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Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Why Israel Is Needed and What Brought it About

Nadene Goldfoot
Ever since 70 AD, Jews have not had their own country which was then Judea.   Thousands were carried off when Rome conquered their country.  Not all Jews left then, and they and their descendants have remained but were few in number compared to the population they had before.  From 132-135 Bar Kochba revolted with his group, but were defeated.  That was the last try of regaining the land from the Romans. 

In Rome Jews were locked up in ghettos, and this idea spread to other countries as well.  In Russia they were confined to the Pale of Settlement, as they weren't allowed in Russia proper. 

Ever since then they have been treated as the scourge of the earth due to religious attitudes of accusations of having killed Jesus.  People were being brought up to hate Jews. That they had lost their country wouldn't have been so bad except that they were treated like 3rd class citizens wherever they went. 

Jews had to go through the Crusades and were killed all along the route to Palestine as well as being there.  Then they suffered from the Spanish Inquisition when people were forced to convert to Christianity or leave the country, and if they dared to cover up their Jewishness and were caught doing so, they were killed. 

France has always been a pretty sensitive country to people's needs, but even there anti-semitism showed its ugly head in November of 1894.  Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillary officer, was of Alsatian Jewish descent. He was accused of telling secrets to the German embassy in Paris.  Convicted wrongly, he was sent to Devil's Island in the French Guiana and put in solitary confinement. 

Two years later in 1896 evidence was brought forth that a Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the culprit, but this evidence was supressed and he was exonerated.  This put Alfred in further trouble as false documents accusing him were brought to court.  Emile Zola wrote about this frame-up and finally the evidence was deemed baseless.  Alfred Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a Major in 1906.  He served in WWI as a Lt. Colonel and died in 1930. 

Theodor Herzl was a Hungarian journalist who reported on the trial.  He was not a religious Jew but had been concerned about all the anti-semitism he knew to be going on not only in France but Russia as well, for in Russia Jews were suffering from constant pogroms or attacks on their villages resulting many times in deaths.  Theodor wrote "The Jewish State" in 1896 and founded the "World Zionist Organization" calling for a Jewish state in Palestine once again.  He saw that despite the Enlightenment and assimilation of Jews, they could never hope for fair treatment in European society.  The Dreyfus Affair was not the first motive for him to think along these lines, but it could have been the final straw. 

At this very time, the Muslim Arabs in Palestine were siding with Dreyfus in the unfair treatment he had received.  There was no reason for him to think he was suggesting a worse situation for his people than they were already enduring.  He had thought of a state in Africa for Jews, but they showed no feelings for a home there.  Only Palestine stirred them as G-d had led them there in the first place.  Every day Jews prayed that they would not ever forget Jerusalem.  They were ready to go home; their real home. 

All this was happening before the first world war.  It wasn't the Holocaust of World War II that caused Jews to return to their home country.  Of course this brought the need out in the open for all to see.  If they had had their own country, they would have had someplace to go.  Jews trying to escape the Holocaust couldn't get into other countries except in special cases.  My own uncle by marriage was one of the last Jews to get out of Germany, and he was unable to get his own family out as the door had closed.  South America wouldn't take any as they had to have baptism certificates.  USA allowed a certain number of Jews, and those had to have sponsors taking financial responsibility for the ones that came over.  My great uncle did that for my uncle.  All of Europe was affected, so that limited the countries one could escape to.  So many still had anti-semitic attitudes towards Jews. 

Even in my own city, while growing up in high school there were sororities that wouldn't take in Jews.  We Jewish teenagers had created our own social life and clubs, and even had a golf club that was Jewish where we held dances. 

Earlier in my parents' day, New York City didn't hire Jews in many jobs.  My mother in law couldn't get a job with the telephone company because of being Jewish.  Jew-hatred was rampant in the 20's in the states.  You saw anti-semitism in every circle; political, economic and literary.  It even suspended mass immigration from Europe.  Even in 1894, W.C. Ford showed his distain of Jews in the USA. 

Today the Muslims are still referring to the Protocals of Zion, German anti-semitic literature and using that as the gospel about Jews.  If you look at the treatment of Israel in the U.N., you can easily see that Israel is singled out and treated like no other country and in a very negative way.  Being the UN has so many Muslim countries and they are holding onto their hatred, it is no wonder. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
KIKE! by Michael Selzer,  upsetting book about anti-Semitism endemic in America since early settlers restrictions against Jews. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/revolt1.html
The Source by James Mitchener, book

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