Why are Jews hated by so many people?

i agree 100 %

Aside from every other reason anybody thought they had for disliking Jews prior to 1920 or thereabouts, there is the problem of communism. Jews were heavily involved in the commie movement in Russia in the early days and played a part in the unholy grief which the system wrought in the Ukraine.

The good news is that owning their own country, Israel, is likely to cure the Jewish people of their national weakness for leftist causes.

i was wondering this last night. i mean i was like damn, if not for america, would israel exist?

Some of the biggest and longlasting scams have came from that area, (religions)

america is backing israel totally?

How good are these people at propganda techniques?

they are really intelligent im guessing.

I see a complete contradiction; if they are so intelligent, how come they think they can bring peace through their apartheid?

It is so odd suddenly receiving an email from some former website that I used to frequent....


Food for thought...
If not for the Jews (and therefore, by dint of history, Israel), would America exist? I mean like, damn... Those various Christian sects, fleeing persecution from England and Europe, that made their way to these fruitful shores saw America as the New Israel. America invented "fulfillment" theology which replaced "replacement" theology where the Christians were supposed to have replaced the Jews in G-d's Plan.
Our Christian forefathers saw America as Fulfilling G-d's Plan for Christians, whereas the Jews had their own distinct place in the world called the Land of Israel.
For the early Christians, America was the Promised Land, flowing with Milk and Honey. Pharaoh was the King of England. The Atlantic Ocean was the River Jordan. The American Indians were the Canaanites.
This was the Land Promised to the followers of Jesus where they would build their New Jerusalem.

From the beginning, that meant that it was incumbent on these Christians to see the Jews resettled in their Promised Land, the Land of Israel.

Our uniquely American heritage of Just Laws and Freedom come from this confluence of Judaism and Christianity.
Today's Israel mirrors todays America.
We are One.

I guess with enough imagination, the story of the Jews can be applied to many cultures of this planet.

true. America would exist, it just prolly wouldn't have been under british control.

Ummm..let's see here...What's the point of the above? How is this connected to the discussion? I'm trying to follow your logic.


The point made a little earlier is one of the major reasons why America chooses to support Israel's inception and continued existence is that it so closely mirrors how and why the USofA was founded (e.g. to avoid religious persecution).

responding to him forgot to quote.

yes...? and...? And, if it hadn't been under British control -- what then? I'm trying to follow you...really, I am.

Anybody who could call Israel an "apartheid state" or any sort of an oppressor is telling a big lie. Look at the fricking map once in a while; you've got this gigantic swath of territory from the wall of China to the west coast of Africa and several tens of degrees of latitude up and down which is the slammite world, and then this tiny sliver of land called Israel which you have to know exactly where to look for in order to find and it's overwhelmingly obvious that any slammite unhappy with life in Israel has more than enough places to go. As to the legitimacy of a Jewish state, there has to be one; there were no Jews who died because they could not get out of nazi-controlled territory in the 40sm they died because they couldn't get into any other nation on Earth and there was a real danger of their going extinct. GIVEN that there had to be a Jewish homeland after 45, their ancestral homeland was at least as good a choice as any.

The contribution Jews have made to western civilization is enormous; by the same token, all but a handful of the contributions which slammites have made, particularly "palestinians", we could live without and be happier than we are.

Column Left | posted April 16, 2002 (web only)
Sharon Wears Oppressor's Cloak
Robert Scheer


What is the fundamental difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads an occupying army.

For those already loosing angry e-mails from their quivers, I ask you to take a few minutes to consider the comparison before rushing to defend Sharon's scorched-earth march through the West Bank as a necessary response to the terrorists that Yasser Arafat either condones or has been too gutless to stop.

Milosevic, like Sharon, cited the terror tactics of neighboring peoples--Croatians, Bosnians and ethnic Albanians who stood in the way of his vision of a secure Yugoslavia--as a rationale for preemptive use of massive military force against them. An occupied people can get ugly in their resistance, unless a near-saint such as Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela leads the movement away from mayhem while winning political victories. Arafat is anything but a saint, and there is much blood on his hands. But it is always the occupier, with the big guns and control of the real estate, that holds the real keys to reconciliation.





Rarely does such an occupation end voluntarily; land is exchanged for peace only when the occupiers feel there is no other choice. Both the plan laid out by former US Senator George Mitchell and the recent Saudi-inspired Arab League peace proposal offered such an option, but Sharon would not accept it anymore than Milosevic would the compromises presented to him up to the end of the Yugoslavia wars.

Instead, both have sought to destroy any momentum toward peace by waging war.

Sharon has humiliated President Bush, not only by ignoring his demand for a withdrawal but by co-opting the president's war-on-terrorism code phrases as cover for his drive to prevent--forever, if possible--a Palestinian state. How simple it would be if only the "axis of evil" targeted civilians, but from Saddam Hussein to Hamas to Sharon, nobody in the Mideast conflagration has a monopoly on such cruelty.

By blasting through West Bank towns, possibly burying children in their wake, the once-proud Israel Defense Forces is heading down toward the moral level of suicide bombers.

Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves. The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population.

Despite stereotypes, Serbs did not start out as oppressive occupiers any more than did Israelis; both their peoples suffered terribly during World War II and sought peace within secure borders. However, the historical insecurity of both peoples has led them into the role of oppressor, feeding a cycle of resistance and repression.

This is the opposite of what the idealistic Zionists who founded Israel had in mind. They always knew that the ultimate test of the new state would not be merely its ability to survive but rather its ability to survive with democratic values intact.

Almost 70% of Israel's officer corps in the 1967 Six-Day War had been raised in the idealism of the kibbutz movement. They deemed justice a universal right--even for Palestinians.

Of course, an Arab world that long refused to accept and guarantee Israel's right to exist did much to kill that idealism. Yet Israel's decision to keep the captured territories has ultimately boomeranged, drastically undermining its democracy and stability.

"If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia--two communities bleeding each other to death for generations," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak this week in an op-ed article. "Alternatively, if we do not disengage from the Palestinians, Israel might drift toward an apartheid state."

Unfortunately, under the heavy hand of Barak's successor Israel already is an apartheid state. This may be what Sharon and Arafat prefer to the Camp David compromise, but it represents the deepest betrayal of the interests of both the Palestinians and Jews.


I've been to Israel and witnessed the oppression of the Palestinians. Where do you get your information?

I admire this soldier, because he sees what is wrong and refuses to follow commands that he sees are illegal.

Published on Monday, May 6, 2002 in the Guardian of London
A Mission Too Far
Haim Weiss, Who Was Once Glad to Serve in the Israeli Army, Tells His Defense Secretary Why He Will Not Go To the West Bank

by Haim Weiss

Dear Ben Eliezer

I must put in writing the reasons that have led me to one of the most difficult decisions of my life - to refuse the call for reserve duty in the areas of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], and the Gaza Strip.

This decision was difficult for two reasons. First and foremost is a matter of principle: I believe that living in a democracy offers equal parts privilege and obligation, and that it is my duty to adhere to the decisions made by majority rule, barring exceptional circumstances. The second reason is that over many years of reserve duty, I have not only served a very important cause, but also formed close bonds with the soldiers in my company and battalion. It is extremely difficult to imagine them serving on dangerous missions while I sit at home.

Despite this, the current situation leaves me no choice but to refuse. The citizen's conscience provides a critical foundation for the checks and balances inherent in a democracy. Israel has done more than grant citizens full rights to protest against injustices. By including the concept of "a clearly illegal command" in the code of military law, it has obliged its soldiers to refuse to carry out orders that are immoral or opposed to the values on which a democracy is based.

As I see it, this concept means that when a soldier is issued with a command opposed to his moral values, he must refuse to obey it, report the event, and ensure that such orders will not be repeated. A soldier who does not do so cannot escape being held morally responsible by claiming that he only carried out orders, but can expect to be tried for his actions. This law indicates that the military and the state see the soldier as an autonomous moral being, who must carry out commands only if they pass his moral scrutiny.

The most critical question that arises is "what exactly is an illegal command?" What is immoral as opposed to just inconvenient or unpleasant, and into which category does the current situation in the territories fall?

An order to fire on a child standing before a roadblock is clearly illegal. But if the order is to shoot above his head to chase him from the roadblock, does the emotional damage the shooting causes the child make the order illegal? Is it illegal to continually enter Palestinian citizens' homes in the middle of the night? Is it illegal to prevent the free movement of Palestinian citizens? Aren't the searches, the humiliation, our many mistakes, an indication that our treatment of the Palestinian population under our rule is clearly illegal?

Military law does not define what a clearly illegal order is, but leaves it to the soldier. My interpretation of the law does not limit it to orders involving attacking, killing or injuring people. Rather, it includes any command that, when obeyed, leads to humiliating human beings, robbing them of self-respect, and depriving them of the basic human rights protected under the UN declaration of human rights, a document signed by Israel.

I used to believe there was a purpose to my presence in the territories. I believed the solutions I offered would prevent problems. Today, I believe my presence cannot solve those problems and that the orders issued are illegal because they deprive the Palestinian population of its basic rights and freedoms.

Prohibiting Palestinians from travelling along roads without providing alternative routes, the never-ending delays at roadblocks, the many hours required to travel short distances, the humiliation, the destruction of homes, the incessant searches, the need to aim weapons at innocent women and children - all these actions turn the Israeli Defence Force into an immoral occupying force, and in these I refuse to participate.

These actions on the part of the IDF provide no protection to Israel. They protect only the settlements built on conquered territory, where Israel has no right to establish settlements. The friction with the Palestinian population is caused by the need to provide settlers with freedom of movement, not by the need to prevent suicide bombers entering Israeli territory. As long as Israel continues to hold the settlements, it will be forced to act immorally toward the Palestinian population.

In addition to the great harm we are causing daily to Palestinians, we damage ourselves as a society. Our society is based on moral precepts in Judaism, which states that "loved is a person created in God's image". Instead, we are raising a generation of violent young people immune to pain and human suffering, a generation who don't see in the Palestinian a human being, only part of a mass to be avoided and feared. We are raising a generation that stops pregnant women, old people and children from getting to hospital.

I am very sorry that things have reached this point. I would be very glad to serve the IDF on any mission entrusted to us, as long as its objective is not connected with subduing the Palestinian population under our rule.

Sincerely,

Captain Haim Weiss

Haim Weiss, 32, is a captain in the tank corps and served in the IDF for four years during his military service. He is completing a PhD in Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I have not waded through the this long thread. I think that not so many have hated the Jew's, but that they are pretty offensive. The Jews have though history refused to bargain with people outside of the genetic group on issues of culture and identity, they insist on being Jews first and anything else second. This is no different then second generation Hispanics, who are legally Americans, insisting that they are Mexican. That is a blatant disrespect to America, and is offensive.

We see this same rigidity to the point of foolishness on the part of Israel, the same disrespecting ways, this time to the palestinians.

I think that there are many American Jews who consider themselves American before being Jews, and some are willing to mix outside of their race, but their is still a disturbing demand that any non Jew who marries a Jew must convert. We have not solved this problem over 2000 years, and it will not be solved anytime soon, only in part because the Jews of Israel insist on conforming to their stereotype of being unreasonable.

Before our trip to Israel, a friend loaned me the book by Susan Nathan, "The Other Side of Israel." It angered me to see such inhuman treatment of the Palestinians. I have tried to see both sides of the Palestinian-Jew issues, and have tried to keep informed about the recent developments towards a peace process in Israel. The tour director we had in Israel, a Jew, is one of the best tour guides I have ever had in all my travels. I told the travel company not to lose him at any cost.

Here's a summary of Susan Nathan's book:

The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide
by Susan Nathan

A Review by Ahdaf Soueif

On October 10, 1999, Susan Nathan stepped off an El Al flight into Tel Aviv airport. The badge pinned to her chest declared "I've come home". The Jewish Agency in London had processed her application for Israeli citizenship in one week, paid her air-fare and was providing accommodation in Israel until she found her feet. Nathan was fifty, leaving behind grown-up children and a recently failed marriage.

The desire to perform aliyah -- the "divinely ordained mission of every Jew to return to Israel" -- had not come upon her suddenly. The daughter of a committed Zionist father (who had moved from South Africa to England), she had visited Israel eight times and had sent her children to work on kibbutzim. For her, Israel was "a land without a people for a people without a land", and she movingly describes the emotions stirred by her aliyah; opening the door, say, to a plumber wearing a kippa, or being hailed by an elderly neighbour who tells her how she, a Polish child, had escaped the Holocaust.

Four months into her new life, Nathan finds herself in a ward in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital. There she is confused to find not only Jewish but Muslim, Christian and Druze Israelis: Israeli Arabs, in fact. She is troubled by the pistol and rifle sported by a young settler coming into the ward to visit his wife and baby, and troubled that nobody seems to think it strange that an armed man should be wandering among unwell women and children. In a strong American accent the settler tells Nathan -- who seems able to strike up a conversation with almost anyone -- that he had just "requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem" and never went out without his weapon. When she suggests that he might be happier in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City he replies that "all of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews".

Up until that moment, Nathan does not seem to have sensed any conflict between her Zionism and her humanism. Now an unease sets in, which eventually nudges her out of Tel Aviv and into Tamra, an Arab town of some 25,000 people. The Other Side of Israel begins as Nathan discovers the Arabs of Israel: the Palestinians who managed to remain in the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 -- and their descendants, and the conditions under which they live.

At the end of the book Nathan finds herself once more with a group of Jewish settlers who have taken over the top floor of a Palestinian house in the Old City in East Jerusalem. They use a common corridor between themselves and their Palestinian neighbours as an open latrine. This is part of the attempt to force out the Palestinians. "Although the methods vary in Tamra, Jerusalem and Hebron", Nathan writes, "the goal is always the same: the accumulation of land by whatever means possible for the exclusive use of Jews."

The Other Side of Israel is Nathan's narrative of her shock and increasing sadness on the road to this moment of illumination. From the moment, on her first visit to Tamra, when she finds that it reminds her of apartheid South Africa -- "I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships" -- to her articulated belief that Israel "is a state that promotes a profoundly racist view of Arabs and enforces a system of land apartheid between the two populations", Nathan at every turn uncovers institutionalized discrimination in all areas of life: land ownership, housing, education, access to work, access to basic services, state benefits. She discovers that land held by Palestinians for generations is constantly under threat of confiscation and homes lived in for years are under threat of demolition; and that to be an Israeli citizen who is an ethnic Arab means that you are locked in a permanent, debilitating and costly battle with a state that essentially wants you to get out. Israeli Arabs are the object of academic and media discussion as a demographic threat, and there is in place a giant construct of complex and disguised mechanisms, designed to make their lives unliveable, which is almost impossible to call to account. One of the achievements of this book is that Nathan unmasks these mechanisms -- with the help of Jewish and non-Jewish friends she lists in a roll of honour in her acknowledgements -- and describes them accessibly.

Nathan's encounters with the common-or-garden Israeli face the reader time and again with what the Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti has called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Palestinians: the bleeding heart Israelis who meet with Palestinians to offer them "love and friendship" but get angry if any mention is made of politics; and the ones who are so troubled by Palestinian "ingratitude" and angered by how they, the Israelis, have been forced to appear harsh in dealing with it. Nathan is very soon disillusioned with them and they with her. But perhaps one of the saddest portraits in the book is of a Palestinian man, an enterprising, hard-working, successful middle-aged head of a family who has twice been ruined and made a refugee by Israel, and now clings with fervour to his patronizing Israeli "friends".

The discoveries that Nathan makes along her journey are not new to anyone who has made it their business to look with clear eyes at the Palestinian-Israeli problem. They have been available in Arabic witness accounts for a long time and in English at least since 1980. What is new is seeing them revealed through the personal narrative of a woman who has had to make a choice between ideology and common humanity. And it is a tribute to her and to the Israeli friends she cites that -- having made the choice -- she and they are no longer content to be bystanders.

The Other Side of Israel could not be more timely. It should leave no one in any doubt about the coherence of current Israeli policies both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and within Israel. Susan Nathan no doubt knows that her book will make her many enemies. But the friends it wins will take her work to their hearts. Perhaps The Other Side of Israel will do more than preach to the converted. It deserves wide attention as a profoundly human story, thoughtful and funny and unafraid, the journey of a Jewish woman, deeply conscious of the history and suffering of her people, to the realization that today, the divide between the Palestinians and Jewish Israelis "is really an illusion . . . an artefact we (the Jews) have created in our imaginations . . . to protect us from the truth".

Time is running out on the Jewish state. As they continue to lose moral authority in the world and the will to fight at home for a now corrupt cause the state will fall. The only hope for Israel is a compromise with the palestinians, which becomes increasingly unlikely the longer the Jews abuse the palestinians. In not too very long the inevitable end will be the end of the state. What happens to the Jews remains to be seen, but we could very well have yet another retaliatory massacre to add to the history books.

hawkeye, Not so hopeless as most of us think. I have a friend who lives in Seattle who has talked to a high ranking official of Israel, and they are making great effort to seek a long-lasting peace process with the support of Jews not only in the US, but all over the world. These are being accomplished "behind closed doors" for now, but most fair-thinking Jews know that they cannot continue subjugating the Palestinians forever and have peace.

I'll share any news I hear from my friend on these threads.

What a colossal display of ignorance about Jews. How would you know any of this?

What have Palestinians done as far as positively contributing to Israel's formation or current betterment? did they carve out and reclaim farmland from a desert? Why is it that their Arabic and Islamic brethren historically did not want to grant them nationhood in their lands?

How do you consider as unreasonable Israel's need for military defense and reaction to an enemy at their doorstep who is dedicated to their destruction of their nation?

As an individual I support Palestinian nationhood and ultimately the relocation to an area AWAY from Israel as they've proven to be dedicated to cause of Israeli destruction as a nation. Read the Palestinian declarations for the last 30 years..

However, that being said, it is patently offensive that you generalize by confusing the opinions of Jews around the world, Jews is America and the nation of Israel as a monolithic group.

As one American Jew, I feel strongly that I'm an American first and Jew second. FWIW, as a point of info, I served in the military during Vietnam era, despite my strong political disagreement with the war. I back my political opinion but support my nation when it calls me with action and duty!

None of my Jewish relatives and friends feel(s) that they're a Jew first over being an American. So if I extrapolate this to the Jewish population at large, any statement to the contrary seems absurd.

What is being confused here is the cultural trait of supporting one's ethnic group and holding on to cultural roots ... being clannish should not be considered as offensive or in any way seen as disrespectful to one's country. So what should you care if in the Jewish faith there are practices of intermrriage and conversion? How is that disrespectful to America in any way, shape or form? Strong religious commnuities have been the cornerstone of American history? Cohesive law-abiding communities
make cities thrive.

American Jews speak English, and pervasively always did in public. They're decidedly in favor of English being spoken in schools (unlike Hispanics and Cubans of Little Havana). Jews are not ny any means separatists.

Sticking with some basic facts and trends, you're about a generation out-of-date with the pervasive trend in Jewish communities now... e.g. Jews inter-marrying at a feverish rate and hardly a Jew under 30 neither speaking Yiddish, Hebrew or knowing when the Jewish holidays are and observing them. Attendance at Sabbath services and membership in an organized temple is at a low point in many (but not all) areas.

You can't deny the American Jew, Israeli Jew almost iron link. The state is only still here because of the American Jews using their power with the American Government to prop up the State. You also can't deny the spiritual and emotional pull of Israel upon American Jews. Not only do many personally support the state but also make pilgrimages to Israel and sometimes even move there for a time. How many hundreds of american Jews currently hold down the settlement outposts in palestine (yes i know it is not yet a legal state, but it should be and it will be)?

Be offended all you want, there is no doubt about the truth of which I speak.

You are grossly misinformed about an iron link. There is also strong support in non-Jewish circles. Take the time to read up on Eleanor Roosevelt and many non-Jewish American Israeli supporters of the 30s, 40s and 50's.

Your inflammatory opinion seems to be that of many others with wishful thinking that Israel will fall and fail as a nation. Your rhetoric is very familiar.