Michael L.
Non-Israeli Jews have been in diaspora for 2,000 years or thereabouts.
We have been in diaspora so long that we have forgotten that we have a home.
The Land of Israel.
This is not to say that America is not also our home or that anyplace we happen to live, say Australia, is not a home. I live in California and have nothing but the highest regard for this land, and these people, and this country.
But that does not change the fact that Jews are indigenous to the east coast of the Meditteranean, just as the French are indigenous to France or the Japanese to their Pacific islands.
Israel is where we come from and why non-Muslims are so hostile to this notion remains a mystery to me. Many Muslims, of course, despise the idea of Jewish indigeneity because Islam is an imperialist religion and any land that was at any time conquered by the forces of Islam, as was Israel in the 7th century, must forever and always belong to the Umma, the people of Islam.
Jews, of course, have no particular reason to respect this wildly fascistic notion other than the fact that Muslims outnumber Jews by a factor of well over 100 to 1 and, therefore, have a far larger megaphone than do the Jews. Anti-Jewish racists, needless to say, believe that Jews control everything from the banks to the newspapers to the schools and do so for nefarious reasons.
This is essentially what the Nazis thought and taught.
It is true that Jews tend to punch well above our weight level, but there are reasons for this. It has nothing to do with "race" or genetic superiority, or any such notions, but because Jews have been put through the ringer by Christians and Muslims for millennia.
It was the very persecution of the Jewish people that has made us strong.
It was the persecution of the Jewish people that essentially created the IDF.
It was the persecution of the Jewish people that caused Theordore Herzl to create the First Zionist Congress in 1897.
Of all the ancient peoples of the Levant, only the Jews have survived. All the rest of our old neighbors are gone, including the Romans. The Jebusites are gone. The Assyrians are gone. The Babylonians are gone. But the Jews struggled through and survived.
I understand why Muslims resent Jews, but what I do not understand is why so much of the contemporary West also does. It makes no sense to me. The Jewish people, small as our numbers were kept, have been a major contributing factor to western culture and society, in the best sense. Judaism is a religion of law and, thus, throughout the millennia has worked through ideas of justice. This is the essence of Judaism and also a major contributing factor within Western jurisprudence and society.
There is a reason that so many towns and cities throughout the United States are named after Israeli towns. ---
But the bottom line is, the truth is, that the Jewish people are the indigenous people to the land of Israel and that is the land that we come from.
Many Muslims do not like this fact for religious reasons.
Westerners are just bullies.
