Love of the Land: For G-d - or country?

For G-d - or country?

Stewart Weiss
JPost
23 November 09

The phrase "dual loyalty" is generally used to refer to Western Jews who must decide whether they support Israel, or the foreign country in which they reside.

But now, this same dilemma is occurring among our IDF soldiers, who increasingly are being asked to choose between the immutability of military orders, and their sacred religious obligations.

This is by no means a new phenomenon. There has always been a tug-of-war between the requirements of war and Halacha.

Observant soldiers, particularly in combat roles, face, early on, situations that present a clash of values: Is it permissible to violate the Shabbat - by riding in a vehicle, using a walkie-talkie, or missing prayers - while in the field? What if there is no time to don tefillin, or no succa to eat in on Succot? To what extent should one risk his life to extract a slain fellow soldier so he may be properly buried?

These and other potential conflicts have been researched by leading rabbis and written up in army manuals that are made readily available for observant recruits.

But now another flashpoint has developed; one that not only affects the individual chayal, but threatens the unity of the entire military structure: Can - or should - a soldier participate in the evacuation of a Jewish settlement, resulting in Israeli land being ceded to the Palestinians; or should the soldier refuse his orders on religious grounds?

This problem has become infinitely more acute since the 2005 disengagement - when Israeli soldiers participated in the eviction of the Jewish residents of Gaza - and is coming to a head over fears that the present government, under intense American pressure, may evacuate as many as 63 more Jewish communities in the West Bank and Jordan Valley.

Already, several soldiers have been jailed for holding up signs signaling their refusal to be part of such an action, and many more have gone on record - even before their induction - as saying they will decline, if asked, to be part of such a mission.

Related: Insubordination can save Israel

THE ARGUMENTS on both sides of this Gordian knot are powerful and persuasive. On the one hand, as part of its "purity of arms" policy, Israel has always allowed for conscientious objection to actions judged to be immoral or illegal. As a people who know all too well what atrocities can happen when soldiers "just follow orders," and we respect the right of individual soldiers to refuse to participate in extreme measures which they deem ethically unconscionable.

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Love of the Land: For G-d - or country?

Love of the Land: The Land of Israel in Exchange for Goldstone

The Land of Israel in Exchange for Goldstone

By Moshe Feiglin

Translated from the Hebrew article on Ma'ariv's NRG website

If it were not so dangerous, it would even be amusing. There is certainly an element of poetic justice in the fact that the same people who gleefully destroyed the homes of over 8,000 Jews in Gush Katif are now being labeled as international war criminals.

In the summer of 2005, Israel's Left waged a war against the settlers. All the forces in Israel allowed to use violence were drafted for the battle. The goal of the war, as so accurately defined by Yair Lapid was "to teach them a lesson." Not peace, not security, not anything else. The State was simply drafted to wage war against the Left's internal ideological adversary.

As far as I am concerned, anybody who took part in the crime of Expulsion is a war criminal. True, there are varying degrees of crime; beginning with Sharon and Olmert, on through the Supreme Court justices and the writers, journalists and anchormen who enthusiastically encouraged the crime, the Likud ministers who voted in favor of the Expulsion, the rabbis who gave the halachic go-ahead to carry it out and down to the soldiers who obeyed their orders. Ultimately, all of them were polluted by this war crime in some measure.

My son will be enlisting in the army next month. I said to him: "If two top officers order you to guard the entrance of a room so that nobody will prevent them from raping a woman soldier inside, you must refuse to obey your orders. And by the same token, if they order you to simply be in the second military line-up or the tenth around the expulsion of a Jew from his home in the Land of Israel - it is exactly the same thing. Exactly."

That is why there is poetic justice in the fact that the Expulsion leaders are now being accused of international war crimes. He who sacrificed his brothers and his land on the altar of international acceptance now finds himself on the international defendant's bench.

It is even amusing. Imagine that tomorrow the current government falls, and businessman Ehud Barak, no longer armed with diplomatic immunity, cannot land in London. Can you imagine a greater tragedy? Bibi and Sarah will not be able to go to the opera, as they did when half the country was in bomb shelters and 130 soldiers and citizens were killed - all in the name of Olmert's attempt to boost his Convergence scheme to continue to destroy the settlements.

Did anyone really listen to Netanyahu's speech in the UN? What was the nucleus of his speech - after he dispensed with all the melodrama? Netanyahu's speech was directed at neutralizing the danger of the Goldstone report. In other words, he wanted to ward off the danger that an entire slice of political and military leaders will not be able to go shopping at Marks and Spencer. In his speech, Bibi said that - with his support - the State of Israel took unilateral action and expelled the Jews from Gush Katif. And if you don't get this Goldstone off our backs, we will not be able to continue to expel more settlers and to establish a state of terrorists in Israel's heartland.

Like it or not, that was the crux of Netanyahu's speech: The Land of Israel in exchange for Goldstone.

I once knew a very special Jew by the name of Shlomo Baum. He was Ariel Sharon's deputy in Unit 101. Before he died, he said to me, "Shimon Peres could not care less if this entire country turns into a pile of ashes - as long as he will be left standing on top of the pile." I was naïve then and I thought that the likeable old man was exaggerating. Today I know that his analysis of Peres holds true for an entire echelon of leaders who will sell this country out so that the capitals of Europe will remain open for their pleasure. Our situation today is more dangerous than ever before because until now, the citizens of this country were able to compensate - with their sweat and blood - for the foolishness of their leaders. Now, the enemy has found the way to direct the arrows straight into our weak spot - the leaders of the State of Israel.

The danger at our threshold is much broader than the question of how our threatened leaders will behave. Historically, physical destruction has always come on the heels of demonization. Gush Katif could not have been destroyed before the demonization of the settlers that preceded the actual expulsion. Even though I was just a young boy in 1967, I still remember Nasser's propaganda against Israel that preceded the Six Day War. All the pogroms and the holocausts that we suffered in the exile were preceded by poisonous propaganda that negated the Jews' very right to exist.

Our flight from our Jewish identity and our decades-long attempt to establish a state of all its citizens in Israel precludes our ability to give a Jewish answer to the claims of the Moslem and Christian world. When we adopted their moral standards, we seated ourselves on their defendant's bench.

It makes no difference how many Israeli soldiers were killed and will be killed, G-d forbid, in our attempt to wage war according to the values of the Western world. We will always be the bad guys- the robbers - in the story. When in 1967 we did not do what we did in 1948 - and left the Arabs in our land - we proved that we accept the principle that this land actually belongs to them. When we drove out the Jews who nevertheless believed in this land and made it flourish, we irreversibly proved the claim that this land is not ours.

I was there, in Gush Katif, when it happened. There was more foreign press there than there were grains of sand. The entire world watched in anticipation to see if it would really happen. The Jews drove themselves out of their land and from that point and on, we are robbers/colonialists - also in Tel Aviv and in Haifa. Furthermore, whoever fires missiles at us from Gaza is a freedom fighter. You can send them one thousand text messages before you invade - but you will still be a war criminal. The Goldstone Report would never have seen the light of day without the Expulsion.

So there is no reason to be amused. The international demonization that we are experiencing threatens more than Ehud Barak's next weekend in London. It threatens us all with physical annihilation.

Nevertheless, there is something positive that is coming out the Goldstone debacle. The State of Israel has its back to the wall and is being forced to re-think its basic assumptions. The 'normalcy' idea is officially bankrupt. The commentators and pundits are still attempting to blame the IDF or Israel's diplomatic efforts. "We should have cooperated with Goldstone," they say. But here and there, we already see individual journalists, like Ari Shavit in Ha'aretz, who at least understand that the problem is not tactical, but rather the essential negation of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

Understandably, the solutions that they suggest are the very same "political processes" that have brought us to this crisis. Their horizons are as broad as an ant's. But as the crisis continues, wider and wider circles in Israeli society will begin to listen to the voices outside the media bubble. Policies that base their justice on Judaism will become Israel's lifeline.

Love of the Land: The Land of Israel in Exchange for Goldstone

For Zion's Sake: Finally Home, and Never Leaving Again

Finally Home, and Never Leaving Again

1012, Jews expelled from Mainz. 1290, Jews expelled from England. 1306, Jews expelled from France. 1483, Jews expelled from Warsaw, Sicily, Lithuania and Portugal. 1492, all Jews expelled from Spain. 1510, Jews expelled from Brandenburg, Germany. 1569, Pope orders all Jews out of the Papal States. 1593, Jews expelled from Italy and Bavaria. 1941, Jewish refugees expelled from the German Reich to Poland. 1956, Jews expelled from Egypt.

Both Church doctrine and Islamic teachings adopted the theology of the Wandering Jew, that the continuous expulsions of Jews was proof of their debased status and rejection by G-d. Jews were regularly forced out of their homes in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East at the whims of kings, clergymen and rulers. The partial list of expulsions above shows the regularity with which Jews were uprooted and were forced to seek new host countries. This 2000 year period of exile forever came to a close on one historic night in May 1948 when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the re-establishment of the State of Israel and the promise of immediate citizenship to any Jew who desired.

Never again were Jews to be left without a refuge or a place of safety. As Hitler's dark forces grew, the world began to close its doors to Jewish immigration, leaving the Jews of Europe doomed to the Nazi inferno. "None was too many" was the infamous response of a Canadian official when asked how many Jewish refugees his country would let in. Then suddenly, this homelessness came to an end with the earth-shattering words: "we... hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, to be known as the State of Israel". Finally, the exile had ended. When the Jews of the Arab world were forced out of their homes, they found a country waiting for them with open arms. The Jews of Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc. were not condemned to wander or to languish in camps but became full citizens in their own country, the Jewish state.

Incredibly, the very same countries that threw Jews out of their homes, prompting many to make their way to Israel and fight for their right to their own state there, are now leading the way in preparing for the expulsion of Jews from there. Leaving the lands of Europe behind, Jews came to Israel and now the European countries are demanding that Jews leave their rightful homes in Judea and Samaria. 70 years after the cry was 'Jews to Palestine!', the grandchildren of those who screamed this now yell 'Jews out of Palestine!'.

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For Zion's Sake: Finally Home, and Never Leaving Again

For Zion's Sake: The Cairo Obamination

The Cairo Obamination

Before the eyes of billions of people worldwide, the leader of the free world munched happily on Mohammedan tuches. In what is without a doubt the largest example of appeasement before terror and fascism since Chamberlain, Obama brought his message of love, peace and reconciliation to the Islamic world, in Cairo. Crying "peace, peace in our time", he repeated ad nauseum myths and revisionist history about "civilization's debt to Islam", his hope for peace between "all the children of Abraham", and apologized for America upsetting the Islamic world. This speech is extremely significant in light of the declaration of jihad against the United States and the Western world, since the victim of aggression cannot even recognize that he is at war. Here are parts of Hussein Obama's speech, with my comments interspersed.

I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement.

Such higher learning is manifested in Al-Azhar's Grand Sheikh's approval of suicide bombings on Islamic grounds.

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For Zion's Sake: The Cairo Obamination

For Zion's Sake: The Hope Lives

The Hope Lives

World leaders goose-step zealously around the "two-state solution", hovering like vultures ready to carve up and divide Israel. Bibi just returned from Washington where he met with the chief supporter of this plot, President Obama. There, he was told in no uncertain terms that Jewish couples in Judea and Samaria cannot be allowed to have children or build homes, and that the US intends to negotiate with Iran, and not deal with the nuclear ayatollahs militarily. To his credit, Bibi did not fold under the intense pressure. One this is clear: the United States is preparing to sacrifice Israel as a scapegoat for "peace" and "reconciliation" with the Arab world.

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For Zion's Sake: The Hope Lives