, as the saying here goes, we’ve survived Pharaoh, we’ll survive this too. Hussein is a dog tail flea tick in HaShem’s eyes.
ziontruth:
It doesn’t surprise me that it’s a point of contention between one faction and another in orthodox Judaism.
Since when have Jews agreed on much of anything? 🙂
But I believe what I have stated is the majority view. I admit that orthodox Judaism is not my field of expertise, though.
One Jew, one and a half opinions. 😉
Whether the one view or the other is the majority depends who’s the majority. The Ultra-Orthodox aren’t the majority yet, but they do have the highest birth rates.
I don’t agree with them, but I still wish I had their confidence.
My solution is to execute Palestinians proven of killing my people or allies.
It’s very simple.
We can extract as much information from them as needed, and when they are no longer useful, they should be disposed of as environmental wastes and toxic assets.
Unlike the Israelis, I do not consider God’s will to be something available for us or our enemies in the afterlife, I consider humans to be manifest expression of any divine will, if it exists and is not merely a higher state of existence/power.
Not being able to bury the intact body of your loved ones hurts, that is easy to understand. But if it hurts, then make the enemies feel it 1000 fold over.
“Cause pain before you injure. Injure before you maim. Maim before you kill. And if you must kill, make it a clean kill. Squeeze every drop of life from the opponent. Because life is so precious, it cannot be wasted, even in death.”
“Let him cut your skin, and you cut his flesh. Let him cut your flesh, and you cut his bones. Let him cut your bones, and you cut off his life.”
The Israelis can refuse to adhere to such concepts, ethical or moral. But neither I, nor God, can guarantee their survival.
Ymarsakar,
“My solution is to execute Palestinians proven of killing my people or allies.”
The Torah’s solution is even more radical, and it’s one that sidesteps all the issues in one fell swoop: Forcible relocation of the entire enemy population away from the Land of Israel.
I hope I will see it done in my lifetime.
In some ways, US influence has been negative and has prevented countries from finding their own path, their own independence and pride.
If this influence is curtailed by a civil war, many things will be possible in the future that wasn’t, if only because US Democrats could force almost any country to bend knee to US policy while we get the blame for it in the years to come.