Great article. Vast misinformation has become "the truth" for much of the world. Part of the problem is the ignorance of how many Jews there are in the world. I love asking people, "How many Jews are there in the entire world?" I have asked people all ages, college graduates, non-college graduates, Jew haters, Jew lovers--and the answers I get back almost ALWAYS range from 100 million to a billion. When I tell them, "only 15 million Jews," they almost always shake their heads and say, "that can't be right," and then they take out their phones and Google it. Then they stare at their phones and murmur again, "that can't be right." (Even Joe Rogan had that reaction live on his show after he "guessed" 500 million Jews in the world and was told the truth). Oh, and show them a map of the Middle East with all the land violently colonized by what is now two BILLION Muslims and the teensy strip of land that is Israel, and you get the same reaction because it doesn't fit with the narrative of Israel being the "colonizing land-grabbers."
Grossman’s Law applies here, as it does to virtually every accusation against the Jews. But in this case, the accusation of Jews as colonists is a specifically Islamist claim (though western useful idiots parrot it often). And anyone who cannot see that Islam is the most pervasive, violent, cancerous, and culture destroying colonial force the world has ever seen is simply ignorant of history.
If colonialism is one of the few sins the modern conscience treats as close to absolute. To name a people colonial is to place them outside the circle of legitimate existence. Then we ought to demand that all those living in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand should pack up and move back to Eurabia.
This is the very essence of blaming Jews. Those who accuse Jews of what they themselves are guilty of hope that these accusations will erase their (real or imagined) guilt.
Like a child who breaks a crystal vase trying to blame a kitten. He doesn't fear punishment. He fears the guilt he feels for what he's done.
This was actually the comment I meant to say “exactly” to. Europeans went out from their various homelands in Europe and colonised, conquered, and converted how many millions of Indigenous peoples to Christianity in the Americas, and stole their land. Muslims went out from Arabia (hence the Arabs) and colonised, conquered, and converted Indigenous peoples throughout Northern Africa, the Middle East, Persia, and into parts of Asia. Have the Jews gone out and conquered, colonised, and converted anybody? No. We’re indigenous to the land of Israel, and we’d be very happy to coexist with our neighbors, except that they want to eradicate us. And yes, the West Bank is extremely complicated. Netanyahu is doing many things there that make me extremely uncomfortable, and they are fundamentally inhumane.
Way to render an otherwise accurate and important comment unlikeable. Judea and Samaria is not complicated once one strips away the false narrative. What exactly is it that Bibi has done in Judea and Samaria that makes you so “extremely uncomfortable” and is “fundamentally inhumane?”
I’m not trying to make anything unlikeable; I’m learning too. As I understand it, the West Bank, or, as I would call it, Judea and Samaria, is divided into 3 sections . Am I ok so far? When Palestinian terrorists are lobbing bombs and firing guns at Israelis, murdering them, I understand the Israeli response: defense. I’m also aware that Israel has really wrought damage on some Palestinians Christian villages, where the people there are simply trying to live. That’s not acceptable. If we aren’t being attacked, we don’t need to defend. I know a Palestinian Christian man here in America, and he says that things are getting crazy for his people. And they aren’t at war with Israel. So how am I to respond to this?
Hey, would you please provide some sources for these claims? I’d really like to see some actual reports of these incidents. Word of mouth is really just gossip and spin, and personal perception and opinion. Show me something I can at least corroborate or not with some research. Your claims require some facts to be credible. The endless demonizing without substance is just hateful and/or ignorant hot air.
This is such bullshit. First, the LA times is no better than the NYT— run a story outrageous enough, and the Jew haters will eat it up, and the weak of heart and mind will drink the kool-aid and apologize for it. This BS is tiresome and the same crap that appears in the local small town newspapers’ letters to the editor by the same lame Jew/Israel bashers ad nauseam. This event is a criminal incident and not representative of Israel any more than the local thug is representative of America. The fact that you insinuate this is Israeli policy, really demonstrates how gullible you are and have made yourself a tool of the Jew haters who know how to use ignorant people who can’t think or stand up for themselves. And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt. Ask yourself why you even fall for this crap. Try having some faith and pride. Education is also good.
Thank you to Matt Field for exposing the profound mechanics behind the accusation of 'colonialism' leveled against the Jews. His analysis strikes at the heart of the matter: the incomprehensibility of a people who reject the logic of both proselytism and assimilation.
However, I would like to take this further. The hostility we see today, masquerading as 'anti-Zionism' to gain a veneer of moral legitimacy, is not merely a historical error or a psychological projection. It is a visceral reaction from a West that has built its own identity around the myth of total fluidity and the transcendence of all contingency.
We live in a time that has declared war on stable ontology. Contemporary modernity aspires to an individual detached from bonds of blood, land, and tradition—constantly 'becoming,' stripped of any 'roots' that might limit abstract self-determination. In this context, Judaism—and its state form, Israel—represents an unacceptable anomaly: it is the 'solid body' that refuses to dissolve into the universal liquid.
The Jew, by their very existence, is a living refutation of the 'end of history.' Their fidelity to a millenary memory and their indissoluble bond to a specific land are not merely 'political choices'; they are acts of ontological resistance. This is what, ultimately, is unforgivable: the Jew does not seek to be 'integrated' (at the cost of disappearing), nor do they accept being 'absorbed' (to become something else).
Israel is hated today because it is tangible proof that sovereignty, the defense of identity, and rooting oneself in a place are not outdated concepts. By its very existence, it exposes the limits and contradictions of a West that has confused freedom with dissolution. It is no coincidence that the attack is so visceral: this is no longer just political polemic; it is the denial of the right of a specific 'historical identity' to occupy physical space in the world.
There is no dialectical escape from this trap: the world needs the Jew as a scapegoat, yet it cannot tolerate them as a sovereign subject. Recognizing this dynamic is the first step toward unmasking not only modern antisemitism, but also the identity crisis of a West that has lost the capacity to tolerate what it cannot transform into its own image.
The American leftist, who attacks Israel for being colonialist, also states that America is colonialist. After all, were not the Native Americans in America first? If Israel must dissolve, shouldn't America? A few say so, most do not.
Was not Europe colonial? England, France, Spain, did they not spread their cultures across the globe during the age of discovery, putting their culture on others? Yet they too attack Israel for being colonial.
Why?
The impetus is at its root, very similar to the root idea of Christianity: The Jews will die for THEIR sins.
When we face the enormity of the inversion of victim-culprit in the accusers' minds, we need to pause and think what type of collective mental illness causes it. We don't hear from professionals at all about this.
" The Jew", that eternal malevolently conceived monster ,embodies all the sins and inhumanities of the accusers. And yet, the depth of the discomfort in the Jew-haters signals another yet more profound abyss.
The Jew is seeing as supernatural, an alien with fierce mental and survival capabilities, capable of living without dogma and with all paradoxes and contradictions. Including the handling of guilt.
As a foundational moral faith, this is a constant irritant . Humankind is pronouncedly un-evolved. Christianity and Islam imposed moral and utopian boundaries on the savage breast, and the savages have not kept the pace. Evolution has been glacially slow.
The revolt against civilisation is in full view. The infantile dream that if the Jew - call it Israel- can be brought down and even be made to disappear, the yoke of an accelerated moral humanity can be reset, is alive in the distorted mind.
Freud saw it all. We are at a loss in making a case for the meaning of those now unbalanced and untethered Western and Islamic civilisations, " daughters" of Israel, as founded by the mother religion and why the blind rage against the mother has caused the millenarian deviations in so many. It's a case of civilisational matricide, and any language abuse or inversion , however grotesque, will do .
The great irony of the name “Palestine” comes from its two theorized etymologies.
The most widespread view is that Palestine derives from the Philistines - rendered as pelset in Egyptian and plishtim in Hebrew. The sense of those words is “foreigner” or “invader”, so hardly a term denoting indigeneity but colonialism in its rawest form.
The other view - even if the minority one - sees Palestine as a sort of Greek naming pun. In this view, it derives from the Greek word for “wrestler” as in “land of the wrestler”. If correct etymologically, it points to a direct Greek translation of the Hebrew “Israel” (he who wrestles with God) which was the name given Jacob after his mysterious encounter with a divine being as recounted in Genesis.
The advantage of this second interpretation is that the land associated with “Palestine” roughly maps on to the land Jews inhabited, whereas the Philistines, as far as we can tell, only occupied a portion of the coast from Gaza to Ashkelon, and so nowhere near the whole of what was seen as “Palestine”.
As it is, the Palestinians are the only “national liberation group” whose native language lacks a specific name for their supposed ancestral homeland. It’s all very telling, indeed.
Jews are considered 'colonialists' or of 'colonialism' because 'Colonialism' is the latest buzzword for destroying Western Civilization of which the Jews are part of.
The simple fact that Jews have lived in that area for about 4000 years is irrelevant. Somehow, the "Left has revised history to teach the youth that there were No Jews in what became Israel until 1948".
In quotation marks are a combo of asinine comments I have read since October 7, 2023, something I had not seen before.
The writer presents Judaism's reticence towards converts as a virtue, in my view it is a flaw and finds no basis in the Torah. Hashem's words are not exclusive towards Jews, as if only Jews are worthy enough or disciplined enough to embrace it. Had our faith been more expansive we would probably not be faced with generations of attempted genocide and extermination because our numbers would be many, as are the numbers of the faiths that fully embrace converts, even seek them out, such as Christianity and Islam.
in Genesis 15:5-6, God brought Abraham outside and said, “Look toward heaven and number the stars… so shall your offspring be,” emphasizing the vastness of his descendants.
In Genesis 17:4-6, God reaffirmed the covenant, saying, “I will make you exceedingly fruitful; nations and kings shall come from you.” Judaism has strayed from these clear indications of expansion and sharing the faith with the world, rather than the self defeating notions of not accepting converts readily and with open non judgmental arms.
Would Hitler have attempted to exterminate us if we numbered in the billions? Much of the suffering our people have endured through the ages owe, in part, to our seeming vulnerability based on numbers, which G-d intended our numbers to be as countless as the stars.
It’s not difficult to understand the math when for 3,000 years Jews have been slaughtered en masse and later forced to convert to Christianity or to live as Dhimmi under Islam. Anyone who is committed to joining the Jewish people can do so after a period of study and engaging in life as a Jew.
YHWH also intended for the Israelites to practice ethnic-based slavery. Do you endorse that too? And let's not forget there is no evidence whatsoever of any of the Hebrew patriarchs and we know these text were written, rewritten and edited many hundreds, if not thousands, of years after the supposed stories took place.
Hilarious, though appreciate the use of YHWH. "Ethnic based" slavery? Must have missed that part of the torah. I do believe in stoning adulterers, murderers, and those who blaspheme and take the name of the Lord in vain. Doesn't everybody?
I suggest you read it then. There are clear difference between the way in which slaves should be treated based whether they are Israelite or not. Generally scholars hold that internal Hebrew slavery was temporary and often debt related whereas foreign slavery was chattel slavery and could be permanent.
Leviticus 25:39–46
Exodus 21:2–6
Deuteronomy 15:12–18
You believe in stoning people who blaspheme YHWH's name? Maybe you should go back to the Bronze Ages then mate. YHWH is an evil POS made up by Bronze Age polytheists who originally believed he had a female consort.
Appreciate the references to biblical texts, which you clearly misunderstand without view of the times in which they were written. These writings were the first where slaves were given rights, entitled to be treated humanely, even given the same rest periods and holidays as non slaves without regard to ethnicity or whether they were Hebrews.
Exodus 23:12
Deuteronomy 5:14-15
The bible reminds the Hebrews they were once strangers in a strange land, and were once slaves to foreigners, so to treat slaves humanely.
Slavery was common practice in many societies throughout the world at that time, even today in some parts of the Muslim world.
As for stoning people who blasheme or commit adultery, not longer practiced and even in old times seldom practiced, Baruch Hashem.
As for your nonsense references to YHWH, Bronze Age polytheists, and female consorsts, no idea what you're taking about mate. Sounds like a bunch of nonsense originated by morons.
Unfortunately for you my first degree was in biblical studies and so I know what scholars actually say. The fact you have never come across YHWH's wife is an indication that you have never read any serious scholarly literature on the Hebrew Bible at all. I refer you to Francesca Stravrakopoulou's summary of modern scholarship in 'God: An Anatomy' where she writes:
"A number of other deities , who likely played their part in the polytheistic governance of the cosmos, were worshipped alongside him [that is YHWH], with the most prominent among them being Yahweh's wife, the goddess Asherah. The biblical writers cannot help but reveal that she was worshipped alongside Yahweh in his temples in Jerusalem and Samaria, while inscriptions dating to the eighth century BCE attest to worshippers seeking blessings from Yahweh and his Asherah'." p.24 (She is professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at Exeter University here in the UK.)
The Israelites were reminded to treat their own slaves kindly but foreign slaves were not afforded that luxury. Chattel slavery is explicitly endorsed in the Hebrew Bible when it comes to foreign slaves.
Did you even bother reading Leviticus 25 at all? I even pointed it out to you.
"44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly."
Property! They will become your property! Property which can be handed down to their children as inherited property. The only command not to be ruthless to slaves is when they are fellow Israelites. Not only this but there are laws allowing a father to sell his daughter into slavery which scholars agree is sex slavery. In some of the conquest passages of the Bible YHWH also endorses the keeping alive of virgin girls (and we do mean girls!) for the purpose of being taken as war booty. The consensus of the scholarship is that this is also sex slavery. They didn't keep the virgin girls alive to play chess with them.
Bravo yes... slavery was normal during this time in history but that doesn't lessen the fact that the Israelites participated in it and copied forms of it taken from Babylonia. There were also nations around the Israelites who were much kinder in the way they practiced it.
Oh and in the modern world slavery occurs all over the place not merely 'in the Muslim world' and you're incredibly naïve if you think it doesn't exist in the western world because it does. We have problems with it here in Europe still.
Appreciate your intelligent response. You clearly know the bible and have perspectives which baffle me, since Asherah appears in the Old Testament not as Hashem's wife (YHVH is an acronym which is unpronounceable in Hebrew, intended to convey G-d has no name humans can pronounce) but as a Canaanite fertility deity. Asherah worship was common among Canaanites and tolerated by the Hebrews because they hoped to live peacefully among them, if not provoked into war. Worship of this and any deity but Hashem was prohibited among Hebrews, and symbols representing other deities were destroyed. Kings who tolerated or promoted such practices were condemned.
Idol worship amongst Hebrews was problematic, with the most glaring and well known example Moses' frustration and anger when coming down from the mountain he saw the construction of the golden calf. Worship of Asherah was considered idolatrous and against the laws of Yawheh (common pronunciation of YHVH). Cite the reference in the bible where it describes Asherah as the wife of G-d. You are the scholar, not me.
If the scholars who informed your knowledge of the Old Testament were similar in outlook to Stravrakopoulou, who wrote that Asherah was considered in the Old Testament to be G-d's wife, I thing you were deprived of solid biblical study and perhaps should seek a refund of your tuition. I am no scholar, though it sounds to me your instructions and readings were largely intended to find fault with Old Testament teachings, laws, and scripture, and thus with the practice of Judaism.
One wonders how this back and forth flowed from my original comment that Judaism should be more welcoming towards converts, as we find in Christianity and Islam.
Tell that to the Hardim (ultra Orthodox) as they are against conversion, have no qualms expanding settlements or inflicting programs on villages and farmers. I did not fight in the Yom Kippur War, for Israeli land expansion. Yet the hypocrisy of no conversion but land that is Muslim for farmers for centuries is fine for occupation, even Gaza.
"a particular people surrender its particularity and dissolve into a universal story written by someone else"
The antonym for "particular" is not universal but "general."
The word "particular" is a term no other self-respecting peoples would accept to describe themselves because they recognize it is designed to efface their identity. Indeed, the world would never ask any other nation to delegitimize itself to gain approval. Self-immolation is not a national ideal.
The more appropriate term is "Distinctiveness." It is respectful. It acknowledges that the Other is worthy because the gifts coming from their their very uniqueness.
Great article. Vast misinformation has become "the truth" for much of the world. Part of the problem is the ignorance of how many Jews there are in the world. I love asking people, "How many Jews are there in the entire world?" I have asked people all ages, college graduates, non-college graduates, Jew haters, Jew lovers--and the answers I get back almost ALWAYS range from 100 million to a billion. When I tell them, "only 15 million Jews," they almost always shake their heads and say, "that can't be right," and then they take out their phones and Google it. Then they stare at their phones and murmur again, "that can't be right." (Even Joe Rogan had that reaction live on his show after he "guessed" 500 million Jews in the world and was told the truth). Oh, and show them a map of the Middle East with all the land violently colonized by what is now two BILLION Muslims and the teensy strip of land that is Israel, and you get the same reaction because it doesn't fit with the narrative of Israel being the "colonizing land-grabbers."
Isn't it cute for any spaniard to accuse Israel or jews of colonialism? Talk about a reparations bill that has never been paid.
Grossman’s Law applies here, as it does to virtually every accusation against the Jews. But in this case, the accusation of Jews as colonists is a specifically Islamist claim (though western useful idiots parrot it often). And anyone who cannot see that Islam is the most pervasive, violent, cancerous, and culture destroying colonial force the world has ever seen is simply ignorant of history.
If colonialism is one of the few sins the modern conscience treats as close to absolute. To name a people colonial is to place them outside the circle of legitimate existence. Then we ought to demand that all those living in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand should pack up and move back to Eurabia.
This is the very essence of blaming Jews. Those who accuse Jews of what they themselves are guilty of hope that these accusations will erase their (real or imagined) guilt.
Like a child who breaks a crystal vase trying to blame a kitten. He doesn't fear punishment. He fears the guilt he feels for what he's done.
Exactly.
This was actually the comment I meant to say “exactly” to. Europeans went out from their various homelands in Europe and colonised, conquered, and converted how many millions of Indigenous peoples to Christianity in the Americas, and stole their land. Muslims went out from Arabia (hence the Arabs) and colonised, conquered, and converted Indigenous peoples throughout Northern Africa, the Middle East, Persia, and into parts of Asia. Have the Jews gone out and conquered, colonised, and converted anybody? No. We’re indigenous to the land of Israel, and we’d be very happy to coexist with our neighbors, except that they want to eradicate us. And yes, the West Bank is extremely complicated. Netanyahu is doing many things there that make me extremely uncomfortable, and they are fundamentally inhumane.
Way to render an otherwise accurate and important comment unlikeable. Judea and Samaria is not complicated once one strips away the false narrative. What exactly is it that Bibi has done in Judea and Samaria that makes you so “extremely uncomfortable” and is “fundamentally inhumane?”
I’m not trying to make anything unlikeable; I’m learning too. As I understand it, the West Bank, or, as I would call it, Judea and Samaria, is divided into 3 sections . Am I ok so far? When Palestinian terrorists are lobbing bombs and firing guns at Israelis, murdering them, I understand the Israeli response: defense. I’m also aware that Israel has really wrought damage on some Palestinians Christian villages, where the people there are simply trying to live. That’s not acceptable. If we aren’t being attacked, we don’t need to defend. I know a Palestinian Christian man here in America, and he says that things are getting crazy for his people. And they aren’t at war with Israel. So how am I to respond to this?
Hey, would you please provide some sources for these claims? I’d really like to see some actual reports of these incidents. Word of mouth is really just gossip and spin, and personal perception and opinion. Show me something I can at least corroborate or not with some research. Your claims require some facts to be credible. The endless demonizing without substance is just hateful and/or ignorant hot air.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-05-07/israel-indicts-jewish-man-accused-of-attacking-christian-nun-in-jerusalem
This is such bullshit. First, the LA times is no better than the NYT— run a story outrageous enough, and the Jew haters will eat it up, and the weak of heart and mind will drink the kool-aid and apologize for it. This BS is tiresome and the same crap that appears in the local small town newspapers’ letters to the editor by the same lame Jew/Israel bashers ad nauseam. This event is a criminal incident and not representative of Israel any more than the local thug is representative of America. The fact that you insinuate this is Israeli policy, really demonstrates how gullible you are and have made yourself a tool of the Jew haters who know how to use ignorant people who can’t think or stand up for themselves. And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt. Ask yourself why you even fall for this crap. Try having some faith and pride. Education is also good.
Thank you to Matt Field for exposing the profound mechanics behind the accusation of 'colonialism' leveled against the Jews. His analysis strikes at the heart of the matter: the incomprehensibility of a people who reject the logic of both proselytism and assimilation.
However, I would like to take this further. The hostility we see today, masquerading as 'anti-Zionism' to gain a veneer of moral legitimacy, is not merely a historical error or a psychological projection. It is a visceral reaction from a West that has built its own identity around the myth of total fluidity and the transcendence of all contingency.
We live in a time that has declared war on stable ontology. Contemporary modernity aspires to an individual detached from bonds of blood, land, and tradition—constantly 'becoming,' stripped of any 'roots' that might limit abstract self-determination. In this context, Judaism—and its state form, Israel—represents an unacceptable anomaly: it is the 'solid body' that refuses to dissolve into the universal liquid.
The Jew, by their very existence, is a living refutation of the 'end of history.' Their fidelity to a millenary memory and their indissoluble bond to a specific land are not merely 'political choices'; they are acts of ontological resistance. This is what, ultimately, is unforgivable: the Jew does not seek to be 'integrated' (at the cost of disappearing), nor do they accept being 'absorbed' (to become something else).
Israel is hated today because it is tangible proof that sovereignty, the defense of identity, and rooting oneself in a place are not outdated concepts. By its very existence, it exposes the limits and contradictions of a West that has confused freedom with dissolution. It is no coincidence that the attack is so visceral: this is no longer just political polemic; it is the denial of the right of a specific 'historical identity' to occupy physical space in the world.
There is no dialectical escape from this trap: the world needs the Jew as a scapegoat, yet it cannot tolerate them as a sovereign subject. Recognizing this dynamic is the first step toward unmasking not only modern antisemitism, but also the identity crisis of a West that has lost the capacity to tolerate what it cannot transform into its own image.
Very well stated and so true.
Well written article. The conclusion is really terrific. Well done. Kol Hakavod.
The American leftist, who attacks Israel for being colonialist, also states that America is colonialist. After all, were not the Native Americans in America first? If Israel must dissolve, shouldn't America? A few say so, most do not.
Was not Europe colonial? England, France, Spain, did they not spread their cultures across the globe during the age of discovery, putting their culture on others? Yet they too attack Israel for being colonial.
Why?
The impetus is at its root, very similar to the root idea of Christianity: The Jews will die for THEIR sins.
Fantastic and eye opening.
When we face the enormity of the inversion of victim-culprit in the accusers' minds, we need to pause and think what type of collective mental illness causes it. We don't hear from professionals at all about this.
" The Jew", that eternal malevolently conceived monster ,embodies all the sins and inhumanities of the accusers. And yet, the depth of the discomfort in the Jew-haters signals another yet more profound abyss.
The Jew is seeing as supernatural, an alien with fierce mental and survival capabilities, capable of living without dogma and with all paradoxes and contradictions. Including the handling of guilt.
As a foundational moral faith, this is a constant irritant . Humankind is pronouncedly un-evolved. Christianity and Islam imposed moral and utopian boundaries on the savage breast, and the savages have not kept the pace. Evolution has been glacially slow.
The revolt against civilisation is in full view. The infantile dream that if the Jew - call it Israel- can be brought down and even be made to disappear, the yoke of an accelerated moral humanity can be reset, is alive in the distorted mind.
Freud saw it all. We are at a loss in making a case for the meaning of those now unbalanced and untethered Western and Islamic civilisations, " daughters" of Israel, as founded by the mother religion and why the blind rage against the mother has caused the millenarian deviations in so many. It's a case of civilisational matricide, and any language abuse or inversion , however grotesque, will do .
A superbly written essay that states our position as Jews, confident in who we are and respecting the other.
The great irony of the name “Palestine” comes from its two theorized etymologies.
The most widespread view is that Palestine derives from the Philistines - rendered as pelset in Egyptian and plishtim in Hebrew. The sense of those words is “foreigner” or “invader”, so hardly a term denoting indigeneity but colonialism in its rawest form.
The other view - even if the minority one - sees Palestine as a sort of Greek naming pun. In this view, it derives from the Greek word for “wrestler” as in “land of the wrestler”. If correct etymologically, it points to a direct Greek translation of the Hebrew “Israel” (he who wrestles with God) which was the name given Jacob after his mysterious encounter with a divine being as recounted in Genesis.
The advantage of this second interpretation is that the land associated with “Palestine” roughly maps on to the land Jews inhabited, whereas the Philistines, as far as we can tell, only occupied a portion of the coast from Gaza to Ashkelon, and so nowhere near the whole of what was seen as “Palestine”.
As it is, the Palestinians are the only “national liberation group” whose native language lacks a specific name for their supposed ancestral homeland. It’s all very telling, indeed.
Jews are considered 'colonialists' or of 'colonialism' because 'Colonialism' is the latest buzzword for destroying Western Civilization of which the Jews are part of.
The simple fact that Jews have lived in that area for about 4000 years is irrelevant. Somehow, the "Left has revised history to teach the youth that there were No Jews in what became Israel until 1948".
In quotation marks are a combo of asinine comments I have read since October 7, 2023, something I had not seen before.
Since when have Jew haters cared one whit for such niceties as history, facts, logic and truth? Never have and never will.
The writer presents Judaism's reticence towards converts as a virtue, in my view it is a flaw and finds no basis in the Torah. Hashem's words are not exclusive towards Jews, as if only Jews are worthy enough or disciplined enough to embrace it. Had our faith been more expansive we would probably not be faced with generations of attempted genocide and extermination because our numbers would be many, as are the numbers of the faiths that fully embrace converts, even seek them out, such as Christianity and Islam.
in Genesis 15:5-6, God brought Abraham outside and said, “Look toward heaven and number the stars… so shall your offspring be,” emphasizing the vastness of his descendants.
In Genesis 17:4-6, God reaffirmed the covenant, saying, “I will make you exceedingly fruitful; nations and kings shall come from you.” Judaism has strayed from these clear indications of expansion and sharing the faith with the world, rather than the self defeating notions of not accepting converts readily and with open non judgmental arms.
Would Hitler have attempted to exterminate us if we numbered in the billions? Much of the suffering our people have endured through the ages owe, in part, to our seeming vulnerability based on numbers, which G-d intended our numbers to be as countless as the stars.
It’s not difficult to understand the math when for 3,000 years Jews have been slaughtered en masse and later forced to convert to Christianity or to live as Dhimmi under Islam. Anyone who is committed to joining the Jewish people can do so after a period of study and engaging in life as a Jew.
YHWH also intended for the Israelites to practice ethnic-based slavery. Do you endorse that too? And let's not forget there is no evidence whatsoever of any of the Hebrew patriarchs and we know these text were written, rewritten and edited many hundreds, if not thousands, of years after the supposed stories took place.
Hilarious, though appreciate the use of YHWH. "Ethnic based" slavery? Must have missed that part of the torah. I do believe in stoning adulterers, murderers, and those who blaspheme and take the name of the Lord in vain. Doesn't everybody?
I suggest you read it then. There are clear difference between the way in which slaves should be treated based whether they are Israelite or not. Generally scholars hold that internal Hebrew slavery was temporary and often debt related whereas foreign slavery was chattel slavery and could be permanent.
Leviticus 25:39–46
Exodus 21:2–6
Deuteronomy 15:12–18
You believe in stoning people who blaspheme YHWH's name? Maybe you should go back to the Bronze Ages then mate. YHWH is an evil POS made up by Bronze Age polytheists who originally believed he had a female consort.
Appreciate the references to biblical texts, which you clearly misunderstand without view of the times in which they were written. These writings were the first where slaves were given rights, entitled to be treated humanely, even given the same rest periods and holidays as non slaves without regard to ethnicity or whether they were Hebrews.
Exodus 23:12
Deuteronomy 5:14-15
The bible reminds the Hebrews they were once strangers in a strange land, and were once slaves to foreigners, so to treat slaves humanely.
Slavery was common practice in many societies throughout the world at that time, even today in some parts of the Muslim world.
As for stoning people who blasheme or commit adultery, not longer practiced and even in old times seldom practiced, Baruch Hashem.
As for your nonsense references to YHWH, Bronze Age polytheists, and female consorsts, no idea what you're taking about mate. Sounds like a bunch of nonsense originated by morons.
Unfortunately for you my first degree was in biblical studies and so I know what scholars actually say. The fact you have never come across YHWH's wife is an indication that you have never read any serious scholarly literature on the Hebrew Bible at all. I refer you to Francesca Stravrakopoulou's summary of modern scholarship in 'God: An Anatomy' where she writes:
"A number of other deities , who likely played their part in the polytheistic governance of the cosmos, were worshipped alongside him [that is YHWH], with the most prominent among them being Yahweh's wife, the goddess Asherah. The biblical writers cannot help but reveal that she was worshipped alongside Yahweh in his temples in Jerusalem and Samaria, while inscriptions dating to the eighth century BCE attest to worshippers seeking blessings from Yahweh and his Asherah'." p.24 (She is professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at Exeter University here in the UK.)
The Israelites were reminded to treat their own slaves kindly but foreign slaves were not afforded that luxury. Chattel slavery is explicitly endorsed in the Hebrew Bible when it comes to foreign slaves.
Did you even bother reading Leviticus 25 at all? I even pointed it out to you.
"44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly."
Property! They will become your property! Property which can be handed down to their children as inherited property. The only command not to be ruthless to slaves is when they are fellow Israelites. Not only this but there are laws allowing a father to sell his daughter into slavery which scholars agree is sex slavery. In some of the conquest passages of the Bible YHWH also endorses the keeping alive of virgin girls (and we do mean girls!) for the purpose of being taken as war booty. The consensus of the scholarship is that this is also sex slavery. They didn't keep the virgin girls alive to play chess with them.
Bravo yes... slavery was normal during this time in history but that doesn't lessen the fact that the Israelites participated in it and copied forms of it taken from Babylonia. There were also nations around the Israelites who were much kinder in the way they practiced it.
Oh and in the modern world slavery occurs all over the place not merely 'in the Muslim world' and you're incredibly naïve if you think it doesn't exist in the western world because it does. We have problems with it here in Europe still.
Appreciate your intelligent response. You clearly know the bible and have perspectives which baffle me, since Asherah appears in the Old Testament not as Hashem's wife (YHVH is an acronym which is unpronounceable in Hebrew, intended to convey G-d has no name humans can pronounce) but as a Canaanite fertility deity. Asherah worship was common among Canaanites and tolerated by the Hebrews because they hoped to live peacefully among them, if not provoked into war. Worship of this and any deity but Hashem was prohibited among Hebrews, and symbols representing other deities were destroyed. Kings who tolerated or promoted such practices were condemned.
Idol worship amongst Hebrews was problematic, with the most glaring and well known example Moses' frustration and anger when coming down from the mountain he saw the construction of the golden calf. Worship of Asherah was considered idolatrous and against the laws of Yawheh (common pronunciation of YHVH). Cite the reference in the bible where it describes Asherah as the wife of G-d. You are the scholar, not me.
If the scholars who informed your knowledge of the Old Testament were similar in outlook to Stravrakopoulou, who wrote that Asherah was considered in the Old Testament to be G-d's wife, I thing you were deprived of solid biblical study and perhaps should seek a refund of your tuition. I am no scholar, though it sounds to me your instructions and readings were largely intended to find fault with Old Testament teachings, laws, and scripture, and thus with the practice of Judaism.
One wonders how this back and forth flowed from my original comment that Judaism should be more welcoming towards converts, as we find in Christianity and Islam.
Tell that to the Hardim (ultra Orthodox) as they are against conversion, have no qualms expanding settlements or inflicting programs on villages and farmers. I did not fight in the Yom Kippur War, for Israeli land expansion. Yet the hypocrisy of no conversion but land that is Muslim for farmers for centuries is fine for occupation, even Gaza.
Tell that to the Hardim (ultra Orthodox) as top k km
"a particular people surrender its particularity and dissolve into a universal story written by someone else"
The antonym for "particular" is not universal but "general."
The word "particular" is a term no other self-respecting peoples would accept to describe themselves because they recognize it is designed to efface their identity. Indeed, the world would never ask any other nation to delegitimize itself to gain approval. Self-immolation is not a national ideal.
The more appropriate term is "Distinctiveness." It is respectful. It acknowledges that the Other is worthy because the gifts coming from their their very uniqueness.