No Victory Without a Goal: By Moshe Feiglin

21 Menachem Av, 5771
August 21, 2011
Translated from the article on the Ma'ariv's NRG website

The frustration that grasped me over Shabbat reminded me time and again of the man who told me how, at his bar mitzvah, "A ghost suddenly entered the synagogue in Budapest. It was scary, with a stench of smoke and death. The ghost ascended to the stage of the synagogue and began to shout: 'Jews! I have escaped Auschwitz to warn you! They will burn you! Run away now!'"

"The synagogue managers," the man continued, "dragged him off the stage and threw him out of the synagogue. I was sitting next to my father, in an aisle seat, and the man touched me. Until this very day, I can remember his smell. One month later, I was in Auschwitz."

That is what happens when the public is not willing to deal with the significance of what it hears. That is what happens when leadership is captive to the existing pre-conceptions. No facts, proofs or evidence will help. They will not listen to you; they will throw you out of the synagogue, they will say that you are an extremist, crazy; they will do anything to save themselves from dealing with the significance of what you are saying.

I didn't really want to write about what is happening in Israel's south. What can I say? "I told you so?" There is nothing taking place now that I have not warned about in tens of articles. What good will come out of writing the same things again? Why should anybody listen now? What can I write? Blame Begin who surrendered the Sinai desert? Rabin and Peres who surrendered Gaza and injected Arafat's army of terrorists into its streets and alleys? Sharon who destroyed (excuse me, "disengaged" from) Gush Katif?

I hear the "experts" on the radio. The broadcasters are not interviewing those people who tried to warn us. Instead, they interview the 'synagogue managers', those people who held senior positions and those who cooperated with the liars. They will go to great lengths to preserve the lie and the mentality that defends it.

"Feiglin! Tell me what we can do!" a senior worker in the Ashkelon municipality shouted to me after a Grad missile landed in her yard.
"First of all, change all the names of the streets, plazas and boulevards here back from 'Rabin' to their original names," I answered her and she, totally shocked, turned around and walked away, not integrating what I had just said to her.

Remember Rabin. It is impossible to get through to a public that is captive to a misconception. From at least the time of Oslo, the Nation of Israel is captive. Instead of freeing itself from the Oslo mentality and the name Rabin that symbolizes it, they changed the names of the Katyusha missiles. Rabin promised they wouldn't fly from Gaza into Israel. They do, but never fear. In the north, where Rabin never promised we would not be hit by Katyushas, we are still attacked by Katyushas. But in the south, where he scoffed at the thought, we are attacked by Grads.

Just a short while after the murderous rampage (a.k.a a "terror attack") in the south, Israel's Air Force eliminated five senior terrorists in Gaza. The news broadcasts also mentioned that they were behind Gilad Schalit's abduction. Why didn't they kill them earlier and prevent the murders? Because Israel has no goal other than to survive. Its leadership cannot initiate anything because there is no national goal for which it is legitimate to fight, other than simple existence. If Israel had killed the terrorists before their rampage, tensions here would have escalated and the media that continues to pump Oslo into our bloodstream would have blamed our leaders. In other words, when there is no destiny beyond mere existence, we cannot initiate. All we can do is react. So now we have more murdered Jews and an escalation of tensions, as well.

All that we wanted was to realize the Zionist goal of "being a normal nation like all other nations." We tried to create an artificial reality that would replace the heavy burden of destiny that the Jewish Nation carries on its back.
But reality, of course, cannot be changed. We have lost eye contact with our destiny and now, even though we are stronger than ever, we cannot defend ourselves. Without destiny, all that we can do is react. And he who only reacts, will ultimately fall.
I am a great believer in this Nation. I believe that ultimately, we will return to our destiny-consciousness. When that happens, our enemies will evaporate. I just pray that the process of reclaiming our destiny will not be too painful.

The American Aliyah . .. and how it will happen Posted on April 27, 2011 - Dovber Halevi

You heard it here first. By 2025 there will be over 1 million American Jews living in Israel.

Actually – you didn’t hear it here first. We read it in the Tanach, Hashem told us this would happen through His prophets over three thousand years ago.

The process of Kibbutz Galyout, the ingathering of the exiles, has been taking place for well over a century. Since the first Russian Jew had enough of the pogroms and headed eastward, there has been a mass movement to the Holy Land from three of the four corners of the earth. Israel today boasts millions of Jews who have roots in the Arab Lands, Asia, South America, Europe, and Africa.

The only part of the world that hasn’t come home en masse is North America.

That’s about to change.

It won’t change because of Zionism, persecution, or even, Hashem forgive me, religious observance. But Hashem is guiding His hand to help us. It will happen for the simplest of reasons – self preservation.

Here’s how millions of American Jews will find themselves in Israel by 2025:

Over the next 15 years, the economic fortunes of America and Israel will cross paths in opposite directions. For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government has amassed a debt load equal to its entire economy. During WWII, all of this money was used towards industrial production of the American war machine. When the war was over, the factories were already built. The capacity was in place for the greatest economic expansion mankind has ever seen. While the debt of the U.S. continued to rise in the post World War II period, the economy grew so much faster that the debt to GDP ratio fell dramatically.

Until now.

Today, more than any government department except defense, America spends $420 billion a year on interest for its debt. This is while interest rates at all-time lows. If interest rates were to “revert to the mean” and hit, say 5%, this amount will double. America owes five times as much debt as they report to the world in the form of future Social Security and Medicare payments. They have to come up with $100 trillion over the next 30 years. Over 60% of U.S. debt is in the form of two year notes. This means that if interest rates were to suddenly spike, America is very exposed. America does not have the luxury of having locked up low interest rates for decades in the form of 30 year treasury notes – they stopped issuing them a while back. If rates go up, within 24 months, the total interest charge to the $14 trillion debt will skyrocket exponentially.

The only way America can pay it’s credit card and keep growing is by printing money. The contemporary term is quantitative easing, or QE3. This is the death blow for any economy. This is what did Germany in during the 1920s. it’s already having an impact today.

As time wears on, less and less of that money will be readily available to the average American family. Taxes will have to go up to service debt, or at least to ensure that after the government pays the interest, there will be enough left to provide the American public the bare essentials. Taxes can go up to 50%. After taxes, the government will continue to print money to “make ends meet,” i.e., fill in the gaps. This causes inflation – which means that after your pay your taxes, the buying power of the money you have left will quickly erode. This is why printing money is often referred to as the “invisible tax.”

Until America fundamentally restructures itself, a process that will take many years of very painful rebuilding, it will continue its economic decline.

Compare that to Israel.

Israel has a debt that is, according to the CIA factbook, 77% of its economy. This ratio is concerning, but not critical. The difference is that Israel has just discovered $1 trillion in natural resources off its coast. The next 15 years will see massive development of these resources and its use domestically, as well as its export to the world. Yes, Israel will probably double its debt in the next one to two decades, but her economy will grow at twice that pace. By 2025, Bezrat Hashem, the ratio of debt to GDP could be 45-50%, a very healthy number.

The State of Israel will not have to print money to meet its financial obligations. It also will not have to raise taxes either. If the economy doubles, or triples in size and tax rates stay the same, then the government will see three times the money flow in to its coffers. If the government even lowers taxes say, 10-20%, in real terms, they will still see more money come in than ever before.

Look at this from a personal perspective.

If you are an American family, you are going to see your taxes go up, and the value of the money you have left go down.

If you are an Israeli family, you are going to see your taxes remain the same, your income go up, and the value of the money you keep after taxes become more valuable. Israel has vowed to invest the lion’s share of its oil and gas royalties into education, meaning that these resources are going to fuel even more growth. Israel may be on the cusp of an economic explosion not seen since America in the 1990s.

This means more universities and institutions of higher learning. More scholarships. More opportunities for scientists, engineers, doctors – which there is a shortage of in Israel, and the like. More government payouts to the citizens. Better health care for everyone. Business grants, subsidized food sales, more aid to the poor and needy, and so much more.

If you are a family in America, the best thing you could do for your future, and the future of your children is move to Israel.

If you are a Jewish family, that’s exactly what you will have to do.

Today more than ever, there is a free flow of human capital throughout the globe. A citizen from Ireland, England, or France can work anywhere in Europe. America boasts millions of workers from all over the world – many of which do not have American citizenship. The opportunity for an American to work in Israel for a better life will become more enticing as time moves on.

Already the Nation of Israel appointed as head of its central bank an American expatriate. Stanley Fischer, whether he knows it or not, is the archetypical 21^st century Zionist Pioneer.

It will start with the doctors. 50% of doctors in the U.S. are Jewish. Israel will have a shortage of doctors this decade. For a Jewish state to have a shortage of doctors is pretty ironic – but the Hand of Hashem is moving His people home. Israel will have the financial ability to offer members of the medical profession more and more benefits to work here than ever. The easiest way to do this is to bring over Jewish doctors who are still trying to figure out how they will survive Obamacare.

It will continue with the pensioners. Currently the United States can continue to print all the money it likes without any consequences to its economy. The dollar is relatively solid, and interests rates are still low. The bond market hasn’t devalued the dollar enough yet for the U.S. Central Bank to cut off liquidity. This situation cannot go on forever. A day will come where investors will sell out of U.S. treasuries, driving down bond prices and pushing up interest rates.

The printing press will have to stop.

The U.S. will still have $100 trillion obligations, but they will no longer have the easy option to handle it.

One option is to just default on its debt. Another is to reneg on it.

America may have to come to the conclusion that it cannot feasibly pay out social security or medicare to its citizens. They will simply cancel it. They can either rewrite what benefits they are obligated for – which will be a shadow of what was originally promised, or just throw it out. Once Social Security and Medicare become true lies, America’s $100 trillion debt quickly becomes a $20 trillion debt. It’s the next “easy” solution to this colossal problem.

You don’t think a Congressman will have a problem getting elected on the platform of “Save entitlement or Save America!”

If you are an American family who paid into the Social Security system for decades, only to now realize that all the money you and your fellow citizens put into the Social Security trust fund were raided by Congress over the last 50 years and all that’s left is a big wad of IOUs that now won’t even be paid off – you are out of luck! If you are 75 years old, a retiree, and in need of medical care, you are in serious danger.

What are you going to do, go back to work? Who will hire you?

Israel has virtually free and universal health care. If you are Jewish, you are entitled to all of it by simply getting on a plane. The price of the ticket paid for by Israel.

That’s exactly what will happen in the near future.

Millions of American families will immigrate to Israel for the simple reality that Israel will have something to offer them that America no longer will.

It won’t start big – it will be a trickling at first.

Norman Moskowitz will move his family to Ra’nana. He will continue to skype all of his friends in Bay Ridge. He will tell his fellow officers at the Shul about the warm weather. He will tell his former boss about the exotic food. He will tell his friends about the cheap health care, and he will talk to a few people about opening up an import/export business. At first they will laugh at him. Then he will talk about the tax benefits. He will talk about how many incentives the government gives new immigrants to set up shop in the Holy Land. He will talk about all the social goodies the government showers upon its citizens with the new tax revenues while he still pays taxes equivalent, or even less than what he was paying back in the states.

In absentia, the new Israeli will be the buzz of Bay Ridge. “Norman has done so well for himself.” They will say.

All the families will be jealous. One or two of them, who were considering Israel for a while, will decide that if Norman can do it, so can they. Then these families will be skyping their friends confirming everything Norman said.

The first dominoes will fall and the chain reaction will begin. Pretty soon there will be a mass hysteria to come to Israel.

That’s how it will happen.

Just like the process of the ingathering, something that has been going on for a while and has now taken on a momentum of its own – the events that have been put in place which will complete this process are about to intensify.

Buckle up.

Dovber Halevi is the author of the financial book, How to Survive the Coming Decade of Anxiety. He writes for Breslov World and The Middle East Magazine. He lives with his wife and two children in Eretz Yisrael.

Pregnant Palestinian woman at Israeli checkpoint - -Must See to Believe!

Pregnant Palestinian woman at Israeli checkpoint

This is a woman who about a year earlier was treated for massive burn over her body from a cooking gas tank explosion. She is stopped at the border when she wants to return to the same hospital in Israel due to her pregnancy.

Due to suspicion and security integrity, she is asked to undress at the border terminal. 

And the world asks: "why do the Israelis need checkpoints, and a border fence?" Watch the video, and "get" the answer.

 

Watch the 3 minute video:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/04/there-are-no-words.html

Equality, Liberty and Jewish Economics : By Moshe Feiglin

The State of Israel is up in arms and everyone is protesting: Doctors, anarchists, homeless, renters who would like to be home-owners, parents, teachers, taxi drivers and more. Some of the protests are real, some are fake, some are authentic, while others hide a different agenda behind their protest signs. It's a mixed and very confusing bag of events that has broken out in our summer heat and it is rocking our government.

It is difficult to sort out what is true and what is false. On the one hand, we all feel economic pressure. Whoever is getting married and looking for a place to live or whose children are doing so knows that this is an impossible situation. More than 120 average salaries are required to buy a reasonable apartment within a reasonable driving distance from Israel's center, where most jobs are located. Our parents in the 1950's and 60's needed only half this sum to buy a home that they could call their own. Then, they worked eight hours a day, came home when the children were still awake and managed to cover their expenses with their salaries.

Today? Who works only eight hours? And who manages to save even one shekel by the end of the month? A family of seven that eats only the very simplest of food cannot get by without a food bill of thousands of shekels, to which they must add their expenses for tuition, transportation, housing etc.

There is no doubt about it; the pressure is real.

On the other hand, Israel's economy is flourishing, and we all feel it. All of us - not only the wealthy. The cafés are packed to the brim. Tens of thousands of Israelis are vacationing this summer overseas. New cars are jamming our highways.

How can we explain this dissonance? Let us begin to peel off the layers of the onion.

First of all, we will remove the first layer; the layer of the protest "leaders". It is actually quite easy to understand what is happening at the protest camps. Someone in the most radical Left understood that they have no chance to win a direct ideological debate with the Right. So they chose a more sophisticated tactic and wrapped their political/ideological agenda around genuine distress, channeling it to undermine the government.

Financial backing from Israel's enemies through the good offices of the New Israel Fund together with generous aid from Israel's media came together to create a huge gust in the sails of the anarchists who suddenly sprang up as authentic street leaders. At first, they enjoyed public approval, but after a few days, when the leaders of the struggle were pressed to logically formulate their demands, they were revealed in all their delinquency and the public got the picture.

So now we are left with the real issue minus the smokescreen. Are things good? Or are they bad? Israel's economy is excellent, no question about it. Technically, its citizens should be in a reasonable economic state. But the unease is genuine.

There are islands of lack of competition that have raised prices of certain commodities. The housing shortage is the result of the almost complete monopoly that the State enjoys, holding 93% of the land in the country. Another factor is the building freeze in Judea and Samaria. An amazing fact that has not been getting much publicity is that most of the land marketed in Israel comes from the 7% that is in private hands. In other words, the State has a built-in interest not to market its land, and to profit from the rise in land prices. The main share of the price of a new apartment is the price of the land. In this way, home-owning hopefuls have become a golden goose for Israel's Treasury. The high cost of food is also the result of hidden monopolies. Paving the way for more imports will lower the prices in no time.

That being said, the root of the distress and the protest is much deeper. In order to relieve the distress, we must enlist standards that are much different than the economic standards with which we are familiar today.

The first standard that we must enlist is the equality index.

Our Sages teach us that if a wealthy person is accustomed to servants who run before his carriage, the greater community must supply him with this level of comfort even if he has lost his wealth. This is the level of loving kindness that we must provide for him.

In other words, there are objective and subjective standards. In other times, nobody would complain about the economic conditions that we are experiencing today. But today, the model for comparison is not a tent in a refugee town, but rather a villa with all the modern comforts to which we have been accustomed. The lack of equality between those who can afford that standard of living and those who cannot creates hard feelings that turn into public protests.

The hard feelings are intensified by the ever-increasing salary gap. It is one thing to live on 5,000 shekels a month. But to live on that salary when others in society are paid ten times that amount - is something else altogether.

Another standard that we will have to enlist to understand the distress is the liberty index. When a person works 14 hours a day and never knows how long he will be kept on the payroll, it doesn't make much difference how much he earns. One way or another, he no longer enjoys liberty. He has become a modern slave.

These two standards; equality and liberty, are really in our own hands. We decide which societal model we would like to emulate. We also decide how much of our liberty we are willing to forgo in order to enjoy the standard of living that we have decided to emulate. To put it simply, the 'social uprising' is really against ourselves.

But it is not that simple. Man is a social animal. Very few people are capable of living with independent standards in a society that holds other standards dear.

The problem, then, is social or on a deeper level, ideological. The State of Israel was founded on the coattails of socialism and until the middle of the 1980's was mired in its culture of robbery. Israel's citizens would hide their wealth (a.k.a. "the under the floor tile savings plan") and would be embarrassed by their economic success. The work culture was based on lethargy; one's connections to officialdom were much more important than entrepreneurship, industriousness and education. The national debt, inflation, unemployment, gross national product and every other index responded in kind. Israel was a state on crutches.

The fall of the Communist bloc raised the banner of free-market capitalism and sent a vast human treasure of industrious and educated new citizens into Israel. High-tech, well-suited to Jewish genius and the problem of marketing Israeli end-products in the world was the perfect solution and Israel has become a true high-tech superpower.

But this was the beginning of the downfall that has led to the social uprising that we are now experiencing. Our newfound wealth has no support system in Israeli culture; no deep tradition of faith and loving kindness that could refine, restrain and above all - give direction and a goal for all the energies bursting forth.

When a nation has no national vision, it begins to fray. With no clear cultural roadmap, the economic turnabout brought about a turnabout in social norms. The concealment of wealth from the exploitation of the socialist establishment was a bad situation, but it did create fertile ground for values like modest-living and making do with very little. The surge of the pendulum to the free market also trampled those positive elements. The free market Israeli capitalism unleashed a culture of competitive ostentatiousness. People began to spend more money than they could really afford. If in the past, Israelis were embarrassed by what they could afford, today they take pride in their acquisitions - even though they cannot afford them.

Israeli society has become captive to a culture that, behind the smokescreen of freedom, negates our liberty. It is easy to be confused by the two terms. But in their essence, they are mutually exclusive. Liberty means taking responsibility, while freedom means absolving oneself of responsibility. The culture that developed with the new capitalism included a highly visible element of voracious freedom; a dimension of "grab what you can and don't be responsible for anything but yourself - if anything at all."

The culture of freedom that relinquishes responsibility and by default, liberty, has led us to a serious deterioration of human rights. We prefer to get more and more freedom in exchange for ever greater sacrifices of our liberty. We prefer to cast our basic responsibilities on the State. "Let the State take responsibility for our children," one of the leaders of the parent's protest said last week.

Police brutality toward demonstrators has intensified and become more violent. Policemen in masks - a blatant characteristic of totalitarian regimes previously unseen here, black uniforms, policemen who are no longer policemen but rather, fighters are now a common sight: Who exactly is their enemy?

Wholesale eavesdropping on citizens has become routine. The biometric law that labels citizens as if they were cattle has passed its first reading in the Knesset. Why does it matter? After all, with all our modern technology that has brought us so much freedom to talk, text and to be in contact from anywhere to anywhere - we are all transparent anyway. Who will dare relinquish all of this freedom in exchange for an undefined piece of liberty?

Liberty is quite evasive. It is easy to lose it without even noticing. Then, in the protest tents, they can't figure out how to formulate a list of demands because they do not understand the root of their distress. They do not know what they want, because a person wants to live and there is no life without liberty.

Paradoxically, we are experiencing quite a lot of aspects of Orwell's 1984 - from within a capitalistic regime. Even Orwell couldn't have come up with that: cultural tyranny without a tyrant; the loss of liberty from the midst of wealth and economic growth as a cultural process that has no address other than us.

When a family goes out for the evening to the shopping mall, they are actually designating consumerism as their culture. It is not unusual to spot couples with small children strolling through the malls at ten o' clock at night. That is the only time that they have to spend with their children after a work day much longer than eight hours. Now they are going to spend the money that they earned at the price of their liberty, exchanging it for more material success that the culture of consumerism forces upon them. Do they enjoy liberty? Or are they slaves?

Do not be mistaken. The tycoon who owns the mall is drowning in the very same swamp. He has not worked any less than the butterflies that have been captured in the net that he suspended between his dazzling storefronts. He is also caught up in unrelenting, impossible competition and is captive to the method and the culture no less than the smallest of his consumers.

Now we must return the baby that we threw out with the polluted Socialist bathwater back into the tub.

Socialism is a sophisticated form of robbery. If it is fine to rob the wealthy because he has wealth, then once the moral dam is broken, the immorality will not stop with a particular person. In no time, the rich layer of society is erased and the same method is applied to the next layer. Before you know it, it also reaches you. And you thought that you would be able to enjoy the spoils.

When the method reaches the back lines, it begins to take much more than money. Because if a person thinks that it is fine to take another person's money, he will ultimately allow himself to take his life. Property rights are not a luxury - they define us as humans; they are one of the foundations that make a person, whom it is prohibited to slaughter, more than an animal, which we are allowed to slaughter. All the absolute socialist regimes eventually perpetrated mass murder of their own nation. Liberty is the foundation of human life. Loss of liberty precedes its loss.

There is no economic method other than free economy. The problem is not with free economy, but rather with the culture that encases it. It is not capitalism that negated our liberty, but rather the hedonistic culture that came with it.

Solidarity, loving kindness, modesty, personal example, respect for others, education: How will we establish a culture that highlights all of these while restraining, refining and directing the wealth that has become our lot?

We have no culture other than our Jewish culture. Israel's economic system must be a triangle: its base is capitalistic liberty and its sides are Jewish faith and loving kindness. There, in the triangle, we can find the answer to the distress that has bubbled over the surface in Israel this summer. 


http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/articles/71/articleA7112.html