Where Are We Headed? Politics and Rosh Hashanah 5785

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

This is Part 4 of a series "Where Are We Headed?", in which I have tried to narrow down the meaning of the words Nation, Government, and War-making. When we use important words sloppily, we can't think straight, much less create good solutions to problems. Today the word to consider is Politics.

I was once welcomed as a member of a synagogue, even though the rabbi knows I'm Catholic. (Maybe they were hard up for members?) Also, I regularly receive some "Dear Fellow Jews" letters from various organizations. Recently I received such a letter, intended "to prepare us for Rosh Hashanah during these terrible times."

The lady, Ava, who composed it had an unenviable task -- to avoid saying anything that might hint of wrongdoing in Gaza. I found her efforts painful and am now going to clash with her, head-on. My plan is to attack her logic in an intellectual way. This is an intellectual argument about argumentation itself.

Dear Ava, your Rosh Hashana letter is ridiculous. You have proposed the theme "We are Jews. Our people are suffering from Hamas' attack. In our long history we have suffered by getting ejected from Christian lands. Eventually, we established a homeland in Israel, taking political control in 1948. As the holiday of Rosh Hashanah approaches, let us renew our commitment to protect one another by protecting Israel." Blah, blah, etc.

May I make three points? Thanks.

1. At this moment -- 2024 in local time, 5785 in Hebrew Tribe time -- there is a genocide going on in Gaza. It is undeniably a genocide as Mr Netanyahu has said he intends to wipe those folks out. That war is also causing a lot of loss of life of Jews in Israel. It is causing major soul-stirring of Jews around the world.

For me as a Catholic, Judaism is a major part of my religious heritage. As I'm not well-schooled in history, I don't know if I've got all the facts right, but I don't need to get them right to know that we Christians sense the morality of Judaism as part and parcel of Jesus' ideas (albeit with Equality thrown in -- maybe that was a Roman theme?).

To me, the main Hebrew contribution to western civilization is theological. It is about "right and wrong as advised by Yahweh." It is about being fair and following the rules, especially the Mosaic rules. Plus -- but I imagine this is mainly modern -- the Jewish thing is to look for social injustice anywhere and try to correct it.

Therefore, if there is a problem staring us in the face, such as the wiping out of Gazans, it can't be correct to say "We must uphold our Jewish community by preventing discussion of The Problem." (I realize Ava's letter did not say that, as such.)

OK, Ava, that's my "Jew Equals Morality" argument against your theme.

2. The second problem has to do with the assumptions you make about a "state." Calling the State of Israel a "homeland for the Jews of the diaspora" is technically incorrect. Maybe the location (roughly, the borders of Israel) is a homeland. But a state, per se, is a state. You are mixing apples and oranges.

Granted, if the vast majority (say, 90%) of a state's inhabitants are of a particular faith or a particular ethnicity, we tend to mentally merge the concept of "state" with those people, or with their mission. Our brain has its ways of simplifying the world. I suppose if that leads to incorrect ideas or policies, we should be more precise.

The nation-state that is today called Israel has long had a large Arab population, some of whom are Christian, some Muslim. At the moment, about 20% of Israeli citizens are ethnic Arabs. At best, you could call Israel the "headquarters" of the Jews. My point is that the nation-state of Israel is plainly not an all-Jew thing. Rather, it's a state. It walks like a state and talks like a state, no matter what the ethnic content is.

There's also some dispute about the ethnic origin of the European Jews who fled in considerable numbers to the then-British Mandate of Palestine in the 1940s. How many of them were ethnically "returning home" to Israel? It has been proposed that a substantial portion of the 20th century Jewish population in Eastern Europe had ancestry in Khazaria on the Russian steppes, whose ethnic ties are Turkic. "DNA" has provided some evidence of this. Allegedly a conversion to Judaism was made, en masse, by the rulers of Khazaria in the 8th century.

That's not a problem as regards Jewish "identity" -- an individual can become a Jew by conversion, and so can a whole nation. However, it takes away from the idea that every Jewish person has a nostalgic right to the old land known as Palestine. The Sephardic Jews, who never left the Middle East, are the exception. It's indisputably their historic "homeland." (But even that is malleable in the modern world -- Individuals move around, groups make new policies about land claims, etc.)

OK, Ava, that's my argument against your equating "a people" with a state. All states have a typical way of behaving, like states. The "State of Israel" is not the same thing as "the Jewish community." An apple is not an orange.

3. Which brings me to an intellectual area that is hardly developed at all: state politics in a globalized world. The element to watch for is: Who is making the decisions that affect the fate of masses of people? In a simpler time of human history, when each tribe was isolated, it could be accurately assumed that the visible leader was really in charge. But today, who makes decisions for Australia? For Ethiopia? For Jordan? For the Netherlands? For the United States? For Russia?

Back in 1990, I obtained a PhD in Politics. That degree gives me almost no clue to understanding who runs the show in 2024, in any country. We were taught to recognize some different types of government -- dictatorships, democracies, colonies, constitutional monarchies, theocracies. Well, all right, there are models of such out there. (Respectively, for example: North Korea, Sweden, Bermuda, Canada, Saudi Arabia.) But isn't every government today in the clutches of one global ruler?

In 2020, who would have guessed that the rather flimsy World Health Organization could order just about everyone on the planet to do a Lockdown, or to wear a mask, or in 2021 to get vaccinated? It did not seem to matter if you were part of a democracy, a theocracy, or a whatever. WHO became the Great Equalizer.

Look -- that boss, the WHO, does not have troops! So the decision-making must have been carried out by the willingness, the agreement, of local "political" rulers! (That, by the way, included Israel, whose citizens were medically experimented on ruthlessly by the vaxxers.)

Of course, words like "emergency" and "epidemic" do tend to get a huge number of citizens to co-operate voluntarily. Still, one is left wondering if, rather than local rulers carrying out the Lockdown, it was hidden troops of world government within each of the 195 nation states. If so, then there are no real "politics" -- just a lot of media blather about the numbers game and personalities. Very entertaining.

I am a dual citizen of US and Australia. In Australia, we say that the US is the hidden boss: Parliament does what Uncle Sam wants. Or, since King Charles is the monarch of Australia, the secret troops that led the pandemic response could have been British. Or, conceivably, given Australia's location, the hidden ruler is China.

Hmm. Does China itself have a hidden ruler? All it took for the Brits to boss the Chinese around, in mid-nineteenth century, was a large supply of opium. Maybe foreign control is that easy.

Does America have a hidden ruler? During the long tenure of J Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, all members of Congress, and even the president, were potentially blackmailable. Hoover could get what he wanted by showing them his scandal-dossier on them. But what was in it for him? Surely he was not the real decision maker about any particular policy.

I am making the odd suggestion that there is no such thing as "politics" when a global ruler is at the helm. Decisions are made and orders carried out, period.

OK, Ava, I have now asked you "Who is the global boss?" It's unlikely that you know. I'm sure you sincerely wish to protect Israel. But that probably involves globalism. Is Bibi obeying someone? I'll bet he is.

Conclusion

This article is 4th in a series at GumshoeNews.com entitled "Where Are We Headed?". The first three articles looked at Nation, Government, and War-making, and this one looked at Politics, using -- for holiday reasons -- a matter of Israeli politics.

Just imagine our brains being so undisciplined that we don't even know what such entities really are. And yet we plan activities, and make judgements, as though these terms were reliable! We blunder around, talking as though every man and his dog knows what 'government' is. Maybe we should pin down what WAR is, as our primary task, since allegedly we are about to enter World War III.

I thank the Jewish community writer, Ava, for sending out a letter that urges solidarity for Rosh Hashana without getting sidetracked into "the Gaza affair." I took the opportunity to unravel her pleading by saying that 1. Judaism is profoundly associated with morality, and that 2. Israel is a state rather than a "community," and that 3. maybe the Jews of Israel -- and the Kenyans of Kenya, etc -- all have a globalist boss whom we lack control over (and can't even identify, for Pete's sake!).

Above, I did not enter into the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but I will now. I think that the wholesale killing (if such it is, we may be misinformed!!) is outrageous. Since it appears to be Israeli government decision-makers that are going wild in Gaza, the citizens of Israel have a responsibility to rein them in.

I hereby recommend that since Jews worldwide (like Greeks worldwide) have a well-known tie to their motherland, they should, every one of them, meet with a few friends (or rabbi) locally and hammer away at what can be done to STOP this genocide. How else can "community" come into it?

October 7, 2024 is only days away. A year of killing is enough, isn't it? More than a million Palestinians are still standing. They are pretty helpless, although other nations such as Iran may enter the fray. Then, supposedly, there will be world war. What ever for?

Questions for your meeting:

What information needs to be put on the table?

If mistakes have been made, would it be wise to 'fess up?

What outcome in Gaza is both humane and feasible?

What will be the price of World War III?

What is in the best interest of ordinary Jewish folks at this juncture?

Which principles and strategies have priority?

What can we do?