The Sin of the Spies, 2.0

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

A few days after Israel entered the old city of Jerusalem in the Six Days War it cleared the most sacred Jewish place – the Western Wall of the Temple. Photo by Yehuda Greenberg, Pikiwiki Israel, CC BY 2.5, Wikipedia

The Six-Day War began on Sunday, June 5, 1967 and on Wednesday, June 7, Israeli soldiers conquered the Temple Mount, some of them scaling to the top of the war memorial of the Muslims over the Jews – i.e. the golden Dome of the Rock intentionally, symbolically built on the site of the Jews’ ancient temples.

The soldiers, like many in history, once atop the Dome, raised the Israeli flag, just like the triumphant U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima, until the defense minister of the post-religious Israeli state, an atheist, Moshe Dayan, ordered them to take it down.

He also contacted the Muslim administrators of the site who during the fighting had fled across the River into the Hashemite Kingdom and told them to return and resume their posts.

And he told the media, this socialist who lived in a collective village, “The Temple Mount has no religious significance to Israelis, only historic.” And in any case, cracking a joke, he said, “Who needs this Vatican?”

Ten days later, June 17, 1967, this same iconic New Jew of the post-religious Zionists, decided to formalize what he did by ceremoniously transferring the keys to the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf and forbade religious Jews from praying on the Mount in order to prevent the conflict with the Arabs from becoming a religious conflict (and never mind that is all it has ever been).

And it was at this point the secular Zionists recapitulated the sin of the spies and the masses who supported them in their refusal to invade and conquer the Land of Canaan. At that point, G-d seems to have concluded that this was a generation raised in slavery, the grandchildren of slaves, who lacked the “right stuff,” and so He decided to have all the males, 20 and older, die in the desert, if not all at once. It would be their children who never knew slavery who would conquer the Land of Canaan.

But here was the New Jew Israeli demanding the right to live in Eretz Yisrael without performing any of the mitzvot/commandments, which is why G-d gave them this land. They wanted a new Jewish identity without the religion, when they are inseparable. Their striving was to separate their Israeli identity from the identity that sustained thousands of generations of Jews they believed was responsible for the endless aggression by gentiles to chastise this people.

For Israelis like Moshe Dayan, religion was superstition for the masses and chose to respond to the enemy Arabs as if it were possible to live together with them without religion being an issue. Dayan was raised to deny the violence against Jews in his boyhood and youth as religiously-despite all the evidence.

In 1929, when he was fourteen, the leader of the Arabs was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini who incited his people to slaughter Jews in Hevron and elsewhere. His oratory was exclusively religious in content. Remember that in that year, only the Zionists called themselves Palestinians, versus the Arabs whose leader Haj Amin said there was no such country, and he was right. The Muslims never knew a country with that name, let alone its borders.

Seven years later, when Dayan was 21, the Mufti led the “Arab Revolt,” 1936-39 –and notice it was not called the “Palestinian Revolt,” whose devotees murdered hundreds of Jews inspired by his religious preaching.

Haj Amin raged at the geography of the Mandatory Palestine created by the League of Nations, insisting, correctly, that never was such a country in Islamic history with that name; only Jews and Christians used it in the knowledge it was a synonym for the Promised Land in the Jews’ Bible, with the Mufti also insisting that Jerusalem was located in southern Syria, whose capital was Damascus.

Moshe Dayan on June 5, 1967 and again on June 17 acted out the secular Zionist dream of rebranding the Jews a normal people with no claims to being chosen. In Dayan’s generation of native-born “sabras,” many insisted they were not Jews at all only Israelis because Judaism, they said, is a religion and they were not religious.

And, so, in that spirit, the born-again Jewish commonwealth after the Six-Day War never once told the world that Judea, Gaza and the Golan were rightfully Jewish lands in international law. They did not want to be seen as greedy for more Arab land.

They have never wielded in their own behalf the Mandate of the League of Nations for Palestine that acknowledged the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” which included the (future) Gaza Strip and its 25 miles of beach front property.

What the generation of Moshe Dayan did was cast the template for the political conflict for the next quarter-century, leading to the fake Oslo peace process led by his soulmates the Marxists Rabin and Peres. Since 1967, the Israeli hope was the Alon Plan, giving back to the Arabs much of the land Israel conquered – but not all. Ignorant of Islam and Arab culture, they imagined this impossible dream to end the homicidal hostility of the enemy. Dayan claimed post-war Israel was waiting for the Arabs to telephone and say they were ready for peace if only Israel would return the land it stole.

Two months after WWII ended, at Potsdam, Truman, Churchill and Stalin ordered ten million ethnic Germans outside of Germany living in neighboring countries to uproot themselves and go live in the new truncated Germany and be denied any compensation for all the immovable property they could not take with them. These millions who owned homes and successful businesses became propertyless refugees overnight in their move to Germany, and why? Because during the War, when the Wehrmacht invaded these neighboring countries, the ethnic Germans in them collaborated with the Nazi army against their neighbors, and in any case, many wanted to flee because their neighbors were on fire with rage and murdered thousands of them in revenge.

In 1947, India lopped off much of its northern tier to create Pakistan as an officially Muslim state, and as a result millions of both Muslims and Hindus uprooted themselves and moved in order not to live as a minority in the other religion’s new state.

In 1923, the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen, who devised a plan to end the endless friction between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans, which also resulted in millions of Turks and Greeks, living as minorities inside the other nation, uprooting themselves.

So, what could be so terrible if Israel launched a policy calling for the transfer out of Gaza of a mere one million, the freeloaders on the UNRWA rolls, the greatest welfare scam in history, followed by the imposition of Israeli sovereignty as per the United Nations Charter?

What would be so terrible, for too many Israelis who would oppose such a policy because they would fear world anti-Jewry shrieking this is proof of Israel as an “expansionist and imperialist” state, in the words of the anti-Jew Steve Bannon. These Israelis want to be normal and liked by gentiles.

Israelis of the Left would wield the counter-argument that such a policy of claiming Gaza would mean having to grant citizenship to the remaining one million Muslims there, or be branded an apartheid state that deserves the fatal fate of apartheid south Africa — which is simply not true. Do residents of Puerto Rico and Guam enjoy the same rights as other Americans? They do not. Israel claiming sovereignty would be under no obligation to bestow citizenship on these Muslims whose religion is on fire with Jew-hatred. That demand is simply inhuman.

The recent insults out of the vulgar mouth of Donald Trump to Israel’s prime minister are largely the fault of the Prime Minister himself for saying nothing when Trump called for Gaza’s transformation into another French Riviera; presumably with the gambling casinos Trump loves to build, and high-class brothels. He also tasked his know-nothing son-in-law Mr. Kushner to draft a plan to build a brand-new, modern Gaza with 100,000 new homes and jobs for the people who elected Hamas as their government, those who did what they did on Oct. 7 and for years more in those torture tunnels for the captives. This would be their “reward” for what they did on October 7 , 2023.

It is the same spirit that formed even the otherwise right-wing Binyomin ben Bentzion Netanyahu who since then never once cited the Palestine Mandate that was incorporated into the UN Charter of 1945 that recognized the (future) Gaza as real estate rightfully Jewish, licensing Israel to this very day to demand the eviction from the Strip of murderous, non-Jews.

Prime Minister Netanyahu might have responded to Trump by saying the Jewish people will decide the fate of the Strip, which future should also include Jews living there once again. Israel will not tolerate the Gaza as a “restricted community, meaning “No Jews allowed.” Netanyahu should have immediately corrected Trump with the truth that Israeli soldiers, more than a thousand of them since 1949, have shed their blood in Gaza, but not one American G.I. The Gaza Strip is legally in international law Jewish land; the claim is rooted in the Jewish religion and by right of the victors to whom go the spoils of war, especially a defensive one.

After 1967, official Israel, led by the post-religious, was incapable of claiming the spoils of war even though the League of Nations and UN Charter saw them as rightfully Jewish territory. That would have been “too Jewish,” in the language of New Jew sabras, meaning, too religious, when the secular Zionists dreamed of a state in which the Jewish religion had no official status. They wanted to make friends with the Arabs, not rule over them.

This attitude likewise accounts for the classic Israeli inability to see the religion of the enemy as his essential, non-nationalist, identity.

In 1967, Moshe Dayan feared giving religion a role in Israel’s never-ending self-defense, and for decades thereafter, the Israeli Left, for example, Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo fiasco, were ardent supporters of the fake “Palestinian” identity as a bulwark against confronting the truth that the war against Israel is not nationalist in character but religious. It is the Jihad.

These so-called “Palestinians” were offered a state in 1993 – but statehood has never been their aspiration. All they want as Muslims is the destruction of the independent state of Jews, and as Arabs, the spawn of desert marauders, they hunger for the booty they could loot from all the wealth the Jews have created over the last 150 years via their Zionism in a destroyed Israel, G-d forbid.

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.