RUBENSTEIN: Please God, choose some other people next time

In Judaism, “chosenness” is the belief the Jews are God’s Chosen People via their descent from the ancient Israelites. They were divinely selected to be in a promissory treaty, a “covenant,” with the one and only God. The idea of the Israelites being chosen by God is most explicitly discussed in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy where its benefits were offered to the Jewish people if they promised to adhere to the obligations of the mosaic covenant between themselves and God.As part of this covenant, God promised via his prophet Moses, “Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land (Israel) which the Lord God of your fathers giveth you” (Deut: 4-1.)Many people, including the 30% of Israeli Jews who are atheists or irreligious, would view these words as a typical ethnic myth, in this case one written long after the founding of biblical Israel. Indeed, nearly all modern secular researchers and most Christian and Jewish bible scholars, reject the Mosaic authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy and date it between the 7th and 5th centuries BC, or 100 to 300 years later.Whether true or not, those familiar with the nature of Jewish humour, a type of banter often employing ridicule, fatalism, grumpiness and sarcasm, would be familiar with the old, God-mocking Jewish reply to the Chosen People assertion: “Lord, please choose some other people next time.”This bitter piece of humour is a product of millennia of factually bitter Jewish history, including subjugation by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC, the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC and conquest by the Romans in the first century BC. The Jews revolted against Rome in 66 AD. After four years of fighting, the rebellion was put down with the massacre of much of the population.Though some Jews remained in Israel, most fled the country, thus beginning a two-thousand-year odyssey in the Diaspora. This scattering across the world featured mainly second-class citizenship, forced assimilation or ghettoization, frequent expulsions and countless pogroms, all culminating in the pogrom of pogroms — the Holocaust.Despite all these indignities, defeats, exiles and mass murders, the dispersion of the Chosen People could not erase Jewish history, identity, culture, religion or resilience.Seemingly always eager to cast blame on Jews for creating or supporting countless human adversities or tragedies befalling humanity, the world is once more turning against God’s Chosen People by calling Israel to cease defending itself against annihilation by the Palestinians and their many Muslim supporters."No Jews, no news” is a cynical Jewish aphorism summarizing this demand to allow its enemies to recover and regroup, one rooted in a harsh and unearned global obsession with this unique Middle Eastern indigenous ethnic group that began not long after the first century AD Roman exile.Calls for Israel to lay down arms against people salivating for its destruction are gaining more and more traction a mere five months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities committed during its unprovoked invasion of Israel. The murder, rape, torture, mutilation and burning alive of 1,200 Israelis, including women, children and the elderly and the kidnapping of more than 240 Israelis, more than half of whom are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip, by Hamas and its Palestinian supporters did nothing to delay almost immediate calls for a ceasefire after Israel dared to strike back.We heard this call loud and clear at a January 12 UN Security Council meeting during which Algeria spoke about what it called the threat of forced displacement of Gazans by Israel. Israel’s permanent representative at the UN, Gilad Erdan, denied this charge while rebuking the Security Council for not condemning actual displacements taking place around the world.“As we speak, there are over one million Muslims being forcibly removed from their homes, all of their possessions taken from them as they face poverty, famine and disease. No, I am not talking about the situation in Gaza, but about Pakistan’s forced displacement of 1.3 million Afghans,” said Erdan.“Why does the forced displacement of Muslims from a Muslim country mean nothing to the Algerian representative and the council? I’ll tell you why: No Jews, no news,” said Erdan. “Over the past decade, 50,000 Christians in Nigeria have been butchered and hacked to death. Is this even a concern to the council? Again, no Jews, no news.”Erdan could have also referred to the countless other examples of forcible ethnic group removal or genocide to which the world has turned either a blind eye or given only a passing glance, mainly when they concern intra-Muslim disputes, only because they don’t involve the Jews.In Sudan, for example, a renewed civil war has killed 14,000 people, displaced eight million and threatened 17 million with famine, all in less than the past 12 months.Between 2004 and 2009, the Sudanese regime killed 400,000 people in Sudan. Millions were displaced and continue to languish in informal refugee camps where they suffer hunger and disease. Since then, the Sudanese regime has dissolved into its violent components: its army and its militias. Since April 2023, the two sides have been engaged in a civil war, causing even more Sudanese deaths, displacement and pain.The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported that 25 million Sudanese desperately need help. Close to 18 million of them face acute hunger. Of the $2.7 billion required for Sudan in 2024, UN agencies have received $96.7 million, amounting to only 4%.Yet, the older Sudanese tragedy receives far less attention than the newer and much smaller conflict in Gaza: Sudan has a population of 46 million, and Gaza only has two million.The straightforward, unabashedly antisemitic explanation: “no Jews, no news.”UN Secretary General Secretary General António Guterres said about Gaza: “We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since I have been Secretary-General.”This claim is nonsensical.When the number of deaths in Gaza stood at a reported 29,000 — assuming local Gazan sources have any credibility — Hamas claimed that it had lost 6,000 of its fighters. Israel alleged that Hamas had lost double that number. Even assuming nearly 30,000 people have died, if the difference is split, the ratio of combatants to non-combatants killed in the war in Gaza would be roughly 1:2, lower than the 1:3 ratio of a similar Middle Eastern asymmetric war when US forces eradicated ISIS in Mosul.The world never condemned the US for these numbers. Nor have Great Britain and America been taken to task for the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945, which killed 25,000 citizens. Nor has America been victimized for dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people, nearly all of them civilians.As for the non-Palestinian Arabs who have been suffering from war for centuries, there is a sense of unfairness that Palestinians have been monopolizing global headlines for the past century only because the alleged aggressors have been Jews.Palestinians even have their own UN agencies, such as UNRWA, dedicated exclusively to the affairs of 5.9 million mainly third- and fourth-generation Palestinian “refugees” when 12 million displaced Syrians, 8.1 million Sudanese, 4.5 million Yemenis, and 1.1 million Iraqis are all lumped under UNHCR where their mainly first generation refugees receive a fraction of the global resources and attention.What this suggests is if there were no Jewish state in what the Arabs now call Palestine, there would be no such refugees, once more proving “no Jews, no news.”Even claims that the rate and scale of Israel’s fighting in Gaza “is unlike any war in recent memory” are false: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an Arab hero to most Palestinians, used chemical weapons in crushing a revolution between 2011 and 2018, killing at least 300,000 and displacing 12 million in the process.No Jews, no news, an aphorism reflecting systemic antisemitism, is reason enough for cynical or highly secular members of the tribe of Chosen People to beg God to select a different people next time.Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba, is editor of REAL Israel & Palestine Report and REAL Indigenous Report.

RUBENSTEIN: Please God, choose some other people next time

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