A Scion of Zionist Aristocracy Wants to Quit the Jewish People. Will Israel Let Him?

 

Avraham "Avrum" Burg.Credit: Emil Salman

A Scion of Zionist Aristocracy Wants to Quit the Jewish People. Will Israel Let Him?

Why Avraham Burg, who has served as Knesset speaker, interim president and head of the Jewish Agency, is asking Israel to annul his registration as a Jew

by Ravit Hecht, Haaretz

Avraham Burg has been a man of many titles. A scion of one of the aristocratic families of the religious-Zionist movement, he was Speaker of the 15th Knesset (1999-2003), a leading member of the Labor Party’s left-leaning “group of eight” in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, chairman of the Jewish Agency (1995-1999) and, as per protocol, during his tenure as Knesset Speaker, he served as Israel’s acting president, between the resignation of Ezer Weizman and the election of Moshe Katsav to that post. No resumé could be more Zionist and Jewish.

Now, though, “Avrum,” as he’s widely known, is out to discard one title: his designation as a Jew according to the population registry of the Interior Ministry. In an affidavit he will submit to the Jerusalem District Court, Burg writes that he no longer considers himself as belonging to the Jewish nationality. He adds that his conscience does not allow him to be classified as a member of that nation, because it implies “belonging to the group of the masters.” In simple, clear words, he asserts, “I can no longer feel identification with this collective.”

This extraordinary act, which seems light-years away from most of Burg’s well-known public activity, comes in the wake of the enactment in 2018 of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

“The meaning of that law is that a citizen of Israel who is not Jewish will suffer from having an inferior status, similar to what the Jews suffered for untold generations,” Burg states in his affidavit. “What is abhorrent to us, we are now doing to our non-Jewish citizens.”

This is not an extreme step, Burg maintains – on the contrary, it is a necessary and logical one. “I ask myself what the citizen who wasn’t happy about the law is supposed to do,” he tells Haaretz in an interview. “It’s not some sort of law about traffic offenses – for me, this law constitutes a change in my existential definition. Because my assumption is that the High Court of Justice will not touch this law, I am moving to the next stage.”

Two weeks ago, the High Court in an expanded panel of 11 justices considered a challenge to the law, in the form of a large number of petitions filed against its constitutionality. Comments made by the justices during the hearings suggest that Burg’s premise is correct. He will submit his request after the bench hands down its decision. “I am not asking for radical things,” he says. “I am not asking to be registered as an Arab, or as I don’t know what. My request states: You [i.e., the state] redefined the sense of the collective. I am not a part of the collective under that definition. Erase me.”

Burg, 65, was always a dove, even in the Labor Party and certainly within religious-Zionist circles. However, the journey he has made in the past few years to the fringes of the left is quite distinct. On one occasion, at a social gathering at which this writer was present, which included some participants from the religious-Zionist movement, Burg’s name came up in the course of a political argument. One person present noted that Burg was lost to that movement – to which his partner replied, “Lost his mind, you mean.”

But religious Zionists are not the only ones who can’t figure Burg out. Since leaving the political arena, more than 15 years ago, he has increasingly distanced himself from his mother ship, the Labor Party, and has even accused it of responsibility for crimes of the occupation. The positions he espouses today are considered radical by most of the Israeli public, including those who call themselves left-wing.

But if you ask him, he will say that his views have remained constant over the years – it’s the country that has changed.

“When I entered politics, in the 1980s, I saw myself as a clear-cut disciple of Yeshayahu Leibowitz,” he says, referring the late, left-wing Orthodox intellectual and scientist. “I espoused two principles: separation of religion and state, and ending the occupation. Decades have gone by since then, and I still want separation of religion and state and the end of the occupation. I haven’t changed – you are the ones who have changed. You have become more right-wing, nationalist, fundamentalist. You are less democratic. I’m in the same place.”

For him, the nation-state law was a bridge too far.

Burg: “I don’t know what the nation-state of the Jewish people is, according to that law. I do know that if you were to take the law as it stands and change the words, and enact it in a place where there’s a Jewish minority – you would term it antisemitic and declare all-out war against it.”

In his declaration to the court, he writes that he does not “accept the distorted and discriminatory definition of the state as belonging to the Jewish nation” and that he is no longer willing for his “nationality” to be listed as “Jewish” in the Interior Ministry’s records, as reasons behind his symbolic act.

In a sense, you’re realizing the fantasy of the right wing. Benjamin Netanyahu said that the leftists forgot what it is to be Jewish, and now you’re saying: I don’t want to be a Jew.

Burg: “You’re asking me a political question. I am dealing with philosophical concepts and the issue of identity. Whether it makes them [i.e., rightists] feel good or doesn’t make them feel good is of no interest to me. If they think they can force me to be part of the collective as they define it, that I will be a patriot of the nationalist collective – they are wrong. They need to understand that the price of unnecessary legislation is the dismantlement of the Israeli collective. I will continue to live my historic Jewish identity in the way that my parents and my forefathers and my foremothers lived. But not this.”

It’s hard to predict how the court will contend with the request of the former Knesset Speaker. The courts here have dealt on many occasions with the issue of identity classification in the population registry, including that of religious affiliation. One of the best-known cases was that of writer Yoram Kaniuk, who sought to change his affiliation from “Jewish” to “without religion,” a request the court granted in 2011.

Supreme Court of Israel

Burg’s request is different, because it refers to the issue of nationality, an anomalous category in the Israeli population registry that’s not found in the documentation in parallel institutions in most other countries, where nationality is the same as citizenship. Attorney Michael Sfard, who represents Burg, explains that this subject was actually debated by the High Court in the past, when the question arose of why one’s nationality in the Population Registry should not be listed as “Israeli” instead of “Jewish.” The court ruled then that there is no such thing as “Israeli nationality” and that it’s impossible to register fictitiously something that does not exist.

Still, Burg does not want a different nationality to appear in the registry’s records, but to erase what already appears there. “There was a case in the 1970s that we are basing everything on,” Sfard explains. “It was about a person who said he was a cosmopolitan, and didn’t consider himself as being a member of any nation – and the court erased his classification. According to the judgments, the test that has to be met is the sincerity of the claim.”

Burg has a great many complaints, referring to almost every sentence in the nation-state law. But even before considering them, the biggest problem for him lies in what the legislation omits: the principle of equality and the need to prevent discrimination. “It was specifically that point was done away with, and what was left was granting the priority of one group over others,” he says.

Burg’s objections to the law itself begin with its very first article, which defines the Land of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people. “The patriarch Abraham discovered God outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel, the tribes became a people outside the Land of Israel, the Torah was given outside the Land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is more important than the Jerusalem Talmud, was written outside the Land of Israel,” he asserts. “The past 2,000 years, which shaped the Judaism of this generation, happened outside Israel. The present Jewish people was not born in Israel.”

The law also defines the symbols of the state: name, flag and anthem. Is that problematic? Is a different anthem preferable?

“Of course. How can a person whose origins lie in Baghdad sing about looking ‘onward, to edges of the East,’ when Israel is to the west? It’s a colonialist anthem. It’s not problematic only because it says, ‘the Jewish soul yearns,’ but because of other things. I think that the moment the Israeli entity was established, with people from all corners of the planet, with all types of identity, ‘Hatikva’ could be the anthem of the Jewish community or even only of its Ashkenazi part, from the West. But if we want it to be the anthem of all the country’s citizens, it requires adaptation. If our ancient sages succeeded in adapting commandments from God – we don’t stone people, we don’t cut off hands, we don’t gouge out eyes anymore – can’t we revise the words of Naftali Herz Imber [on whose poem the anthem is based]?”

In favor of an Arab PM

What about the article in the law stating, “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”?

“Here my criticism is actually aimed at the Palestinians. Run for mayor of Jerusalem. What are you waiting for?”

Would you like to see a Palestinian mayor of Jerusalem?

“If I can entrust the Palestinians to treat me medically and to administer my medications, and with the brakes of my car – can’t I entrust them with the sewer system of Jerusalem?” And Burg adds that naturally he would also be very happy to see an Arab prime minister in Israel.

We come to the article that I was curious to talk to you about, because you were the chairman of the Jewish Agency – the article in the nation-state law that talks about ingathering of the exiles and aliyah. You are attacking the nation-state law now, but the Law of Return has discriminated between citizens here for years. Where were you all that time?

“I’m ready to deal with the Law of Return, to argue with it,” Burg says, adding that he supports a “very considerable annulment” of its stipulations. “I want all the people who come to Israel to do so by means of some sort of general citizenship law, not through the Law of Return. The Law of Return will remain as a clause: If a person and a community are persecuted for their Jewishness, they will have a fast track” to citizenship.

Burg says he doesn’t regret serving as chairman of the Jewish Agency (“I would not have arrived at these conclusions if I hadn’t pass through that place and done that work”). And he believes that Jewish existence in the Diaspora is a model from which to draw inspiration, mentally and spiritually: “One of the things that was done away with when the state was established is the power and benefits of the Diaspora structure. In the Diaspora we had different types of responsibility, involvement, enrichment vis-a-vis the surrounding community – a feeling of what it means to be a minority. What is missing here is not more nationalism, but more communalism.”

For this reason he is convinced that Jews in Israel can learn from Jews in the Diaspora. “When I look at the [people attending] non-Orthodox synagogues in the United States, I think that they didn’t grow up the way I did, but that is where the next corpus of the Jewish people was created,” he explains. “Instead of sending our [Israeli] children in large numbers to the death camps, they should be sent on Birthright trips to the Jewish communities [abroad].”

Reform Jews in the United States complain that their children are becoming estranged from the Jewish people.

“Your question assumes that the Jewish people is numbers and genetics, and I think that the Jewish people is ideas and values. If the Jewish people is 14 million Rabbi [Meir] Kahanes, then that people should be eliminated. If the Jewish people is one Nelson Mandela or one Dalai Lama, let UNESCO enshrine it in perpetuity. My patriotism is not for numbers. One of the spectacular things that Zionism did was to take a train and get it to travel backward – back to the language, to the places and to certain stations in history. But I’m not certain that I want to stop at that exact station. Why not stop at the station of the patriarch Abraham who had another, non-Jewish, wife? Why not stop in the kingdom ruled by David, who had wives from all over the region? Why not go back to the period in which marriage was actually the place in which fruitful relations between us and our surroundings were created?”

Speaker of Knesset Avraham Burg raises a toast of Tu Bishvat

In other words, as opposed to what the majority of traditionalist and religious people feel in this country, you believe that “marriages of assimilation” are desirable?

“I am in favor of preserving ideas and values, and not engaging with sex and genetics. Imagine that world peace extends from the Emirates and Gaza to the outskirts of New York. No one wants to annihilate us anymore – a situation, by the way, that has existed for 30-40 years, only it’s being concealed from us. And then, for the first time, the Jewish people would face the question: Does it know how to survive without an external enemy? We can survive only when there is an enemy. Give me a war, a holocaust or a pogrom – I know what to do. I say that we need to develop a completely different language, a non-contrarian language, where some members of other communities come and marry us and some of us marry them. I also want to assume that the communities that intermarry kill each other less.”

‘Religious-chosen’ supremacy

The bottom line is that Burg is certain the nation-state law has a far deeper aim, which goes beyond discriminating against the Arab community in Israel. “My assumption is that deep down, the people who are behind the law want to ground Israel in a different constitutional basis than that intimated in the Declaration of Independence – to base the country far more on the values of religious Zionism and on the supremacy of one group that derives from various kinds of authority, the central one being that of the ‘religious chosen.'”

For this reason he is convinced that the law will also end up encouraging discriminatory practices among the Jews. “With Basic Laws, in places where a lacuna exists in Israeli law, you turn to Hebrew law – and Hebrew law turns to God. Just like other legal systems [in countries] around us, where sharia law is decisive. That is the deep ambition.”

So in your opinion, the nation-state law is one more apparatus on the road to the creation of a state based on halakha [traditional Jewish law]?

“The road is being paved before our eyes. Go out into the street and ask Jews whether the Jewish people is a chosen people. Seventy percent will reply yes. Ask them what ‘chosen’ means, and 10 percent will tell you that we have greater missions, such as humanism and world reform – things that go down well in the north, at a place like [anthroposophic kibbutz] Harduf. 

The rest will tell you that it’s all about genetics, the Jewish brain, that God chose us – things that are blood. And now we come to the question of questions, which Israel has never addressed, of whether a ‘chosen people’ can make fair and egalitarian choices, or conduct a truly democratic election process, involving those who are not among those chosen. The answer is no.”

So maybe you have a problem with the people?

“In the Jewish sources there’s a struggle between two worldviews. One is that of the Jews’ supremacy over the other peoples, and the other is a universalist approach in which we are equal to all human beings. I am connected to the Jewish artery in which all human beings are equal but different. One of the tasks of establishing independent Jewish sovereignty was supposed to be to break this feeling of inferiority/superiority, which is a Diaspora complex. In this exactly we failed.”

What’s your take on the religious-Zionist movement today?

“You think that religious Zionism is just settlers, so let’s stop for a minute and take a look at the status of women, for example. Let’s say I’m a religious-Zionist woman like that: I went to high school and I want higher education, so I don’t get married at 19 but closer to 30. That means there are 10 years in which I live alone at home and make kiddush [the blessing over wine] by myself; maybe I attend an egalitarian minyan (prayer quorum). And when I get married, I want to continue making the kiddush in the house, so there’s feminism in the family. What do you do with that? In contrast to my mother, who thought there were no Jewish gays, today there are many religious families whose children are from the LGBTQ community and still preserve their identity.”

Still, the messianic dialogue is very present.

“Of course the dialogue exists. Just as on the Tel Aviv secular side, you hear kibbutznik talk from the 1940s. The grammar of the old language still speaks, but its worlds of content are no longer there. [Yamina party leader] Naftali Bennett is not Hanan Porat [the late National Religious Party MK, and one of the founding fathers of the settlement enterprise]. He may speak the same words, but he’s already the secularization of the messianic dream. Hanan Porat was ecstasy; Bennett is a politician who does politics. So I tell myself: Fine, the terms have changed. Where does that put me?”

Do you still wear a kippa?

“No. I am doing exactly what my father [Yosef Burg, a founder of the National Religious Party, MK and government minister] did when he taught at Gymnasia Herzliya [high school]. He taught Talmud with a kippa and history without a kippa. Look at the photographs of all the Knessets from 1948 to 1967. My father was an Orthodox rabbi, the leader of the National Religious Party, a cabinet minister on its behalf, and he was without a kippa. I do go to the synagogue with a kippa.”

But you used to wear a kippa in your daily life.

“For years I was the genetically engineered fruit of the system, and I didn’t connect with my inner persona. My latest book has dozens of pages, about the kippa. Socks are pulled on, shoes are laced, a belt is looped and a kippa is ‘coerced.’ I think I answered you.”

Do you still keep kosher?

“I’m vegan.”

Do you uphold the Jewish commandments?

“Of course. I respect everyone. I honor my father and my mother. I love humanity. I do not murder.”

But you don’t have separate sinks for dairy and meat.

“I’m not into religious bureaucracy.”

Are you still a believer?

“I never believed. God is not part of my equations. I wrote five books about why I don’t occupy myself with him.”

Burg observes that his alternative approach to Judaism stirs criticism, but also identification and positive reactions. “I get dozens of requests from couples to marry them,” he says. “It’s because I present an alternative – Judaism that doesn’t traffic in women. Because the traditional Orthodox marriage ceremony is traffic in women, and I believe in equality between man and woman.” His books are even read in ultra-Orthodox circles, he says, “by anyone who has a free mind,” as he puts it.

‘Avrum went bonkers’

Burg will be the first to admit that his ideas are not easily palatable for most Israelis.

“The immediate feedback I get in all comments is ‘Avrum went bonkers,’” he says. “No one who’s in their comfort zone likes being told, ‘In another 20 years you’ll be in a different place, in a non-comfort zone.’ I’ve done that a number of times in the public discourse. In 1992, I stated at the Labor Party conference that religion and state should be separated, otherwise we will regret it. They didn’t listen. A decade and a half ago I warned against the rise of racism in Israel, and people wouldn’t talk to me. Today I say that in another 20 years there will be all kinds of groups in the Israeli totality. But the central group will be the one that’s defined by civil life, in which all human beings are equal. No Israeli is worth more than any other.”

In the past few years, Burg has been occupied with establishing a Jewish-Arab political party within the framework of the Brit (Covenant) group, and he serves on the international board of the New Israel Fund. Asked what he thinks about the situation of the Labor Party, once his political home, Burg replies that he isn’t able “to think about things that don’t exist.” Left-wing Meretz, too, needs to change direction, he says. “The former politics in the left-wing camp, which was also organized – with the exception of a fig leaf here and there – on a national basis, needs to shift to politics organized on a civil basis. There needs to be a joint Jewish-Arab party of which Meretz is a part.”

He’s unfazed by the claim of left-wingers that his idea is an electoral dud. “That sort of true equality hasn’t yet been tried,” he says. “We have a moment of grace now. None of us believes that at this very moment anyone among us can replace the right. So maybe we’ll take advantage of this moment for renewal, so that one day we will be able to replace it?”

Burg’s reference to a Jewish-Arab partnership does not stop at the Green Line. “The validity of the two-state solution has expired,” he says. Today he advocates a single state for Palestinians and Jews: Because there is no possibility of achieving two states, the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip need to be granted, at the very least, the right to vote for the Israeli parliament.

Do you think that would be a guarantee of a successful democracy?

“If you had asked me in June 1967 how many years it would take until we got out of the Palestinians’ life, I would have said two months, maybe half a year. It’s been 53 years. So I say to you, give me [another] 53 years to forge the relations between the nations. Can we reconstruct foundations of trust in 53 years? Maybe we can. I am asking for the same amount of time it took to spoil things, in order to fix them.”

Doesn’t your position reflect someone whose heart was broken by the Israeli project?

“On the contrary, it’s a suggestion for an alternative. I say that the project is stuck. And I am not stuck in more-of-the-same. It’s optimistic thinking.”

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-a-scion-of-zionist-aristocracy-wants-to-quit-the-jewish-people-will-israel-let-him-1.9414503

 

 

Why I left the cult

BY AVIGAIL ABARBANEL  OCTOBER 8, 2016

AVIGAIL ABARBANEL, AS A GIRL IN ISRAEL

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
–From Easter, 1916, by WB Yeats

Dear Israel and Israeli Jews,

Maybe it’s pointless writing to you, and I guess I am not expecting a response. I am writing because I feel a certain sense of duty. After all I come from you, so maybe, maybe some of you might listen to me, might get curious, take a risk and entertain what is currently unthinkable to you.

I left what seems like a very long time ago, twenty-five years. I don’t think you’ve changed much since, except for the worse maybe. Psychologies like yours have the nasty habit of getting worse if left untreated. I always remember you as harsh, defensive, hot around the collar and ready to explode at every opportunity, loud and unforgiving. You had pockets of calm and maybe even kindness, but they were reserved for those who lived in the nicer greener places, and they had more money than we did.

I grew up in Bat-Yam and it was terrible there. It was an endless dense noisy mass of concrete; clumps of heavily populated blocks of thin-walled flats as far as the eye could see, separated only by bitumen roads. It’s not what you usually like to show the rest of the world, and it’s not what the rest of the world think of when they think of you. I grew up on Hashikma Street. What a cruel joke that was, naming that awful concrete dessert, Hashikma… ‘The Sycamore’. There were no trees there. During my childhood I had no idea what a shikma tree even looked like. Whoever these people were, did they think that by naming the street sycamore it would somehow make it better for those of us destined to spend our childhoods there? Did they think they could fool us into thinking it was nicer, more idyllic than it really was? All it did was tease and torment. The name of my street spoke to me of something I had no access to and that I thought I could never have.

This schizophrenic split between the name of the place and the reality of it is symbolic of your entire existence. Where I grew up wasn’t much different to many working class neighbourhoods elsewhere in the world, but I was always told that we were not the same as everyone else. We were special, we were better: more moral and ethical, more civilised. Don’t tell me you didn’t say that. I remember very well! I actually paid attention at school.

But with the mind of a child, I kind of sensed that we weren’t special at all. I suspect a lot of children who suffer abuse within their own families at the hands of their own people, develop doubts about their group. If you protected me better, maybe I would still be a part of you. But you couldn’t protect me or other children like me precisely because you are not who or what you say you are, a more enlightened and ethical people. You are a group of humans with gifts and with flaws, and with plenty of cowardice like every other group. You are no different from any human society that hides and even enables crimes against its own children, and that fails to protect the vulnerable in their midst.

A few years after I left you, I gradually began to realise that I was the same as any cult leaver. It was a shock, but looking back I wonder why I hadn’t seen it before. Then again, rarely can people inside a cult see where they are. If they could, the cult wouldn’t be what it is. They think that they are members of a special group that has a special destiny, and is always under threat. The survival of the cult is always the most important principle. Cult members are taught from birth that the world outside is dangerous, that they have to huddle together for safety. Every member of every cult is a recruit.

At this point you are probably going to say that cult or no cult, this was entirely justified. Have I forgotten the holocaust? No. Of course not. Persecution of Jewish people throughout history was very real indeed. Whatever Jewish identity is, Jews were a hated and despised group among many cultures in Europe, and Jews have always had an uneasy co-existence with non-Jews. Any marginalised or persecuted group has an uneasy relationship with the dominant culture. Once you have been discriminated against it’s hard to trust.

But two big things bother me about you. One, this history of persecution is so inseparable from your identity, you can’t see beyond it. Not even your most talented artists, academics, intellectuals and writers, can see beyond. You all seem to be caught up in it, except for a very small and extraordinary minority of people who can see Zionism for what it is. Anyone who has suffered trauma tends to feel separate and different. It’s human psychology once you have been abused, to feel that you are no longer the same as everyone else. But anyone who was abused and traumatised has a duty to get better and not allow the fear and the victimhood to become their identity. Those of us who were abused and traumatised have this duty because if we don’t heal, we either hurt ourselves or others, or both. That’s where you are and that’s what you are doing. You have not only allowed trauma to become your very identity, you have glorified it and are worshiping it as a god.

The second and even more important thing that bothers me is the crime you have committed and are still committing in the name of ‘our’ survival. You wanted a solution to the persecution of your group, and herein lies the problem. You decided to create a Jewish ghetto that you think of as a safe haven, on a land that was fully populated. You came in and took it, committed ethnic cleansing and are continuing to do so as we speak. I know you would not feel that you have completed your mission until you have all the land without the people.

You are a product of settler-colonialism, a state created through the removal and the elimination of the people who lived in the territory before you. The relationship you developed with your victims, the Palestinians, bears all the hallmarks of a relationship between settler-colonisers and those they wish to eliminate from existence. Settler-colonisers don’t just remove people off their land. They remove their historical places, monuments, evidence of their history oral and physical, all traces of their existence… If there is no victim, there is no crime. If the territory is cleansed of the character given to it by those who lived there, it is open to take on a new one.

I know what it’s like to be blind to the fact that you are settler-colonisers, people who are committing a terrible crime. You cannot see yourself as the ‘bad guy’ here. You are so steeped in your self-created myth, that you always were and always will be the most tragic victim in the story of humanity. I once was one of you and I know that it is practically impossible to see through your reasoning: ‘We merely returned to our ancestral home. We just want to live in peace with our own people. What’s wrong with that? Why don’t others let us live in peace?’

There is a powerful force field, some kind of a lead-lined shield inside you, that protects your belief from the truth, from reality. You don’t deny that you ‘came back’ and settled the land, you just can’t see what it means. So let me spell it out for you one more time. When a group of people comes into a territory (no matter their reason), removes the indigenous people and takes their land and resources, it’s called settler-colonialism. Settler-colonialism is immoral and it is a crime against humanity. Victims don’t always go silently into the night, so crimes have to continue to be committed until the victims’ resistance and defiance are crushed and they disappear from view and memory. There is nothing original or special about what you are, or what you are doing. You are like all other settler-colonisers before you. Not even your capacity for self-deception and your deception of others are particularly special. It’s been done before. There is nothing special about you at all.

Let’s say you did ‘return home’ as your myths say, that Palestine really was your ancestral home. But Palestine was fully populated when you started to covet it. In order to take it for yourself you have been following quite closely the Biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. You killed, you expelled, you raped, you stole, you burned and destroyed and you replaced the population with your own people. I was always taught that the Zionist movement was largely non-religious 

(How you can be Jewish without Jewish religion is perplexing in itself). 

For a supposedly non-religious movement it’s extraordinary how closely Zionism — your creator and your blueprint — has followed the Bible. Of course you never dare to critique the stories of the Bible. Not even the secular amongst you do that. None of my otherwise good teachers at my secular schools ever suggested that we question the morality of what Joshua did. If we were able to question it, the logical next step would have been to question Zionism, its crimes, and the rightness of the existence of our very own state. No, we couldn’t be allowed to go that far. It was too dangerous. That would risk the precarious structure that held us in place.

So like all cults that have ever existed, and those that will no doubt continue to be created, you live in self-imposed blindness. You create and recreate a picture of reality that is filled with holes, but you are OK with that. The possibility of filling those holes brings you face-to-face with your mortal terrors, your morbid fear of annihilation. And you can’t bear it. I know what annihilation means to you. It doesn’t just mean killing. Annihilation means that the Jewish people, that Jewishness itself would no longer exist. To you ‘assimilation’ is also annihilation. They taught us that at school. We were taught that assimilation was despicable, cowardly, treacherous to our people. Whenever Jewish people marry non-Jews in their own countries, and when all traces of Jewishness, whatever it is, become diluted, you worry. You think it’s the end. Because there are no individuals, only the group, when the group goes individuals go too. So you feel any perceived threat to the group as a personal threat to each one of you. That’s why you cry antisemitism so readily and reflexively, whenever you perceive the slightest threat to your cult state.

ABIGAIL ABARBANEL TODAY

I left the cult because I wanted to find out who I was. I refused to accept that the only purpose of my life was to defend the cult and allow it to continue. It’s human, it’s mammal, to allow one’s identity to be subsumed by the group, but it doesn’t make for a good life. We survived as mammals partly because we lived in groups. Without the group around them, individuals probably died out in the harsh world our ancestors lived in. Your psychology is nothing more than simple cave/herd psychology and it’s not unique to you. But we as a species have the capacity for so much more. In the world we live in now, our survival depends on transcending our natural base instincts. We can develop and use the moral and ethical part of our brain, the part that gives us self-awareness and concern for others, the part that can take responsibility for our own sins and crimes and can make amends. Our salvation is not in our own little groups any more, but together as one species.

Come on, leave the cult and the ghetto mentality behind, join the human race, do the right thing. You want to be really special, to fulfil a special destiny? By all means! Lead the way to enlightenment by owning up, repenting and making amends, by transforming your identity into something healthy and positive. Show what can be achieved when we are more than frightened mammals…

I don’t expect you to hear me or to see what you cannot see. You are experts at indoctrination and are too deeply steeped in your fear-based picture of reality. You are a great disappointment to me. That’s why I support the BDS against you. If you don’t stop yourself, someone has to.

https://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/why-i-left-the-cult/?fbclid=IwAR1XXYBIgRdlc0QUZ7iLJ5502LE4Hk6tdbUb3IyZlQEKcGICsr8T2ao_aL8

-------------------------------------------------------------

My Comments,

1.  Demythologising (any) religion, to me seems to be the most promising antidote against mass psychiatric behaviour (although religion as such, has not yet been officially acknowledged as a psychiatric disease, apart from obsessive religious insanity, which diagnose might create a first opening of the necessary discussion), be it on an individual scale, be it on a collective scale.

2.  More than twenty years ago I already reached the very same scorching conclusions - about this highly racist cult-driven western colony (and its christian-zionist zealots) in the ME and its heavily and continuously persecuted Palestinian victims - as the author (annex psychotherapist) of this article.

3.  False accusations like anti-semite and/or self-hating jew are the qualifications that are being distributed by the usual suspects, once one is prepared to share one's analyses on this subject to the greater community.

4.  But as I stated in my opening-sentence  :  The only remedy against the big religions (and their dangerous endeavours) is to systematically demythologize their basic notions, so one might be able to change the deceptive self-perception and evenly deranged world-view, which in its turn might lead to a less violent world.

5.  It is a pity however, that psycho- and/or socio-pathological behaviour of people / peoples does belong to the very core of the inner psychological sanctimonium of the patients involved, so treatment of any kind might often be met with great anxiety and ditto animosity.  

6.  Nevertheless one has to try and to confront these people(s) with the highly inconvenient truth about their psychiatric predicament and the consequences of that state of mind for their social context, to put it mildly.

 

 

Republican plan to challenge election signals ‘cult of Trump’ will live on in Biden era

Around 140 Republicans expected vote against counting of electoral college votes, in symbolic move to disrupt Congress and bolster Trump

Edward Helmore in New York

Sat 2 Jan 2021 07.30 GMT

Maverick super-loyalists to Donald Trump are set to make an audacious spectacle in Washington next week by voting against the formal counting of electoral college votes certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

While the tactic by outliers won’t be enough to stop Biden becoming the 46th president, it will serve to disrupt Congress, bolster Trump and establish an acidic tone to political co-operation with the incoming Democratic administration.

Two Republican members of the House of Representatives are reported to have told CNN, without releasing their names, that they expect around 140 GOP colleagues to vote against a procedural certification vote in a joint session of Congress on 6 January. The strategy speaks to the continuing stranglehold the outgoing president maintains over a significant faction of the party, political observers said on Friday.

Peter Wehner, vice-president at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative thinktank, and speech writer for three Republican presidents, called the prospect of many Republican lawmakers voting against certification “a disturbing sign”.

“It’s an indication that this is a secession-from-reality caucus,” Wehner told the Guardian.

“It’s illiberal, anti-democratic, pernicious and widespread in the Republican party. It’s not just a closing act for the Trump-era but an opening act for the post-Trump era. It’s virtue-signaling to the base that after Trump leaves, these people still consider themselves to be Trump acolytes and part of the cult of Trump.”

Democratic consultants concurred.

“This is still the Trump party,” said strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “They may see this as an act of survival, and may not even believe in the reality of what they’re doing. What they do believe in is getting re-elected in [midterm elections in] 2022. If we had a president who was prepared to leave quietly, this would not be a discussion.”

The looming spectacle comes despite the failure of Trump’s legal team to win any of at least 40 lawsuits involving allegations of voter fraud in November, an election officials called the most secure in American history.

On Wednesday, Trump ally and Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced he would object to certifying the electoral votes during the joint session on 6 January .

In an essay published Wednesday in the conservative commentary magazine The Blaze, editor Mark Levin backed up Hawley, claiming that states failed to follow their own election laws.

But in a conference call on Thursday, Senate majority leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell reportedly said that his 6 January vote certifying Biden’s victory will be “the most consequential I have ever cast”.

McConnell has told senators not to join any attempt to delegitimize the electoral votes, believing that the effort could cause Republicans to lose two Senate seats being contested in the run-offs in Georgia on 5 January.

Wehner believes McConnell opposes Hawley’s effort because it forces Republicans to go on record and potentially threatens his control of the Senate. “If they go on the record against what Hawley is doing it’s going to inflame the Republican base; if they agree it with it, it’s so transparently ludicrous that it’s going to hurt some Republicans in more moderate states,” Wehner said.

In a blistering open letter on Wednesday, Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse also opposed Hawley, warning that “all the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party”.

“We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse wrote. “But they’re wrong … adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”

According to Jim Sleeper, retiring professor of political science at Yale University, the House Republicans’ rebel plan aspires to assist the kind of McConnell-led obstructionism he practiced against the Obama administration.

“Beyond January 20, we’re looking at a Republican party that is gearing up to make sure – assuming Democrats don’t win control of the Senate – that McConnell will be able to repeat his act of stymying almost everything that Democrats could hope to do.”

Any effort to block certification goes along in tandem to suppress voting, Sleeper believes, that springs from organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

He said it was part of a larger operation to restrict mechanisms that an open, democratic process make possible.

“It’s part of a creeping coup d’etat that we’ve seen Trump going along with in his own loopy-minded way,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/02/republican-plan-oppose-certifying-biden-victory-electoral-college

   

‘We are leaving the club. No one asked us to go’ – History shows that Brexit will damage us all

The personal and human relationships between us and our continental neighbours are priceless, writes Michael Heseltine, yet every abusive headline echoes across the channel

d.d. 01-01-2021

C

limb to the gallery of the Arc de Triomphe and you will find enshrined in large black letters the words of Marechal Foch in 1919 as he commented on the Treaty of Versailles that closed history's chapter on the First World War. “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years” was his prophetic judgement. So sad; so true. The war to end all wars had merely created the conditions for the next one.

I listened to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast of the news that we were once again at war on that September day in 1939. I can hear the words today as clearly as I did, aged six, standing in our kitchen in Swansea.

These were some of my earliest memories. Searchlights seeking German bombers in the nightly raids and, tear-jerkingly, the view from the Regent’s Palace Hotel overlooking Piccadilly Circus the night the Second World War ended. People, many in uniform, delirious, dancing, laughing, crying. I shall never forget the conflicting emotions. I will always remember the abiding conclusion that there had to be a better way.

You do not need a degree in history to know that Britain’s story is one of bloodshed alongside, or against, our European neighbours. Against the Romans, the French, Dutch, Spanish and Germans, first on dry land, but increasingly at sea, as we created the greatest empire the world will ever see.  

The 20th century brought war on a horrific scale, the slaughter of generations of young people and whole communities of civilians wiped out in a single night. How could anyone resist a fierce determination that it must never happen again?

The continental powers approached that challenge from a starting point rather different to ours. Three times, in three quarters of a century, they had been occupied, defeated, fought over. Our island fortress protected us from some of the worst excesses and made us the last hope of restored freedom.  

Anyone with an interest in the conflicting political emotions surrounding the growth of European integration at that time should listen to a series of interviews by Michael Charlton commissioned by the BBC, in which he interviews British politicians and officials faced with the need to decide what role we would play as the Europeans met us at Messina to thrash out the terms of the Treaty of Rome.

Winston Churchill, in opposition after the war, had made a significant contribution to the post war debate when he declared that we must create "a kind of United States of Europe". There is controversy about whether he thought Britain should be a part of it, and certainly, when he became prime minister again in 1951, there is no evidence that he was up for the party political battle it would have involved. Rab Butler, in his interview with Charlton, put it in the language of the day: "It simply wasn’t on. It wasn’t on. We were quite wrong, of course.

"Churchill’s speech is important, however, in that it makes clear beyond doubt that the European Movement was always political. Opponents claim they were tricked into believing that we joined an economic arrangement in 1973. The Schuman plan that regulated iron, coal and steel industries across Europe was a stepping stone to the EEC, initiated by the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, and signed in 1950. Again, this was a political initiative to gain supranational control over the essential war making industries. Europe, from the start, was embarked on an essentially political journey and everyone knew it.

Harold Macmillan faced the trauma of Britain’s post war dilemma and the political challenge of telling the truth to a nation still motivated by delusions of yesterday’s power. The world had changed. The emergence of a European powerhouse based on German and French partnership, the preeminent American power, and the growing determination for self government across the empire, required us to redefine our destiny.  

Macmillan took up the challenge. The winds of change were blowing in a new direction. We needed to recognise the logic of history and our geographic location. General de Gaulle doubted if British public opinion was ready. If he had lived to see the 2016 referendum he would have said he had told us so.

Ted Heath led the Conservative Party of my generation. We understood exactly what was happening. A powerhouse of world significance was emerging from the disparate strengths of the nations of Europe. Together we would be stronger, richer, more influential and we wanted Britain at the heart of it. The Labour party was split and Harold Wilson opted for a referendum, thus avoiding the break-up of his party – for the time being at least.  

I first went to Europe with my parents in 1947. With friends, in 1954, I hitchhiked 2,500 miles down through France, up through Italy, Switzerland and Germany and back across Holland and Belgium. We slept by the side of the road or in hostels. That Europe has largely gone. The war damage, the demolition, the self-evident poverty. What has not gone is the pride of nation.

They have created common rules because large, competitive production lines deliver cheaper products. Together we can afford the cost of competing with America and China whose governments provide such support for their technological and industrial base. That is why I did so much to create the European Space Agency in 1973. Our desire for safety, environmental standards, and better healthcare overwhelms any trivial deviations that individual regulatory systems ever achieved. I have no problem with the search for acceptable common standards of behaviour of tolerance across Europe with sanctions imposed where they are ignored. We stood back too long, faced with the early manifestations of this, in Europe in the 1930s.  

By the narrowest of margins, and usually for reasons about which Europe was irrelevant, we decided by referendum to leave the European club in 2016. I deplore that decision. However, confirmed as it was by the election in 2019, I cannot deny the democratic mandate. One day, I believe the decision will be reversed but not for some time. The present leaders of the Conservative Party have reversed the opinions of their post war prime ministers. That is their responsibility. Their fault.

We are leaving the club. No one asked us to go. Many of us will have made a similar decision in our personal lives. We may have left a club, a job, a team, a regiment or any other human organisation created to further our particular interests. How often does any organisation change its rules to facilitate such departure? Would you change your rules to allow a departing member to undermine your standards and thus compete more effectively? Changing the rules for one would lead to a chorus of demands from other members. How long does it take before a trickle of change swells into a flood, undermining the foundations of the structure itself?

Once the curtain that Covid-19 has drawn over so much news is lifted by the rollout of the new vaccines, the daily drip of damaging consequences of Brexit will become clearer. The lost investment, the European conferences with no British voice, jobs lost here and replaced in our former market, phone calls to other capitals that once would have come here.

Most damaging is the language of Euroscepticism. The personal and human relationships between us and our continental neighbours are priceless. We work in each others’ companies, holiday in each others’ resorts, marry across the frontiers and share a cultural and historic heritage beyond price. Every abusive headline echoes across the channel.

If we are to have our cake and eat it, they are left with an empty plate. If Britain is no longer prepared to help with the levelling up of poorer Europe, that message is clear. If European fishermen can no longer fish in our waters, why should the City of London have access to European currency markets. Every advantage we claim for Brexit provokes the question at whose expense.

Historians know where these arguments have led.

Michael Heseltine is president of the European Movement and a former defence secretary

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-deal-boris-johnson-european-history-world-wars-b1781270.html