I recently read an opinion piece by a young woman in the Bay Area who described how her Jewish values, informed by her Jewish upbringing, compelled her to travel to the “occupied territories” in order to defend the Palestinians against the Israelis. The obvious question is, what exactly does she mean by “Jewish values?” Traditionally, Jewish values mean God, the Torah, and the Covenant, which includes the promise of the Land of Israel. According to these values, saying that the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is an illegal occupation of land that rightfully belongs to some other nation is equivalent to renouncing Judaism itself. But the young woman’s version of Judaism apparently doesn’t include these concepts.
The fault is not hers alone, but her teachers, and their teachers, going back multiple generations, who have followed a corrupted form of Judaism that rejects our religion’s most basic tenets and attaches supreme importance to artificial social theories that have never been proven to work anywhere.
One of the peculiar features of this corrupted Judaism is its worship of victimhood. Everything is seen through the eyes of the victim. Claiming that you’re oppressed grants you instant moral authority, while being accused of oppression makes you an automatic pariah never entitled to the benefit of the doubt. So if the Israelis impose harsh measures on the Arabs, the only possible explanation is the sadistic pleasure they get from doing so. No consideration is given to the possibility that the Arabs might have done something to deserve such treatment.
People who follow this corrupted form of Judaism also seem totally oblivious to the fact that Arab leaders constantly cultivate an attitude of murderous hatred against Jews, and that they would slaughter them without mercy if Israel ever let down its guard enough to enable them to do so. They claim to be opposed to violence, but we don’t hear howls of protest from them when the official Palestinian media calls on every Arab to grab a knife and stab the first Jew he sees. Maybe they feel that such actions, though perhaps regrettable, are a natural and understandable response to the inconveniences Arabs are put through when they’re searched for weapons at checkpoints.
The real problem in the Middle East is the obsessive rage that many Arabs and Muslims feel toward Jews, rage which is carefully passed down from generation to generation and actively nurtured by Arab leaders, in a culture that has a very long tradition of settling its disputes by the sword. Why this murderous rage exists, and whether Jews themselves might bear some responsibility for it, and whether some Jews might bear more responsibility than others, could be the subject of another article. But the rage is real and it isn’t placated by the activities of these ill informed Jews, who imagine themselves to be contributing to peace, but who are seen by their Arab “friends” mostly as “useful idiots” who work to weaken Israel’s ability to defend itself in preparation for its final destruction.