do you think mordy might one day make aliyah to a settlement?

you've already got a couple, right? what's 6 more?

http://i.imgur.com/BDBK4mR.jpg

http://cd.pbsstatic.com/xl/26/0026/9780553140026.jpg

interesting read thx mordy

lol @ that choose your own adventure

wdyll on yr birthright trip

https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/196_505579837317_8314_n.jpg

yes that's an aeropostle sweatshirt

i want u guys to have the full compliment of evidence

what are the theological implications of aliyah

it's a really big mitzvah. it's such a big deal moving to israel that the lubavitcher rebbe had to explain why he didn't move there (bc his chossidim were still in diaspora). there are laws about when you're allowed to move away from israel (acc to the torah). in fact, there's a discussion of this fact in the Ruth narrative bc it begins with the family moving away from Israel bc of a famine and there's a question of whether even a famine is sufficient cause to leave the country. (the biblical isaac is notable for having never left israel in his lifetime - bc he was sanctified as a sacrifice during the akeidak narrative he was too holy to leave the land.)

a cute side note - the babylonian diaspora was so productive for the jewish ppl that they said that just like it's forbidden to leave israel, it's forbidden to leave babylon - unless you're moving back to israel (cue Cyrus the Great). when i was in yeshiva they used to make a similar joek about brooklyn

'hallelujah' denied status as new blink-182 'i miss you' youtube still du jour by being a fairly catchy ditty in its own right

ok so theological demands are for strong & unified heartland. do you think this exists in microcosms around the world as well as in israel? obviously with less imperative but with a similar urge to thrive?

it's not just about strong & unified heartland. the land is central to jewish faith. it's ubiquitous in the foundational documents (torah, prophets + writings almost entirely about the land of israel), liturgical texts, etc. i know the concept of returning home is not unique to the jews (i was kinda surprised to learn that diaspora studies in academia has nothing to do w/ jews), but it's probably unique in terms of its extreme historical persistence.

the land is central to jewish faith

This land is my land.
That land is your land.
You stay on your land.
I'll stay on my land.
There's this here border
I drew between them.
This land was made for me, not you.

that's beautiful, aimless. where is it from? samuel 2?

robert frost

good news, thread. my friend in the settlements is sending me some photos of settler-life to share.

http://www.trendingcentral.com/boycott-israel-image-month/

weird thread. Fake Mordy?

false flag mordy

all that glitters

isn't this the ilidf board?

hurting, do u like my birthright pic?

is it true that there are religious jews in the settlements? would it therefore be boring to be surrounded by religious jews all the time, especially at weekends?

just thinking through the logistics before you buy a tract of land

JNF has planted more than 240 million trees and developed more than 250,000 acres of land since 1901, greening the landscape of Israel and preserving vital ecosystems. JNF’s forestry expertise and commitment to environmental protection makes it one of only two countries to end the 20th century with more trees than it had at the start.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

are you still on about this

i'm thinking about making a trip in april - not permanent tho

yeah im sure thats what you all say at the border

lol as if - who do u think is running the border?

if you can tell me without googling who ran the border at ballyshannon i'll let you have that point otherwise meh we all have our little local battles i guess

i could've sworn she died like a decade ago

Naturally, I googled. Wtf?!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

if ariel sharon dies within the next 48 hours then YES [X]

if he outlives it then that is a sign that NO [X] the fierce old testament g-d has enough emissaries in israel for the time being

that settles it

lol punz

whats an aliyah to a setetlement... please dont use any fancy jew words when explaining to me

a shtetlment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyTu_ZdcBCo

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/29/obituaries/20130129ArielSharonObit-slide-YW1Q/20130129ArielSharonObit-slide-YW1Q-superJumbo.jpg

Sharon talking to Rabin - Peres sitting to the side

the highest income tax rate in israel is 52%, comparable to the netherlands

http://www.timesofisrael.com/2013-record-year-for-tourism-government-says/

http://www.israeldailypicture.com/2014/04/breaking-news-thousands-of-vintage.html

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AMQwnSL7Q4g/Tgq6DmJ6DgI/AAAAAAAABUM/F-8ki3eVmNY/s1600/Jer%2Btitle%2Bpage.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUDaLuwUiX8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUDaLuwUiX8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39W3oCzw4SQ

http://i.imgur.com/U70c7ak.jpg

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13743/israel-s-navy-transforms-itself-for-21st-century-power-projection

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/196345/stop-worrying-about-israel

i admit this made me tear up a little near the end
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-i-left-western-europe/

As someone with a pretty substantial, errrr, relationships with the Glasgow Jewish community, I don't recognize any of that, Mordy, but obv. it's that person's experience, so fair enough. Doesn't sound much like Glasgow though.

he sounds like he was very uninvolved in the glasgow jewish community and more heavily involved in the college activist leftist community? iirc he says something like his birthright trip was the first time he was in a majority jewish group? that would be v unusual for participants in the community

i'm like so full of shit btw i have zero intention of leaving the US. luckily yearning to move to israel w no actual plans or intentions to do so has a long tradition i can tap into.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-israel-remain-firmly-positive.aspx

his birthright trip was the first time he was in a majority jewish group?

lol wtf

i just checked bc it is lol so tbf he says: "I went to Israel first on Taglit-Birthright. Just meeting the group I would be travelling with at Heathrow Airport was the most young Jews I had ever been around." "most young Jews I had ever been around" birthright iirc my trip had like... maybe 25-30? so not totally insane, but still probably means not a huge amount of participation in glasgow jewish life.

i won't hold my breadth for BDS advocates to address the new gallup numbers. for those guys the big revolution is always imminent if not sooner

personally I don't really know what to make of Americans' continued love affair w Israel - pro-Israeli Jews make up such a tiny portion of the overall American population it isn't too hard for me to imagine that the bulk of support is rooted in either a) general anti-Muslim sentiment and b) eschatological evangelicals, cuz really why else would yr average American give a shit about (or even remotely understand) Israel.

maybe 25-30? so not totally insane, but still probably means not a huge amount of participation in glasgow jewish life

yeah I don't think my kid has ever been around more than 25-30 young jews; e.g. the whole student population of his talmud torah is maybe about that much, so I guess there are times when there are that many young jews together in a building with him, but I'm not sure he's "around" the much younger or much older kids. There are no more than 10 Jewish kids in his entire school I'd say. That's just how it is when you don't live in a Jewish town!

25-30 is kind of a lot if you narrow it down to a particular age range, although there were various points in my life when I was definitely in a bunch of Jews of my age group (primarily summer camp sorta situations). But yeah my daughter's never been in a group of 25-30 Jewish kids her age. She's definitely been around more than 25-30 Jews tho!

ok so i've spent a lot of time thinking about this and my best answer is that americans identify very strongly with the jewish people. i'm not sure exactly why (something maybe related to self-identification as exceptional) but once you start looking for it you see it everywhere. the puritans saw themselves as enacting a certain kind of exodus and i've read that they heavily identified with the old testament and used it as a basis for their legal code (and that thanksgiving was originally thought of as a yom kippur analogue). you def hear it in the expression judeo-christian which obv was not invented by jews, and in hebrew roots phenomena. i've considered that black communities might have their own version of this re identification w/ the exodus narrative, and of course u have black israelites groups. i think that support for israel is related to this, and its refounding as a kind of seismic religious moment that is not exclusively eschatological. and then you have obv answers that for christians it is probably nice to have access to so many of their holy sites and there's a lot of american religious tourism. xxp

ok so i've spent a lot of time thinking about this

lol u don't say

I think a lot of it is as simple as "all those countries over there hate us - except for Israel!" and from there it's just a circle-the-wagons mentality + sure religious tourism

like the way i see it the eschatological stuff and anti-muslim stuff was grafted onto this original identification which is the real story (and i think has v interesting implications if you're interested in speculating about the future of religion in america). mormons have heavy philosemitic identifications too. (btw this isn't too uncommon and there's a thing where a royal english family identified as being scions of david or something? but i think totally ahistorical on a national level like we see today.)

mormons have heavy philosemitic identifications too

yeah I find this really annoying personally. But they were looking for a biblical analogue to their own experience and the OT was a better source (duh) than the NT. Same goes for the Puritans I suppose.

the puritans overlaid the entire narrative. they crossed a sea to enter a promised land. i feel like the US is indisputably the most philosemitic country in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism

It's because the OT is a core text, surely?

which part? i think obv christianity's lineage has a lot to do w/ it but some of these things - like the ten lost tribes of israel - are post-OT

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/middleeast/yemen-jews-israel.html

JERUSALEM — They landed in Israel late at night — a man in a dark suit and traditional headdress, wheeling a suitcase; a mother, veiled, in a long black robe and holding a sleeping toddler; and a rabbi carrying a Torah scroll believed to be more than 500 years old.

They were among a final group of 19 Yemeni Jews who were spirited out of their war-torn country in recent days, the Jewish Agency announced on Monday, bringing a monthslong clandestine rescue operation to a close.

Photographs taken at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv by a representative of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body that deals with Jewish immigration, documented the arrival late Sunday of the last of the Yemeni Jews who wanted to go to Israel.

They are remnants of an ancient and once-vibrant group that became increasingly imperiled by violence and anti-Semitism as Yemen descended into civil war.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuHhRatCQAAd8eM.jpg

can someone with photoshop superimpose this on an irl map of the united states

daydreaming antisemites should probably transfer their planned new israel to an area of the united states that is less likely to contain native americans and other groups they might purport to care about

https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/stalin70th_pppa.jpg

http://www.wired.com/2016/05/israel-can-customize-americas-f-35-least-now/

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-israels-air-force-dominates-the-sky-16896

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/

http://nypost.com/2016/08/01/amare-stoudemire-i-rejected-nba-offers-to-fulfill-israel-dream/

no word on whether he's moving to judea & samaria

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-judoka-yarden-gerbi-takes-home-bronze-at-rio/

Israeli judoka Yarden Gerbi overcame an early loss to win the bronze medal at the Rio Olympics on Tuesday, becoming the first Israeli athlete to win a medal at the 2016 games, and the first Israeli Olympic medalist since windsurfer Shahar Tzuberi took home the bronze in the 2008 games in Beijing.

Gerbi defeated Japan’s Miku Tashiru in the repechage to claim the third place spot in the under-73 kg competition.

Gerbi, 27, and the 2013 world champion in her class, thus became the seventh Israeli athlete in history to be honored on the Olympic podium. She was also only the second woman to do so — the first being judoka Yael Arad, Israel’s first-ever medal winner, who took home the silver in Barcelona 1992.

Didn't see the medal match but she was impressive against the Chinese opponent I saw her beat.

i don't know the story behind it but Sae Miyakaya's floor routine was 100% using Kol haolam kulo as music.

https://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/infinite-jihad-rabbi-shagar-on-the-disengagement/

I will try to illustrate the contradiction in the lessons of the war through a discussion regarding who is our enemy.

The Lebanon War was waged against a religious enemy Nasrallah, the Radical Islamic fundamentalist. In this regard, at least externally, we would agree that religious extremism endangers us, being that the secular Arab governments of Jordan and Egypt have signed peace treaties with us.

Yet, conceptualizing the enemy in this way presents a challenge for us, because, as we’ve mentioned above, in the eyes of many secular people, our religious community, at the very least, parts of it, suffers from the same religious extremism. They hold that the resolution to the conflict lies in a movement of secularization that may allow for tolerance and openness, two prerequisites for peace. In truth, those secular pockets of the Arab world are perceived as more moderate and open to the concept of peace.

From this perspective, the connection between the Disengagement and the Lebanon War is the open and inner struggle against secular Israel, which enjoys the support of the secular west in their perceptions of religious extremism.

Yet, it is not so simple to get the full picture here. To wit, for Nasrallah, the state of Israel does not represent a rival religion, but rather the supremely hated secular, colonialist West. As religious people, where do we locate ourselves in all this?

Do we not identify somewhat with Nasrallah’s critiques?

If true, perhaps our enemy is actually secularism? If this is so, the connection between the Disengagement and the war is different. The war is the punishment for the Disengagement. We may rightly ask here if it was not a kind of secular extremism that employed its systems of power against the settlers of Gush Katif and their faith? We may relate to the perpetrators of the Disengagement as agents of a foreign culture ourselves. For many of us, they evince the feeling of “…and we have been exiled from our land and distanced from its [holy] ground”[4] – whether from a practical (the Disengagement) or metaphysical perspective (secularism).

Surely these mixed feelings are quite confusing, and a crucial question that stands before us now is whether the real battle is external – Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, or internal – the struggle against the secular left, and those on the right who have been ensnared in its positions. It is possible that this question stands behind the dispute between the statists (mamlachti’im), who say that we should continue to draft without question and are opposed to disobeying military orders, and those objectors (=sarvanim) who refuse to forget what has happened and for whom joining the army in defense of the state is not automatic.[5]

I think that specifically from this great paradox that a tremendous religious blooming may sprout forth. This contradictory situation is such that on one side Nasrallah depicts a negative, cruel, and perverted religious vision, and yet on the other we stand before a totalizing globalization lacking roots and identity (this too yields tragic results, even if they are generally hidden, and in many ways no less cruel than the fruits of radical religious extremism)

This situation must lead us to a third way, a combination of both messages. We must understand both the failings of secular Israeli culture and the failings of one-dimensional religious fundamentalism that has flourished in our world as well. This will bring us to the ability to transmit a new religious message.

In order to cultivate this message, it is incumbent upon us to break down the dichotomy of choice between warmongering religious extremism and westernizing peace-seeking which is built upon forfeiture of identity and roots. Religious must redeem the message of peace. A new kind of religiosity must develop. On the one hand, rooted in values and on the other hand, prepared to achieve real peace.

To me, it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that at the end we will indeed achieve a ‘religious peace’. This is because the left does not found peace upon deep respect for the religious other, but rather upon a total discount of religion, with the claim that it is the source of the war. The paradox here is that in doing so, the left actually intensifies the conflict. It is specifically here that the Muslim feels threatened, because the peaceniks approach him from the perspective of liberalism and globalization. [The Muslim] senses in this a sophisticated attempt to subjugate his values with western values, including the hegemony of their representative in the region – the State of Israel.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/two-muslim-states-in-africa-send-first-ever-envoys-to-israel/

(senegal and guinea)

Seeding Controversy: Did Israel Invent the Cherry Tomato?
http://www.annawexler.com/uploads/2/0/2/4/20246021/wexler-gastronomica-2016.pdf

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/01/israel-palestinians-us-egypt-saudi-arabia-mahmoud-abbas.html

Meanwhile, some of the ideas that the American team looked into are starting to leak out, explaining why Abbas beat such a hasty exit from the scene. Although they have no formal confirmation, reports about them have started to appear on Al Jazeera's English-language website and various other places. These reports refer mainly to an old plan, already raised a decade ago. Now it seems as if most of the main players in the region, including the US team, are giving this plan another look. This would involve an exchange of territories by three or more parties (perhaps even four or five). What makes it different from prior efforts is that this time, the Egyptians and Saudis are in on it.

At the core of the idea is the creation of a major Sunni-Israel alliance, which would serve as a counterbalance to the victorious Shiite axis, which poses a threat in the north. The basic idea includes an extensive territorial exchange, in which Egypt would cede a piece of the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Strip. With this, Gaza's territory would extend southward along the seashore, making it three or four times larger than it currently is. This would make it possible to relieve some of the pressure in Gaza, but it would also shift the balance of power between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

According to this plan, the center of power in the future Palestinian state would be in Gaza, expanded toward the north of Sinai, rather than the West Bank. In exchange for the expanded territories that they would receive in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians would give up territories in the West Bank, allowing Israel to annex the settlement blocs along with a generous amount of land around them, thereby maintaining some degree of territorial integrity between the various blocs. At the same time, Israel would give Egypt a narrow strip of territory along the lengthy southern border between the two countries. There is also the possibility that Saudi Arabia and Jordan would also participate in these territorial exchanges, with various ideas proposed.

Maybe there's a better thread for Israel travel talk? couldn't find one...

Aside from reading Catch the Jew, is there anything else I should think about in preparing for my first Israel trip later this year? I'll go for a couple of weeks, mostly in Jerusalem with probably a couple of days in Tel Aviv and in Haifa. It's an academic trip rather than tourism, but there'll be time for sightseeing and obviously eating. Does anyone here have advice on what are good neighborhoods to stay in Jerusalem? I'll want relatively simple access to the Hebrew University, that's my only constraint.

ok I see now that this is on a sub board I've never heard of, so I'll make an ile thread instead

https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/analysis-israel-beats-the-odds-is-safest-corona-country/

Just wait till the conspiracy theory crew hear about this.