Reform and Orthodox: Some Angles on the Middle East

The emergence of the Jewish nation in the 20th century as by far the most powerful in terms of wealth and influence has left the Jewish community sharply divided under the labels “Reform” and "Orthodox," or “Zionist" and “anti-Zionist," these antonyms corresponding with the terms “secular* and "religious."

This sharp division inside Jewry, with all forms of worldly power overwhelmingly on the side of the Reformers, has given rise to a weirdly contradictory situation in which the Reformers, who have flatly rejected a Biblical interpretation of history, find themselves today without any religious support for their Zionist ambitions except that supplied by Christians who continue to believe that the Jews are "God's chosen people" now in the process of fulfilling prophecy.

As modem Jewish historians frankly admit (for example, Abram Leon Sachar in The History of the Jews, and Howard Morley Sachar in The Course of Modem Jewish History). Judaism and Christianity have been equally influenced by the so-called Enlightenment, ushered In by European thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Charles Darwin. In the resultant secularization, Reformist Jews, who today form the overwhelming majority, have dispensed with just about everything in the old orthodoxy based on an anthropomorphic concept of “God," many of them even taking pride, as Abram Leon Sachar remarks, in “aggressively spelling the name of the deity with a small 'g'."

After much bitter internal strife among the jews, some semblance of order was restored at the Universal Synod of Berlin in 1889 when it was agreed that Jews would be free to interpret scripture as they pleased and could even be agnostics or atheists, provided they remained loyal members of the nation. Therefore, while today many Christians cling to the notion of a “Judeo- Christian God," the modem educated Jews, whose views are decisive in communal affairs, no longer believe in a God with human attributes, a God who is 'pleased" or “angry," who “chooses" a people and confers on them territorial freehold in perpetuity. All this is dismissed by the Reform Jews 39 mere symbolism, now to be replaced with the concept of a nation which does not have to wait for a promised “Messiah,” but is quite capable of being its own “God” and “Messiah,"

So why the schism within Jewry today? Why have they not all become equally secularized? The answer to such questions is that while Judaism always was a racial creed inseparable from the national identity of a people living in dispersion, it did possess a somewhat elusive religious component which in New Testament times had faded out of the prevailing orthodoxy and needed to be found and restored. Thus it is clinging to something in Judaism which is more than raw nationalism which explains the passionate intensity of a tiny minority of so-called “strictly orthodox" Jews today, some of whom go so far as to identify with non-Jewish opponents of Zionism.

Nevertheless, the preservation of the group solidarity of a people living in dispersion among “strangers” has always required the implementation of a dual moral code-one law for "us" and another for “them," one set of attitudes among "us" and another towards “them."

The almost irresistible appeal of Zionism today, especially among the young who have lost all feeling for religion, is the motivating excitement of group ambition and aggrandizement, an appetite much whetted by the rewards of unprecedented success during the last century and a half.

These facts have an important bearing on developments in the Middle East where in 1982 the exultant Zionists made an astonishing demonstration of their power and influence and where also they encountered Jewish opposition on a scale not to be seen anywhere else in the world.

A newspaper headline on September 21 summed up the main news of the day: “U.S. Forces for Beirut-if Israel Approves," No attempt was made by the media to answer the obvious questions:

• Why did the United States, a nation on which Israel is almost wholly dependent for both money and armaments, have to submit to the indignity of having to wait-like France and Italy, also-for permission to send its peacekeeping force back to Lebanon?

• Why no angry outcry from American congressmen and senators over ruthless aggression carried out by Israel in contemptuous disregard of all the conditions which Congress had attached to American military aid, one of these being that such arms must be used only for defensive purposes?

• Why the nervous circumspection, even timorousness, of the leaders of so many other supposedly powerful industrially developed nations, in their reactions to Israel's long-prepared and massive invasion of Lebanon in equally contemptuous disregard of all the orders and injunctions of the United Nations, not to mention the rude brushing aside of a peace-keeping force which the UN already had in southern Lebanon?

On the same page of the headline quoted above was this one: "Israel No Longer David; It's Now Goliath”-a rather unguarded remark from President Reagan which made nonsense of a Middle East policy which has cost the Americans scores billions of dollars since the state of Israel came into existence in 1948 and had now brought American armed forces into the battle zone of Lebanon.

Almost simultaneously the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London declared that Israel then ranked as fourth in military' might, the first three being the United States, the Soviet Union and the Peoples' Republic of China. A tiny state which received nearly all its money and arms as gifts from the United States was now more powerful in military terms than populous and highly industrialized countries like Britain, France, Italy and Japan.

There is only one way in which the paradox can be resolved: There is another kind of power in terms of which Israel ranks a good deal better than No. 4 in the world. And what kind of other power is there except the financial to which all other forms of power, the industrial, commercial and political, are subordinate?

What this means is that if the tiny state of Israel is in its own right not a superpower, it is most certainly one of the limbs of a superpower-other such limbs including powerful lobbies in all the developed nations with effective participation in their administrations and almost total control of the world’s network of public communication, or press, correctly described by Alexander

Solzhenitsyn as being "more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.”

Understandably, therefore, the emergence in the West of a new and wholly unprecedented kind of superpower, with Zionism as its political aspect, has remained one of the twentieth century’s biggest unreported happenings, hard to identify and even harder to describe because, unlike any other superpower that has ever existed, it has no territorial or geographical boundaries Israel itself being no more than one of the innumerable signs of its existence,

And yet, how this weirdly different kind of superpower came into being can be quite simply explained to those not wholly ignorant of history.

The story of what happened is so strange and, for many, so hard to understand, that it can hardly be repeated too often.

Last century, and until quite early in this, great money power existed mainly in the form of national concentrations of it, bent on promoting national purposes, Thus, there was a British money power (for many years the greatest), an American money power, a Belgian money power, etc. Not only were these agglomerations of money power separate but they were even in fierce competition with each other, as witness the 19th century’s scramble for colonies in all the so-called undeveloped parts of the world.

What then happened was that the Jewish banking families which had for a long time been operating from within the different Western countries, working in unison, were able to draw all the national concentrations of financial power into a single international or global financial system, which they now control and which they hope to be able to convert into a single global political power.

The United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, etc., all look as if they are separate and independent nations, but let us not be deceived; all have lost their economic separateness, all are under the dominion of a kind of witch-doctor magic exercised by a single global money power.

One of the features of the new superpower that makes it different from all its predecessors is that since most of its influence and controls are exercised through the mind, it depends heavily on deception and, therefore, cannot afford to be open and honest about its operations and intentions. The source of its great strength is, therefore, also the source ofits weakness* its Achilles' heel-hence, its frenzied and sometimes quite violent response when its paper curtain of protective falsehood is penetrated.

So massive, so intensive and so long-continued has been the falsification of information bearing on the Middle East situation, that today the reality bears hardly any resemblance to the media- sponsored appearance.

Developments in the Middle East, including the invasion of Lebanon, the seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria, the occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank of the Jordan, are of the greatest historical importance because they-and the reactions of the so-called superpowers to them-epitomize our entire century of conflict.

Obviously, when Israel's leaders flung a powerful army into Lebanon, rudely brushing aside a United Nations peace-keeping force which had the support of both the United States and the Soviet Union, they knew for sure that they had nothing to fear from either of the “superpowers/* and even less to fear from the U.N.

The Israelis had no more to fear from the Soviet Union this time than before; for was not the Soviet Union the only countiy supplying Israel with arms during the 1948 fighting which resulted in close on one million Arab inhabitants being driven from Palestine into the desert or into exile in the neighboring Arab states? Nor would those Israeli leaders have forgotten that after the Six Day War of 1967 the Arabs were astonished to see the Soviet delegate at the United Nations vote in unison with the American delegate calling for a cease-fire with no conditions for a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Arab territory they had seized.

The only opposition encountered by Prime Minister Menachem Begin in those days was from the Orthodox minority in Israel; they held a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv and demanded Bergin’s resignation.

Even Dr. Nahum Goldmann, for many years president of both the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, who devoted his life to championing the interests of the Jewish people, later maintained a decidedly negative attitude towards the state of Israel and its leaders.

What the huge Reform Jewish majority see and celebrate as a triumph of Jewish nationalism in the Middle East, many Orthodox Jews, especially those living in present Israel, regard with deep anxiety as an explosive disintegration of Judaism as a faith and way of life and as a community, culminating possibly in a worldwide hostility to the Jews of unprecedented dimensions.