Big, big, fan of Judaism, not so much a fan of Zionism, not a fan of the Israeli Government per se.
If you are running behind the religious theology of the Abrahamic Covenant in Genesis, you ought to be familiar with Exodus 32 and 33:
Exodus 32:8-10:
8 They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, 'This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!'"
9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.
10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."
If you need the Cliff's Note interpretation - in verse 10 God tells Moses that the Israelites have angered him enough that he is transferring the covenant from Abraham's lineage to Moses' direct lineage, but Moses intercedes for the Israelites, and in verse 32:14 he convinces God to change his edict:
14 And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.
He is still a little upset, so this, parent to kids, 'get out of my face before I let you have it':
Exodus 33:3 - "Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way."
Most folks don't have a full grasp of Zionism, or for that matter, Jewish history.
First of all, the Romans won. A majority of the Jews in the Roman Empire probably converted to Christianity during the first five centuries AD following the official Jewish expulsion of Christians from synagogue worship. It is a common misunderstanding that following the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in the Jewish-Roman wars of ad 70 and 135, the Jews of Palestine were driven from the land as a people and that modern diaspora Jews are their descendents. Actually, there never was a great “dispersion” or “mass exile” of Jews following the Jewish-Roman wars of ad 70 and 135. Most of the Jews were “people of the land” (Am Ha’aretz), peasant farmers generally indifferent to politics but devoted to their homeland. Keeping a low profile, they remained in Palestine, many becoming Christians and Muslims under Byzantine and Arab rule. As mentioned earlier, Jews of the Diaspora, including the ancestors of today’s northern European, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, continued to be largely the descendents of proselytes. Today, dark-eyed, brown-skinned Palestinians are more likely to be Abraham’s physical descendents than the light-skinned northern European Ashkenazim displacing them. This has been acknowledged by Jewish historians, including two of the founders of the modern state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Zvi:
To argue that after the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus and the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt Jews altogether ceased to cultivate the land of Eretz Israel is to demonstrate complete ignorance in the history and the contemporary literature of Israel . . . The Jewish farmer, like any other farmer, was not easily torn from his soil, which had been watered with his sweat and the sweat of his forebears . . . Despite the repression and suffering, the rural population remained unchanged” (Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present, Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi, 1979; in Hebrew, translated by Sand, p.198).
The fellahin [Arabic-speaking Palestinian peasants] are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming . . . They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes http://questions.org/attq/are-todays...aelite-tribes/
It was more rugged for the Jewish people who left the middle-east, for the next 1800 years or so they were hectored unmercifully by primarily, Christians and Catholics. High points:
Mid-1400’s – Jew’s kicked out of many European Countries – some return to Israel
1500’s – first ghettos established.
1543 - Martin Luther wrote ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’ which contained these gems: the Jews are a "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision and law must be accounted as filth”; they are "full of the devil’s feces ... which they wallow in like swine”; the synagogue is an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut.” Luther advised Christians to carry out seven remedial actions:
1. to burn down Jewish synagogues and schools and warn people against them;
2. to refuse to let Jews own houses among Christians;
3. for Jewish religious writings to be taken away;
4. for Rabbis to be forbidden to preach;
5. to not offer protection for Jews on highways;
6. for usury to be prohibited, and for all silver and gold to be removed, put aside for safekeeping and given back to Jews who truly convert; and
7. to give young, strong Jews flail, axe, spade, spindle, and let them earn their bread in the sweat of their noses.
1615 – King Louis, XIII, of France: “ all Jews must leave the country within one month on pain of death.”
1619 - Shah Abbasi, of the Persian Sufi Dynasty, increases persecution against the Jews, forcing many to outwardly practice Islam.
1727 – Catherine I, of Russia: "The Jews... who are found in Ukraine and in other Russian provinces are to be expelled at once beyond the frontiers of Russia."
1862 - During the American Civil War General Grant issues General Order № 11 (1862), ordering all Jews out of his military district, suspecting them of pro-Confederate sympathy. President Lincoln directs him to rescind the order. During this period, Polish Jews are given equal rights. Old privileges forbidding Jews to settle in some Polish cities are abolished.
1871 - Speech of Pope Pius IX in regard to Jews: "of these dogs, there are too many of them at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in all places."
1881–1884 - Pogroms sweep southern Russia, propelling mass Jewish emigration from the Pale of Settlement: about 2 million Russian Jews emigrated in period 1880–1924, many of them to the United States (until the National Origins Quota of 1924 and Immigration Act of 1924 largely halted immigration to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and Russia). The Russian word "pogrom" becomes international.
1891 - Expulsion of 20,000 Jews from Moscow, Russia. The Congress of the United States eases immigration restrictions for Jews from the Russian Empire.
1899 - Houston Stewart Chamberlain, racist and antisemitic author, publishes his Die Grundlagen des Jahrhunderts which later became a basis of National-Socialist ideology.
1915 - The World War I prompts expulsion of 250,000 Jews from Western Russia.
1917–1921 - Attacked for being revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries, unpatriotic pacifists or warmongers, religious zealots or godless atheists, capitalist exploiters or bourgeois profiteers, masses of Jewish civilians (by various estimates 70,000 to 250,000, the number of orphans exceeded 300,000) were murdered in pogroms in the course of Russian Civil War.
1933–1941 Persecution of Jews in Germany rises until they are stripped of their rights not only as citizens, but also as human beings. During this time antisemitism reached its all-time high. The Reich Flight Tax is used to expropriate funds from Jewish emigrees.
1938 July 6–15 - Evian Conference: 31 countries refuse to accept Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany (with exception of Dominican Republic). Most find temporary refuge in Poland. See also Bermuda Conference. The only country willing to accept a large number of Jews was the Dominican Republic, which offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees on generous terms.
1939 - The "Voyage of the damned": S.S. St. Louis, carrying 907 Jewish refugees from Germany, is turned back by Canada, Cuba and the US.
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