Yaakov Shapiro - Has Zionism Hijacked Judaism? (2017)

Dr. Mosvinsky: Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. Rabbi Shapiro is a pulpit rabbi of a congregation in Queens, New York, and a specialist in Jewish history and law, on which he's the author of three books, the first of which was published when he was 19 years old, and he has a fourth book, which is due to come out this next week. But he's best known for his outspoken stance defending the historic Orthodox Jewish position that rejects the concept of Jewish nationalism and therefore opposes Zionism and does not recognize the concept of a Jewish state. He has represented this position on behalf of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community throughout the world in both scholarly and political forums to a remarkable variety of audiences, including those in the United States, the State of Israel, and the European Union in Brussels. The rabbi is currently completing his next book, the first one to be written in English, which is a three-volume work on traditional Jewish opposition to Zionism. Rabbi Shapiro.

Yaakov Shapiro: Thank you, Dr. Mosvinsky, and thank you all of everybody for inviting me here today. It's a pleasure and an honor to speak for such a prestigious audience. Before I start, do you mind if I take off my jacket? It's a little hot in here. Thank you. Today, the goal of our talk is to understand the relationship between Judaism and Zionism, official title of today's discussion was, Has Zionism Hijacked Judaism? In order to answer that question, we have to understand a little about Judaism, a little about Zionism, and at the end, we're all going to be able to answer that question for ourselves. The truth is that in order to understand Zionism, you really do need to understand Judaism, but not because Zionism is Judaism and not even because Zionism is an offshoot of Judaism, but for a completely different reason and that is in order to understand the medical profession you need to understand disease. If you want to know why a doctor does what he does, why a doctor prescribes medicine or perhaps decides to make an operation or put a cast on someone's arm, you need to understand the nature of the sickness. The same relationship that the medical profession has to a sickness, Zionism has to Judaism. Judaism is the sickness, and Zionism is the cure. Without understanding Judaism, you will have no idea why Zionists do what they do. People think, mistakenly, that Zionism is a purely political movement, And they view it in purely political ways. They would other political movements. And because of that, they don't really understand a lot of what's going on. The piece to the puzzle that's missing is Judaism. And we'll start off with an example. Start off with an example, a mysterious statement by the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he made, quoted in the Jerusalem Post, 12-26-2016. In one hour from now, we're going to be able to understand the statement. But right now, it'll be a mystery to all of us. The context of the statement was, after the United Nations Security Council voted 14 to 0 with America's abstention, that the settlements in Israel are illegal against international law. The following was Mr. Netanyahu's response. He didn't agree or concede to the Security Council vote. And he said, quote, Israel is a country with national pride, and we do not turn the other cheek. This is a rational, aggressive, and responsible response, the natural reaction of a healthy nation that's making clear to the nations of the world that what was done in the UN is unacceptable to it. He said, quote, People said that what he was doing was involving Israel in a world war, so to speak. Quote, I say enough with the diaspora mentality. I say there's no diplomatic wisdom in being obsequious. Not only will our relations with the world not be harmed, in the long term they'll only improve because the nations of the world, quote, respect strong countries that stand up for themselves and They do not respect weak and obsequious countries that bow their heads. Now, if somebody told me that I was doing something against international law and I would have various possible responses at my disposal, I could say, number one, I disagree. It's not against international law. I could say it is against international law, but I don't really care. I could say, three, what you're describing as against international law is, in fact, against international law, but you don't understand the facts and circumstances of what I did. Either of those or many other possibilities would respond to the charge of doing something against international law. What Netanyahu is saying over here doesn't respond to that at all. What is he saying? He says he's talking about national pride. I'm going to come back to this, but I want this on the record now. National pride. What in the world does national pride have to do with the charges? What is he talking about? Did anybody, somebody hurt his pride? National pride. Have you ever in your lifetimes heard a prime minister, a head of state, respond to opposition by saying, no, we have national pride? We do not turn the other cheek. We know what that means. Turn the other cheek is a New Testament phrase. It means that we are Jews and not Christians, and we're not going to turn the other cheek. That's what it means. But what in the world is he saying? It's a rational, aggressive, responsible response, the natural reaction of a healthy nation. Healthy nation, get that. Healthy. Did anybody question the health of his nation? Was there like a Ebola epidemic or something? What does he mean a healthy nation? And then he says, I say enough with the diaspora mentality. Diaspora mentality. The nations of the world respect strong countries that stand up for themselves. He wants respect. They do not respect countries, and what were his words? That bow their heads. And we do this because we are Jews and we do not turn the other cheek. We do not turn the other cheek. Now clearly, he's addressing issues over here that probably people in this room have no idea what he's talking about. There's something he's trying to communicate about being a healthy nation, national pride. He's trying to tell the world something that many people in the world, and if you don't know what we're about to say in the next hour, just won't know what he's talking about. National pride, healthy nation. bow their heads, turn the other cheek, excuse me, somebody accused you, you could deny it, you could admit it, you could deny it, you could do whatever you want, you could plead guilty or not guilty, you could fight it or not fight it, somebody saying that what you're doing is illegal. What does it have to do with pride, health, health, pride, bowing heads, what's going on here? In an hour, we'll be able to understand it because what he was doing was talking pure Zionism. At the outset, we want to discuss Zionism. Now, at the outset, I want to get over something that probably a lot of people have heard in the past. And that is that Zionism was created as a Jewish response to anti-Semitism, to create some kind of safe haven, a safe place for the Jewish people. Another version of this says that Zionism was created in order to give the Jews an army to be able to fight against the anti-Semites. This is absolutely false. It's a fiction. The entire idea that Zionism was created as a response to anti-Semitism is, as Shlomo Avineri puts it very politely, quote, political propaganda. It's true that the Zionists believed that Zionism would solve the problem of anti-Semitism, but for a completely different reason. They thought, astoundingly, that if Zionism were to succeed, anti-Semitism would disappear. And this indeed motivated many people to become Zionists. But even though it drove many people to support Zionism, bringing about the end of anti-Semitism or protecting Jews therefrom was not the reason Zionism was created. Max Nordau, Lieutenant to Theodor Herzl and one of the founding fathers of Zionism, said, he explained, and I quote, It's not correct to say that Zionism was a gesture of truculence or an act of desperation against anti-Semitism. In the case of most Zionists, the effect of antisemitism was only to force them to reflect upon their relationship with the nations, and their reflection led them to conclusions which would remain a lasting acquirement of their mind and heart, even if antisemitism were to disappear completely from the world. He's saying even if anti-Semitism would disappear from the world, Zionism would still retain its mission and its momentum and would continue. A response to anti-Semitism was not the purpose of Zionism. There are similar statements from other Zionist founding fathers. The historical record is full of such statements. It's clear. Shlomo Avineri argues that it would be ridiculous to say that Zionism is a response to anti-Semitism because of all the possible times for Zionism to have appeared, the 19th century would be the least likely because the 19th century was the best century for the Jews as far as anti-Semitism is concerned. It's the beginning of the 19th century when Zionism developed, when it first appeared since the destruction of the Temple 2,000 years ago. Boaz Evron has a spatial, not a temporal, argument also to show that Zionism is not a response to anti-Semitism. That is where it appeared. He said 19th century anti-Semitism, especially the racial so-called scientific anti-Semitism, developed in Germany and France in the 1860s and 1870s. No Jewish nationalist movement developed there and then. The Jewish nationalist movement they call Zionism developed at a time and in places where anti-Semitism was not at its strongest. In many ways, it was at its weakest. I'm going to add some arguments from Judaism to show that Zionism was much more and much different than response to anti-Semitism, number one. If all Zionism was was a response to anti-Semitism to find a safe place, why Israel? Why Palestine? Why the Middle East? There was a Uganda suggestion. There were other suggestions. If all you're looking for is a safe place for Jews to go, why insist on Israel? And they did insist on Israel. Why? Go take an island somewhere. Go take Uganda. It's as safe as anywhere else. It would be much safer than Israel. That's for sure. Yet they didn't. Another thing. The language. They created a language. This thing that in Israel they speak Hebrew. Hebrew is not the natural language of the Jewish people. For thousands of years we have not spoken Hebrew. Even during the days of the Second Temple, Jews did not speak Hebrew, they spoke Aramaic. You know the story, do you ever see the clip on YouTube between Netanyahu and the Pope? No, I'm just not joking. It's not like Netanyahu and the Pope walk into a bar. It's not a joke. Go on to YouTube and punch in Netanyahu Pope. What you'll get is a little clip. The Pope, a couple of years ago, came to visit Israel. He sits down with Netanyahu, and Netanyahu's telling him in Hebrew. He's bragging to him about Israel. He says, this is the place where Jesus lived, and he spoke Hebrew. So the Pope says, no, Aramaic. And Netanyahu says, yes, but he understood Hebrew. Could be he did, but that's not the language that they spoke. There were people, there were Zionists that decided that the Jews should create a language, Hebrew. And modern Hebrew is very, very different than biblical Hebrew. I've got to tell you, I have a hard time understanding modern Hebrew. I really do. I understand biblical Hebrew perfectly. But modern Hebrew is very hard for me to understand because it's much different. But they created this language for the Jews to speak. Why? Do you know how much effort went into that? Do you know how difficult it is to teach people a new language? Jews came from Russia. They came from Poland, came from Germany to Israel. It happens to be Theodor Herzl in his book, The Jewish State, had no intention of the Jews in Israel speaking Hebrew. They don't speak Swiss or German or some such language. This was another idea from the Zionists. Why? If all you're looking for is a safe place, a haven, why create a language? Why, in what they called the ancient homeland, create a language? There was much more to Zionism, clearly, than merely... finding a safe place for the Jews. Now, we're going to speak a little about Judaism now. We're going to take you back in time about a thousand years. Before 1,000 years, we could do 500 years too, even 400 years. 350, things get a little murky. Once the Enlightenment came and Judaism was affected by outside influences. We're going to take you back 500, 1,000 years, and we're going to describe the basics of Judaic thought. The first question is, what is a Jew? Now, if you want an old definition of a word, usually go to the dictionary. It's not going to help you over here very much. I have in front of me two dictionary definitions of Jew, one from the Cambridge Dictionary and one from Oxford English Dictionary. According to Cambridge Dictionary, quote, a person whose religion is Judaism or a person related by birth to the ancient people of Israel. Now, that's one of two things. Either your religion is Judaism, even if you're not related by birth to the ancient people of Israel, Or, even if your religion is not Judaism, if you're related by birth, how are you related? I'm not sure. Paternally, maternally, cousins, it doesn't say exactly, related by birth to the ancient people of Israel. Before the ancient people of Israel, were there Jews? I seem to remember a story in the Bible about a nation coming out of Egypt and giving a Torah on Mount Sinai. And the Bible says, which means now, today, you have become a people. That was in the desert. That was not in any country. It was before the Jews went into the Holy Land. And yet the dictionary says either a person whose religion is Judaism or related to the ancient people of Israel. Oxford says, quote, a member of the people and cultural community, people and cultural community, whose traditional religion is Judaism and who trace their origins to the ancient Hebrew people of Israel. So according to Oxford English Dictionary, being a Jew is being a member of a people and a cultural community. I'm not sure what connection, what kind of cultural community the Jewish people are. Around the corner from me where I live, there is a fine young Yemenite Jew. His name is Yechia. Yehi's family was in Yemen for centuries my family comes from Poland and my father's side for centuries 500 years we were in Poland and my mother's family is from England I have nothing in common with Yehi culturally my family spoke Yiddish his doesn't we eat different foods now we're all a little mixed up because we're all in the same neighborhood and we influence each other but traditionally he eats different foods speaks a different language completely the only one thing we have in common is our religion What exactly is a cultural community when we're talking about the Jews? Just look at this room. If we would point out different Jews and you would say, this is one cultural community, people would laugh. A thousand years ago, Rav Sadi Goyin, who was born in Egypt in the 800s and died in Baghdad in the 900s, explains the definition of a Jew. He said, our nation is only a nation. Our people are only a people because of our religion, because of our Torah. That's it. When Ruth the Moabites converted, she told Naomi, your people are my people and your God is my God. Our tradition tells us that when she said your people are my people, it meant your commandments, your Torah is my Torah. The Jewish people, a thousand years ago up until recent times, identified as Jews for only one reason, because of a religion. The Jews were a religious community. If you did not practice the religion, it did not make any sense to call yourself a Jew. There were no such thing. If you didn't practice the religion, people converted to other religions. But there was no such thing, with a few quirky exceptions. Perhaps Benedict Spinoza was one of them. Depends who you ask. But with a few perhaps quirky exceptions, there were no groups of people that were not observant, that did not follow the religion, that still considered themselves Jews. Atheists did not consider themselves Jews. Jews that converted to other religions did not consider themselves Jews. Jews are completely religious people. But more than that, the religion defines them as Jews. When God gave Moses the Torah on Mount Sinai, that transforms the that group of people that left Egypt into the Jewish people. Now, I'm not asking everybody here now to believe that God gave Moses the Torah on Mount Sinai. That's our religion. You don't have to believe my religion. But you know what? No problem. If you don't believe my religion, then maybe you don't believe that God meted upon the Egyptians ten plagues, you don't believe that Adam spoke to a snake, and you don't believe that the Jewish people were created by God on Mount Sinai. But the only way you could believe that the Jews, the way Jews identified as Jews for thousands of years, is only because they believed, as I do, as we Orthodox Jews do, that God came to Moses on Mount Sinai, thereby creating a people called the Jewish people. The Jews had no national aspirations and no national goals. even when God told Joshua, go into the Holy Land and conquer it. That wasn't a nationalist thing. That was a religious thing. It was a religious command by God. Our land, the relation between the Jews and the Holy Land, is not the same as the relation between, let's say, the French people in France. To us, it's not a homeland. Do you know where the homeland of the Jewish people is? It's the Torah. It's God. It's our religion. The land is a holy land. Imagine a big synagogue. It's a place for pious people to worship the Lord. It's a place where we could worship God, fulfill God's law better in a more holy atmosphere than outside the land. But it's not a national homeland. It's a holy land. The language is not a national language. Hebrew is not a national language. Jews did speak Hebrew in biblical times. But language is called, it's called Lashon HaKadosh. You know, a very interesting thing is a professor, Eliezer Schwed, he points out that all languages are all named after the people that speak the language. France, French. England, English. America is also English. Russia, Russian. But to the Jews, we called it Lashon HaKadosh. It wasn't called Jewish Lashon. They were the Jews. It wasn't called Jewish. It's called the holy language. Because it wasn't the national language of the Jewish people. The Jews did speak it, but not for nationalist reasons. It's a holy language. We are not allowed to speak any mundane words, any mundane thoughts in that language. It's designated nowadays, for the last few thousand years, for study and for prayer. It's a holy language. Are Jews a race? Of course not. There's no race of the Jewish people. We have black Jews, we have white Jews, we have Chinese Jews, we have all sorts of Jews. We accept converts. You can't convert to a race. Jews aren't a family either. If we are a family, if we're all related, explain to me. Why it would be that, you know, Jewish law says that Jewishness follows matrilineal descent. If a male Jew marries a non-Jewish female, the child is 100% non-Jewish. And if a non-Jewish male marries a Jewish female, the child is 100% Jewish. If it's a blood... If it's a blood identity, a blood family, you would be half Jewish, a quarter Jewish, and more. Familial affiliation follows, according to Jewish law, according to biblical law, paternal lineage. If you are from one tribe, a male marries a female from a second tribe, the child's tribe follows the father. Family follows the father. The only thing that follows the modern Jewish law is religion. ipso facto. Jews are not a tribe. Jews are not a family. You can't convert to a family. You could be adopted, but there's a difference between an adopted child and a converted Jew. An adopted child to a family isn't actually biologically a member of that family. There's a law that says you have to treat the child as if he was a member of the family. But by a Jew, it's not that the law says you have to treat the convert as if he was a Jew. The convert is 100% full-fledged Jew as much as anybody else. King David was a descendant of converts. Converts are 100% Jews. And what do you have to do to be a convert? You have to accept the religion. The Jewish values. We had purely spiritual values. The interest of the Jewish people was not to win Nobel Prizes and not to win Olympic gold medals. It wasn't to conquer land. All the Jews wanted in ancient times was to be left alone to study Torah and to do our mitzvahs. Our Torah tells us who is strong, he who conquers his own self. Who is honored, he who honors others. Who is wealthy, he who is happy with what he has. The sword was the antithesis of the Jewish lifestyle. Classic Bible, they're two brothers, Jacob and Esau. Yaakov and Esau. Esau is the one with the sword, the hunter. Yaakov is the one that sits in the tents and studies. The Jews eschew violence. We are, even when Jews went to war, you know our tradition tells us that we didn't win wars because of how strong we were. We won wars only because of God's help. Again, I'm not telling you I'm not trying to convince you to believe my religion, but I'm describing what my religion is. There's a story, I'll tell you a story. In the days of the Maskeelim, they didn't like Orthodox Jews. Well, they wanted to change and make them more modern, you know, make them more hip and stuff. And they used to make fun of a lot of the Jewish philosophers. And they did a play once, a skit, like a Saturday Night Live kind of skit, about the Jews, Jews going to war. Here was the skit. They had the priest that recruits soldiers, and he said, okay, whoever, Jews are going to war, who wants to join the army? Thousands of recruits. He said, okay, but the law is that if you're not religious, you cannot fight in the army, because God will not help you. How religious do you have to be? Very. Even if you violate minor rabbinic ordinances, you're not allowed to be in the army. So many people went home. Then he said, okay, whoever's scared of war, whoever's scared of battle, that means you don't have enough faith in God. You're not allowed to fight either. Go home. More went home. Whoever recently got married, whoever recently built a house, as it says in the Bible, everybody got home. At the end, there were only two people left for the army. Two rabbis. Two elderly great rabbis. Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik was one of them. And Rabbi Israel Mayer Kagan. Two of the great sages in the early 20th century. And it was funny. Right? And they made this skit, and the Jews, Orthodox Jews, ran to Rabbi Soloveitchik, who was one of the subjects, one of the two people left in the army, and they showed him the report of this play, and they said, they're making fun of us. What do we answer? And he went through the entire play, and he said, yes, they're right about this. This, that they told him, that everything they said is 100% true, but they forgot one part. We won the war. That is how the Jewish army won wars. Moses held his hands up, and so long as Moses' hands were up, the Jews were successful. When he stopped looking at God, they were not successful. Again, this is my religion. I'm not trying to convince you to join it, but I'm describing it to you. This is Judaism. We do not have any warrior ideas. The warrior is the antithesis of a Jewish person. And the Jews, all they wanted to do, they were not, everybody else was interested, all the other nations. What is their national pride? Winning gold medals, Nobel Prizes, the Olympics, conquering wars, winning wars. You know, the Vikings had this expression of straw death. If you died on your bed, it was humiliating. Straw death because a bed was made out of straw. And whoever was a stronger warrior was more honored. There was no such thing amongst the Jewish people. But we were proud. We were proud, we were the proudest people. We were the proudest people because we were doing what God wanted us to do, and fulfilling our law, and even when we were persecuted and murdered, we were proud. You know what we were proud of? The Jews were proud that we were the persecutors, we were the ones persecuted, and not the ones doing the persecuting. When the Jew was forced to dance by the landlord, the maiofas dance it was called, the humiliating dance, He was proud that he wasn't the guy making him dance. And this is the way Jews were. Now, here's the problem. Imagine all of this. Imagine living as a people like this in this community that you don't believe in Judaism. Imagine that. Imagine... after the French Revolution, imagine after the emancipation, imagine where you have an opportunity now to win the gold medals. You have an opportunity now, they're not keeping you in the ghetto anymore, to win the Nobel Prizes. You have an opportunity to be a warrior. You have an opportunity to be a part of history. You have an opportunity to do all this, and you don't believe in the religion of Judaism. You have a problem. You wouldn't want this lifestyle. Who would want a Jewish lifestyle if you don't believe in the Jewish religion? That's the whole thing that's based on. That was the Zionist problem. And especially, especially if you perhaps absorbed some of the anti-Semitic attitudes that were prevalent in your days. So you may say something like, quote, the Jewish people is a very nasty people. Its neighbors hate it and they're right. Who said that? Adolf Hitler? No. Mussolini, no. Vladimir Jabotinsky said that. If the tables were turned and the others were like the Jews, wouldn't we have good cause to hate them as well? Who said that? Yosef Chaim Brenner, another big Zionist thinker. Those loathsome Jews are vomited out by any healthy collective and state, not because they're Jews, but because of their Jewish repulsiveness. That was Uri Zvi Greenberg. Quote from historian Anita Shapiro, no relation to me. A tendency crystallized amongst the Jews to adopt and internalize a portion of the vitriolic critique, meaning used by the anti-Semites. As a general rule, modernized Jews liked to attribute the sins which the anti-Semites accused Jews of to their more tradition-minded fellow Jews, still unaware of the many positive things the Western world had to offer. Such attitudes were also evident in Zionism. There was anti-Semitism, and there were then modernized Jews, and they were thinking, why does everybody hate us? It's because of them, those religious Jews. The anti-Semites are right about them. More than that, and the Disability Studies Quarterly, an article by Dr. Sandy Sufian called Mental Hygiene and Disability in the Zionist Projects, She cites many examples where Zionists accuse the Jewish people of mental illness. What kind of normal people would want to be the way the Jews are, the way I just described? What kind of normal people who would want not to be part of history, not to win gold medals, not to be strong soldiers, not to be like normal people, abnormal, unhealthy? Those are the Jews. Which is there more of? Yosef Chaim Brenner asks about the Jews' ugliness or immorality. His answer, whether we like it or not, we're forced to say there's too much of both of them at the same time. The Zionists accuse the Jews of mental illness. How'd they get this mental illness? Well, a rabbi, Zionist rabbi, Jack Tauber, I don't know if he was orthodox, He was the secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky and the editor of the Hadar magazine. That was Jabotinsky's magazine. He explains, quote, deprived of a national center, Jews were unable to produce national culture as they once did. We're hindered in producing Jewish science, art, music, literature, and architecture. Can anybody define for me an example of Jewish art? Literature? No. That's because we're busy with other things. Architecture? No. Would somebody voluntarily be like that? These cultural obstacles led to psychological difficulties. The result has been chaotic thinking on the part of a Jew. Instead of applying his energy to the development of social and cultural activities that would be of definitive value to his people, he has prattled about a mission of peace, that can be accomplished only by dispersion, saving the world, redeeming the world proletariat, and has only gone on suffering unbearable agonies. Zionism was not a response to anti-Semitism, it was a response to Judaism. It was a movement to normalize the Jews. It was a social engineering project to take the Jews and change them from people that I described, like Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan and like Rabbi Soloveitchik, to people like Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. Normal people. People who love strength. People who love gold medals, Nobel Prizes. Jews, you have an opportunity finally to be normal. The goal was transformation. I'm going to put this over here. Transformation. Okay? Transformation. That was the Zionist goal. To transform the Jews into normal people. Zionism is not merely antithetical to Judaism. It was the antidote to Judaism. How did they plan? Well, Jan Non-Rubenstein. I know Norton knows Jan Non-Rubenstein. Jan Non-Rubenstein describes this thus. To be a Goy means a Gentile. And by the way, contrary to what many people say, that is not in the slightest a derogatory term. It's not a pejorative. It simply means Gentile. To be a Goy was the dominant theme of Zionist philosophy in its formative period. On everything, the Zionists differed. He says there were those territorialists that wanted to consider territories outside of Palestine for the hard-pressed Jews. There were Zionists of Zion. There were practical Zionists. Even the very basic idea of a Jewish state did not escape dispute, and much doubt was cast on its soundness and practicality. One idea, however, he says, one craving, one urge, enjoyed a variable consensus. That is, to be a new people, to escape the role history imposed upon the Jew, to become, in Herzl's words, this is the last page of his book, The Jewish State, a wondrous breed of Jews that will spring forth from the earth. Yosef Chaim Brenner said, we want the Gentile culture in our own streets, in our own land, in our own people. And that which we would do if we were assimilated with them, we want to do amongst ourselves in our own way. Most of all, we want to be vital and alive without the yoke of Torah and religion, and without the lies and beliefs of religion. Jacob Klatskin explained the goal of Zionism was to deny any conception of Jewish identity based on spiritual criteria. The goal of Zionism was to dismantle Judaism and to create a new Jewish people. Now, you may ask, why don't they just convert? Why don't they just assimilate? Why do they need any of this? The answer is they tried. It didn't work. Zionism was plan B. There were many assimilated Jews. Theodor Herzl, by the way, in his diary, describes an idea. Before Zionism, he had to straighten out the Jews, convert them all to Christianity. I'm not joking. He had great Christian... You know the old joke, what's the difference between Herzl and Jesus? Herzl celebrated Christmas, Jesus celebrated Hanukkah. Herzl had an idea. It wasn't a realistic idea, but it was an idea he had. He recorded it in his diary. That'll work. If that doesn't work, then Zionism will work. What happened was that, especially in 1881 in Russia, there was a tremendous string of pogroms that lasted years. Millions of Jews, between two and three million Jews had to flee Russia. And it was mostly the assimilated Jews that were attacked. So assimilation didn't work. Zionism was plan B. What assimilation could not accomplish, Zionism was designed to accomplish. And basically, the idea is, okay, Goyim, okay, people, you don't want to let us play in your ballpark. We'll make our own ballpark for ourselves. So here was the Zionist plan. We're going to create a new people. Now, what type of people? Here is fact one about Zionism. Zionism was different than all the other religio-political movements, different than other religions, in that other religions, other political movements, have various ideas of what they want people to be, what they think the world should be. The communists think that communism will save the world. The Christians believe in the Christian religion. Zionists didn't care what they would be. This goal of Zionism was to make sure what they are no longer. Being Jews. What was the best way to question the Zionists had to deal with? What was the best way to dismantle Judaism? Vladimir Jabotinsky made a eulogy on Theodor Herzl. Listen to what he writes. To imagine what a true Hebrew is. Hebrew meaning Zionist. Call themselves. To picture his image in our minds. We have no example from which to draw. You can't use any model to know what a real Zionist will be. Instead, we have to use a method of, and here he used the rabbinical expression, meaning learn something from its opposite. We take as our starting point a Yid of today and try to imagine in our minds his exact opposite. That's a Zionist. A Zionist doesn't have any particular characteristics, but we do know he's the exact opposite of a Jew. And by the way, Just keep a little attention on Netanyahu's statements. slowly they're going to become understandable. The Yid is frightened and downtrodden. The Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is disgusting to all. The Hebrew should charm all. The Yid accepted submission, and the Hebrew will learn how to command. The Yid likes to hide with bated breath from the eyes of strangers. The Hebrew, with brazenness and greatness, will march ahead to the entire world, look them straight in their eyes, and hoist before them the banner, I am a Zionist. At the Second Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1898, Max Nordau introduced the idea of muscle Judaism. A short description from Wikipedia captures the idea pretty well. Quote, the characteristics of the muscular Jews are the exact opposite, an antithesis of the diaspora Jew. Nordau saw the promotion of muscular athletic Jews as a counterpoint to such depictions of Jews as a weak people. In addition, the muscle Jew is the opposite of the rabbinic Jew, the man of letters, the intellectual, who is said to be busy all his life leaning on his books and engaging in esoteric subjects, and therefore he doesn't possess much strength and his muscles are weak. Professor Az Almag, sociologist and historian in the Haifa University, argues in a book called Sabra that much of the classic Israeli culture and personality was purposely engineered to represent the polar opposite of the old-time Jew. The Sabras, the Israelis, had this expression, a dugri, a It's an Arabic word, straight speech. Because we don't like to be complicated. Israelis, they don't like to be complicated. They don't like to be intellectual. They just want to be, you know, walking around with sandals, with a swagger on their land, without having to think too much, right? Where did they get this image from? This was not organically or naturally developed. Rather, argues Professor Almag that this was synthetically designed to be an overcompensation for all the rabbinic Jewish traits. Everybody knows Orthodox Jews, rabbinic scholars, like to argue a lot, but we believe that arguing and debate is one way, an important way of coming to a conclusion on something. And debating with precise details and stuff, degree is the opposite of what we call pilpul. The personality, the non-intellectualness, the strength, they wanted to be the opposite of a Jew. The reason why they advocated the farming at the beginning of the early Zionist farming kibbutzim. Zev Yaivitz, a school principal in one of the Moshavot in Zipron Yaakov wrote in 1888, and I quote, The farmer's great and inclusive capacity is physical strength, bolstering the strength of the farmer's sons, most of whose senses are stronger than their minds, is best done by giving them something concrete rather than study of a theoretical sort. Study of a theoretical sort is what we specialize in. Applying theoretical concepts to actual situations is what we specialize in. The Zionists said, no, we are ashamed of what you guys are. We are ashamed of what the Jews were. All the Jews were were downtrodden and oppressed all their life. And no wonder, just look at you. You're not normal. You don't want to be strong. You bow your knees to everybody that oppresses you. And by the way, according to our Torah, that is the way we remain safe. We look at, there is no shame. at giving in to an oppressor, just like there is no shame. You know how we look at the anti-Semites? Like animals. Is there any shame playing dead when a grizzly bear attacks you? No. Well, you're going to say, no, I'm going to be proud and I'm going to hit the grizzly bear in the nose. You've got to be crazy. We didn't look at the anti-Semites as competition. We looked at our anti-Semites as a bunch of animals. And nobody is going to feel pride because the animals attack. Nobody's going to say, well, I'm jealous of the animals and I want to be one of them, unless you consider them not animals. You consider them real, valid people. Then say, well, I want to be like them. And the Zionists wanted to be like the anti-Semites. You know the Warsaw Ghetto? The story of the Warsaw Ghetto, the massacre, they're portrayed as heroes. Now, I do not deem to judge anybody, any decisions that anybody makes under those circumstances. It's not what I'm trying to do. But I will say, though, that what they did, perhaps in their mind it was heroic, but at the bottom line, it was not. You know why? Because the heroism in what they did lies in the fact that they went and died as men. At least they went down fighting. That's the attitude. Okay. Let's assume, let's have a mind experiment. It wasn't Nazis that surrounded the Warsaw ghetto, but rather wild animals, lions and tigers and bears. Would anybody here in this room say that it would be considered proud and heroic to go down fighting and go fight the lions and tigers and bears? No. Nazis, anti-Semites are worse than animals. Animals are the way they are because God made them that way. And yet nobody would feel pride, nobody would feel shame in being attacked by an animal. Nobody should feel shame at being attacked by a Nazi who has a gun who's stronger than you. And the Jews felt that way until the Zionists came. They were ashamed. To them it's heroic, go down fighting. I'll tell you a story. I did a radio broadcast a few weeks ago about the settlements and about Zionism. And one of the callers called in and said that Zionism is a very good thing because it gives the Jewish people a a safe place to go in case there's a Holocaust. Now, of course, that's a fantasy. It doesn't make any sense. If there's a Holocaust, Israel is going to be the least safe place to go. And if there is a Holocaust, the odds are it's going to take place. I mean, listen, the president of the United States, not this one, not the previous one, I don't remember him running to some other country begging for help because Iran is going to send a blow up Washington, D.C. with a nuclear bomb. The opposite did happen. But I asked him this. I said, you agree that Israel causes wars, deaths of Jews, anti-Semitism goes up whenever Israel gets into hot water in the Middle East. That's a statistic. University of Tel Aviv issues reports every year. Whenever Israel gets into a war or into any controversy, Jews all over the world, from UK to US to Venezuela to Chile to Greece to France, they're attacked. Anti-Semitism goes up. So you're telling me that it's worth having a state of Israel and paying the price in Jewish blood in wars and anti-Semitism as an insurance policy, a premium for an insurance policy, in case one day there's a Holocaust, and you need a place to go, and Israel will let you in, and Israel will be a safe place. Tell me, at what point does this premium for this insurance policy get too expensive? How many Jews should die so that you should have, if there is no Holocaust, then all this was for nothing, right? Tell me, how many Jews do you think is worth it? A million? Six million? Ten million? At what point do you say this is too expensive? And he says, well, you know what? All of us, we should all go down fighting. Go down fighting. You know what Mr. Alsop, the journalist for Newsweek, told the mayor, that she has a Masada complex. You know the story of Masada. Masada means nothing to the Jewish people. until the Zionists made it into something. There were a group of what we call Biryonim that were holed up when the Romans attacked Jerusalem and exiled the Jews in a fortress called Masada. The fortress was abandoned. It was previously there. It was sitting there. And the Romans came and the people of Masada... Oh, by the way, they did not fight. That's Israeli propaganda. There was no war. Not one Roman soldier was killed in Masada. Read a book called The Masada Myth or read the scholarship on this. It's a fantasy. What happened was they all committed suicide without a war. He told Golda Meir, you have a Masada complex. We're going to go down fighting. And Golda Meir told him, yes, we have a Masada complex and a Pagram complex and an Inquisition complex and so on and so forth. The Zionists wanted to fight. They didn't want to be Jews. They wanted to be strong. They didn't want the humility that the Jewish people went through. In particular, what they hated most about the Jews is, number one, The Jewish nation was tasked with the mission, and all they wanted to do really was to engage in the study of Torah and Mitzvahs rather than pursuits of art, culture, science, and sports. There's nothing wrong with art, culture, science, and sports, but I prefer to study my religion. That's my preference. The Zionists considered me insane. No problem. Number two, the idea, the Jewish idea, the value that... hates violence and fierceness of character, even when fighting is unfortunately necessary. The idea that we look down on the ways of the warrior and the tough guy and instead puts value on character traits of humility and what we call in Yiddish edelkeit. That the hands of Esau, our enemy, are poison for our soul and it's the very opposite of what the Jews strive for. They hated the fact that Jews are not, that the heretics, if you're not religious, they're not considered part of the Jewish people. Because their application to enter Gentile society was rejected by the Gentiles, the Zionists had no choice but to be Jews. To do so, however, in order to be a Jew, they had to be religious. But that didn't work. So what they had to do is they had to reconstitute the definition of what a Jew is. They hated the fact that the Jews are mandated, while in exile, not to fight Jews. against our enemies. We'd rather play dead. We'd rather run. That's what God told us. They hated that. They considered that disgusting, cowardly. The Zionists believe that Judaism ruins the Jews. Quote, Zionism is a revolutionary movement. One could hardly find a revolution that goes deeper than what Zionism wants to do to the life of a Jew. This is not a revolution of the political and economic structure, but a revolution of the very foundation of the lives of the member of its people. It's a revolt against the tradition of many centuries, helplessly longing for redemption. Instead of these sterile, bloodless longings, we substitute a will for realization, an attempt at reconstruction and creativity on the soil of the homeland. Who said this? David Ben-Gurion. Here was their plan. Here's how they wanted to transform the Jews. One, nationalization. Nationalization. The Jews are a nationality. The Jews are not a religion. The Jews are one people. It was a nationalist movement. Zionism was a nationalist movement. It was different than, let's say, nationalist movement, let's say, here we're in the United States of America. How did America get created? America got created. We had the colonists from England, and they wanted independence, so they made a nationalist movement, and they broke off, and the colonists became the American people, right? That's not the way Zionism works. Listen to this. Consider it. A bunch of people in the Middle East in 1948 decided to make a country. Fine. Whose country, whose nation state did that become? Like the colonists, was it the people who were there? No. That became the nation state in their mind of all the Jewish people. I'm sitting here in America, my father's in Poland, my mother's in England. In the Middle East they make a country and that becomes my nation state? You know that Zionism is defined as the national liberation movement to the Jewish people. Hello? No, it was not. There were a very small percentage of Jews that were Zionists in those days. It was not the national liberation movement to the Jewish people. It was the national liberation movement to the Zionists, speaking in the name of the Jewish people. The Jewish people were a nation. That's number one. I don't know how they figure we're a nation. We have no national characteristics. They invented Hebrew. so that the Jews should have some national characteristics, languages, perhaps the most important characteristic of a nation. Land is first or second on the list. Because Jews didn't have any national symptoms, they decided to create them. They created Hebrew. Then they made a land. It was very similar, the Jewish nationalist movement to, let's say, the black nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey and later Malcolm X, where they decided that all the black people are one nation. But over here it was worse, because everybody knows what a black person is. What's a Jew? The black nationalist movement considered people that didn't join them traitors. Toms, they used to call them, right? The Zionists considered all Jews that didn't join their movement traitors also. Because Jews are a nation. Step one, nationalize the Jewish people. Make them think like they're a nation. We're a nationality. One of the advantages of them for becoming a nation is that Peretz Molenskin said, you're not going to have to be religious anymore to be a Jew. What's a loyal Jew now? Somebody loyal to the country, speaks the Hebrew language, fights in the Jewish army. Forget about religion. You see, here's what Zionism was doing. It was taking a religion, a religious community, and transforming it into a national political one. The Holy Land is not a Holy Land anymore. Now it's a national homeland. The language is not a holy language. Now it's a national language. The second thing Zionism did in order to transform the Jews, and this is the weakest part of Zionism, and if anybody wants to oppose Zionism, this is the weak link. Here's the best way to oppose it. The second thing, let's assume, let's pretend the Jewish people are a nationality. Can anybody here explain to me how Israel became the nation state of that nationality? Let's assume we're a nationality, we're a race, we're a nationality, we're a culture, whatever you want. David Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister. There was a country created in 1948. How in the world did that country become the nation state of all the people of that nationality? That's the second claim of Zionism, centralization. And this is their main claim, that Israel represents the Jewish people. You see, most of the discourse, pro-Zionism, anti-Zionism, is whether the Jews have a right to a land, whether the Jews have... It's not the Jews that are demanding rights to anything. It's the people in Israel, it's the Zionists. What does it have to do with the Jews? There are millions of Jews all over the world. They created a country. I would like somebody, anybody, Zionist, anti-Zionist, whatever you want, to explain to me how that became the nation state of the Jewish people. What is a Jewish state altogether? Well, if you look on Israel's website, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's website in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mfa.co.gov, I think it is. Avigdor Lieberman says, listen to this. Israel is to the Jews, what France is to the French, and Japan is to the Japanese. So now Israel not only becomes, forget about safe haven, no, Israel becomes the identity, a core part of Jewish identity. Before 1948, I don't know what the core part of Jewish identity was. Well, they had something called Shlilas Hagolas, which meant between the Second Commonwealth, the Second Temple period, and 1948, The Jews were kind of like in limbo. Didn't count. Shlilos Hagolos, they called it. The negation of the exile. We were kind of like nowhere. They look at that as some kind of continuum between like, King David, the Second Temple, and mostly King David, the Second Temple, we were not an independent state. We were part of the Roman Empire, as we all know. There was no king of the Jewish people in the Second Temple, but somehow, from biblical times, some type of continuum to the state of Israel. That's all mythology. This centralization that Israel represents the Jews, that they speak in the name of the Jews, that Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of the Jews... Naftali Bennett wrote it, his people say it all the time. He came to Congress, Benjamin Netanyahu, and said, by the Iran deal, and he says, I represent not only my people, but all the Jews all over the world. Could somebody explain to me how Benjamin Netanyahu represents me? Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, and perhaps in the Middle East they are a democracy, but I was born Jewish in a certain religion, and I know that because I was born Jewish, a man in the Middle East claims to be my prime minister. And if I want to, I don't like Donald Trump, I can move to Mexico or Canada. Mexico, I don't want to be able to get past the wall. But if I can move to Canada, I can move to Brazil. I can move to wherever I want, to the North Pole. And I'm not, he's not my president. But wherever I move, because I'm born Jewish, Benjamin Netanyahu is my prime minister. That sounds like a dictatorship to me. You see, if you want to understand Zionism, forget about, for a moment, how they treat their own citizens, Jews and non-Jews equally. No, look at their relationship, not... towards their own citizens. Look at their relationship to the people outside of Israel. Their relationship to the Jews outside of Israel. This is a radical type of nationalism that is unmatched anywhere. That you have a nation that claims not only to represent its citizens, but a whole group. It's like the Vatican. I'm not joking. The Vatican is to the Catholics. They claim to be like the Vatican of the Jewish people. Now, of course you understand what this means. if you don't believe Israel should be a Jewish state, you're an anti-Semite. Because if you don't believe that the Vatican should exist or should be Catholic, you're anti-Catholic. If you don't believe in the Vatican, you're anti-Catholic. If you don't believe in Israel now, you're anti-Jew. This is Zionism. And more than that, even more than that, there's another part of Zionism that we have to learn about, that makes their nationalism even more radical. It's called, hard to translate in English, Mamlach Tiyus, that's Hebrew. State-ism, I guess. That's how many people translate it. David Ben-Gurion invented this. What this means is that not only does Israel represent the Jews, but It's a type of nationalism, an organic type of nationalism. Say in America, nationalism is a social contract. We all pay our taxes, and in return, if people in California are attacked, I have to go to the army to defend them. No problem. And the United States of America serves the American people. We can criticize its leaders. It doesn't matter. America serves the American people. In Israel, it's not that way. It's the opposite. In nationalism, the organic type of nationalism that Israel portrays is that all the Jews are cells in the body, and Israel is the body. The interests of Israel, mamlach tiyus, means that the interests of Israel define the interests of the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion was criticized for taking reparations money from the Germans. Here's context. So how could you do that? Holocaust victim, millions of people died, and you're taking money for their blood? Ben-Gurion said, you don't get it. He said, if the Holocaust victims were here today, they would say, whatever is in the best interest of Israel is what we want. Israel doesn't exist to serve the Jewish people. The Jewish people exist to serve Israel. The interests of the Jewish people are defined by whatever is best for Israel. The Jewish people all over the world. Because number one, well, that's their identity. How do you define a Jew? You know, the tragic flaw of Zionism. We're running out of time, so I'm going to have to leave out most of the things I wanted to say. The tragic flaw of Zionism is that there is no other definition of Jew, no viable definition of Jew that they could come up with. The problem, therefore, that's why in Israel they have problems with conversions. Somebody wants to convert to Judaism. You know the whole thing where you have to be religious, and in Israel, well, why is it that way? In a conservative or non-Orthodox, a conversion is not recognized in Israel. The problem is that if Judaism is a religion, which it is, then conversion to Jewish people means an acceptance of a religion. When you convert to Christianity, it means that you accept the religion. When you convert to Judaism, it means the same thing. But if Jewish people are a nationality and not a religion, now what does it mean to convert to Judaism? The only working definition they have of Judaism, the only thing that Jews have in common is the religion. So they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. I want to convert to Judaism, but I don't want to be religious. Well, I want to convert to Christianity, but I don't want to believe in Christianity. I want to convert to Buddhism, but I don't believe in Buddha. I want to become a Yankee fan, I don't believe in the Yankees. I want to convert to Judaism, but I don't believe in Judaism. You see, this is where the problem is coming from. It's the definition of what's a Jew. Now, one more thing. You know what? I'll tell you this. Do you know who invented Zionism, the intellectual origins of Zionism? Well, you think they were so creative they picked this up on their own? They cults together a bunch of ideologies, nationalism for sure, organic nationalism, Nietzschean philosophy, particularly the Übermensch, Russian workers' movements, German romanticism, particularly vitalism. But there is one place that a lot of people don't know. where Zionism got a lot of their ideology from. Do you know the quote, the phrase that they say, it was popular at the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th century, about Zionism, Jews returning home to Israel, a nation without, a land without, a people for a people without a land. Who said that? Now, people quote in the name of Golda Meir a lot. Scholars will tell you it was really Israel Zangville. It wasn't. It was Lord Shaftesbury of England. This was the evangelical Christians. Whose idea was it for Jews to speak Hebrew? It was not Ben Yehuda's. It was the evangelical Christians. Hundreds of years before Zionism, there was a Christian, Protestant, Puritan movement of Zionism 1500s, 1600s, that developed through 1700s, 1800s, way before any Jews thought of Zion, it is their belief that God promised the Holy Land to the Jewish people unconditionally. It is not our belief. Our belief is, yes, of course God promised the Holy Land to Abraham, but, you know what, in Judaism, our concern is not to worry about what God promised us. Our concern is to worry about what we promised God. If God promised somebody the Holy Land, he'll get it to him. When the Messiah comes, we'll get it. We're now in exile, and we're not even supposed to have it. But it's a Christian evangelical belief. The idea that Jews have nowhere to run, that they need a safe haven, whose idea was that? Ever hear of the Blackstone Memorial? After the Russian pogroms and the Jews needed to run out of Russia here in America, a guy by the name of Blackstone wrote a petition to President Harrison, mostly non-Jews, but some Jews were on it, saying that the Jews have nowhere to go. Who's going to take millions of Jews from Russia? They need Palestine. They need the Holy Land. Otherwise, they're going to be slaughtered in Europe. All of these were Christian evangelical ideals. The Zionists took it from them, and I'll tell you the solution to a big mystery with this principle. You know, David Ben-Gurion told the British committee, they asked him, what right do the Jews have to the Holy Land? And they mentioned the British mandate. So he said, quote, the mandate is not our Bible. The Bible is our mandate. Now here's the problem. David Ben-Gurion didn't believe in our God. He said, I don't believe in the God of the Bible. I can't pray to some supernatural person. He said, I don't believe in it. He doesn't believe in God, but God promised them the land. What's going on? Everybody knows this contradiction. The answer is, because Ben-Gurion was talking to the British, who had a tremendous Puritan, Protestant leanings, and they believed this. And what he was saying was, we're a fulfillment of your prophecies. The evangelical Christianity had Zionism before the Jews had it. Who introduced Theodor Herzl to the Grand Duke of Baden? Reverend William Hechler, one of these evangelical Christians that read Herzl's book, and he figured out that the Messiah is here or something for that. He approached Herzl, and he introduced him. He was, I think, the tutor of the Grand Duke's nephew or something. And he introduced Herzl. It was the Christians. And you want to hear something? Astounding. I think it was 2010. Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in the side of the Auschwitz concentration camp. And he mentioned something about a prophecy in the book of Yechezkel, Ezekiel, I think it is in English, 37, where the prophet sees bones, dry bones, rise up out of the grave and grow flesh. And Benjamin Netanyahu said that this prophecy is fulfilled with the state of Israel because the Jews are a bunch of dry bones and that was Israel. And I'm thinking to myself when I saw this, it's very odd. for Benjamin Netanyahu, who's a completely non-observant secular Jew. When he went to Poland, they offered him, they said, do you want kosher food? He said, no, I don't need it. I'm not joking. He's completely non-observant. What is he doing expounding on the Bible? I did a little research. This interpretation of Yecheskel 37, he, well, I don't want to say plagiarized, but he lifted it from somewhere without attribution. It's 150 years old. Old Christian evangelicals had that interpretation of Yehezkel 37, way before Netanyahu said. And the next day after he said this, all the evangelical websites were popping. The Christian Broadcasting Network. Oh, the Prime Minister of Israel decided that the prophecy of Yehezkel is fulfilled in the State of Israel. The Messiah is coming. One more thing. Why are there so many Jews that support Israel? Well, some of them are Zionists. Very few of them know what I just explained over here. They think that the conflation between Israel and Judaism is so axiomatic all over. How many times have you heard the Israeli flag being called the Jewish flag, right? It's just so axiomatic. You ever walk into a store, a department store in December, so they have the Christmas display and the Hanukkah display. The Christmas display is always green and red, and the Hanukkah display is what? Blue and white. Do you understand what this means? This is just one small example. It's all over. It's axiomatic. It's osmosis. I'll tell you something else in terms of the nationalist identity of Israel. If anybody here was in Jerusalem, you know that the streets are, the vast majority of the streets are named after historical Jewish personalities. My son noticed something. He calls me up. He went to study in Israel a few years ago. He says to me, he says, he says, the brainwashing here is unbelievable. I said, what did you notice like in a day he just arrived? He said to me, in all the streets that are named after various Jewish personalities, in all of Jerusalem, there is no street named after Moses. There is no street named after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or their wives. The street names begin with Joshua in Nun Street when the Jews went into the Holy Land, then starts Jewish history. They erased Moses. They erased our forefathers. They erased Abraham. They're not there. So a lot of people don't know. And there's a lot of indoctrination that Israel, the conflation between Israel and Jewishness. But there's one more thing. The By the way, you guys figured this out already, right? You guys figured this out already. Yeah, it's pretty obvious now. But when Israel started, when Israel started, just like all other countries, there was a right wing and a left wing. The right wing were more socialists, the Labour Party of David Ben-Gurion. The left wing were the revisionists. Today, they morphed into what's called the Likud of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky was influenced by fascism, and he was very, very militant, and he wasn't a land-based, Labour-based like Ben-Gurion was. In 1977... Ben-Gurion's people, the Labour Party, went out of power, and Vladimir Jabotinsky's people... The Likud, which was then the Likud, went into power. Menachem Begin was elected prime minister in 1977. Begin was much more militant than Jabotinsky. They had a confrontation where Jabotinsky scolded Begin in public for his militancy and his belligerence. Begin had an attitude, everybody's against us, we don't care what anybody says, so on and so forth, he told him. Jabotinsky said, why is it, philosophical question, that the noise of a squeaking door disturbs people, but the noise of a machine running does not. So Jabotinsky said that the reason is because the squeaking door noise has no purpose. He said, your statement, your speech that you just made, he told Begin, is the noise of a squeaking door. He said, you need to get along with people, you need to get rid of this belligerence. But in 1977, pagan came into power, and Zionism shifted from left to right. What happened was, instead of, let's build the land, we have a land god, pagan land worship kind of thing, labor, socialism, instead, Zionism became power. Everybody's against us. We don't care what anybody says. Where were they during the Holocaust? That's all Menachem Begin. And what happened was, he succeeded in whoever he was able to influence in throwing them into adrenaline mode. So what happens is that he convinced everybody, or whoever he was able to convince, that... Israel is the only thing standing between the Jewish people and another Holocaust. And it doesn't matter when anybody says or anybody thinks that Hitler is around the corner. And he's around every corner. And everybody is Hitler. He's everywhere. And Holocaust centers seems innocent enough. Holocaust museums. Every Jewish town has a Holocaust museum. More Holocaust museums than yeshivas. A little kid walks into a Holocaust museum thinking he's going to learn something about his heritage. He walks out learning instead something about his identity. Jewish identity, you're a Holocaust victim. Who started this? Theodor Herzl started this. Because when they asked the British committee, asked Theodor Herzl, what's the definition of a Jewish state? He said, well, state we know. You know what the definition of Jewish is? A group of people united by the common enemy, the anti-Semite. The definition of a Jew is somebody who the anti-Semites hate, according to Theodor Herzl. Without anti-Semites, there would be no Jews. In the religion, without the revelation of Sinai, there would be no Jews. To Herzl's definition, without anti-Semites, there would be no Jews. The more anti-Semitism there is out there, the stronger Jewish identity gets. Where were they during the Holocaust? All of this... strengthens Jewish identity. And Jewish identity, in turn, strengthens this attitude. So you know why there are many, many, especially Orthodox Jews, I don't have numbers, I don't have statistics on this, but just, you know, I'm an old man, I've been around a long time, and just speaking to people and seeing and reading, there are so many Orthodox Jews that are not Zionists, and they'll say, I'm not Zionist, but, you know what? You can't say something against Israel because if you do, it'll be taken the wrong way. It'll be used. Jews will be killed. You know what it's like? Imagine you're driving 60 miles an hour. You're a passenger. You hate the driver. He's a real nasty guy. And you're arguing about politics. I don't know, whatever he wants, Republican, Democrat, whatever. You're a Bernie Sanders guy and he's a Steve Bannon guy, whatever it is. And then you're arguing and you're ready to go at each other's throats. And then you hit an ice pack. going 60 miles an hour, and the car's careening out of control, and he says, help me, hold the wheel, hold the wheel. You're not, that's not the time to argue about politics. You hold the wheel, when you're done, then you can argue again. Menachem Begin and the Likud party, their job was, their strategy is, to keep the Jewish people in a skid mode. And their Israel is saying, hold the wheel, we'll argue later. Support us now. Because the anti-Semites are trying to kill us. Radical this and radical that. And everybody's going to kill us unless you support us. It's not a Zionism. It's fear. And as Zionism went down, the ideological Zionism of Kibbutzim and building the land went down. At the same time, the fear factor went up. In this room Professor Mezvinsky will tell you. My friend Maury sitting next to him will tell you. I can tell you. Almost everybody can tell you how they have been accosted by people with this outrageous claim that if you explain to people there's a difference between Judaism and Zionism, you're going to get Jews killed. Because, God forbid, people should think, no, Jews are strong if there's an Israel. That's the only thing stopping the anti-Semites from killing anybody. Leo Pinsker, a Herzlian Zionist, he said that once they have a state of Israel, even the Jews that don't live in Israel will get much more respect. because they will look at us like a real people, not a downtrodden, we're real people, we're normal people, we're healthy people, we don't, we stick up for ourselves, that all happens through Israel. Jews have, I would call it, vicarious safety through Israel. The truth is the opposite. The truth is, we know that the more... All Israel does is get Jews into hot water all over the world. Never mind the 20,000 or 30,000 people that were killed in wars in Israel. But whenever Israel causes more anti-Semitism all over the world, I mentioned the Tel Aviv University, and I want you to know, just last week, after Benjamin Netanyahu said he supports Trump's Mexico wall, the chief rabbi of Mexico, I have a copy of it in Hebrew here, sent a letter to Aryeh Deri, He's one of the ministers, an Orthodox Jew, telling him that from the moment that Netanyahu said he supports this wall, anti-Semitism in Mexico has exploded. Could you please, please tell him there's a difference between a wall that Netanyahu made to stop terrorism versus a wall that Trump made to stop people, legal or illegal, whatever, trying to get work? I'm not saying America can do whatever they want. but don't tie us to what Netanyahu does. That is the key. The truth is the opposite. That's the key. The key of Zionism is to keep everybody on the discourse, are the Jews entitled to do this? Are the Jews in nationality? Did God promise the Jews the land? Forget that. That's centralization. That's a claim Israel wants. Israel wants to exist, look, Let them exist. America wants to support Israel. They have reasons. Support. This has nothing to do with politics, Israel's conflicts. Israel's a country, as far as I'm concerned. It's like China. It's no more Jewish country than China. Jews live there, and Jews live in London, Jews live in Belgium, Jews live in Antwerp, Jews live in Paris, Jews live all over. But Israel is not the state of the Jewish people. And it would be healthier, no matter what Netanyahu says, it would be healthier for the Jews, for the world, and for Israel, if they would give up that claim to be the nation-state of the Jewish people. Stop being the Vatican. The Jews in Mexico don't have to suffer because you want to support Trump's wall. You want to support Trump's wall. And even Israel would even get more support Yes, support Israel. Not support Israel. Get more support if they do this. Because if the reason why America supports Israel, according to the Zionists, is because they have common values, etc. If you become a normal country and get rid of this Jewish state business, you'll have much more common values with America and all the normal countries. If you ever meet a Zionist asking this, what makes Israel the Jewish state? What makes it the state of the Jewish people? What? How did it become the Jewish people's state? The majority of Jews, they'll say, support Israel. Maybe. And let's assume the majority of people in America are Democrats. That doesn't mean that the Democratic National Party represents the Republicans in America. You see, Zionists cannot afford Jews saying, that Israel is not the Jewish state. Since there's no organic connection between the Jewish people and the state of Israel, the only reason why Israel is the Jewish state is by consensus. And if even a minority of Jews, and also non-Jews, say Israel is not... How did Israel become the nation-state of the Jewish people? It's a fiction. It's a claim. And guess what? Zionism is defeated without one casualty. Zionism manifests in the claim, not anything tangible, a claim that Israel is the state of the Jewish people. Forget about how they treat their citizens, how they treat the Jews outside of Israel. Outside of Israel, they have Jews who they claim they represent. They demand loyalty from. Get rid of that. You're not the Vatican. You're China. Call yourself Herzlstam. And then you'll be a normal country. And Zionism is defeated. Forget about all these things about Jews and rights. It's not Jews that you're dealing with. It's the Zionists. Many Jews support them because they are scared not to. Because they have this thing in their head, because they were indoctrinated, that if people believe that Israel is not the Jewish state, I don't know what's going on, I'm not sure. Herzl said that, you know, Herzl really wasn't the first Zionist, we all know that. Herzl's claim to fame, as far as Zionism is concerned, is that he got Zionism off the ground. He ran the operation. It wasn't for Herzl, Zionism would have remained some ideology that was spoken about in Starbucks or whatever. Herzl said, let me tell you the secret. He said, Zionism was never an intellectual system. He said, people will die for a flag. People need songs, flags, symbols, slogans. That's what, he said, what created the German Empire? Red and gold colors. A flag. People will die for a flag. People will give them flags, give them symbols, give them slogans. It's an emotional ideology. That's why the car skidding at 60 miles an hour, that's where it is. And it starts with Herzl. There's the weakness. Israel is not the state. It's China. Whenever I speak... at public rallies or protests against various things that Israel does, if the press is there, they're not interested in our cause. They don't care about if Israel's digging up Jewish graves or they're drafting the yeshiva students into the army. They only ask me one thing. What do you think about the Israel-Palestinian conflict? And I tell them. And Maury was there, here in the city, some guy came with a big TV camera. happened to me in Brussels by the EU, it happened to me, it happens to me all over. And I always tell them the same thing. I said, why don't you ask me about China? I was just interviewed last week for I24 News. The guy asked me the same thing. I said, why don't you ask me about China? You know there are territorial conflicts regarding the South Chinese Sea? Why don't you ask me about that? You're not asking me about that. Because what would I know about that? You're asking me about Israel-Palestine because I'm Jewish. And you think as a Jew, I should or would weigh in on this. Well, that is exactly what I'm protesting against. Israel, as a human being, yeah, I'm concerned about all the conflicts all over the world. But as a Jew, Israel is no more relevant to me than China, than Russia, than England. There are Jews living in Israel, and there are Jews living in England, and there are Jews living in America, and there are more Jews living in America than there are in Israel. Israel still has a minority of Jews. But Israel has nothing to do with me as a Jew. I don't understand that. I believe that those that even protest against Israel on the sides of the Palestinians, those Jews, that's Zionism. They've fallen into the Zionist trap. Because why are these people inserting themselves, Americans inserting themselves in that conflict, as opposed to any other human rights conflict all over the world? And so because you're Jewish. And if you're old enough to remember the Vietnam War, there are many Americans that protested the Vietnam War, but the Chinese did not protest the Vietnam War, because as an American, you have a right and an obligation to protest against what your country does. And if you feel that as a Jew, you have a right and an obligation to protest against what Israel does, that means that presupposes that Israel is your country. If a guy steals my credit card, and he's accused of committing a crime with it, And they ask me, Shapiro, do you think this man is innocent or guilty of this crime? Why would I tell him? Why would you tell him? It's like, leave me alone with this guy. I have nothing to do with him. Just give me back my credit card already. Why do I have to do it with this guy did? When somebody asks me what I think, whether Israel is innocent or guilty, it's the exact same thing. It's like asking me if China is Israel, innocent or guilty. And I'll speak to you about China, I'll speak to you about Vietnam, how they treat the Muslims, and about the sweatshops in Japan, and the South China Sea conflict, no problem. But don't ask me as a Jew what I think of anything Israel does, because Israel has nothing to do with me or the Jewish people. Simple as that. We have to break that... Second part, the centralization. Once we do that, see, Zionism is defeated. Israel becomes Herzl Stan. They can do whatever they want. They have their own political problems. They can deal with it like any other country does. But what makes things complicated and all messy is that it's like the Jewish state, and they're dealing with the Jews all over the world. And do the Jews have a right? Get that out of the conflict. Erase that. Now you have a normal political issue, and it can be solved through normal political means. Thank you very, very much for inviting me here. I hope I was either enlightening or enjoying, or maybe even both.