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Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.

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The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

It's About Religion, Not Land By Dennis Prager

If you've seen videos of recent attacks on Jews in New York City, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere, you may have missed a very revealing aspect of those attacks. They were almost always – as they have been for decades – accompanied by curses such as "[Expletive deleted] the Jews."

Now, given that the perpetrators are almost always Muslims – whether immigrants or children of immigrants from an Arab or other Muslim country – two questions present themselves:

Why attack American or French or British Jews? And why curse "the Jews"? In other words, given that the recent wars have been between Hamas and Israel, why aren't these attacks outside of Israel on Israelis and Israeli institutions? Why level curses at "the Jews"?

The answer is this: The Muslims who seek Israel's destruction do so because Israel is Jewish, not because Israel occupies the West Bank or Gaza.

First, the Muslim world sought Israel's destruction from the day Israel was established in May 1948, before it occupied a centimeter of the West Bank or Gaza. Second, Israel does not occupy Gaza. Israel withdrew completely from Gaza 16 years ago. Third, the Palestinians rejected a state of their own at least four times:

Rejection No. 1: In 1937, the British Peel Commission offered the Arabs 80 percent of the geographical area known as Palestine. The Jews were offered 20 percent. The Arabs rejected it.

Rejection No. 2: In 1947, the Arabs rejected the United Nations partition plan.

Rejection No. 3: In 2000, at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 94 percent of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital. But Arafat rejected the offer. In the words of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Arafat was "here 14 days and said no to everything."

Rejection No. 4: In 2008, Israel tried again. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. The Palestinians said no, again.

The reason for all these Palestinian/Arab rejections of a state of their own was that it meant a Jewish state in the Middle East still existed.

The Middle East dispute has never been about land. Israel is the size of New Jersey. It is slightly larger than El Salvador. If it were the size of Manhattan, the Palestinians and many Muslim states would still seek its destruction. There are 22 Arab states in the Middle East, but there is no room for one Jewish state. There is even a state with a Palestinian majority: Jordan. The issue is not land. The issue is religion.

Why is Iran wholly preoccupied with destroying Israel? It has nothing to do with Muslim solidarity; the Iranians don't care about Palestinians. It's entirely about hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. If the Iranians cared about fellow Muslims, they would be targeting China, which is accused by the United States and other Western countries of committing genocide against the Uyghurs – a predominately Muslim ethnic group that lives in China – a charge that includes forced sterilization of Uyghur women.

Westerners want to believe it is about land – in part because they are secular and think in secular terms. And in part because they need to believe that the dispute is about land. Only then can they blame Israel. If it were about a Muslim desire to destroy the Jewish state, they could no longer blame Israel. Even worse: They would have to blame Islamist fanaticism.

THE ONLY HOPE - THE NATIONAL REFERENDUM

(Excerpts) (So very appropriate for today with the Arab uprising and attacks by knife, lynching, car ramming etc.) [Rav Kahane warned us and Jews did not listen]

The election of a national emergency government for four full years, consisting of one party (rather than the impossible coalition of today) that will be obliged and have full power to implement the following program:

A) Putting an end to the Arab uprising with all means that the army deems necessary. This will include automatic and compulsory expulsions of law-violators and their families, the free use of weapons against stone-throwers and other attackers of Israelis, as well as permission for Jewish civilians traveling in the territories and under attack, to use their weapons freely in the same manner as soldiers

B) The annexation of the liberated areas (Judea, Samaria, Gaza) by incorporating them into the State of Israel. Full Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, including the Temple Mount, and free Jewish settlement throughout the land.

C) Offering both the Arabs of the territories and those within the pre-1967 Israel the choice of: 1) remaining in the land with full individual rights (cultural, social, religious, economic) but no national ones (they will not be citizens, will not vote, nor sit in the Knesset) as they recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, 2) leaving the country willingly with compensation for property or, 3) refusing both of the above and being removed from the land.

D) Dismantling the country's present bureaucratic, government-bobbled economy and introducing a free economy with private initiative, incentives to investors, and freedom from obsessive regulation and red tape. The opportunity to make Israel an economic super-power lies down the road of free enterprise.

E) A total overhaul of the country's educational system to put an end to the disastrous ideological bankruptcy of the young Israeli who has little if any knowledge and emotional links with Zionism, Judaism, or Jewishness. A curriculum that will include large doses of Jewish values and Jewish sources as well as Jewish national pride and Zionism, taught by ideologically competent teachers.

F) The creation of a new state television and radio authority with positive values toward Judaism and Jewish nationalism. An end to the deliberate distortions of the news and the undermining of national morale and values.

G) The compulsory learning by every Jewish youngster of a manual

trade so as to recreate the Jewish worker that was the dream of Zionism and is the basis of any normal national economy and state.

At the end of four years, another referendum will be held to see if the people agree that the aims of the national emergency government have been achieved or if another four years will be needed.

The referendum will declare and mandate that, if approved, the Knesset will be dissolved and a free election held within 30 days to elect one party with full and absolute powers and obligations to implement the program mandated by the referendum. Any party or list will be eligible to run and be elected on condition that it will pledge to fully accept and fully implement the above program.

This will be the reply to the enemies of Israel who dream of its destruction. This will be the reply to those within the State whose policies would destroy the Jewish body and eliminate the Jewish soul.

As World War II struck Great Britain with all the frightening implications of defeat, British democracy froze the democratic political system, suspended elections and major political rights. It did so because Great Britain faced a threat to all that was dear to it. How much more should Israel, faced with a threat to its very existence, not shrink from this.

And one can fairly taste the reaction of the demagogues of democracy to the above. On every high hill and under every leafy tree the declaimers of democracy cry out in well-rehearsed fury: This is a threat to democracy!

Ah, how shrill the squeal of the stuck, the bowl of the hypocrites of political history. They bemoan the threat to democracy. They warn against the threat to democracy. The democracy that does not exist and that never really did in the state of heartbreak. Israel.

Gehenim Valley 052721

On a warm summer evening, the City of David leads a group of Israelis through the Valley of Gehenim to a peaceful falafel dinner at the end of the valley.

Among the modern buildings and ancient stones are hidden corners of green nature, right in the heart of the city. On the tour we will get to know the fascinating story of Guy Ben Hinnom, tour along it, visit a number of special vantage points and finish with a tasting meal at Beit Begaye - a new hospitality complex located at the top of the cliff.

The World Hates to See Jews Defending Themselves

Shall we stand with our hands – or our planes – in the air?

Don Feder

I'm haunted by a photograph from the nightmare years. A Jewish boy, 9 or 10 years old, dressed in an oversized coat and cap, is being led away from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, his hands in the air. German troops are taking the child to certain death.

For me, it symbolized the culmination of 2,000 years of Diaspora history – of mass murder, torture and every horror imaginable, leading to the Holocaust and the slaughter of one out of every three Jews on earth. But that was only a way station. The end of the road is nowhere in sight.

I contrast this with images of an Israeli war plane sitting on a tarmac and plumes of smoke rising from buildings in Gaza.

If you're a Jew, those are the choices: Live on your feet or die on your knees.

When there are creatures screaming for your blood – who fired 4,000 missiles from Gaza, staged mini-Kristallnachts from New York to LA, marched throughout Europe waving Palestinian flags shouting "F___ the Jews, F___ their mothers, Rape their daughters," posted 17,000 Tweets with variations of "Hitler was right"-- the choice is very simple: Do you want to be a survivor or a statistic?

The oversized leftwing of the Democrat party shifted into high gear. The Muslim Brotherhood thanked quisling Bernie Sanders, AOC, Rashida Tlaib and the rest of the Jihad Caucus for opposing U.S. arms sales to Israel.

In gratitude for having their ancestors sold into slavery by Arab traders, Black Lives Matter activists (think of what they could do with missiles) raved about Israel's "colonial occupation."

How can you occupy your own land?

Of course, they think America is occupying our land too. That's why critical race theory and anti-white indoctrination have become so popular from the AMA to the Boy Scouts (with its diversity/inclusiveness merit badge).

Occupation? Israel is the only nation in history with a quit claim deed from God, as recounted in the first three books of the Bible. That covenant is eternal. That's why Jews are the only people in history who maintained their identity and returned to their land after two millennia of exile, and why they have retained that land ever since against overwhelming odds.

Mark Twain said it eloquently in his 1899 essay, written almost 50 years before the rebirth of Israel.

"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"

It's no secret. The Jew is the irrefutable proof of God's existence. If God did not exist, Jews would not exist.

That's why genocide was Hitler's primary goal throughout World War II. He blamed Jews for Judeo-Christian morality, which he saw as an affront to the natural order. Thus, he reasoned: No more Jews, no more God -- with His thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots -- and we can go back to being happy pagans with the strong devouring the weak.

There are as many reasons for anti-Semitism as ways for Democrats to spend money: envy of Jewish success, paranoia over Jewish conspiracy theories, the need for scapegoats.

The existence of Israel is only the latest catalyst. Even barely sentient progressives have to ask themselves: Was Israel (which didn't exist from the first century until 1948) the reason for thousands years of forced conversions, expulsions, blood libels, massacres and pogroms?

In the final analysis, the Jews are hated for introducing humanity to God, for teaching the world about truth and justice. There are still Jews who are willing to proclaim and even die for that truth, too few, sadly. And part of that truth is the relationship of Israel to the land.

Nothing can withstand this reality – not the terrorists with their brutal desert god, not the left with its utopian vision, not the so-called international community, which is reflexively anti-Israel.

The world hates the Jews for reclaiming their ancestral homeland – where they lived for 1,600 years before Muhammed. And it hates Jews for defending themselves.

Black Lives Matter, AOC, Antifa, Tlaib and other domestic terrorists endorse the lie that Israel was the aggressor in the latest round of violence. The same gang of fanatics who are trying to destroy America want to destroy Israel as a warm-up -- proving again that the destinies of these two great nations (unique in the annals of history) are intertwined.

Today is 1943 and 1948 and 1967 – past, present and future. The world is still trying to annihilate the Jews – to drive us into the sea. How will we respond – with our hands -- or our planes -- in the air?