RUTHFULLY YOURS

This past week, a group of young right-wing activists, including myself, met for a discussion with former MK Moshe Feiglin, in which he spoke about his goals when creating his new political party, Zehut.

Feiglin described the reality the way he saw it, as he often does, by describing the “horrible” state of affairs and claiming that the State of Israel was in very bad shape. He, of course, then promised that he was the only person who could change things.

“Is this the State of Israel that we dreamed of for 2,000 years?” he said.In the time leading up to Independence Day, I could not help but cringe when hearing such a description of reality.

I also could not help but answer with a resounding yes! This is indeed the state we dreamed of for 2,000 years, for in the past 68, Israel has grown into nothing less than a miracle.

ISRAEL’S POPULATION grew from a mere 800,000 in 1948 to an impressive eight million by 2013. This growth was caused by two things that were, by themselves, miraculous.

For a western country, Israel has a high birthrate, with 3.04 per woman in 2012, compared to 1.88 in America, 2.0 in France and 1.38 in Germany.

Since birthrates are usually a reflection of hope for the future, the fact that people living in war-torn Israel are still investing in birth is great testament that a nation whose national anthem is called “The Hope” is still living by this important principle.

The second factor leading to this population growth was Israel’s impressive ability to integrate hundreds of thousands of Jews who immigrated from all around the world.

From Australia to North America, through Brazil, Morocco, Europe, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Asia, Israel has successfully been fulfilling the biblical prophecy of the ingathering of the exiles: “The Lord, your God, will bring back your exiles, and He will have mercy upon you. He will once again gather you from all the nations, where the Lord, your God, had dispersed you.”

From its very beginning, this young and small nation with a fragile economy has been able to bring together people from very different backgrounds into one nation and an impressive, thriving democracy.

Israel is also the only nation in history that has been able to revive a dead language. It is hard to believe that at the beginning of the previous century, Hebrew was used as a language only for prayer and religious study. Today, it is thriving. People speak in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew, joke in Hebrew and even curse in Hebrew. Hebrew is once again a living language.

From 1950 to 2007, the per-capita GDP in Israel grew six-fold. The country’s now-thriving economy is at the center of international innovation, which abounds in Israel not only in hitech, the heart of the so-called start-up nation, but also in academia and defense industries.

As for international relations, things have never been better. Just recently, Israel opened an office at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. It joined the OECD a few years ago. While relations with the European Union are at times tense, bilateral relations between Israel and European states remain strong: Germany, France, England and the Czech Republic are all led by people who proudly call themselves friends of Israel. Australia and Canada have constantly deepened their ties with Israel, and even a very hostile Obama administration has not been able to hurt the strong bond between the Israeli people and the American people.

ISRAEL IS far from perfect. Its shortcomings span all its sectors. However, one must realize that this is true of every single nation in this world.

There are no nations that are perfect, no states without shortcomings. It is easy for a politician like Feiglin to distort reality by focusing only there and ignoring the incredible advancements of our society. It is also easy for politicians who have never been in a position of power – where they need to compromise on their principles, the way every leader rightfully needs to do in a democracy – to criticize ruling politicians for “not going the whole way.”

One can easily list the problems with our lack of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, ignoring the silent steps undertaken in order to protect the rights of the Jews living in these areas. One can easily list the problems we have on the Temple Mount, where Jews are robbed of their right to the free practice of religion when they are not allowed to pray.

Yes, there are still many shortcomings.

However, when we come to understand that perfection exists only in utopian fantasies, we quickly realize that when looking at the accomplishments of a government or state, we must judge not the way things are, but the trends that are present. Anyone claiming that Israel’s history has been anything but blessed with positive trends is living in a parallel reality.

There is still a long way to go, but Israel is on the right path.

A person can start working with the system to try and influence change, incremental as it might be, instead of having a “my way or the highway” approach like Feiglin has had ever since entering politics, where he announced he was running for prime minister before he even entered the Knesset as a regular parliamentarian.

Yes, compromise is less appealing, but it is the way things get done. This is how we see slow change happening. A lack of compromise means no change will happen.

Feiglin’s discourse is not very different from the discourse of the Left. People there are also imbued with utopian dreams instead of realistic policies. They like to blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for everything bad in this world, as if he were responsible even for the weather. Yet a worse aspect of this discourse is that it shows a great deal of ungratefulness for what we have accomplished as a nation in such a short time.

ONE WEEK ago, we celebrated Holocaust Remembrance Day. This week, we marked Remembrance Day, in which we remembered and thanked the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for us to achieve these great accomplishments, and celebrated Independence Day. The contrast between the two days shows how far our nation has moved forward in only a few decades.

By ignoring our accomplishments, by always asking for more without recognizing what we already have, people are showing a great deal of ungratefulness to all those who sacrificed so much to bring us to where we are today.

Asking for us to keep moving forward is a great thing. Ignoring our accomplishments turns us into incredibly ungrateful beings. ■

The writer is an attorney and a former legislative adviser to the Knesset’s coalition chairman. He previously served in a legal capacity at the Foreign Ministry. He is a graduate of McGill University Law School and Hebrew University’s master’s program in public policy.
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In a week or two, Israel will again be the focus of a well-dressed international lynch mob. According to news reports, US President Barack Obama intends to use the so-called Middle East Quartet, comprised of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU, as a tool to ratchet up Western condemnations of the Jewish state.

The report is expected to include even more expansive assaults on Israel for refusing to deny Jews our civil rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

It will likely ratchet up the false claims that have already been made to the effect that Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods and homes beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal and a threat to world peace.

The Quartet statement will also brutalize Israel for lawfully destroying illegal construction projects undertaken by the EU in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The EU engages in illegal building in order to subvert Israel’s rule of law and enfeeble the IDF.

Around the same time that Obama has scheduled his newest assault on Israel, France is expected to convene a so-called peace conference. The stated purpose of the conference is to restart the fraudulent peace process which the Palestinians killed nearly 16 years ago and have never agreed to resuscitate.

The novel aspect of the French conference, which neither Israeli nor Palestinian diplomats will attend, is that other than the misleading headlines referring to their powwow as a peace conference, the French are making no effort to hide that the sole purpose of their initiative is to condemn Israel.

The purpose of the conference is to provide diplomatic cover for the French government to recognize a state called Palestine. When then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced the conference in January, he said that whether or not the conference leads to peace, France will recognize “Palestine.” And just to be clear, the “Palestine” France intends to recognize will be located in land controlled by Israel and to which Israel has a valid claim of sovereignty.

In the face of the approaching international onslaught, thought leaders and politicians on the Left insist that Israel must act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they argue, must participate in the Paris conference, and he must announce an initiative now to vacate Judea and Samaria, or to stop allowing Jews to exercise their legal right to build homes in these areas and in Jerusalem.

As every Tom, Dick, and Harrietta tries to talk about climate change and the massive wildfire that destroyed a good portion of the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray — in the heart of the oil sands region, there is unscientific nonsense being spewed all over the place.

Take Elizabeth Kolbert’s article at The New Yorker. Apparently Kolbert won the “2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.”

Kolbert claims the following: “April was exceptionally mild.”

Wrong. Wrong. And even more wrong.

Here are the mean daily maximum and mean daily temperatures for the month of April at Fort McMurray since records began in 1916, with the 2016 data highlighted in red.

Not only was April 2016 not “exceptionally mild,” it was colder than April 2015 and quite a bit colder than many other Aprils in the past several decades.

What is happening instead is that Fort Mac’s annual average temperature is changing rapidly over time.

Jan Poller, my trusted friend and e-pal brought this to my attention….rsk
The Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies And Languages Presents: Is Islamophobia accelerating Global Warming?
Sponsored by Global Studies and Laguages, Global Borders Research Collaboration, MIT Anthropology

Ghassan Hage Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne Introduced By Bettina Stoetzer, Global Studies And Languages

Mon. May 9

This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’ Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist, titled: “Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?” (2016) that engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis” in Europe and beyond.

The talk is free and open to the public.