I am ashamed of this Israel.
When, during our weekly prayers in the synagogue, we also pray for wisdom for Israel’s leaders, all I can think is: yes, wisdom. And a very long prison sentence.
--Rosanne Hertzberger, microbiologist and former Member of the House of Representatives in the Netherlands.
P.S. Hertzberger wrote this in the NRC newspaper, and there are many, many Jewish people in the Netherlands who share her view on Israel.
I think that around 30% of the (jewish) world’s population strictly adheres to Zionist ideology, whilst that figure rises to around 50% in Israel and America.
It also makes for a complicated discussion; there’s always a Zionist about who takes the opposite stance and berates everyone as an anti-Semite. It is an extreme right-wing nationalist ideology less than 200 years old and has absolutely nothing to do with being Jewish itself.
And so did my grandma and mother, they became Catholic. I'm a Buddhist. My granddad is Turkish, a Moslim, his dad too aswell as the whole Ottoman lineage. On Dutch, Irish, German and Polak side, mostly Christians and one sister reclaimed her being Jewish. Religion is one thing, Being an extreme-right nationalist another.
@bitchboss “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary.” – Hillel, Talmud, Shabbat 31a.
Did those "religious leaders" forget the Talmud, I wonder? And yes, I do find myself in Hertzberger's quote. Same, same. Asking myself continuously, how a religious person can do such things. Other religions have a similar text, be it Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism… It's a simple human principle…
Jews are followers of Judaism, whether Orthodox, Reform or Conservative. War always seems to be driven by faith. Even Hinduism, Buddhism and older monotheistic/non-monotheistic faiths has their wars. Looking back at history, one can draw two conclusions that are intertwined. We, as humanity, wage war as rabbits breed, and we, humanity, are keen to invoke religious or ideological rhetoric to gloss over the horrors of war.
@bitchboss I'm ashamed of the world at this point. People who couldn't possibly be more far removed or uneducated on Israel and Palestine have taken it upon themselves to have an opinion. I'm pretty far removed myself, but it shouldn't be that hard for someone with zero cultural context or any horse in the race to see a bombed out school, and think "well I certainly don't like this."
I know there's only so much time in the day and we don't all have the time to educate ourselves on 75 years of history, but if you really need all that historical context before you can confidently decide that thousands of dead civilians is a problem for you, then frankly you're a piece of shit. And if you've lived through multiple US wars that were so obviously about resources as opposed to w/e their excuse was at the time (e.g. WMDs), and you still can't come to the conclusion that whatever this is about, it's got next to nothing to do with what those civilians believe or who they voted for, then you're a really stupid piece of shit.
I can only hope that people are less apt to believe everything they see on TV or the internet elsewhere in the world than in North America. I was pretty impressed when I spent a week in Ireland a few months back to see a lot of very public support for Palestine.
I couldn't tell it any better than you just did.
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