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Sheri Oz

 

Sheri Oz – Indigenous Upstart Nation, Israel, Scares World Leaders

I finally figured it out – I now know why the world wants to dictate the agreement they think we should reach with the Arabs, sorry – the “Palestinians”. It isn’t that the world really thinks that the “West Bank” (i.e., Judea and Samaria) is occupied territory. And it isn’t that, in their hearts, they deny that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, or think it is an international city that should be run by the UN or some such ridiculous idea like that. No – they know that Judea and Samaria are part of the ancestral homeland of the Jews; they know that Jerusalem has always been and will always be our capital.

For the longest time I have been struggling with the apparent ease by which the law-abiding nations of the world, those that are democracies like us, ignore international laws related to Israel. They seem to have invented so-called laws that are contrary to those on the books in order to de-legitimize my country’s presence in Judea and Samaria as well as the right to our capital, Jerusalem. They go along with the farce of assigning refugee status to Arabs who claim to have resided in the British Mandate of Palestine as little as two years before 1948, a decision that set in place an unnecessary (insurmountable?) barrier to peace, and then they blame Israel for being non-compliant. They pay lip service to objecting to BDS when, in fact, they may be hoping it will succeed in destroying our economic base (as long as they don’t have to give up all the Israeli components in their laptops and cell phones, and other Israeli technological and medical inventions).

In short – the governments of other countries really do seem to want to eliminate Israel from the world map.

We need to distinguish between Jew-hate on the part of “the man in the street” and the motivational factors affecting governing bodies in their dealings with Israel. I used to think it was antisemitism that made world leaders behave so unfairly toward the Jewish nation. But now I am not so sure. It may be less antisemitism than abject fear. Not fear of Jews taking over Wall Street or the film industry, or the world – no, this is not the return of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They are afraid that if the Jews succeed in regaining control of all, or most, of our ancestral homeland, we will be a light unto the other indigenous nations.

THAT is what they are afraid of ?

Instead of having been wiped out, if we Jews can rise up, like a phoenix in the desert, from the defeat and dispersal that sent us scattering off to all corners of the earth 2000 years ago — and if that is accepted by the world’s nations as our RIGHT — then will that not set the wheels in motion for other indigenous peoples whose rights were snatched from them in the even more recent past?

Can the Indian tribes of the USA, the First Nations of Canada and indigenous peoples in Australia, the South Pacific, northern Africa (and more) use Israel as a role model for taking back control over lands that were stolen from them? Such theft was accomplished most often by genocides that included, in some cases, selling the indigenous peoples into slavery in far-off lands, kidnapping children and babies from their families and raising them in abusive environments that sought to erase their languages and cultures from their collective memories. But, like the Jews, many of these indigenous peoples, weakened, traumatized and impoverished as they may be, hang onto or are resuscitating many of their traditions and their languages.

Canada and the USA, neither of which fully honours their treaties with the indigenous peoples (to put it mildly), and also Mexico, Morocco, and other modern states built on land stolen from indigenous populations because of greed, and in some cases (such as the Americas and Australia) as a refuge from persecution in Europe, must be shaking in their boots at the thought that the descendants of the victims of their manipulations and out-and-out theft will one day seek justice Israel-style.

Perhaps they are afraid that the outcome of such a revolt would match those of the uprising of indigenous peoples in southern Africa more than the imperfect but more successful Israeli model of integration of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens into all aspects of Israeli life.

I am sure that the UN did not mean the Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples to be taken as far as regaining absolute control over stolen land and that is why they must clip the wings of the Jewish Bird of Emancipation and Sovereignty mid-flight before it can do any real damage to the order of things in proudly democratic and humanitarian modern states that continue to tread upon the rights of the indigenous peoples they have subjugated and marginalized. THAT is why they must reject the Jewish claim of indigenous status in The Holy Land and collaborate with the Arab Peoples in the invention of a “Palestinian Arab Nation” that never existed, conferring on it an imaginary history and accusing the Jews of doing to the Arabs what they, themselves, do in the lands they call home.

This has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with saving their own skins. They do, however, make cynical use of the easily aroused antisemites who are willing pawns in their political shenanigans.

 

Sheri Oz is a retired psychotherapist and family therapist from Haifa, Israel. She also has a web site Israel Diaries

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Image credits: Three images are from pixabay.com. Credit for the photo of the Maori woman: By Lindauer, Bohumír Gottfried, 1839-1926 (Alexander Turnbull Library. Reference: G-516) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons / Credit for the Berber man: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmichel67/79645052/ Flickr.com] == Licensing == {{cc-by-2.0} / Credit for the Israeli guard: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKibbutz_Guard_1936.jpg / Credit for the old Jewish man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jews_in_Jerusalem_1895.jpg