some inconvenient truths about religious fanatics in Palestine and America

    While the world’s most famous Bible salesman, who told Israel he is their best friend, is prosecuted in his hometown for paying a porno star hush money to help him get elected president, this very interesting analysis of where the Jews in Israel originated showed up in my email account yesterday, and I could not help myself.

My Two Senses

Hopefully, Some Small Insight on the Hamas-Israel War
In this conflict everyone loses, again and again.

OL’ FLAWRIDUH CRACKER
MAY 15, 2024

Arc of a Covenant, authored by Walter Russell Meade* was published in 2022. Though it received highly positive and glowing reviews, it never landed on my list of must reads. No, I’m not going to cry over not having read this in two years ago. However, I’m ecstatic over finding it recently.

Among the numerous food for thought insights he provides are:

The demographics of Israel

For most of my life I believed that the vast majority of Jews in Israel (I would have thought 80% conservatively) migrated to Israel from Europe in three waves. The first and far smaller was post WWI as the result of the Balfour Declaration, where Great Britain carved out a homeland for Jews in Palestine. This wave was supported largely by the Zionist movement 

The second and far larger would be of course survivors of the Holocaust, what might be called “The Exodus” wave made popular by Otto Preminger’s blockbuster film with Paul Newman in the lead protagonist role.

The third wave embedded in my mind was resultant from the crumbling of the USSR, where Russian Jews, exited to move to Israel.

Occasionally I would read about Jews from Ethiopia and North Africa migrating, but it barely made my radar scope.

Here is the reality

The largest sect of Jews in Israel today are not from or descendent from the WWII Holocaust European or Ashkenazi Jews ( 32%). The largest Jewish ethnic group in Israel, about 40% to 45% of Israel’s population, are called Mizrahi; Jews’ whose ancestors hailed from Jewish communities in the Middle East, including Israel itself.

Map from Wikipedia indicating geographic origins of Mizrahi Jews whose diaspora came almost exclusively from being driven from Muslim/Arab nations.

The second-largest ethnic Jewish group in Israel, about 32% of the population, is Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry to central Europe, most often via Eastern Europe. By 1945 when WWII ended, about two thirds of these Jews had been murdered by the Nazis.

Why this shows has connection to the current Hamas-Israel War?

This is largely the conclusion I draw from the fact that in the 1948 war about 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee Palestine and within the year:

entire communities of Jews in Middle Eastern countries (primarily Iraq and Yemen) were relocated to Israel with the active help of the State. Jews from North African countries followed in the late 1950s in a wave of migration that continued until the late 1960s. While they were all Jews, they were a rather diverse population in terms of their socioeconomic resources 

(Cohen 2002; Semyonov and Lerenthal 1991),

Effectively the fledging state of Israel embittered three-quarters of million Palestinians by taking the land they lived on and then back filled it with equally embittered Mizrahi Jews who had been driven from their land by Muslim ruled nations.

There is no “The Reason” for the renewed and devastating war that now rages, but the situation that drove it was virtually cemented in by 1948.

---

* Meade is a professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest. From 1997 to 2010, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
Dang interesting demographics. 
Too bad the good American Bible people didn’t clamor for America to receive the European WWII Jewish refugees, instead of later clamoring for the state of Israel to come to be, because their Bible gave that land to the Israelites, even though they had told God to take a hike many times since being made that promise? Now the good American Bible people, and their Bible salesman, Donald the Great, want Israel to atone for some of their ancestors having Jesus crucified by defending where he was born, roamed and died to save them, whom he never knew, from whatever they did wrong without any remorse, even to the extent of killing every Muslim nearby, if that’s what it takes?

Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker
I’ll use Meade’s research to lend some insight on American support for Palestine as a land where Jews could go to live.
It is a combination of views and ideals that morph over time. American support for “nationalist” causes, where people of all ethnic and nationalists beliefs would have a place to call homeland is a big part of it. Why? Because it mirrors concepts of self determination, and Democracy for the downtrodden. 
Another ties in with Biblical philosophy among Evangelicals and Puritans who felt America was a surrogate for the “shining city on a hill” and all kinds of Moses like promised land is America thinking.
Finally, after the “Big Wave” of immigration it meant less Jews living in America, because they had a place they could go to. Out of sight out of mind.

Sloan Bashinsky
Indeed, out of sight out of mind :-)
Imagine no Israel in Palestine. Imagine the hand-wringing and gut-wrenching in the America religious right over Islam controlling where their Jewish savior was born, roamed, and killed at the behest of Jewish leaders of that time. 
That’s what the Crusades were about- Islam controlled that place. That, and a lot of Christian men were not happy where they were and took a vacation hoping to get laid, feel important, get rich, famous, or whatever.
As long as Israel exists, that place will be what the Old Testament foretold, and maybe that’s where Armageddon will start? If Israel feels sufficiently threatened, it will detonate its nuclear arsenal wherever it feels will do it the most good and wreak the most havoc.
The America religious right hope Israel will kill every Muslim in the Middle East.
When Donald Trump announced he was Israel's best friend, he hoped that would get him every Jewish vote in America.
When Trump started praising the Bible, he hoped it would get him every conservative Christian vote in America. 
The two Bush presidents got America into a war with Islam, and President Biden and the Democrats view Israel as America’s only ally in the Middle East.
In Genesis, God told Abraham that Isaac’s seed would become a great nation, and that Ishmael’s seed also would become a great nation and would cause Isaac’s seed trouble. Judaism and Christendom view Isaac as the child God promised Abraham, but Islam views Ishmael as that promised child, and therein lies the still very much alive root of what is going on in that region.

Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

Clearly a core issue in the “legitimacy” issues of Israel and Palestine is directly tied to “The Bible.” Because this proponents will tell you is the accurate, and undeniable truth, straight from God to those he inspired. So, depending on the current “expert” of the moment, currently claiming to have a direct connection with God as a divine interpreter, then there is no higher voice of truth or authority. This methodology worked well for early Puritans, who decided to make America the “New Jerusalem” The authority of a perceived God who sanctions a belief is clearly powerful stuff. It’s what makes suicide bombers and martyrs as well.

Sloan Bashinsky

You summed it up nicely, even though puking might be the candid response :-). Religious fanatics are certain God is on their side, they are the chosen people, and that’s been proven over and over again in Judaism, Christendom and Islam. If I were America’s president, I would detach America from the Middle East altogether, and let whatever happens there, happen, while I attempt do deal with what is going on in inside of America, which is so much less convenient and fun, but it is what the Jew Jesus recommended- beam in one’s own eye, the true jihad. :-)  Any nation that claims to be under God and puts in God we trust on its money, invites God to say, “Oh, really?”:-)

    After I published the above at my Substack newsletter, a classmate at Crestline Heights Elementary School in Mountian Brook, Alabama, commented:

Peter Rodes Robinson
Utopian Solutions 
Very readable and interesting. I recommend putting colons after headlines that indicate who is speaking. I didn't immediately get the alternative speaker structure of your essay.
A relevant fact. Some Arabs in the Middle East protected Jews during Holocaust. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_and_Muslim_rescue_efforts_during_the_Holocaust

Sloan Bashinsky
Thanks, Peter.
It was OL’ FLAWRIDUH CRACKER’s My Two Sense’s Substack post, so I didn’t occur to me to use colons, which I used to do when reporting dialogue with other people, and maybe I should return to that style.
Once upon a time, I read in the Koran that Mohammed advised treating surrendered enemies kindly. From what I read of the history of the Middle East, Asia Minor, Turkey, etc. after Islam took it over, people of all faiths were welcome, as long as they didn’t cause trouble. 
The Christian Crusades seriously damaged that balance and created deep hard feelings in Islam toward Christendom. 
I’ve had several discussions with OL’ FLAWRIDUH CRACKER since stumbling across his Substack. He does not belong to any herd, sect, cult, from all I can tell. He puts a great deal of thought into what he publishes. He does not seem inclined to think, or believe, or perhaps he’s simply agnostic, that what you and I were raised in Crestline to call God exists. So, he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to give the three Abrahamic religions/their scriptures credit for the dynamics in Palestine and the Middle East. 
The Christians and Jews I discuss Palestine with tend to side the chosen people view and that’s why America must help Israel. Their Bible says, so that’s what is, as far as they are concerned. 
I wonder how they would deal with what Archangel Michael told me as I walked out of the U.S. Post Office in Key West a few days after 9/11? “America should get out of the Middle East altogether and let Islam and Israel fight it out, or work it out, and in that way learn, which, if either, are God’s chosen people?” 
Three nights before 9/11, Michael had asked me in my sleep, “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I woke up, made the prayer and went back to sleep. On 9/11, my concern was President Bush would get America into another Vietnam-like war it could not win. It did not occur to me that he would get America into two such wars.
Whenever I told American Christians or Jews what Michael told me, they shrugged it off, or looked at me like I was daff, or nuts.
I remember a Methodist Sunday school teacher telling his class in 2004, “I wish God would kill all Muslims!” I said softly, “What about turn the other cheek, pray for and do good to your enemies?” He said it again. I tried again. He said it again. I switched gears and said loudly, “What’s wrong with Christians? Don’t they read their own Bible?! In Genesis, God told Abraham that Ishmael’s seed would become a great nation and cause Isaac’s seed trouble, so if God said it, what’s the big deal?” It was as if all the oxygen was taken out of that Sunday school classroom. They couldn’t speak. 
I spent some time in churches back in those days, even though in the Gospels Jesus himself never built one church of wood, stone and mortar.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com