Law, Power, and Justice

MONDAY 28 OCTOBER 2024

Podcast. “Israel News Talk Radio” (Note: Right Wing Israeli) The Jews Wo Make the Best Combat Soldiers 10/28/24)

•        (Note: Many on the right in Israel strongly support the election of Trump.)

According to Lenny Goldberg, host of this podcast:

•        So many of the fallen Israeli soldiers are from the settlements.

•        These are great soldiers because they live on the land, grow upon the land, unlike the (citified) kids that come from Tel Aviv.

•        “Hill top youth” they are called by Goldberg.  “They know who the enemy is.”  “They hate the enemy.”  They know that “this government and this army is so messed up.”

•        The “hill top youth” knows that the military command has no idea what they are going to do with Gaza when they get “the Hamas” out of there.

•        “The government and the Shin Bet persecute the hill top youth” but they still go out and fight.  The “settler kids” make “the best soldiers.”

•        There are “response teams” in these settler groups. These kids go out with the response teams and so they are familiar not only with the land, but with fighting and weapons.

•        They know “the deck is stacked against them.” 

•        Many Israelis are “upset” because there are so many extreme right wingers in the military.  Some soldiers are complaining that the military is filled with right wing extremists.  Lenny (podcaster) quotes the headline from a newspaper where over a hundred soldiers, after seeing a “far right spirit sweeping the army” and frustrated over the failure to get back the hostages, they are saying that if Netanyahu doesn’t make a deal with Hamas, 130 reservists will no longer report for duty.  The fact that there are right wingers in the military means that there are “good jews in the army with motivation” who are only extremists “for these leftists.”  “Thank God” for these “extremists.”  If the leftists see “right wing fanatics” then don’t serve.

•        It’s like these movie stars who threatened to leave the US if Trump wins.  “Let them leave.”

•        A lot of these leftist soldiers are “very dangerous and very idealistic in their leftwing ideology.”  Goldberg talks about a practice of the Israeli army where they are entering a building that they are not sure of, and they get an Arab to go into the building first.  Goldberg agrees with this practice. 

“Why should a Jewish soldier get blown up?  Let the Arab be blown up.”.  Leftist soldiers film this and send it out, to get these soldiers into trouble.  “It’s the settlers or the religious soldiers who understand Jewish war ethics that the life of one Jew is worth all the Arabs in Gaza.”

•        Moses last words to the Jewish people were  “You shall tramp on their high places.” (Note: The high places of the enemy.)

•        But, “We have one ear on what Washington wants us to do.” 

•        In the Six Day war, we didn’t care what the world thought.  “It’s the religion that gives you the motivation to fight.”  “You’re doing God’s work.”

•        “The entire world belongs to God Almighty….he gives the land of Israel to whoever he wants to….” There were people here (in Israel) when God gave the land to the Israelis.  (He’s using the story of God giving them the land of Caanan?) God said,  “I’m bringing in new tenants.” ” That’s our claim to the land.”

•        There are a number of claims to the land 1) the historical claim that we lived there (Netanyahu used this), 2) the claim that the Arabs attacked us a number of times and he who conquers wins, 3)  and the air tight claim, “that God gave Israel to the Jewish people.  “It’s in the Bible.”

•        The first argument can be discredited by the fact that Jews were conquered by the Romans.  So the historical argument is not air tight.  The only real genuine claim is that God gave Israel to Jews.

•        In Lebanon there are villages not far from the Jewish towns, “fancy…. European style” houses are there.  There were fancy houses in Gaza as well. In the basements of these houses, you see “weapons of war” the quantity and the quality our soldiers have never seen.  Soldiers see “what they are planning for us.”  Hezbollah was prepared for a wave of attacks.  Everything “was so sophisticated” “Like nothing they (the soldiers) had ever seen.”  The medical kits as well, were “high level…equipment.”  It was all from Russia.

•        This is a “war of survival….we have no choice”….we have the soldiers but we don’t have the heads.  As the leaders of the military admit, we have only used a portion of our capabilities.

•        The military leaders and the government have this “thing about proportionality.”  We are getting attacked on four fronts, 100,000 people displaced in Northers Israel and they are worried about proportionality.

•        Rabbi Mer Kahana, talking about the first Lebanon War. 

•        The “tragedy of the IDF pulling out of Lebanon before really finishing the job.  And we have to…pray that that scenario doesn’t repeat itself.”

•        Parallels to the Lebanese war today. 

o       There “will be a great cheer from all the leftists and from the American Jewish Committee.  Israel will pull out of Lebanon….”  “We had in our power to physically liquidate these … Nazis….kill them, kill them.  Stomp, pressure…”  Unafraid of what the world says.

o       In the first weeks of the (first Lebanon) war “Peace Now, and the leftists, and the world, and CBS, and the New York Times…gave orders to its troops” not to use air power when attacking PLO positions that are in civilian areas because you “might kill civilians.”

o       The Israelis had to go in without cover.  It was an “Insane decision….All the Arabs of Lebanon are not worth the life of one Jewish soldier….In World War II, the Gentiles understood how to fight a war…bombed the cities….They were bombing the German people, because….the German people that was going to back Hitler….who cheered Hitler.”

o       “…there wasn’t time for misplaced pity…our rabbis tell us, he who has mercy on the cruel will someday be cruel unto the merciful.  We had pity on the Arabs in Lebanon….”

o       “Nothing happens in this world except that God wills it…Jewish weakness is a desecration of God’s name….The lesson of the Holocaust, the real one…the Germans laughed at them and mocked them and said, Jews where is your God?…We empty God from the world by our being weak.”

o       “…he (God) shows the nations through the Jewish people…only Jewish strength and only Jewish power and only Jewish victory can prove to them that there is a God in Israel.”

o       The state of Israel was “an explosion of Jewish power…Jewish strength…Jewish pride…”

o       In the six day war: “We saw God. The world saw God.  The world trembled….we took this miracle and we threw it away….”

o       Moshe Dayan, opposed taking the Golan Heights in 1967 because it might kill Russians.  “He was a secular man of little faith, no faith.

o       End of speech.