ISRAEL UPDATE

September 9, 2001 - This is the part of the year that I like the most, since the weather hopefully starts to cool off, the football season starts and we start to look forward to the Holiday Season.

Jews around the world are now preparing to enter into their Holy Day Season of Rosh Hashanah (New Year), Sukhot (Tabernacles), and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).

Yet as we look at all of the positive or enjoyable things this time of year brings, we must look at the nation of Israel as it faces not just the Holy Days, but the threat of war as well.

It is hard to believe that this current trend of violence called Intifadah or uprising is now completing its first full year. Yet with the toll of dead and wounded almost daily on both sides, it actually now should be called a war of attrition, not an uprising.

Uprisings come within poor groups of people who are oppressed poor and have no support, yet fight to be free from oppression.

The Palestinians have received millions of dollars of weapons, supplies, and vehicles and have the support of the oil rich Arab world.

So as the Jews enter the stores to purchase supplies for the Holy Days, Israel must arm themselves against a world bent on her destruction. War, yes, uprising, hardly.
 

September 9, 2001 – It’s been said that war is nothing more than an extension of someone's political beliefs, however, one cannot make this statement without including religion in it.

History bears out that political ambition and religious zeal have always gone hand in hand when men's piety becomes misguided. Could we say the forces of the Vikings were any worse than the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman or Greek war machines?

Are we to say the Crusades that shed so much blood in the name of G-d, any less heinous than those of the Spanish explorers of the New World?

Dare we say the Bolshevik Revolution and brutality of Russian dictators would pale in comparison to those horrors of the Nazis?

Vietnam and Cambodia could surely be considered parallel to the crises in Boznia Herzogovina, with their religious persecution and political oppression.

Yet, sad to say, as the lifeblood of Israel is being slowly extracted by attrition, war can somehow be justified in the name of nationalism. Today, Israel's attempt to survive is being shown as Imperialism and their opposition are heralded as freedom fighters.

All war is ugly and horrible, but definition comes from the political, financial and religious ambition, not because G-d said to kill your neighbor.
 
 

To be continued...