Why I Am Not an Israeli

By  Sha’i ben-Tekoa

FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been a proud Israeli citizen for decades; I have risked my life for Israel.

But I am not an Israeli because I don’t think like an Israeli, leastwise like Israel’s ruling class. I think like an American.

I was not born in Israel, not educated in Israel, didn’t serve in the IDF created by its founders in 1948, post-religious, socialist Jews who also shaped the culture. In the first decades of the state, Mapai kibbutznik and moshavnik communards dominated in politics, the army, the air force, the economy. They were never more than 5% of the population but they ran everything until 1977.

One of the iconic representatives of their New Jew sabra persona was Moshe Dayan, the soldier-farmer-kibbutznik. No capitalist businessman he, he was also fearless in battle, almost pathologically brave, but when IDF soldiers captured the Temple Mount in 1967 and raised the Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock — which is a war memorial to Islam’s conquest of Jews and Judaism — Chief of Staff Dayan ordered it taken down, saying, “The Temple Mount has no religious significance for Israelis, only historic. And in any case, (sneeringly) who needs this Vatican?” He then invited the Muslim priests who had managed the Temple Mount but fled to Jordan in the Six-Day War to return and resume their posts.

I am a Jew and an American and do not think like an Israeli. Consider, for another example, the Marxists Rabin and Peres in 1994, suckled on hating the Jewish religion, who handed over two-thirds of the Gaza Strip, evicting all Israeli military personnel and installations, and civilian Israeli communities. In 2001, the first jerry-built, home-made rocket manufactured in the Strip was shot off into Sderot.

And the rest is history. Over the following twenty years, not tens but scores of thousands of projectiles were launched from Gaza into the Israeli “envelope communities,” and what did Israel do during these two decades of this Ishmaelitic aggression? Every day, 700 semi-trailers bulging with all kinds of consumer items entered Gaza from Israel, which also supplied the Strip with electricity for free to, for example, power the lathes that fashioned the rockets.

THIS IS NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR

Then the inventive Israeli mind came up with the Iron Dome System which they are so proud of, though, seen from another angle, has been a complete failure for the following reason: The home-made Qassam rockets were terror rockets. They were primitive and could not be aimed at an enemy’s formations, military bases or industrial base. They were fired at random into Jewish neighborhoods to terrorize the Jews and were successful every time because in the instant the Muslims fired off a rocket, sirens would wail in Israel at three o’clock in the morning, driving hundreds of thousands of Jews in southern Israel from their sleep in their pajamas, shuffling into safe rooms or apartment house stairwells.

The Qassam rockets that did land did some damage, to people and property, but not much.

The invention of the Iron Dome was the product of the Israeli mind conditioned by the Israeli self-identity that governs relations with the enemy Muslims in Gaza. Israel’s founding fathers were the kibbutzniks who produced such communities as those bordering the Strip horribly massacred and demolished on October 7. I myself worked some months in one of them, whose communards flattered themselves for being so good to the people next door in Gaza, apparently in the belief this would show them we are not the terrible people they think we are and thus they will modify their behavior. In a nutshell, these socialist Israelis believed that being nice to the Arabs would eventually transform them into friendly neighbors.

Were Israelis a normal nation, they would not have invented Iron Dome. A normal people would have reacted to the Qassam rockets in kind. Israel might have responded with its own rockets fired, also at random, into the Strip; and because Israelis are technologically advanced, Israel’s ordnance would do a lot more damage to human beings and property. For every Qassam rocket fired at Sderot, Israel might have responded with ten rockets, and told the people there, “If you want to engage in an artillery duel, no problem. And if our missiles do far more damage than yours, we make no apology for being a more advanced people than you wild asses of Muslim men in Gaza with the ethics of Stone Age cavemen.”

For sure, World Anti-Jewry would howl as Israeli rockets fired at random crashed down in Gaza destroying and killing. The goyim would roar, “War crimes!” to which Israel would calmly reply, “What is your problem? We are doing EXACTLY what they are doing: firing rockets at random into the people next door. If you want us to stop, get your fake “Palestinians” to stop firing rockets into our homes and we’ll stop.”

Over two decades of this Arab abuse, a whole generation of Israeli children in the area grew up, entered the IDF and when examined presented symptoms of PTSD.

That Israel tolerated this insane relationship was a function of the fractured Israeli identity and Zionist aspiration to have, in the words of the book title written by the Prime Minister, “A Place Among the Nations.” Israelis aspire to peace with the surrounding hundreds of millions of Muslims, which is unrealistic until Islam undergoes a spiritual reformation of the magnitude of the Protestant Reformation and really the Enlightenment.

Consider as well official Israel’s relationship to the same homicidal Arab antisemites in Judea and Samaria as in Gaza. Israelis call then “Palestinian terrorists” (when, strangely, there is nothing Palestinian about them.) Israel treats the most violent ones as criminals subject to Israeli legal proceedings that puts them on trial and punishes them with imprisonment. Before October 7, there were some 500 Muslim Jew-killers serving life sentences, and never mind there is no such punishment in millennia of Jewish jurisprudence. In modern Israel, murder a Jew and you will be physically confined to a building until the end of your days but be provided with free food of your liking, hot showers, entertainments, and free medical care, and all at Jewish taxpayers’ expense, which is another deformation in Israeli thinking, dare we say in the souls of the secular Zionists who founded the modern state.

These days, this abnormal Israeli identity has also produced a government deciding to go along with the demand of the U.S. and really all the goyim to participate in providing humanitarian aid to the people in Gaza who brought to power the Muslim maniacs of October 7. When in human history has a victim of aggression been told that it may pursue the enemy men with weapons among the enemy people, but their welfare is also Israel’s responsibility”?

In effect, what Trump and the world have done is to deny to Israel the ancient tactic of siege warfare, the least bloody kind there is. You cut off the enemy’s food and water, and nature takes its course. The enemy comes out with his hands up. Instead, Israel is forced to provide for the welfare of the enemy?

The IDF, leastwise some anonymous officers in the media, have complained of this insane collaboration between Israel and the Muslims in Gaza. Every day, as before October 7, hundreds of semi-trailers enter the Strip to sustain the Muslims there whose gunmen every day take pot shots at our soldiers. Over the weekend of February 1st, Israel’s warriors had to slay 32 of them.

So, I am not an Israeli in my thinking but an American who loves and learns from American history, the 250 years of settlement that it took to spread from sea to shining sea, with no small percentage of the growth, and the expansion of a flag of 13 stars to 50 stars, the result of wars in which the U.S. took land as the spoils of war. The whole American Midwest arose on territory ceded to the Americans by the British as part of the peace deal in 1783 at the end of the War of Independence.

Likewise, so much of the American West used to belong to Mexico before 1848. Americans fought that two-year war and took home about a third of that country’s territory.

Since, therefore, it is common in human history that at the end of a war victors take land away from the defeated, Israel also has the right to take land away from the defeated, aggressor Muslims, namely, a tiny strip of beach front property some 25 miles long and 5 to 8 miles wide. If the Americans guiltlessly took away a third of Mexico, surely it is not too much for Israel to demand this sliver of rectangular real estate, especially since the United Nations Charter of 1945 recognized the territory of the (future) Gaza Strip as rightfully Jewish Zionist land.

But, tragically, it is so Israeli not to claim this right, but to passively allow Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to claim the right to design and administer the future Gaza Strip.

Who gave them title to this real estate, whose sand has been soaked in the blood of more than a thousand IDF soldiers who fought and died there since 1949? Who gave Trump, Kushner and Witkoff the right to even imagine this right? Neither of them have lived in Israel let alone shed their blood for the born-again commonwealth of the Jews.

It is Israel’s passivity and silence in this matter that is another hallmark of the abnormal Israeli identity.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.