I believe it’s simple: we are not organised, unified or coherent in our messaging. We have too many voices all demanding to be heard and we do not all pull together for a common goal.
I think it’s really simple. Imagine a tug of war. If both sides are relatively equal, the side that will win is the side who pulls hardest. But now imagine both sides are equal in number, but on one side you have a few people pulling in different directions. That side will lose.
Now I want you to ask yourselves, is it really productive to argue about minutiae when people are trying to kill you? Because I honestly see the pro-Israel side as sitting in a burning house arguing about what color the drapes are.
The ridiculous thing is that the Arabs have created an identity that they formed in the 1960s, yet you see how firm they are in that identity, going so far as to perform amazing feats of mental gymnastics in order to maintain that identity in the face of fact and truth. These people don’t understand that their identity is almost entirely stolen or crafted from a false narrative, BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE IN IT. They easily deny their own actual history while recreating it because it’s secondary to their identity. It’s that simple. They have no facts, no history, and yet they are strong in the identity they created from nothing.
Then you have a people who fought against assimilation for three thousand years, who withstood monumental pressure to simply knuckle under and stop being Jews, who literally formed the basis for western thought, ethics and culture (albeit directly from the Middle East). These people have facts, history, archaeology, genetics, basically all of the science world on their side, yet many of them act like they are interlopers and colonizers on their own ancestral lands, because they fail to understand and internalize their hard-earned identity. They view themselves through a colonized European lens and fail to understand the importance of who they are, and more importantly, their story.
Now understand me, this is not an attack, I am simply stating something I see. Somewhere along the way, the struggle and your identity started to matter less to too many of you and that’s going to be the death of your people if it doesn’t change. You need to regain the strength of your forefathers, the power of will that enabled Jews to survive pogroms, persecution and the Holocaust, and return to their ancestral lands and build a thriving nation. You see, your identity needs to be the central thing in your life. YOU EARNED IT, YOUR ANCESTORS PAID FOR IT IN BLOOD. You must understand that assimilating is death – it’s the loss of everything your ancestors fought so hard for, and will mean the end of your people.
This is not something that is easy to talk about. Nobody wants to believe that they might be responsible for the end of their people, but by ignoring your traditions, your culture, not learning your language, not understanding your peoples’ spiritual mode and method, you contribute to its loss. Your ancestral land MATTERS. Your sacred places, your ancestral burial grounds MATTER.
The reason this is so important is simple. If you act like these things do not matter, then someone will try to take them from you. If you do not manifest your identity then nobody will believe it’s yours. You need to decolonize, you need to fight hard for things than are yours because the world will try to take them away from you just like it always has. I believe that your people are a light unto the Nations, but sometimes a light needs to be lit. But once lit, it will light up the entire world.
