From various sources which I don't remember at the moment probably Douglas Murray from Britain and maybe an Israeli former general whose name eludes me at the moment Hamas leaders thought Israel would not respond in any militarily and they could destroy the country in days with the help of Hezbollah, Iran and the West Bank launching another October 7. They were wrong.
I see no evidence that Israel will not be destroyed and almost everyone here including Moslems, Christians, Druze and other minorities killed. I hate to say this but as much as I reject Jewish orthodox beliefs and what I learned from working in a stock brokerage company with a seat on a major stock exchange that past performance is no predictor of future results when it comes to Jews there is a lot to be learned from history that has repeated itself in cycles over and over again. There are numerous problems with reading the Bible in any foreign language except the original Hebrew and a few other words from languages such as ancient Ethiopian and ancient Egyptian and that includes modern Hebrew been heavily mistranslated, some on purpose. If you understand the ancient Hebrew some of the words could have up to 5 o 6 meanings and possibly many more depending on the context of what's being described.
Here is a post in the following paragraph I wrote to a forum for which I never received a reply by what I can only assume is someone who hates Jews for whatever reason. The author does reply to many people over the few years I have read the forum wihich includes many other authors. He was in a partnership with an MD who gave general medical advice I thought was important enough for people my age (I'm currently 76) to take into consideration.
Haliva is responsible to a large extent, in my view, for allowing the massacre of Oct 7, 2023 to take place and may or may not have called for retaliation (I never read or heard what he said in Hebrew which is often mistranslated and distorted on purpose.
Haliva absolutely does not represent the majority of Israelis or the government's policy. Hamas in its charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel which means the killing of every Jew and probably many Arab Moslems in the process. Israel sends food to Gaza. This is like sending food to the Germans during World War II. Would you have supported that?
Israel could have finished the war in a few hours if it wanted to and obliterated all of Gaza which was handed over to them in 2005. Hamas was overwhelmingly elected and has controlled Gaza for almost 2 decades. That was the only election.
There has been no genocide in Gaza. See this link.
https://aish.com/israel-is-not-committi ... planation/
The Palestinians have rejected every peace plan starting from 1947
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Na ... _Palestine
Clinton and Israel offered Arafat 94% of the West Bank with 4% of Israel with East Jerusalem as its capitol. Arafat rejected the plan culminating in the second intifada which killed hundreds of Israelis in terror attacks. Former President Bill Clinton talks about it starting at 5:35 of this clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIcH4x0Xbe4
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has said that in order to protect Gazans, Israel will sacrifice their own soldiers, many who have been killed.
Here he is talking about Israel and Gaza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufi2ypuVEFk
I don't think the USA should give any money to Israel. I am an American Jew born and raised in the USA, who holds dual citizenship with Israel. My best friends in this life of 76 years are all Christians who I met at Columbia University in the fall of 1967. Two of whom are sadly deceased. There are wonderful people of all faiths as well as despicable ones.
Israel is not an apartheid state. Arab Moslems attend universities, work in Israeli hospitals, and are represented in Israel's governing body the Knesset. You can read this.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pol ... sour-abbas
I don't think Israel has a very good chance of survival. I wanted to move with our family who are all dual citizens to the USA over 25 years ago, but because our daughter had cancer as a child, I was afraid she would be denied health insurance coverage with a preexisting condition. When she was being treated for cancer, a Palestinian teenager was in the same room with her. Israel paid for that girl's treatment which probably cost a million dollars.
The life of Yahya Sinwar the Hamas leader who planned the October 7 attacks was saved by Israel.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/20/midd ... inwar-intl
I don't know what you think of this country. Maybe you think Israel has no right to exist, or we should all die for the killing of Jesus. I have read numerous passages in what is called the Old Testament, King James version, that have been heavily distorted from the original Hebrew.
Tovia Singer gives a very detailed analysis in his two volume set Let's Get Biblical which I suggest you read.
I could write a lot more, but this is enough for now
Nafod
As you can see I spent probably an hour writing this post which does not include decades in Israel learning about this culture, Jewish religious studies including basic texts, Jewish mysticism, as well as reading books about ancient Israel, ancient Jewish practice by university professors specializing in various aspects of Jewish thought, history movements etc.. .
I have been a serious student since I entered junior high school in the fall of 1961. I could say a lot more but I'm exhausted. It's now 23:16 in Israel. I think every adult in this country is exhausted from this dreadful war that should have ended in a month with the defeat of Hamas who terrorize their own citizens. I haven't been to Gaza but I know soldiers who have. The human race in a lot of ways is very disturbed spending so much more money on war than peace. A butcher in a neighborhood grocery immigrated from Ukraine a few years ago. I asked some months ago about the current situation in Ukraine. He said in Hebrew there is no more Ukraine. I didn't understand because there was still a government and soldiers and a population. After I spent some time reading about the devastating war in Ukraine I understood that the Ukraine he had lived in was no more.
It can centuries and thousands of trillions of dollars to create a civilization and these days a nuclear war could destroy the human race and everything it built in 15 minutes. I can't live with the fear every minute I will most probably die in an extremely cruel way if I stay here for more than a year or two but I am facing the reality that even if I live past 100 I have lived almost my whole life. In childhood a day could seem to take forever depending on many factors, but now a year passes in a blink. I joined this forum over 13 years ago and it seemed like yesterday.
Thanks for responding
My real friends are from the dorm at Columbia university who I met in the fall of 1967. My best friend is dead, as is one other and as I have written before the two others are alive
One is on the East Coast and his first wife died after 39 chemotherapy treatments having decided to refuse the 40th. He had a kidney transplant and has remarried. The other is in Greece suffers from emphysema and other illnesses he has not disclosed. A son who he barely knew from a second marriage that ended in divorce after a few years is dying from HIV drugs according to his father. He lives on the East coast. I won't begin to describe the suffering the two of them have endured.
As for me, my 39 plus year marriage is over (I keep hoping it isn't) but I have to face the facts that M (I never refer to her as my wife) has repeatedly lied to me since the war began. She acts like she loves me and at times I think she does but I believe for a lot of reasons she wants me out of her life dead or alive. I'm not joking. It's such a complex issue and painful issue involving two adult children suffering clinical depression one of whom almost died from a very rare cancer in 2002 at the age of 11 who I never expected to have any contact with again that I won't go much further. I never hit them, and thought I was a good enough father. 5 trauma therapists said I was a good father. I've written this before. They got paid. They were wrong. I got burnt. If I could do it over again I'd never have been involved with women. I'm not gay but almost all my serious relationships end in a lot of emotional pain. I don't know how but I keep going. I have felt like killing myself but never even try for better or worse. I will do whatever I need to feel alive including listening or watching Jimi Hendrix who for me was the most incredible performer I ever saw including jazz greats Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, and a few others who played with John Coltrane who died before I had even heard his name.
Miles was invited to the White House when Richard Nixon was president. I think it was one of Nixon's daughters who had never heard of Miles Davis and asked what have you done. He replied brusquely, "I changed music a few times."
I've changed music five or six times" is a famous quote from Davis's autobiography It's true from my having heard him play in concert 3 times (once in a club of about 100 people). He said I play life. Whatever that means I started to feel a lot better remembering how incredible music was for me starting when I first heard Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957 when I was 7 or 8 years old play Great Balls of Fire. this is not what I heard or saw on Dick Clark's TV Show American Bandstand but it's good enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rARVtbfAB8g Obviously I was too young to understand all the sexual innuendoes but it had such tremendous energy that counteracted a lot of the craziness of living with my parents, the oppression and discipline of public secular school and orthodox Jewish education for about 7 hours that it saved me from being a depressed child according to my mother years later. I am too tired to write any more but music has been an incredibly important part of my life. I thought in the late 1960s my generation could change the world and bring peace. I was naive and very idealistic. I am a lot more sanguine and hope the sane voices don't allow humanity to perish in a nuclear holocaust. It's now 23:57
What can I say I can't believe I heard Jimi Hendrix, saw the great mime performer Marcel Marceaux live, heard some famous opera singers went to Europe in the late 1960s when it was unbelievably cheap if you had American dollars, almost got killed 3 times, and almost arrested for smoking marijuana in London (it has been over 50 years since I smoked it and took what purported to be LSD twice - it wasn't. There are so many people who say the Grateful Dead changed their lives. Hearing them in a concert on May 5, 1968 changed mine (I had never taken any illegal drug and didn't that day. Jerry Garcia, the guitar player, who I thought was pretty mediocre at best, played incredibly.
There were 500 or so of us left from the original audience of about 10,000 (Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Jefferson airplane also performed) in a free concert in Manhattan's Central Park. We were all dancing on benches. I had never felt such ecstasy and freedom. It went underground a number of times but it's still inside. I now know it takes a lot of work for me to move in the direction of whatever freedom could be. I am so much a product of my genetics, childhood background etc.. I took a psychology class over 50 years ago and our professor quoted Professor Philip Zimbardo "by the time a person is in their early 20s, he is a museum of old habits." I wanted to scream that can't be true but didn't. I have been working in one way or another to
move out of that museum that all too many people are completely unaware of. I must have made progress, but a lot of times especially during this war I feel I completely regressed.
I had already heard Hendrix in concert twice before watching the movie Monterey Pop where this clip comes from. Hendrix came to regret what he did at Monterey but felt he had to for whatever reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVN8_7wVSG0
The videos and recordings and memories can never do justice to having been there live. He had some incredible wisdom for a person who didn't finish high school and came from a broken home. His father was drafted into World War II so James Marshall Hendrix (his given name) only met him when he was 3 or 4 years old having been shuttled around to different family members and neighbors. He barely knew his mother who was an alcoholic and a teenager when she married his father and was pregnant with him. She died when Hendrix was 16. I'll leave you with what he purportedly said
When the power of love overcomes the love of power there will be peace. I hope we meet again Jimi Hendrix. You gave so much to people like me. You'll never know. I'm not you and wouldn't want your life. I hope I have brought and brings some light to a world that seems to grow darker each day.
Nafod
all the best.
lenny
