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God Gave Them Someone Else's 'Land Of
Milk & Honey' To Conquer Twice?

By Jay Janson

08 October, 2011
Countercurrents.org

(Note to the reader: The title of this article will surely bring the usual automatic indignant and dismissing charge of anti-Antisemitism (a euphemism for anti-Jewish) especially from most uncritical promoters of the present state of Israel, however your peoples historian author knows his Bible, including the Torah (the first five books of it), and knows as well, subsequent events in the Holy Land since the time of its writing.)

Anyone with half an education can reel off names of the inordinate number of renowned thinkers, philosophers, inventors, composers, physicians, artists, singers, musicians, educators, actors, movie producing moguls, comedians revered as seminal contributors to Western civilization from Maimonides through Einstein and beyond. A student of human history cannot but be amazed at this impressively high proportion of beloved and respected household names being of Jewish descent.  Sociologists tend to attribute this disproportionately high number of geniuses and great achieving stars in the firmament of human development in the West to the emphasis given to study and learning in Jewish religious observance, stressed as an obligatory search for moral intelligence.

During the high Jewish holidays of October, as we watched TV programs of serious celebrations of the myths and stories that make up the traditional religious beliefs taught as the sacred history of the Jewish people of ancient times onward, this prodigious accounting of seminal Jewish contributions to humanity came to mind.  One would assume that most of these super intelligent and famous stars in the firmament of Western culture respected and enjoyed the traditions of their Jewish heritage. But how many actually believed the biblical tales of miracles and intercession of God and Devil handed down through three centuries as the true history of the Jewish people, and not to be challenged except in disrespect and bad taste? 

A good guess would be probably none, or a very few.  And now, in the space age of planetary exploration, ancient myths and superstitious belief in supernatural beings and events are looked upon as colorful and charming bonds of ethnicity, especially interesting for their finding integration in sensitive form in the graphic and performing arts and literature.

Normally, spooky parts of the fables of ethnic groups relating their history are taken with a shrug of the shoulders, a grain of tolerant salt. After all, we are all descended ultimately from a primordial savage background. But it is disconcerting to hear them emphasized or even praised as important, and characterized as something cosmically ordered and therefore good (good of course for those with their God on their side).   Einstein, for example was aware of various ethnic myths and legends being used for nefarious enterprise and brutally ignorant political purposes as propaganda for self-righteousness even is his day.

Given the present situation in Palestine carried forward from British occupation and the colonial powers dominated UN creating a sure situation for a bloody and unending civil war, certain passages in the Jewish Bible and quotes the Qur'an taken out of context have become uncomfortable to hear doted upon to justify homicide.

We cannot help but notice our own involvement in the Jewish stories celebrated during Jewish holidays for everyone to enjoy. For what was during Biblical times the God of the Jews, has become everyone's God in that part of the world's population with the religious heritage of Jerusalem, albeit with name Yahweh altered with some altered significance to Jesus and then later again to Allah. And it feels confining for anyone who has lived more among the non-Jewish, non Christian, non Muslim more numerous peoples of the world. Feels even worse forced to witness the in-depth lethal animosity between Jews and Christians on one side and Muslims on the other (notwithstanding that the former insist that good Muslims are on their side while Muslims insist that good Christians and Jews are at one with the Muslin side).

If one resides in a city with a huge Jewish minority like New York during the ten day holiday period between the major religious observances of Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah a day for renewing commitments) and the big holiday of Yom Kippur (for self-purification), one is aware of the TV networks presenting programs describing not only these holidays, but major biblical events leading to the founding of the Kingdom of Israel, its demise, and the founding of the modern state of Israel. For those of us aware of how the fifty-three year long miserable state of permanent hostility in Palestine came to be, watching zealous telecasts of bible stories and their inferred implications meant to distort real history, is extremely unnerving for the blatant and obviously intended mis-education of both children and the innocently gullible. It is a mis-educating that is not spiritually motivated, pious presentation notwithstanding.

We are treated to repetitions of the fables of the Exodus as miraculous fact, though some of us are aware that there exists no archeological evidence for the basic assumptions in the tale about the nature of the Jewish people of that time. Actually the Torah gives a more credible version than that what we are treated to: as the Jews depart from Egypt, they are able to easily sack towns for provisions and this reminds us that in studies of the earliest ancestry of Jewish leaders finds them of a warrior class, not unexpectedly, since most peoples of that age in early history were warriors.

Nowadays, with the term 'terrorist' in wide use, in Jewish bible history programs, the horrific passages in the bible describing the heavenly instructions given to slay every person and animal in Jericho and the many descriptions of the terror the indigenous people of that land felt with the approach of the Israelites is understandably skipped over. But when I was a child, we sang fun lyrics in church about Joshua making the walls come tumbling down, with no knowledge of the subsequent slaughter of all the men, women and children inside. To this day, the American spiritual "Joshua Fit' the Battle of Jericho, Jericho" is improvised on in jazz performances as a joyous theme.
Well, in all due respect to the needy righteous conquerors, it obviously wasn't joyous for the those who created, prospered, were invaded and killed by those God had promised their land to. But be that as it may, the Jewish bible was written by Jews for Jews though later, the spread of Christianity made it apply hypothetically to the whole universe, including the Buddhist-Confucius-Hindu-Animist majority of Earthlings. 
After the consolidation of the lands conquered, the saga of the Jews, which today is meant for Christians to consider their own, continues forward on to the glory of a Kingdom of Israel, suffered invasions, defeats, destructions, captivities and exiles that happened as well to various other nations of peoples during the rise and fall of the empires of the ancient world through that of the Romans. Then comes the diaspora over centuries, depicted more as an forced exile than a seeking abroad of opportunities in faster developing lands. Then the centuries of horrible persecutions suffered at the hands of by and large more recently civilized Europeans culminating in the Holocaust and afterward their being entrapped into a international-investment-community-backed grisly war situation for many desiring to return to what had become Palestine or colonial land (Carefully avoided is mention of their being entrapped into permanent war by the same colonial powers responsible for backing and investing in Hitler with full knowledge of his intentions). *

Jericho was invaded by Jews again during the  Six-Day War  of 1967, along with the rest of the West Bank, Gaza, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights, no massacre this time, but again, not a joyous occasion for the residents of Jericho. By this time, twenty years of outside investment stimulated warfare had seeded enough pain, injustice and hate to lock in excuses for ever more desperate acts of terror from the oppressed and conquered as well as further ever more unimaginable massive punishment and terror from the conquering, conquering ever further.

Therefore we wince when Jewish celebrations through another year's high holidays have featured the retelling again of a less than candid and complete history that will undermine future efforts to expose and curb a dangerous fanaticism in favor of a Greater Israel forcibly encompassing all the lands of the bible as God given. For although it was written,

"When the LORD brings you into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Hivites and Jebusites--the land he swore to your forefathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey- Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you, "

for if God gave the land in primitive times under primitive bloody conditions and circumstances, would God, three thousand years later, now followed by a infinitely wider swath of humanity, want the land reconquered in blood again in His afforded Age of Instant World Wide Communication, Rapid Scientific Progress and Abundance?

* See:
US Invested Heavily In Hitler Compensated Europe's Jews With Arab Land - Therefore
in Three Parts: Part 1. History, Part 2. Deception, Part 3. Imagining
Synopsis:
Israel is in bed with a US business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-semitic in outlook, and coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments made possible. A popular quip in Yiddish goes, “with such friends, who needs enemies?” Arabs saved Jews from Christian persecutions in 637, 1187, 1492. Now Christians are persecuting Arabs. Needed! Jewish-Arab Semitic solidarity. With the world evolving and changing, how long will Israel remain merely a U.S. outpost in the Middle East and servant of America's business run foreign policy of world hegemony in disregard of its own safety and that of everyone else .
http://www.countercurrents.org/janson090611.htm

Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his. GlobalResearch, InformationClearingHouse, CounterCurrents, DissidentVoice, OpEdNews, HistoryNewsNetwork, are among those who have published his articles .

 



 

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