5786

I sent this out to a bunch of the tribe and thought, what the hell, might as well post it to the blog. I only have had one negative comment, most of the recipients agree with me, but you don't have to.

Rosh Hashana, 5786

To all of my Jewish and partly Jewish friends and their spouses and families, I wish you the happiest and most productive coming year.

I would also like to say something political that some of you might like and others might dislike. It pains me to say this.  I rarely vent against Israel while among gentiles but feel like we mishpucha can talk. 

It is okay to love Israel and hate their current representatives. They are not serving their people. They are deserving of shame and scorn. 

I am the son of a sabra. I have lived under rocket and scud missile attacks during two conflicts including the totality of desert storm. I support their right to exist and abhor the Hamas attack of October 7th.  

I want to see every remaining hostage released alive.

But I must also say that every Palestinian is not supportive of Hamas nor do they deserve to be removed from Gaza or exterminated. An Israeli intelligence chief said that he wanted to see fifty Palestinians killed for every victim of the October 7th attacks, even if they are children.

“The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations,” he said in the broadcast comments. “For everything that happened on October 7th, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”

As you know, about 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led cross-border attacks, the majority of them civilians, and 250 were taken hostage to Gaza.

This man's attitude is sick. This attitude and the attitude of the zealots on the right who feel like they have a biblical mandate for taking Judea and Samaria, makes me very nauseous and want to squirm. We have no right to kill thousands of innocent arabs with such disdain. 

I had quite a few Palestinian friends in Israel and would like to tell you that many are wonderful people and themselves abhor Hamas. The ridiculous and desensitized disproportionality of the Israeli response was horrific.

In fact there have been many occasions these last few years when I have been embarrassed to be Jewish. Thankfully many Israelis feel the same way I do. Hopefully their crazy leader will be gone one day and they can find a way to co-exist but the duplicitous Netanyahu has done everything in his power to make sure that will never happen, letting extremist settlers kill their neighbors and fragment what once could have been a second contiguous state. 

The Jewish leader I respect right now is Zelenskyy,  not Bibi. I love the Jewish people but the Israelis need to get their shit together and start acting like human beings again. They have alienated the world and many jews here in America and I am certainly one of them.

You may agree or not agree with me and that is your right. But I am disgusted by Israel and also by their relationship with our own leader, Donald Trump. May saner and more human heads and hearts prevail.

Love,  Robert