reg, #3, re: "I tend to agree basically, though I wonder
if it could have been avoided. At the time Israel was created,
only a person with an extreme sensibility to karmic things
could have avoided this mistake. Many Israelis I had as friends
either chose to live abroad or were against this idea of a
Zionist homeland."
I was six years old in 1948 and have clear memories that
practically all the adults around me at the time were complete
supporters of the State of Israel, but had an understanding of
what was going on there that's extremely naive if judged by
today's standards. They belonged to the hard core of the
countercultural and occult communities in the Los Angeles
area and so did the Jews they were personally acquainted with,
and they were also mostly on the extreme left politically.
So they lived in a dream world where Israel would eventually
have an economy and social structure based mostly on
cooperatives and also serve as a host nation for large
numbers of tourists who would come to the "Holy Land"
every year. And this naivity continued through most of the
Fifties, as more and more emphasis was put on rescuing
Jews from Soviet oppression.
re: "The karmic sensibility says that a collective trauma
like the Holocaust will rebound."
A lot of people in the world occult community have always
realized this on the instinctive level, but haven't been
able to deal with it on the practical level. The reality
is that the karmic "ball" has massive weight, and when
it rebounds, it often crushes innocent and guilty alike.
re: "Some Israelis have extreme prejudices about all Arabs.
and they will say things like 'these people only understand
a show of force' and stuff like that. The sad thing is that
by now in the age of Islamic fundamentalism this became
true even though it is a gradual process. You could say that
there is a sibling rivalry energy between forceful defendants
of the idea of a Jewish homeland and local radical Arabs,
though there are many wiser people in both groups who would
like to live in peace - those are usually people who care
less about fanatical ideas of religion and ethnicity."
Until just before the 1967 war, lots of American occultists
used to visit Israel and live in Palestinian neighborhoods
because "it's cheaper and the Arabian food is a lot more
interesting than the Israel version of Kosher food". That
day is long gone, and I suspect it's hard for younger
people anywhere in the Western world to imagine that this
version of Israel ever existed.
re: "As a person with family and friendly connections to
Jewish people, I could say that it is a far simpler issue
in Eastern Europe - Jews are a very good part of our local
history and they have been only on one side of a victim-
perpetrator cycle. But it is far more complex in Israel
and all I can say is that I think no one can own the land,
though both groups have a try and also Christians 'defend'
the idea of a Holy Land. At the same time I know would be
mechanically classified by enemies of Jews with the Jewish
group. Also, even Orthodox Jews are very tolerant about
accepting goyim (or more exactly, non-Jews) even in their
holiest gatherings, as long as we put on a cap and observe
their customs, plus they are far more tolerant about the
practice of things that actually challenge orthodoxy.
I had discussions with Orthodox Jews on Shabbath about
Indian astrology and Hindu meditation. I wonder what a
fundamentalist Christian or Moslem would do if a
non-believer would be present at all."
My personal experiences with American Jews were exactly
the same as you describe happening in Eastern Europe
until about the mid-70's, when the majority of young
Jews started being almost completely assimilated into
the secular culture. Right now, practically all of the
fancy old Synogogues in the SF Bay Area have been sold
to non-Jews and are either Christian churches or homes
to businesses or charitable groups. The surviving
Jewish congregations, both Orthodox and the various
reformed sects, tend to meet in rented storefronts
and the like, as various "minor" Christian sects
have traditionally done. However, this massive
assimilation has gotten so little media attention
that it rarely gets talked about in discussions of
Zionism versus Islamic fundamentalism.
re: "As a society, Israel is facing very difficult
choices. I have a very spiritual friend who traveled
there recently and was absolutely stricken with how
beautiful everything was maintained, houses,
surroundings, agriculture, historical monuments etc.
When they were crossing into Syrian or Jordanian
territory, they were accused and searched and made
to pay right away (just because they came through
Israel with Israeli visas, they are not Jewish)
and they could see the agricultural lands neglected,
the buildings and monuments not kept up to standards
and so on. Would present-day Israelis best abandon
everything two or three generations fought for
successfully? Including Modern Hebrew? On the other
hand, how can you live in peace when armed guards
are present at playgrounds and people run for shelters
every hour of the day and night? The narratives simply
do not match, neither do the cultures. I know about
the racism and the ethnic faults perpetrated by
Israeli armed forces, and I worked alongside with
Palestinian activists in the US. However, hearing
the Israeli narratives of different people affected
me over the years... In their narrative, Arabs always
exaggerate, distort facts and present their side of
things, plus they have strict power structures similar
to mafias and tribal chiefs. But I also know about
the horrible lack of justice local non-Jewish people
have to suffer. During the last two Gaza wars, the
world was horrified at the cruelty of Israel, e.g.
bombing places where children were staying or
hospitals - at the same time, it is also horrific
to leave or place children and the sick and wounded
right on top of military installations."
It looks to me right now that the only way to have
peace in this part of the world is for all non-Jews
to be expelled from Israel, or exterminated if they
refuse to go, and for the Western World to set up
a long-term Cold War with both the Islamic World
and with Israel. This sounds harsh and pessimistic,
but I can't think of any realistic alternatives.
The irony of this is that such a solution will
automatically impoverish both Israel and the
various Islamic nations. The Western World will
be forced to find alternative sources of energy
and oil will no longer be a major source of
wealth in the Middle East. Since none of these
countries has the right kind of climate and
natrual resources in general to sustain a
successful high-tech economy, they will all
sink ever deeper into poverty, while the
equatorial regions of the New World, Africa,
and East Asia become increasingly productive
and wealthy.
re:"The British Empire chose to leave this
mess to the modern world when they were just
transferring the seat of the Western power
hub to the US."
This is why I believe that they should have
created a State of Palestine rathe than a
State of Israel.
re: "One thinks of Edward T. Hall and his study
of cultural prejudices - and maximized. Hall's
famous book The Silent Language (1965 Review)
pointed out how many things we take as 'human
nature' are learned and how they were vastly
different in different cultures. Quote from the
book review: 'If you’re a born and bred American
and you’ve lived in any non-Anglophone country,
you may have realized after a time that the local
people you met didn’t just speak a different
language—they were really weird. They acted in
all sorts of ways that struck you as irrational,
frustrating, and eventually annoying. They stood
too close to you, or too far away. Their voices
were too loud, or too soft. They were vague about
such basics as time, distance, and probabilities.
And after months of this disorienting behavior
all around you, you may have wondered whether you
were going mad. In a sense, you were. You were
suffering from what has come to be called
“culture shock”—a sometimes-traumatic condition
that results from the removal of familiar cultural
cues. In its worst manifestations, culture shock
can make you feel as though you’ve been detached
from reality.' This concept was brought home to
Americans by returning Peace Corps volunteers in
the 1960s and 1970s. Because volunteers had been
immersed by design in local cultures, they brought
culture shock to light for many Americans.
Fortunately, even before the first Peace Corps
volunteers were posted overseas, a cultural
anthropologist named Edward T. Hall had studied
the roots of culture shock in great detail and
published his findings in a compelling book,
'The Silent Language'. Those of us who served
in the early years of the Peace Corps benefited
directly from Hall’s insight. In my training\
program in 1965, 'The Silent Language' was required reading."
I personally was clued into all of this by the following book:
"Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term "future shock" as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of 'too much change in too short a period of time'.
"Alvin Toffler distinguished three stages in development of society and production: agrarian, industrial and post-industrial.
"The first stage began in the period of the Neolithic Era when people invented agriculture, thereby passing from barbarity to a civilization. The second stage began in England with the Industrial Revolution during which people invented the machine tool and the steam engine. The third stage began in the second half of the 20th century in the West when people invented automatic production, robotics and the computer. The services sector attained great value.
"Toffler proposed one criterion for distinguishing between industrial society and post-industrial society: the share of the population occupied in agriculture versus the share of city labor occupied in the services sector. In a post-industrial society, the share of the people occupied in agriculture does not exceed 15%, and the share of city laborers occupied in the services sector exceeds 50%. Thus, the share of the people occupied with brainwork greatly exceeds the share of the people occupied with physical work in post-industrial society."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock