Why Does Israel Stay So POOR?

Rabbi Pinchas Winston was giving a speech, as usual, promoting Aliyah in Texas, USA when an audience member asked him: if we all just move to Israel, where will all the Tzedakah collectors go to collect money, huh?!

Rabbi Winston responded, tell me, do you think Jews who make Aliyah generally do so for materialistic reasons, or to come closer to Hashem?

To serve Hashem.

If so, then tell me, what stops the Master of the World from making Israel a wealthy country? Why are they made to leave the holy land and collect money in Texas?!

You tell me.

Well, Chazal tell us Noah made a hole in the ark to feed Og Melech Habashan, so he could survive the flood (Yalkut Bereishis 7:56). Likewise, Hashem doesn’t allow us to be wealthy for your sakes. As for us, we’re already in the land of Israel. But you! What connection would Texans have to the land if you couldn’t give Tzedakkah to Eretz Yisrael?!

That’s the real reason we keep coming to Texas.

‘Though You Soar Like an Eagle, Though You Place Your Nest Among Stars…’

Are All the World’s Problems Ours?

In 2003, George W. Bush took us to war to liberate Iraq from the despotism of Saddam Hussein and convert that nation into a beacon of freedom and prosperity in the Middle East.

Tuesday, Mike Pompeo flew clandestinely into Baghdad, met with the prime minister and flew out in four hours. The visit was kept secret, to prevent an attack on the Americans or the secretary of state.

Query: How successful was Operation Iraqi Freedom, which cost 4,500 U.S. lives, 40,000 wounded and $1 trillion, if, 15 years after our victory, our secretary of state must, for his own security, sneak into the Iraqi capital?

Topic of discussion between Pompeo and the prime minister:

In the event of a U.S. war with Iran, Iraqis would ensure the protection of the 5,000 U.S. troops in the country, from the scores of thousands of Iranian-trained and Iranian-armed Shiite militia.

That prospect, of war between the U.S. and Iran, had been raised by Pompeo and John Bolton on Sunday, when the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and a squadron of U.S. bombers were ordered into the Middle East after we received reports Iran was about to attack U.S. forces.

The attack did not happen. But on Thursday, Tehran gave 60 days’ notice that if it does not get relief from severe U.S. sanctions, it may walk out of the nuclear deal it signed in 2015 and start enriching uranium again to a level closer to weapons grade.

The countdown to a June confrontation with Iran has begun.

Wednesday, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, for the second time in a week, test-fired two missiles, 260 miles, into the Sea of Japan. Purpose: To signal Washington that Kim’s patience is running out.

Kim rejects the U.S. demand that he surrender all nuclear weapons and dismantle the facilities that produce them before any sanctions are lifted. He wants sanctions relief to go hand in hand with the disposal of his arsenal. Few believe Kim will surrender all of his nukes or his ability to replicate them.

The clash with Kim comes days after the failed U.S.-backed coup in Caracas, which was followed by Pompeo-Bolton threats of military intervention in Venezuela, a country 100 times the size of Puerto Rico with 10 times the population and a large well-equipped army.

This week also, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford told Congress that the U.S. will have to keep counter-terrorism forces in Afghanistan “until there is no insurgency left in the country.”

Which sounds like forever, as in “forever war.”

Before flying to Baghdad, Pompeo was in Finland. There, he warned the eight-nation Arctic Council about Russian aggression in the region, suggested China’s claim to be a “near-Arctic” nation was absurd and told Canada’s its claim to the Northwest Passage was “illegitimate.”

Our Canadian friends were stunned. “Those waterways are part of the internal waters of Canada,” said the government in Ottawa.

After an exhausting two weeks, one is tempted to ask: How many quarrels, clashes and conflicts can even a superpower manage at one time? And is it not time for the United States, preoccupied with so many crises, to begin asking, “Why is this our problem?”

Perhaps the most serious issue is North Korea’s quest for nuclear-armed missiles that can reach the United States. But the reason Kim is developing missiles that can strike Seattle or LA is that 28,000 U.S. troops are in South Korea, committed to attack the North should war break out. That treaty commitment dates to a Korean War that ended in an armed truce 66 years ago.

If we cannot persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons in return for a lifting of sanctions, perhaps we should pull U.S. forces off the peninsula and let China deal with the possible acquisition of their own nuclear weapons by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Iran has no nukes or ICBMs. It wants no war with us. It does not threaten us. Why is Iran then our problem to solve rather than a problem for Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the Sunni Arabs?

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

The ‘Canaanites’ Win: Israel is Neither the Jewish State nor Even the Jews’ State!

Some writers regard unconverted Arabs being granted “Israeli” citizenship an absurdity.

They complain when the “news” refers to “Israelis” harmed in an accident, without troubling to inform us whether or not they are Jewish.

And they are shocked when state media frame matters about whether or not “Israelis among wounded in California synagogue shooting that killed one”, instead of focusing on the murder of Jews (how many of those killed by the Germans were Zionist?!).

They are shaken and dismayed: Is this a Jewish state, or a cosmopolitan state?!

Nu-nu. So, what else is new?

Contra Meir Kahane, the impossible contradiction in the Israeli declaration of independence is not the words “Jewish” and “democratic“, but Jewish” and “State! Statehood is not Jewish, and cannot be made Jewish. So, it’s good the pretense is fading, but bad this is used as a weapon against Jewish identity.

Let’s entirely separate Religion and State, and then oxygen and state.

Humans have ordinal commonalities of varying strengths, to be treated in descending order. Unlike “Tov shachen karov me’ach rachok“, State borders are forcibly chosen and stressed, slashing through voluntary lines of kinship: religious, familial, climate, business, etc.

See the following quote from Rabbi Yitzchak Breuer: