post 2

 

Looking for a Starting Point

Christian, Muslim, Arab, Jew,

There is no God

that is just for you.

Put down the guns.

Do something right,

before we are lost

in endless night.

Palestine?

There is archeological evidence of a city in what is Gaza today, that goes back 4,000 years. But the Palestine we know today comes much later. The name Palestine, itself probably comes from what we call the Philistines, a sea people, who traded across the Mediterranean and settled in the Gaza area much later. They were one of the peoples the Jews fought with when they pushed into what they called Canaan.

The Hebrew Bible tells a tale of the shepherd boy David, later King David, who kills the Philistine giant and champion with a slingshot to the head, without ever having to get close. There is a similar story of a boy defeating a giant in the Illiad, which predates Goliath by 800 years. Like all things Biblical, it is unwise to take things literally. What we are meant to learn is the plucky little Jews, through brains rather than brawn, overcame a physically bigger enemy, the Philistines.

In British culture we have learned to identify anything Philistine as culturally inferior and social boorish. It has not been difficult for Israel to convince us Brits that the Philistines are to be treated with contempt.

Until very recently, the western understanding of people from the area of Palestine was one of very backward Arab peasants or migrant herdsmen. Many of us have been successfully sold the big lie that it was a land without a people and it was perfect for a people without a land, the Jews. (Golda Meir)

All the peoples of the book, Christians, Muslims and Jews, begin their story with Abraham and are sometimes called the Abrahamic peoples.

Ur of the Chaldees?

They don't come from Palestine or Israel or the Levant, but either what is now Southern Iraq or southern Turkey. Their God, Jehovah (Christian spelling), tells them to emigrate to the land of Canaan, a land promised to them by their God. They first defeat, then murder the Canaanites.

Abrahamic Jews conquered Palestine in the name of their God, and long after the Roman expulsion of most of them, are in the business of conquering it all over again.

This first Jewish conquest was a very brutal business, but not much different from those of a long stream of conquerors who have come and gone over the millennia, and less murderous than some.

If you are perverse enough to try to discuss any of this with Zionists, you will find a general agreement that the Jews were given all of greater Israel by God, and it is theirs by right. Jews are merely returning to their own God-given homeland. They are just taking back their birth-right.

A little research will reveal that even the monotheism, which comes with the people of the book, is less certain that it might be. Indeed in some texts Jehovah has a rival , El shaddai, the Shatterer, though it is usually argued that this is just another name for the same God.

Whichever way you choose to look at it, this monotheistic God worshipped by Christians Muslims and Jews is violent, vindictive, possessive, and discriminates against women.

He claims to be the only God, and all people who do not accept him as God are likely to be subjugated. Jews , Christians, Muslims; they have all done and continue to do a lot of subjugating in the name of the same God, even when they are trying to subject each other to their version of the will of this same God.

It is pitiful; it is sad; it is tragic.

Jerusalem?

This is viewed as a Holy City by all the people of the book. One group or the other has conquered it at least once. Yet for long periods of time they were able to share the city and live in peace with each other. It is seen as the capital city by all the groups.

But is it a sensible place to start?

I wrote a poem based on the painting “Jerusalem” by the English poet and painter Edward Lear .

Jerusalem A poem by Nick Owen September 2012

We look over his shoulder

At Shepherds standing by,

Unmindful of the city.

An open sky is heaven enough for them.

But shining on the other hill

The artist shows so clear

The place they call Jerusalem

So far and yet so near.

A valley lies below us, bare and dark.

For me this has to be the shadow of death,

A place of desolation, fearful, stark,

Where all too many soldiers took their final breath.

Armies of the past, and of the future too;

We do not see them now upon the ground

And yet I think I hear their dreadful sound.

Over his shoulder we see some goats or sheep

In pastures almost green,

A peaceful, restful, pastoral scene;

Even the rocks are bright and clean.

He might have drawn on William Blake.

These could be northern English hills;

An English man’s Jerusalem to make,

Not covered in satanic mills.

Out of nowhere, a God without a face

Compels the souls of men to make for this.

It whispers to the world, “This is the place

Which, more than any other, is the source of bliss,

More powerful, more wonderful than any lover’s kiss.

For, if there is redemption, it is here.

Come all ye, and enter without fear”.

Our fathers went on pilgrimage to reach this holy city,

A pure white shining citadel beyond decay.

In hope to reach eternity, they made their way,

With prayers in many tongues, and oaths to say.

Some came in peace, some came in holy war

They shared a sacred dream,

Some thing, for them, worth fighting for.

Thousands fought and thousands died

And thousands more may fight and die

To hold this land. Many have tried

To find a way of peace, but many lie

And will lie again. I ask you why?

When you believe that God is on your side

You do not count the dead, or lose your pride.

We look over his shoulder

For a dream that we hope to come real

A place of love and beauty, peaceful games,

A place with magnetism, a serene appeal,

Where conflicts end in happy resolution.

But all these hopes are turned to desperation,

The darkness spreading higher on the hill,

As world war threatens death to every nation.

Christian, Moslem, Arab, Jew,

The jealous God that was just for you

Can change his mind, adding new revelation.

Acceptance might transform your indignation.

Please set aside the gun and bomb,

Or I fear the end of days will come,

Jerusalem itself will be no more.

The breathless child Lear left behind

Escaping into nonsense or fine birds

And pastoral landscapes of this remarkable kind,

Where life becomes more real, less absurd,

And men sit silently, no words

Upon their lips. Perhaps his promises had all been kept

Or maybe he has stood here, painting while he wept.

That is the best I have to offer on Jerusalem right now.

England?

It was not Jewish people who invented Zionism, it was the English in the eighteenth century. Thus Christian Zionism predates a Jewish version by more than a century.

Jewish law tells us that Jews are forbidden to return to live in the holy land. They are in exile all over the world because that is the will of their God.

They will be able to return to live in the holy land only when the Messiah is sent by Good to welcome them home.

As far as I know the Messiah has not yet come. There is a Jewish Rabbi in America who told the special one, Netanyahu, to get ready to welcome the Messiah who will soon come.

The English Zionists did not have to worry about any injunctions and prohibitions. For them the return of the Jews to the promised land would fit very well into their Christian eschatology.

There are a number of versions of “the end of days” for these Christians, some wackier than others. They are based on the book of revelation in the Bible which is a very odd text indeed.

The fervent hope is for the Jews to reconquer all of the holy land, bring back the Messiah (Christian version) and leave the Jews to rule the world under Christ, while all Christians will ascend to heaven in what is called “The Rapture”. There were a number of dates suggested in 2024 when the rapture would happen.

As far as I can tell, the Christian Zionists are still on earth.

I am unable to tell what happened to the first Zionists, but the idea cropped up again among a particularly extreme protestant sect called “The Plymouth Brethren” in the nineteenth century. The group persisted into last century. My first girl-friend at University came from a family of them.

They produced a version of the Bible with annotations supporting the ideas of Zionism, which took off in a big way among English people who emigrated to America.

Today there may be as many as 170 million Christian Zionists in the United States of America, a number vastly bigger than all the Jews on earth.

Russia?

The Jewish founders of Zionism were late nineteenth century Russians and Poles.

The eighteenth century was a time of rationality, science and intellectual enlightenment in Europe before the French Revolution.

But the nineteenth century went in the other direction, going for Romanticism, the irrational, intense emotion, and at a collective level, Nationalism. A God, which ruled all Christendom became a National God, which fought on the side of every Nation which fought another Nation.

It is very hard to fight an idea whose time has come, and Jews, suffering pogroms which sought to exclude, marginalize or exclude them in the countries of Eastern Europe, were no exception.

It helped that these founders were Jewish by culture and birth but not by religion. They were atheists. The injunction not to go to the Holy land did not bother them. Indeed, not all of them wanted to build their Nation in the Holy Land. It was always going to be an unwelcoming place.

While the Zionist dissenters in England were persecuted for their faith and many of them fled to the United States in search of a free and just society, it was the Jews of Europe who were most savagely persecuted, by states seeking to ethnically cleanse their territory to create a homogenous Nation. They were the victims of a great evil.

This is perhaps the best place from which to make a start, yet it is hard not to go back further.

Jews have been persecuted everywhere from the middle east to America.

It would take a big book rather than a little weblog to enumerate all the violence against Jews.

Why should this be the case? Are Jews more victimized than any other group in history?

The Chosen People

If you interact with Zionists on the Quora website, as I have done, you will find a number of things about Zionist beliefs that may surprise you.

1. Extreme arrogance.

2. Supremacist views

3. Belittling of anyone sharing different opinions

4. Being sanctioned by God to do whatever they want to do

You may well not be surprised. You probably already had these impressions from the people on TV who speak for Israel. Some were from Israel, some from the USA. The attitude was the same.

Jews are much more successful than any other group, they are most of the top bankers, singers, commentators, actors, directors etc etc etc.

As we watch hostage swaps again on our screens we see that one Israeli is worth about thirty Palestinians. In terms of deaths it is one for a thousand or more.

I ask myself if this is a long term attitude among Jews.

In London , where I lived among Jews in Hackney, I had a Jewish landlord who was even more arrogant than the most arrogant English teacher at my school and that is going a bit. But the Jews who lived and worked around me were not a bit like him. He was an ultra orthodox Jew, they were just ordinary people. I assumed wrongly that it was just the Hassidim who were objectionable. He was owner class, they were working class. He was a rich capitalist. They worked for him, quite a lot of them.

Let me make it plain; I do not believe in the superiority of one human being over another, or of one group of human beings over others.. I see this as a root cause or war and social problems. We share the same spark of humanity.

When one group sells itself as the chosen people of a monotheistic God, who accepts the existence of no other Gods, this group is always going to be in trouble with other groups. They will have to submit or fight.

My professional background is in psychology and psychotherapy, I have taught them both at the highest level in the UK. Within that I was a specialist in group psychology and psychotherapy.

Everywhere people create groups. From the earliest times it was small bands of hunter gatherers, something long predating our extended families and nuclear families.

Groups require ideas which hold them together. While there will always be tensions in a group, the bigger the group the greater the tensions. The tighter the rules holding the group together, the longer the group tends to last. It is important for external tensions to exceed internal tensions. Hence, the founder of a management consultancy firm I worked for had a motto of “Colleagues in adversity”.

Groups compete with each other. To do so successfully they exaggerate the good things about their own members and invent negative qualities about other groups and their members. Each group becomes the good guys, while others become bad guys. In the first world war National Groups fought each other to a standstill based on the idea that God, the same God, was on their side, while the other side had become possessed by something evil.

In a world where might equals right the victors “justly” punish the losers for fighting against them.

When you want to go to war with a neighbouring country you make up stories about how the enemy eat babies. This stratagem goes back hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Israel just pulled the old stunt to destroy Gaza.

My suggestion is that a small exclusive group that thinks it is superior to all those outside the group is going to find itself in endless conflicts with its neighbours.

If such a group is to survive and thrive it must either grow, keep running away, or find some means of dominating other groups by force or superior intelligence.

The Jewish group has stayed small compared to most others. It has suffered prejudice and hatred and violence many times, but it has survived.

Today it would appear to be more powerful and successful than ever in its history. Of which more later.