Someone Needs To Tell The Arabs

6 min readMay 11, 2024

That Handwritten Scroll

This is a picture of the Torah. I think Jewish people do not talk enough to non-Jews about what it is and the place it has in our religious and cultural life.

I’d like to tell you a few things about it which are important for understanding what is happening today, because it gets to the heart of the ties between Jewish people and the land of Israel.

The Torah is a large scroll, handwritten in ink, in exactly the same form as the first Torah written for the temple in Jerusalem around 2,500 years ago.

Every Jewish community in the world has a Torah. It contains the five books of Moses, or what Christians would call the first five books of the old testament. These are the only books religious Jews consider to be truly holy, as they were supposed to have been written by Moses himself as revealed by God. Other books in the Jewish bible are tribal histories and, while important, are not sacred in the same way.

The scrolls are written by hand, in Hebrew, and stored in the holy ark ( a kind of cabinet ) in each community’s synagogue. The transcription is vital and painstaking. By tradition, if the transcriber of any copy of the Torah makes the slightest mistake on even one character, he must throw the whole thing out and start again.

There is a Torah scroll in Bologna, Italy known to be around 900 years old which is identical, character for character, with Torah scrolls made in modern times all over the world, from Ethiopia to Poland to China to America. The accuracy of transcription of the Torah across time and geography is one of the most unlikely accomplishments in all of human culture.

That should give you a sense of how important the Torah is to the Jewish people.

The Torah contains the mythic history of the origin of the Jewish people in the land of Canaan, and their tie to the land, starting from the creation of the world and proceeding through generations to Moses standing on the precipice of the land, forbidden from entering with the people.

It doesn’t matter if it is not literally true. It encodes the meaning and the purpose of why the tribes of Canaan set aside their differences and came together to live as one on the land, and the rules they created for themselves to live together as one.

The central message: They are all the children of the same God, and that God wants them to live together as one family. That God has no name. That God has no image. He simply Is, pure Spirit, Eternal, and He wants them to be a light unto the nations.

That message over the centuries became universalized. It gave birth to Christianity. Christianity completed it by adding two values it was lacking, Grace and Faith. Grace is a forgiveness which is sincerely sought and freely given, though it cannot possibly be earned or deserved. Faith is belief in a hope which is beyond reason and cannot be justified by reasons. The concepts of forgiveness and faith existed already in Judaism, but Christianity made them metaphysical and tied to divinity in a way which transformed them from their ancient forms.

Over the millennia the Jewish people did not adapt Christian theology but, by exposure and by our own suffering, we did recognize and absorb the wisdom of the Christian values which complete the Jewish law. No people needed transcendent concepts of forgiveness and hope more than we did.

That hope manifests in our annual religious round, built around the Torah story. Each week of the year on the Sabbath, religious Jews read a portion of the Torah story to each other. Each year begins with reading about the creation of the world. It ends with the Jewish people, freed from slavery, entering the Holy Land.

And so it goes, again and again, cyclically with the changing of the moon, for 2,500 years, every year, no matter where we have been scattered like leaves across the globe, we travel this journey in Hebrew, about our tie to that land. Each synagogue was built with its front doors facing Jerusalem. Each day, Jews who prayed did so facing Jerusalem, no matter where they were in the world. Always, facing Jerusalem and in Hebrew.

In 1948, one of the greatest miracles in all of recorded history occurred. Hebrew, which had been a dead language preserved in the Torah, carried on the shoulders of Jews everywhere in the world for 2,000 years, spoken only in liturgy, was revived as a living language in Jerusalem, in the land where it originated, having been preserved unaltered for millennia by the aching knuckles of transcribers working by candlelight, and lovingly toiled over by the eyes and fingers of long-bearded rabbis.

Along with Tamil and Sanskrit, it is one of the three oldest living languages in the entire world. It is the only one of the three to have died and been resurrected.

There is not a more Christian story on earth outside of the New Testament itself: faith, hope, resurrection.

I do not know how to get this message across, but someone needs to convince the Arabs that the people of Israel are not the Dutch Afrikaners of South Africa. The Jews are not Dutch colonists who came to make a buck and who are going to go away under threat of violence or fear of sanctions or the pointed spear of criticism. The Arabs have chosen the wrong goals because they understand wrongly who they fight.

We are ancient. Our memory is long and full of suffering, far more than they can deliver. For 3,500 years the only things we have ever agreed on as a people are that there is one God, we are one family and we belong to that land. Netanyahu is wrong about many things, but he is right that we will fight alone if we have to and we will fight with our nails if we have to.

The first Arab-on-Jew pogrom of the modern age, in which the Arabs of Palestine attacked and massacred immigrating Jews, occurred in 1920. It has been 104 years and counting. If the Arabs do not accept there is no version of justice for them which does not also include Israel, not as a temporary concession to be destroyed later, but as an eternal nation, there will be bloodshed for centuries more.

It is stupid. Someone needs to get the message to them. Those in the West who are picking up their banner of Jews being colonists of the West, being some foreign people who will be driven out by isolating them from their colonial sponsors … are just ensuring peace will never come.

Go deeper video: 600 Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren sing, “Am Yisrael Chai”

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine

10. The 1920’s And The Spread of Hate