Nadene Goldfoot
Netanyahu has won the race for PM in Israel once again, but has not been congratulated by Biden, but Biden has already congratulated Silva of Brazil as soon as it was known that he had won. Biden called Brazil’s newly elected far-left president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on Monday, just a day after that country’s elections.
Is this 4th grade behavior I've seen in my students or what? Netanyahu enjoyed close relations with former president Donald Trump and helped his administration take the historic step of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided 3,000-year-old capital city. The Trump-Netanyahu alliance also brokered a historic set of peace agreements between Israel and its former Arab foes in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. To me, this is the one very important step that Trump had accomplished and meant a great deal to me and to Israel. Presidents have made promises as Obama had done, but always found reasons to never follow through.
The Biden administration, upon taking office, initially had a policy of not referring to these peace agreements by their formal name, the Abraham Accords the Free Beacon reported at the time.
Netanyahu has won with an obvious large religious coalition, and methinks this has bothered our American Democrats. They must understand that Israel is a very small Jewish land, created out of need for a safe place for Jews in a world of anti-Semitism. Israelites were told that we would be standing alone in our Torah. We've been created as we are through 33 hundred years of history, seeing great empires come and go, and yet the Jews remain, knowing what we must do to survive.
I notice that when anti-Semitism is at its worst with terrorists acting out a lot in Israel, the population as a whole is more comfortable and feels safer with Benjamin Netanyahu and his party, Likud. When assimilators were more popular, the Left was more popular. The arrow has swung around back to their original religious ideals.
We are different from the general public, we know. "Let us see what kind of peculiar creature the Jew is, which all the rulers and all nations have together and separately abused and molested, oppressed and persecuted, trampled and butchered, burned and hanged---and in spite of all this is yet alive." No, of course people haven't done anything lately that bad; the Holocaust was already 80 years ago. But Israel is living through its good days under conditions that Biden can't imagine with terrorists in Gaza shooting all the time; and neighbors on edge who have been threatening. The stress that Netanyahu shall have to be under and that Lapid has been living with is more than any other country could stand without breaking down. There is a Chinese curse; "May you live in very interesting times," and we certainly are.
Our people are different. As Ben Gurion once said, he was president of 3,000 presidents! Every Jewish man is a unique intelligent and creative thinker, usually. This is reflected in the number of political parties that have been born in Israel. There are 10 major political parties participating in the Knesset; and 15 other parties that didn't quite make it; and 29 former parties. We are not followers but leaders. Each man is a leader. You should have seen my husband, Danny. Every group he joined, he aimed to be the president and it happened. After living in Israel, I think it's the air we were breathing. I found myself writing plays and acting in them along with my husband. We taught school by day and acted at night. It's also in our genes that get activated just by being together.
So, another important big activity found in Israel is praying. What big activity does Biden see around him? Jews pray at the Wall, in their homes, at synagogues, at their meals, in restaurants, and some even rinse their hands with a pail full of water first before eating and saying a prayer. It's part of our culture for at least a great majority, especially the Orthodox and I'd say the Conservatives as well. Reform are a very small group in Israel, but we have many who are just plain secular, too. You see, our people are very active. They have parents who urge them to get college educations, to be doctors or nurses or lawyers, to read, to ask questions, who dote on them.
One more activity for the list is that of accomplishing a mitzvot, a good deed, like visiting a sick person in the hospital. Some people are really into that, getting excited when getting the chance to do a mitzvah. There's never a dull moment in Israel.
The USA has 3 major parties; Democrat, Republican and Independent. It's like the old Jewish joke of 2 Jewish men being washed up on an island and each builds a synagogue for themselves and another-the one neither one would enter. It doesn't pay to vote independent as they never win, only take away votes from one of the others.
A famous translator of the Talmud, Rabbi Adin Steinsalz, once said with tongue in cheek when asked to explain the prevalence of anti-semitism, "The Jews claim to be the chosen people, and the world suspects that they are right." As I think about it, we seem to have been chosen to be the world's scapegoat and I laugh as some Christian denominations claim to have already taken our place and that we are no longer viable or necessary anymore. Glad to see they thought we once were. When was that? Well, we believe that this choseness meant that we had a very heavy responsibility. It wasn't meant to be a reward. It was our stubbornness to stick to an oath taken that caused our being chosen. It was a demand that we remain alive and had to carry out our beliefs shared with us by Moses, for 4,000 years.
We were explained to that the world was to exist for 6,000 years and in the first 2,000, there was a lot of desolation, then 2,000 more years the Torah flourished, and the next 2,000 years is the Messianic Era, and we are in it now. Right now the year is 5783. We have to sweat it out for 217 more years and Wow! That's about 8 more generations to go.
Israel is a very Democratic country. They have elections and the people have spoken. They are also an extremely small country that can be reached by any rocket or missile. The USA is quite vast. They have much less to fear.
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Leo Tolstoy said, "The Jew is the emblem of eternity. He whom neither slaughter nor torture of thousands of years could destroy, he whom neither fire nor sword, nor inquisition was able to wipe off from the face of the earth, he who was the first to produce the oracle of G-d; he who has been for so long the guardian of prophecy, and who transmitted it to the rest of the world---such a nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is everlasting as is eternity itself."
Resource:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgzGqRQGRgFNKmqwjzSSXSjvJwkst
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-18008697
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesh_Atid
Book: Destiny by Ken Spiro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Silva_(novelist)
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