Catch The Jew!: Eye-opening education - You will never look at Israel the same way again

by Tuvia Tenenbom

“No. In Bet Shemesh we don’t have Arabs. Here it’s only Jews.” Why was the bus stoned?

My clothes are a Jewish uniform and I’m very used to them,

hot, for you and for me.

your clothes have nothing to do with anything Jewish. Moses didn’t wear them.

your obsession with tempting females is not Jewish, either.

When they came to your communities, to kill you because you were Jewish,

you copied their ways and their taste. I say

There are many gays in the Haredi community. You didn’t know?”

30 percent of Tel Aviv residents are gay.

Hebron is a biblical city. Here the creators of Judaism and their spouses are buried:

Me’arat Ha-Makhpelah (Cave of the Patriarchs),

massacred twenty-nine Muslims. Just because.

small, 3 percent of the city.

what kind of a creature I am: Jew or German?

Arabs, meaning Palestinians, don’t put a penny down.

SCENE: Jewish girls walk in the street. Two Arab kids throw stones at them.

He views me as a leftist troublemaker and wants me to go.

the man and the woman who appeared from a cemetery with a video camera

an impressive show of nothingness. It takes but one video camera to defeat them all.

I get on a bus, saying my goodbye to this holy city. Allah is the greatest, the muezzin shouts at me

Gideon Levy. Gideon is a columnist for Haaretz who for years has dedicated his time and writing in defense of the Palestinians and attacking the

For so many years Gideon has championed the Palestinian cause, but not one Palestinian has befriended him, or he one of them. Obviously, despite what his articles may suggest, he really doesn’t care about the Palestinians, only about the Jews. He’s an Israeli patriot, as he says to me. He wants his Israel, his Jews, to be super-humans and reply to a bullet with a kiss. In short: he wants all the Jews to be Jesus and die on the cross.

It is mind-boggling to me how people who say they love Palestinians so much and dedicate their lives for preserving Palestinian identity and culture, don’t even entertain the thought of studying this culture. They know Kant, they know Nietzsche, they know Sartre, they know Aristotle, but they know no Quran, no Hadith, and no Arabic.

Udi doesn’t strike me as being the self-hating Jew of the Gideon Levy variety. Udi is not a “patriot” Israeli; he doesn’t want a “Jesus” Israel, he wants no Israel. Udi is the normal self-hating person. He loves the Palestinians not for what they are, since he doesn’t really know them, but for what they are not: they are not Jews, they are the Jews’ enemies, and this makes them fantastic people.

It is interesting to see what the EU people are busy with these days: using Yad Vashem, the monument for millions of Jews slaughtered at their hands, as a platform for poisonous propaganda against the survivors of their butchery.

This is an Israeli thing, a unique habit, and he reminds me of it: listening to the news every hour to make sure, may God help us, that Israel still exists. This habit is one of the most interesting, most touching, and most frightening realities you would ever encounter in Israel. It contains no words, almost no emotions, just one short move of a finger pressing a button or clicking a screen in order to turn on a news broadcast. But don’t think of it, for if you do you might start crying for these people.

in order to speak with other people you need to understand the others’ culture. If you want to make peace with the Palestinians you must first understand them, their culture, and the nuances of their culture, but the Ashkenazi Jews have not internalized this fact yet.”

(according to their latest available annual report of 2012) Rape Crisis Centers in Israel a total of $6,721 and it gave the Rabbis for Human Rights $328,927.

Like Nadia, Eternity gets higher education for free. And like her, she studies with the Jews and she spits on them. These two women, I think, are smarter than the Jews who pay for their education.

The Jews, he argues passionately, have no right to have a land of Jewish nationality, because this is racism, but the Arabs have a right to have a land of Arab nationality because this is not racism. I ask him to explain this obvious discrepancy to me but for the life of him he can’t.

‘Yes, I am Chosen!’” They were happy to hear it. I said to them: “I am Chosen not because any God chose me. I chose Him. Do you understand? I chose Him because of His teaching: treat the orphan and the widow with justice, rest on the seventh day. He started socialism, do you hear me? When everybody was working seven days, God said, ‘No!’ That’s why I chose Him.’”

I think of the difference between Arabs and Jews. When Arabs make up stuff, they laugh it off once they get caught. Jews, like the atheist Gideon or believing Arik, get very tense.

A Mercedes and an iPhone, coupled with a law degree from an Israeli university, are the truest trademarks of the poor. This is theater of the absurd, I think to myself,

You cannot – repeat: cannot – criticize Peace Lovers. They have a monopoly on compassion and truth, and they staunchly demand their basic human right to state their opinion without anybody uttering another word once they have spoken.

“Fifteen years ago if you called a Bedouin ‘Arab,’ he would hit you in the face. Today, with NGOs like Adalah working on their behalf, they see themselves as Arab and as Palestinian.”

what’s interesting here is that our Lady of Palestine makes an issue of people’s free choice to live in a place of their choosing, when her own office is in a neighborhood that accepts no Jews, a fact she readily admits to when questioned on this issue.

Why, then, do you dedicate your time to help one weak people succeed in making the other people weak? What’s the rationale for all of this?

What happens here in front of my eyes is this: Israeli leftist NGOs are ever in search of their own people’s wrongdoing and in competition with each other for recruiting local spies.

Europe is trying to atone for its colonial past by issuing dictates to a non-European country. That the same mouth utters these three reasons while not wearing a burka is a testimony to the genius of European diplomacy.

Out of the seven billion people now living on the earth, there are about fifty thousands souls who agree with these settlers. Practically everybody else is certain that they are the greatest obstacle to peace. Personally, I have never understood why. Let’s say that the land is divided between Arabs and Jews, and let’s say that the Arabs get the whole of the West Bank. Why, I want to know, can’t the Jews still live there? There are millions of Arabs living in proper Israel, why can’t a few Jews with skullcaps live with the Arabs? In what book of law is it decreed that a land must be free of Jews?

So you don’t believe in giving territories to the Palestinians? “Of course not! Before the 1967 War, when Jordan and Egypt were holding the lands the Palestinians are now claiming, the Palestinians didn’t want those lands. Why didn’t they? They don’t want to have a state!”

In the last ten years, David informs me, there have been at least twenty-five coproductions between Germany and Israel. How many of the twenty-five have had to do with politics? “I think something like 60 percent.” Are there any right-leaning coproduction movies? “No.” In other words, Germany is working hard on influencing the minds of the Israelis, not to mention the minds of foreign viewers. Germany. Again.

“The international community has 600 million euro investments in Area C (area under full Israeli control, where about 5 percent of Palestinians live).”

How many NGOs are operating on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? “Three hundred. This estimate is for the West Bank only, excluding Gaza.” How many in Gaza? “One hundred.”

For the most part, German NGOs are funded by political parties – don’t ask me to explain this strange phenomenon – or by Church-related organizations that are funded by the government, which means that German NGOs are funded by the taxpayer, millions of taxpayers.

“Per capita, a Palestinian gets more financial support than any citizen of any country anywhere in the world.”

What is the number of Israeli NGOs operating in Palestinian areas? “About a dozen.”

Israel claims that the Geneva Convention is not applicable to the areas it captured in 1967, yet it operates within the convention’s parameters as if it did accept their applicability.

“A group of Palestinian militia stormed into the Nativity Church and took captive civilians who were inside and, in response, the IDF besieged the place.” So that’s when the “reality of this land” reached your heart, as you said. What do you mean by “reality”? “The reality of living under occupation.” Let me understand you, Brother: When the Muslims took your Christian brothers and sisters captive, endangering their lives in one of the holiest shrines of your faith, you changed your first allegiance, your allegiance to your Christian brothers, to those Muslims. Not just your allegiance, but you made an even greater decision in their favor by coming here. Does this make sense to you? To me, it’s mind-boggling. Don’t take this personally, but sometimes I think that whenever Germans talk about Jews, sense and logic mysteriously vanish. Am I wrong? Brother Josef stares at me, then stares at some invisible point past me and, after a few moments of total silence, he blurts out: “Yes, it is mind-boggling.”

We stop at an old house, where no one lives, and we look at its architecture. Lubna explains to us that “no one lives here because the owners were forced out by the Occupiers.” Lubna points at the ceiling, where we see burned beams of wood, and explains that “this is what people did centuries ago.” When was this house built? “This house is from the first century and it belonged to the original Palestinian residents who lived in this city under the Ottoman rulers.” The same Ottomans, I guess, who founded Alsra in the Negev, Halil’s village so well protected by Adalah. The Turks were here in the first century? “Yes. They were the first occupiers of Palestine. Then the British occupied Palestine, and now it is Israel.” This is a very enlightening narrative. No Romans or Crusaders have ever been here, according to this narrative. The Turks, who in reality first showed up here in 1517, have their presence moved back by a millennium and a half according to this narrative. I tell Lubna that no Ottoman even dreamt of being here in the first millennium, not to say century, since the Ottoman Empire started over twelve centuries later. Members of our group, educated Westerners who have come to the Holy Land to show their sympathies with the “poor Palestinians,” as one of them had told me before, wish that this strange German would stop talking. They ask no question of Lubna, and everything they hear they accept. They buy it all, wholesale, and they don’t need me to disturb their peac...