Why I, an orthodox Jew who lives in Jerusalem, can no longer support the State of Israel

My father is an Israeli.

From the time I was very young growing up in London, I remember him going on and on about the greatness of the 'tiny State of Israel', constantly attacked by hostile neighbors on all fronts, and roundly criticised by 'anti-semitic' countries around the world for trying to defend itself.

That is the story I was told, and that is the story I believed, that the State of Israel was beyond reproach, and always 'good' and always innocent of any wrong doing.

In 2005, I and my young family moved to live in Israel, to put our money where our mouths were and to go and support the 'Jewish State' in the most fundamental way we could, by becoming part of it.

In the years that followed, a lot of the 'shine' started to come off my naive notions of the 'only good' State of Israel. The disillusionment began with the disengagement of Gush Katif. For 5 years, I lived in a place with a lot of people who had been 'disengaged'. My kids went to the same school, and I could see just how deep the scars ran.

Then, as a journalist, I started to hear stories about torture going on in the West Bank - both of Palestinians and of Jews. Of course I didn't want to believe that - so I ignored the signs that something was going very wrong with the State of Israel, and buried my head in the sand.

But the clues kept coming.

I read Ben Hecht's book Perfidy, about how the nascent State of Israel turned their backs on a million Jews in Hungary at the end of World War II and refused to redeem them from the Nazis for literally pennies.

Then, I started reading about how the secular Zionist movement in Israel basically wrest control of the money coming in to support the religious yishuv, or settlement, around World War I, diverting most of it into their own coffers and leaving the [then] majority of religious Jews in Israel to starve to death.

And many tens of thousands of religious Jews did.

Again, I didn't want to believe all this stuff.

After all, it went directly counter to all the brainwashing I'd received as a kid, about how 'holy' and above criticism the State of Israel was. So for years, like a guilty secret addiction, I continued to read things 'from the other side of the argument', without really knowing what to do with it.

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Fast forward to 2015, which is when I first heard about the curious case of Rabbi Eliezer Berland, a Breslov rabbi living in Israel who was being 'chased' across 3 continents by the State of Israel.

I had no connection to Rabbi Berland at that point, but the whole story just didn't make sense to me, from a journalistic perspective. I started researching it, and to cut a long story short, I discovered that Rabbi Berland had been deliberately set up and framed by the secular State of Israel - aided and abetted by the media - for crimes he didn't commit.

I wrote two books about what I discovered, called One in a Generation I and II.

The books hardly sold, presumably for the same reasons I'd kept quiet about all my niggling doubts about what the State of Israel was really up to, in my name, throughout all those years.

For most Jews, especially orthodox Jews, it was just too hard, too painful, too unthinkable that the country we prayed for, that we put so much love, money and effort into, that we defended to our non-Jewish friends and neighbors - was actually not what we thought it was, after all.

Then, a few things happen that really started to shake the whole picture up.

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Thing one was the Jeffrey Epstein case, including his links to State of Israel intelligence. As the stories of child trafficking and blackmail gathered steam, I felt revulsion that any country, let alone a purportedly Jewish State would resort to such horrible tactics, regardless of what was really on the line.

Better to die good, than to live so evilly.

But once the shock wore off, the cold reality sank in that THIS is what intelligence does. This is how intelligence agencies act - cruelly, immorally and totally above any concept of abiding by the law, either national, global or Divine.

And of course, I finally realised that the State of Israel's intelligence also had to be up to their necks in these sordid tactics.

And finally acknowledging that was so painful.

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The next 'shock' was COVID-19.

Over the last few months, I have had first-hand experience of how the State of Israel has routinely targeted it's haredi / religious and Arab citizens for testing, in order to create a fabricated picture of religious and Arab neighborhoods being 'hotspots' for COVID-19.

Off the back of that fabricated data, the secular State of Israel has gone after one religious and Arab municipality after another with draconian measures; prevented observant Jews from praying, using mikvahs, learning Torah; and created the spectre of Jewish anti-semitism against observant Jews in the State of Israel, by portraying the religious public as 'disease carriers'.

I hear stories of religious Jews being barred from public transportation in Israeli cities like Bat Yam, because the secular public there has been brainwashed that 'religious Jew = disease carrier'.

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Just over two weeks ago, the State of Israel tried the same trick in the Ukraine. The country's 'Health Tzar', Ronny Gamzu wrote a letter to the Ukrainian authorities accusing Jewish pilgrims to Uman of spreading COVID-19 in the Ukraine.

This was totally unfounded.

And it occurred at exactly the same time that the State of Israel was working hard to get countries like Greece opened up for its sun-loving citizens. I guarantee Gamzu didn't send a letter to the Greek authorities explaining how secular Israelis were coming to spread COVID-19 in the country.

As I write, 2,000 Jews have been stuck in Belarus for over two weeks, in terrible circumstances. They were on their way to Ukraine for the annual pilgrimage to Uman for the Jewish New Year, when Israeli PM asked the Ukrainian President Zelensky to bar entrance to them.

Netanyahu denied doing this, initially, but he was caught in the lie when none other than President Zelensky himself explained the Ukrainians had shut their borders at the specific request of Netanyahu, and the State of Israel.

In a stroke, these pilgrims went from being law-abiding travellers to semi-criminal outcasts, stuck in a foreign country through no fault of their own, while the State of Israel turned their backs on them.

Why?

Because they are religious Jews.

That's the only reason.

A few months ago, PM Netanyahu personally caught a plane out to India, to escort back a young Israeli woman who had been caught carrying drugs. He made such a big deal of what the State of Israel was willing to do to rescue it's citizens - even when they were drug dealing and doing other nefarious things.

But what he forget to mention is that this effort would only be extended to the State of Israel's secular citizens.

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Amongst the 2000 Jews stuck sleeping rough on the border between Belarus and Ukraine, there are small kids. Many of these people have now run out of both money and food, having been stuck there for approaching 3 weeks, all because of the actions of the State of Israel.

I never thought I would see the day when the so-called Jewish State would abandon 2,000 half-starving Jewish Israelis to their fate - in the middle of a revolution - just because they are religious.

Yet, that is the shocking reality.

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And so, as the stories of the State of Israel's aggressive discrimination and hatred of its religious Jewish subjects continue to mount, and as the facts continue to suggest that the State of Israel is not the paragon of innocent virtue we were all brainwashed into believing it was, I find myself in a very difficult place.

It's a place where I want to continue to be proud of the Jewish State - the country that I uprooted my comfortable life in England to move to, more than 15 years ago - but in all good conscience, I just can't do it.

I can't continue to support a State where religious Jews are truly second class citizens, where discrimination, immorality and cruelty are rife, where the politicians only serve themselves and the hidden powers controlling them from behind the scenes, and where the State itself has become the single biggest exporter of anti-semitism against religious Jews in the world.

Not in my name.

However painful it is to say this publically, it has to be said and reality has to be acknowledged, if we are truly to build something good and holy and moral in Eretz Yisrael.

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LINKS:

To see the awful condition of the 2,000 Jews stuck on the border of Belarus, without food or shelter:

https://umanshalom.co.il/news-page/%d7%96%d7%a2%d7%a7%d7%aa-%d7%97%d7%a1%d7%99%d7%93%d7%99-%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%a1%d7%9c%d7%91-%d7%94%d7%aa%d7%a7%d7%95%d7%a2%d7%99%d7%9d-%d7%91%d7%92%d7%91%d7%95%d7%9c-%d7%91%d7%9c%d7%90%d7%a8%d7%95%d7%a1/

To see the text of Ronny Gamzu's letter to the Ukrainians:

https://img.mako.co.il/2020/08/21/letter%20to%20the%20president.pdf?Partner=interlink

Some of the headlines outlining the discrimination against chareidim in Israel, during COVID:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/meeting-with-pm-over-coronavirus-enforcement-haredi-mks-demand-end-to-abuse/

https://egyptindependent.com/politics-plague-israeli-virus-response-ahead-of-holidays/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=44&v=YqmyLLb2k_k&feature=emb_logo