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How Israel Can Be Normal

Published: March 26th, 2008
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         Since the founding of the state, the goal of Israel’s leaders has been to make Israel a normal state like all other states. But currently, Israel’s leaders do not even bother providing their citizens with security – the basic commodity that all “normal” leaders supply. Once again we see that those who attempted to establish a “normal” (in other words, anything but Jewish) state here and to run Israel’s affairs according to “normal” standards find themselves ruling Israel in an awesomely abnormal manner.

 

        Paradoxically, in order for the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state in the Land of Israel and in order for it to have normal highways, normal Internet, normal public transportation and a normal army (in other words, in order to have all the normal systems common in a normal state to function in the state of the Jews), we must always remember that Israel is not a normal state. We must remember that Israel has a different, super-normal destiny and values system; thus we must conduct ourselves accordingly. A leader who does not understand this simple truth is doomed to abnormality in the negative sense – announcing a siege on Gaza in the morning and calling it off in the evening.

 

         On the Shabbat before Purim, Jews throughout the world read the Torah portion, Zachor, in which we are commanded to remember Amalek and his evil schemes to obliterate the nation of Israel. But currently, Israel is in the throes of a desperate attempt to erase its history, to not remember. In doing so, it has lost its internal reference point, leaving it completely dependent on its enemies. Without Judaism, we have no right to be here. We are nothing more than foreigners occupying the land of Hamas – and they are simply fighting a war of independence.

 

         Those who had mistakenly assumed that Israel’s leadership was beginning to understand reality received a chilling wake-up call last week from Israel’s president. “Why do we need to learn history?” Shimon Peres asked, as he stumped for Education Minister Yuli Tamir’s educational methodology. “Everything is in the computer, anyway.”

 

         I do not think that there is another leader in the world who would dare make such a foolish and dangerous remark. No nation, no matter how young or remote, would demonstrate such blatant scorn for the history of the world and its own national history. But the king of the Jews, president of the country that claims to represent the most ancient nation in the world, wants to stop our children from learning history. After all, everything is in the computer and can be easily accessed with the press of a button.

 

        Technically, Peres is correct. The problem is that if history – the foundation for our culture and heritage, and the justification for our existence in this land – is in the computer and not in our heads and hearts, we will have no idea what we are doing here, why we should stay here and suffer, and certainly not why we should fight for this land.

 

         “I hate history,” Peres explains, completely negating the Divine directive to remember history. Everything is in the computer. “And anyway,” he continues, “we live in a world in which territory has no significance.”

 

         The entire post-modern ideology in which everything is “virtual” is personified by the president of the State of the Jews. Nothing is real anymore. The land is virtual, the Kassams are nothing more than “Shmasams” (as Peres called them) and Israel’s policy is nothing more than a spin. In other words, reality is the amount of time that a given item stays in the headlines. Nothing else has any significance. Even pain is no longer real. Luckily for Israel’s leaders, the two soldiers who died unnecessarily in the IDF’s most recent (and meaningless) venture in Gaza were killed – rather than captured. Otherwise, we would have been forced to remember them. Now that they have died, they are nothing more than their mothers’ problem.

 

         Shimon Peres and the rest of the Oslo priests have enslaved us in a language and mentality that have made our reality meaningless. How can we stop the missiles from being fired on Israel when so many of its streets and structures are named after Yitzhak Rabin – the person who, more than anyone, symbolizes the process that has brought this catastrophe upon us?

 

         Israel must free itself of the Oslo mentality. The key is to keep the memories in our heads and hearts – not in our computers.

 

         To learn more about Moshe Feiglin and Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership), and to order Feiglin’s newest book, The War of Dreams, visit http://www.jewishisrael.org/.

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