To Be Secular-Or Not To Be Secular-That is the Question

Submitted by M. Tovey (United States), Dec 19, 2011 at 17:28

This is interesting reading. Is Israel secular, or not: by the included arguments, how are we able to tell? From a decidedly religious perspective, since Judaism is the dominant religious preference of the people that help Israel in its rebirth, one would conclude that the Jewish State is, in fact Jewish due to its people being Jewish, non – Jewish citizens notwithstanding. But is that really true?

To be sure, when the exiles of Europe were trying to get into the Middle East Jewish enclaves of the land, they were operating under the hope that, at last, they found a place they could call home, if for no other reason than the ancient claim and the earlier attempts of ethnic Jewish people like T Hertzl to recreate a homeland in the British 'Palestinian' mandate.

But for all the assertions that Israel is nationally religious, too much of what they do is secularly based. That is their problem; a confusion of national/religious identity that leaves them open to all the overt and covert attempts to dislodge them from the land. It was a secular mindset that allowed the government of Israel to cede Gaza to the 'Palestinians,' and look where that got them. It was a secular mindset that allowed the waqf to keep and maintain the Muslim identity of the al-Aksa masjid.

But it will be the religious antipathies of those who do not want a Jewish homeland to continue in the face of increasing 'Palestinian' claims that believes in unfounded terms that Israel has no rightful claims to the Jewish identity of the Jewish heritage. It is what they are preparing to go war over.

Whether Egypt's election was a proper contest or not, the underlying sympathies of the dominant Egyptian rulers now in power are distancing themselves from the relative peace once enjoyed for the realities of the mindset that the Islamist revolution wants Israel gone, whether secular or not. To them, it makes no difference-just ask Erekat and his collaborators.

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