The Japanese have known for years that spending mindful time in the woods is beneficial for body and soul. Now western doctors – and royals – agree
Every day, apart from when it’s raining heavily, Dr Qing Li heads to a leafy park near the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo where he works. It’s not just a pleasant place to eat his lunch; he believes the time spent under the trees’ canopy is a critical factor in the fight against diseases, of the mind and body.
They demand detailed answers well hidden in the future before considering any action in the present.
No, we don’t know how everything will unfold. We aren’t quite sure how to perform the Avoda yet. There are many, many questions. In fact, we are certainly getting even the questions themselves wrong.
So what?!
In Shemos 10:26 Moshe explains to Pharaoh why the Hebrews need all their flocks for the Holy Day in the desert (if we take their conversation at face value, anyway):
וגם מקננו ילך עמנו לא תשאר פרסה כי ממנו נקח לעבד את ד’ אלהינו ואנחנו לא נדע מה נעבד את ד’ עד באנו שמה.
“And our cattle, too, will go with us; not a hoof will remain, for we will take from it to worship the Lord our God, and we do not know how we will worship the Lord until we arrive there.”
The Biden administration thinks that a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA) could run a post-war Gaza Strip at peace with Israel, but that ignores several inconvenient facts:
2) The same poll shows that 72% of respondents supported the massacre of October 7. But somehow a new Palestinian state in Gaza would embrace coexistence with Israel?
3) The PA has an abysmal track record of corruption and was too weak to prevent a Hamas-led coup in Gaza, less than two years after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. So why would the PA perform any better this next time?
4) The Gaza Strip has one of the highest population densities in the world and the problem will only get worse, thanks to an estimated population growth rate of 4% (among the highest in the world). A 2018 study by Mario Coccia found that “terrorism thrives … with high growth rates of population combined with collective identity factors and low socioeconomic development.”
5) The plan to create a post-war Palestinian state in Gaza would establish an unthinkable precedent with far-reaching consequences for global security: terrorist movements can now rape and behead their way to statehood.
6) There is no Arab or other power with the popularity, authority, and morality to educate for coexistence and to ensure that all reconstruction funds rebuild Gaza as Singapore instead of Somalia.
Yet the international community – including the U.S., EU, and U.N. – still clings to the delusional idea that if they just pressure Israel into accepting a future Palestinian state in Gaza, that the impoverished, overcrowded, and radicalized territory will suddenly flourish.
While Japan and Nazi Germany were successfully de-radicalized, that was only after the kind of absolute defeat and extended occupation that global opinion would never allow for Gaza.
Given the six inconvenient facts above, resettlement is the only solution that avoids perpetual war between Gaza and Israel.
Instead, the international community insists that Gazans stay in the overcrowded and now largely destroyed Gaza Strip, despite their hateful determination to keep attacking Israel. That’s even though leaving them in Gaza is a recipe for humanitarian disaster and endless extremism: a failed state with a fast growing population, no economy, no infrastructure, and now huge numbers of homeless. How is insisting that Gazans remain in Gaza actually helping them?
And the longer the international community coddles Palestinians with massive humanitarian aid and diplomatic pressure that prevents Israel from conclusively winning the wars that Palestinians start, the longer they’ll think that “resistance” might someday pay off – maybe by the 34th war, in the year 2075.
Why are Palestinians the only people not allowed to lose a war? What makes Gazans worthy of such preferential treatment? The Tibetans never blew up a bus in Beijing nor massacred their Chinese occupiers, and yet they must submit to China’s military superiority. But somehow Gazans have a stronger moral claim to a state and are therefore exempt from the rules of war and history?
Adding to the absurdity of insisting that Gazans remain in Gaza, they aren’t even indigenous to that land, which has been ruled and inhabited by countless peoples over the centuries, as this brief history explains.
Most Gazans are the children or grandchildren of people who arrived as refugees. Indeed, one of the root causes of the Israel-Gaza conflict is the conviction among Gazans that they are refugees who will one day return to live in the territory of sovereign Israel. Their real desire is not to live forever in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Rafah, but to move to Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem (after removing the Jews “from the river to the sea”).
And yet, the practical result of socialist policies is to create the poor, crushed people we must then support…
Rabbis have brazenly supported the rich eating the poor since at least the Cantonist Decrees (the Malbim, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter and the like are the exceptions to prove the rule). See more here.
