Discussion on Jewish Identity and History

Every American should watch this.

They share the myth that Israel is the result of the Holocaust.

It is absolutely false.

It's a myth.

It never happened.

Prior to World War II,

there were some 4 million, 4.5 million Jews in

what was called Eastern Europe outside of the Soviet Union.

These people couldn't stay where they were.

They lived among hostile peoples, people who didn't like them,

peoples who hated them, many of them, most of them.

There was an economic crisis of tremendous proportions.

Of 3.3 million Jews in 1939 in Poland,

one third were on or below the poverty level.

Jewish children couldn't go to school because they didn't have shoes

in the winter to go to school with.

There was a decline,

constant decline in the 1930s.

But there was nowhere to go.

America was closed.

Britain was closed.

Western Europe had closed by then.

South America was closed.

Palestine was closed by the British from 1936 on.

If you were to go back to the earliest days of Zionism

and tell most of the people who were embracing the ideology back then that you're going to get your state,

but here's what it's going to require and here's what it's going to transform you into, it would have lost a ton of support.

It took a long time and a lot of effort to even get much of the Jewish community around the world to support Zionism in the first place.

It was primarily just an Eastern European movement.

The German Jews, the French Jews,

most British and American Jews, it took all the way up until the 1930s before they started to come around to it at all.

If you would have gone back then and told them that this is what it's going to entail,

this is what it's going to take from you, a lot of people wouldn't have supported it to begin with.

When you have this edifice that is built on the brutality and requires really the,

not just the hard things to be done in war, but really to keep it going over time,

requires the population to take on a persistent mentality of paranoia and hostility, the way we've seen taken root over there,

something like that becomes, it goes back to what you were saying about the effect that it has even on the corruptor.

It becomes oppressive on people.

It becomes something that people are not as interested in defending. But it turns them into monsters.

The more you think you're hated, the more you hate other people.

Right. Yeah. It always happens that way.

For all of us.

George Kennan, when talking about the Soviet Union, he said something like,

I won't be as eloquent as he was, but that it's

the privilege of every paranoid man to eventually prove himself correct.

And it's because when you believe everybody's out to get you,

you interact with everybody as if they're out to get you. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're out to get you.

That happens with every cult, every,

honestly, every nascent nationalist movement.

We saw this after the first world war to go back to that.

You saw a lot of these emergent countries, the Polish, for example, the Czechs.

You see it with the Ukrainians now, especially since 2004, when you have this newly birthed sense of nationalism.

You feel like you're under threat, you know, you were just under an empire for centuries, you might be under an empire again if you're not ready for that threat.

And there's this real, real sense of paranoia and hostility toward outsiders that kind of holds the national community together.

And most of those other countries stabilized to a point that, you know, it wasn't necessary any longer and the kids were raised differently.

But in Israel, they've been in a state of conflict for their entire existence.

So that it's really just, it's become the identity of the state, you know, and unfortunately, this is one of the saddest things about the whole project.

And there were a lot of prominent religious Jews back in the early days of Zionism who feared exactly this,

that Zionism was just going to swallow Judaism whole.

And it really has done that.

And what that means in practice is that for so many Jews, not just in Israel, but in the diaspora,

the definition, here's a perfect example of it, actually.

There was a Gallup poll or a Pew poll a few years back where they polled American Jews and asked them, what is the most important aspect of Jewish identity?

And it was, you know, belief in the Torah,

affinity for the state of Israel,

various moral values and things.

Far and away, the number one answer, like 70% was remembering the Holocaust, which is another way of saying, you know, when you consider like the Jewish understanding of the Holocaust,

it's not the way the Armenians understand the Armenian genocide, where this is something that the Ottoman Empire, the Turks did to us.

This is the culmination of what mankind has been doing to us for thousands of years since, you know, the Pharaoh and all the way on up through, and then it culminated in this thing.

So when you say remembering the Holocaust, what it really means is remembering what they have done to us.

And when that become, when 70 something percent of, you know, your entire population are answering that as the primary fact that is constitutive of their identity,

there are going to be consequences to that and how that identity develops and how you relate to the rest of the world.

And you know, it's something... Well, how do you feel about people who hate and persecute you?

Well, I mean, I know how I'm supposed to feel and how I do feel. Right.

Right. No, Christianity offers us a way out of this.