ICOT: Thanks for the beautiful article.
DarcheiNoam: There is an obvious self-contradiction in your article about Rav Amram. His thesis is that the Arabs were always friendly and it was the Zionists that made the Arabs bloodthirsty via the Balfour Declaration. He says that there is no difference between the Arabs and other non-Jewish nations.
And that is exactly why his whole thesis falls. Because the Germans butchered six million of us for no reason it shows that the non-Jews start with us totally unprovoked. Rav Amram equates the Arabs with say the Swiss. Therefore there is no reason not to equate them with the Germans and any other anti-semitic governments throughout our history, because what is the difference between one non-Jewish nation and any other. Since we know that the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust were completely unprovoked, it follows that the Arab pogroms and terror attacks are equally unprovoked. So his hashkafah falls to pieces in a complete self-contradiction.
And this is exactly the rationale of the Zionists. We will no longer trust other countries to protect us and be forced always to live under foreign rule, since that has led to tragedy after tragedy. We have the right to one little place in the world that we can call our own. And we will make our own state there that will be run by Jews and be a safe haven for all Jews everywhere.
And BTW we are not conquering and taking over anybody else’s land, as Rav Amram seems to say. Did we ever try to take over Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iraq? Eretz Yisroel is our land that was given to Avraham Avinu and has belonged to us from time immemorial. We have every right to go back home. We needn’t concern ourselves with any nation exerting false claims over our own home. They occupied our land, not the other way around.