”Israel”, Rotten Fruit of False Knowledge

“Israel” is a fascinating word. According to the Bible it means, “He struggles with god”. This was the name given to Jacob because he struggled with God all night. And won. A ridiculous statement if taken at face value. As a metaphor it opens a treasure of interpretations. In any case, this all-night wrestling match between a shepherd and the creator of the universe should not be regarded as documentary.

Academic Bible researchers tell us that the entire story of creation was added to the Story of Moses as a prologue hundreds of years after the time of Moses. This makes the name Israel even more fascinating. Who were these Israelite-Egyptians who invaded and conquered the land of Canaan?

For one thing, they were not slaves. They were armed. Slaves don’t carry weapons. The Bible refers to them alternatively as tribes and armies. Moses was negotiating for them with the Pharaoh. Pharaohs didn’t negotiate if they didn’t have to. The Pharaohs of today still don’t.

The word Israel seen from an Egyptian perspective contains the “-ra-” element at its center. Ra was the king of Gods and the creator of the universe. The last “-el” of Israel refers to the Hebrew God. A likely interpretation of the word Israel probably echoes a universal declaration that is still heard in our days: We struggle with God ON OUR SIDE.

On the other hand, we have no evidence that the Israelites ever were in Egypt. According to Prof. Ze’ev Herzog, Chief of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University

The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel…. The many Egyptian documents that we have make no mention of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt and are also silent about the events of the exodus.

The lack of notation in Egyptian records is all the more significant if we remind ourselves that Canaan belonged to Egypt at the time Moses was supposed to be splitting seas and receiving stone tablets from a burning bush. Canaan was Egypt’s frontier against the Hittite empire.

We have no non-Biblical evidence of Moses either; nor of Joshua, David, Solomon or the kingdom of Israel itself. Nada. Not among Egyptian writings, Assyrian writings or anywhere. No scratches on walls, no pictures on vases. Nothing. The first written notations of Moses and the Israelites first appear nearly a half millennium after they were supposed to have left Egypt.

Strange!? Not at all. At nearly the same time as the Israelites were blowing down the walls of Jericho, the Greeks were pouring out of a wooden horse in Troy. And both events got written down about the same time some 500 years later. The Bible and the Iliad (and the Odyssey) were the first best-sellers after having been best-tellers for hundreds of years. Achilles and Moses were the Rambo and Terminator of their day.

It’s not even particularly strange that the Bible story was sold as non-fiction. The people who swallowed this story were living in a flat world at the center of the universe right below heaven where God watched over them.

The only strange thing in all of this is that people who claim to be ancestors of the characters in the first action-drama novel have taken a large portion of land belonging to other people in order to reestablish the fiction and call it Israel. That’s more than strange. In a digitally connected world with evolutionary perspective and scientific knowledge, strange doesn’t quite cover it.

But if you have God on your side (whisper: and some ungodly superpowers), you can take any territory you want, “subdued the whole region … leave no survivors … and totally destroy all who breath, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.” Joshua 10:40

The creation of today’s Israel initiated a tragedy that painfully developed through destruction, suffering and death toward a catastrophe. Writing about Palestine in the 1934 edition of the Swedish Encyclopedia (Svensk Uppslagsbok), Professor J. Fröden says that the Zionist movement:

intends to give Jews from foreign countries the opportunity to return to ‘their old homeland’. This movement is divorced from reality because Palestine has for hundreds of years been relatively densely occupied by an Arab population that is racially, linguistically, religiously and culturally completely foreign to Jews, and barely any space is available for a new people.

With what right was land taken from the Palestinians and given to the Zionists? Please don’t tell me about a UN decision! Wrong is wrong even if it wears a fancy hat. How would you react if someone took half of your house and gave it to a “foreign” family to live in? For any reason! No one asked the Palestinians. They had no say in the matter.

A big chunk of territory was taken (stolen) from the natives of the land and given to foreign elements not because it was right, just or necessary, but because it fit into superpower plans. All that was needed was some super propaganda. So fireworks of positively loaded words exploded around Zionist puppets dancing in front of a holocaust background and – abracadabra – the theft was sold as justice. Democracy! The victims of the theft were cast as unreasonable people and consequently their rights, needs and opinions were of no value. Despite a Jewish government with a Muslim population, and a dependency of a foreign power (USA), Israel was, and still is, promoted as a democracy. Believe that and we’ll tell you the one where a shepherd defeated the creator of the universe.

Territorial theft or exploitation should surprise no one familiar with superpower politics, but this case was packaged with the poison of religion. Secularization, solidarity, tolerance and socialistically oriented politics enjoyed popular support after the second World War. Putting religion back into politics soured the sweet possibility of unity and peace, and turned the atmosphere bitter with conflict and division.

Israel – A Disease of the Jews.
The only justification for the state of Israel rests on its claim to support Jews. It was created for the sake of Jews. We now have nearly 70 years of experience with which to evaluate this Jewish “haven”.

A little over 40% of the world’s Jews live in Israel. 48% of the Jews live in the USA and western Europe (Western Jews). The Western Jews have lived in peace with their surrounding, have prospered and continue to assimilate into the population at large. The Israeli Jews have been in constant conflict with their surroundings, enjoy no security and have become all the more isolated in the world except for the USA.

Western Jews have done quite well without Israel. The only thing threatening them is the anti-Semitism generating from Israeli politics. The Palestinians have paid a horrible price for the creation and expansion of Israel. The costs are still mounting. It’s just a matter of time before a bill is laid on the table of the Western Jews. That’s the way the poison of religious politics spreads.

Israel claims that all criticism of Israeli politics is anti-Semitism. That’s pure racism. The Zionists are either very stupid or very malicious to dress state policies in religious robes. Perhaps they are both. A long list of prominent and known Jewish critics of Israel exposes the absurdity of that claim.

“The wrongs committed over the past 52 years and reaching back into the last century by Zionism towards the indigenous people of the Holy Land are a ghastly crime.”
Rabbi Meir Hirsh, Neturei Karta in Jerusalem, Palestine.

It seems that Israel is still struggling with God on its side. The God of Israeli however, the god of “kill all the women and children” (Num 31), “leave no survivors … totally destroy all who breath” (Joshua 10), is not the God of justice, love and mercy that the rest of us embraces.

“Those who believe the Bible is documentary are living a fiction.”
Dartwill Aquila