“[Arab] morale following Jewish [military] successes low with thousands Arabs fleeing the country. Last remaining HOPE is in entry of regular Arab armies, spearheaded by Arab Legion.” Cable from the US consul in Palestine to Secretary of State George Marshall (cited Migdal, Kummerling, The Making of a People, p.146)

In 1948, the US revoked its UN vote in favor of creating the Jewish state. Truman slapped Israel with an arms embargo during the war of survival, three years after Auschwitz. When the Jews won, the Americans pushed us to an unprofitable armistice—and did so again in 1956, 1967, 1973, and after various intermediate confrontations.

Why the demand for restraint? I don’t know. It seems totally irrational to me. I don’t think the American politicians consciously subscribed to the balance-of-power game and so prevented Israel from achieving total victory. I imagine the US actions stemmed from moral idealism of the same kind that led the US to tacitly support German re-occupation of the Rhineland before WWII. Sort of the idea that nations shouldn’t be pressed too far, a watered-down version of the balance of power.

In 1973, the Americans prevented Israel from annihilating the Egyptian Third Army. Was it because of the Soviet nuclear threat? Hardly so. The USSR did not threaten the US in 1973. It wasn’t even clear if the Soviets had really shipped nuclear warheads to Egypt. Such a transfer would have run contrary to the Soviet doctrine: Russians never exported nuclear weapons into other conflicts, and removed missiles from Cuba when conflict loomed.

The Russians also kept decidedly low profile in the war, even staging the expulsion of Soviet military personnel by Sadat. Soviet reinforcements for Egypt were a response to the American help to Israel. It seems that America and Russia escalated their support for their clients based on their perceptions of the other side’s intentions.

Besides, a detrimental armistice was imposed on Israel after the immediate nuclear threat had dissipated.

America cared very little about the possibility of nuclear confrontation between Pakistan and Soviet-backed India. It is easy to twist the arms of subservient Israeli politicians, but not of Pakistanis.

Does Israel depend on the US for military resupply? Today, yes, after decades of increases in American aid. Such backing did not exist before the final days of the 1973 war. Israel won all her wars without the US, and the resupply in 1973 came too late and went almost unused. Egypt took the resupply as a convenient excuse to concede defeat, and made it a point of propaganda that it stopped the war not because the Israelis had crossed Suez and were roaming at will at the Egyptian army’s rear, but because of American involvement. Iran similarly rationalized its armistice with Iraq: it was not due to exhaustion, but because of the United States’ downing of an Iranian civilian aircraft.

Israel needs no one’s military help if she resorts to first-use of nuclear weapons. Just make it a law that any invasion will be answered by a nuclear strike. That’s it. No need for American guarantees. And just how many times has America reneged on its promises?

About the importance of American weapons for Israel, that’s another misconception perpetuated by those who want Israel to continue begging for US aid and so submit to the whims of US administrations, or rather to the Jewish establishment which claims to manipulate those whims. The first airlift arrived after Israel had crossed the Suez Channel and won the war, and many days after Israel had stopped the Egyptian advance. Actually, Egypt stopped by itself because they weren’t prepared for a mobile war in Sinai, nor apparently did they plan to strike at Tel Aviv. I believe the Egyptian version, that Sadat only intended to upset the status quo and push Israel to the negotiating table—recall that both Israel and America ignored Sadat’s peace offer in 1972. Back to the point, the airlifted weapons were left unused. And Israel won the Six Day War without asking America for resupply of weapons. Preemption always pays.

The US provided aid to Israel for a single reason: to offset the growing Soviet influence. Egypt, a Soviet client, could not be allowed to win a major war and thereby tremendously increase Soviet influence in the Middle East. America similarly supported anti-communist struggles everywhere, from Korea on, and the aid they gave to Israel was very small compared to American expenses in other conflicts. If America was so concerned with Israel’s survival and the justice of her wars, why did the US impose an embargo on arms shipments to Palestine during the ideally just War of Independence? Also, the US announcement that it would supply weapons to Israel came immediately after the Soviets announced their aid to Egypt. After the Soviets declared a nuclear alert, the US did likewise. It was an incremental spiraling of the conflict between superpowers, with Jews being only pawns.

Perhaps Kissinger wasn’t bluffing when he said that Israel wouldn’t receive a nail if it preemptively attacked Egypt. That only testifies to how weak the purported American bond to Israel is. Charles de Gaulle famously put away the photos of Soviet missile installations in Cuba presented to him by Kissinger, saying that France would support America no matter the proof. America’s standard of support for Israel is much, much lower. The US would apparently have let Egypt destroy Israel with Russian support if Israel had attacked first. The US position is still more bizarre because Egypt had actually launched the war formally a few days earlier by closing the Tiran Straits, an international waterway, for Israeli shipping—a legally accepted casus belli. The Kissinger anecdote also condemns Israeli generals who spend tremendously on an army which depends on ongoing resupply from foreigners for even a short preventive war. Among the cowardly Israeli generals, even the “hawks” advocated attacking the Syrians rather than the main Egyptian force—even after Israel had received incontrovertible intelligence of an impending Egyptian attack. Israeli preemption wouldn’t have succeeded anyway, because of the secret deployment of Soviet SAM batteries near the Suez Canal. It is a miracle that we did not preempt and lose all our aircraft.

The American support for Israel in the UN is meaningful only compared to the entirely anti-Semitic Russian and European voting. Unlike those anti-Semites, America simply acts with minimal decency. Condemning Israel for genocide, apartheid, human-rights violations, and aggression is a libel so obvious that it just won’t fly with American public opinion. American cooperation in the UN buys Israel just a little time. Thus, during the 2006 Lebanon War, the US Administration quickly backed down from its original position that Israel is entitled to destroy Hezbollah, and accepted the European position on immediate cease-fire.

Hebrew words are made of three-letter roots composed in turn of two-letter root-cells. There is some evidence that every letter of the Hebrew alphabet is a stand-alone root cell with its own meaning.

Two-letter root cells form three-letter root cells by two major methods. One, combining two two-letter root cells where the second letter of the first cell and the first letter of the second cell are the same: bet-reish (cleanness) + reish-aleph (standing above, thus, seeing) = bet-reish-aleph. Two, adding a third letter to two-letter root cell. The further down the alphabet is the third letter, the lighter is the action: nun-shin + aleph (move), hey (dislocation), iod (loan), caf (bite), lamed (fall), mem (breeze), kuf (kiss), reish (bird), tav (exhale).
Two-letter root cells are semantically meaningful and seem to follow a similar pattern of decreasing intensity the further down the alphabet is the second letter: aleph-vet (to give birth: av—father, aviv—spring, beginning of the year), aleph-gimel (to bind: aguda—wisp, egel—drop), aleph-dalet (to raise: ed—steam, adon—master, the raised one), etc.

The root structure is artificial. Hebrew roots were consciously constructed rather than evolved naturally.

Words in the Torah commonly have multiple meanings. No large extra-religious texts in Hebrew survived from antiquity, and it is often impossible to reconstruct the meanings precisely from various contexts. We know how the sages understood the words at the time they translated the Torah into Greek, but they might not preserve the original meanings.

The correct approach to understanding the Torah is etymological. As long as the root meaning makes sense, it should be used. Whether the sense derived from the root meaning complies with exegetical requirements is unimportant; exegesis should follow etymology. Whenever several meanings are equally plausible etymologically, the most common meaning should be assumed.
The common approach to the Torah is to put exegetical requirements first, and then see if the required meaning of a word is plausible, or even remotely possible. Given the scarcity of ancient texts, a wide range of meanings is at least remotely possible, which often allows for wild exegesis. The etymological approach puts a stop to that misreading.

Consider Genesis 1:1. Bereshit is universally translated as “in the beginning.” The primary meaning of reshit is main, principal.

Several instances of reading reshit as “beginning” are dubious. Genesis 10:10 says, “And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh…” It is odd that several kingdoms are named one beginning. The phrase makes more sense if we substitute principal for beginning: The enumerated towns were the principal places of that land.
Proverbs 8:22-23: “The LORD made me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” Such reading presumes that the account of Creation omits the immensely important episode of creating the Wisdom before other things. More plausibly, “The Lord made me [wisdom] his principal way, put forward [distinguished] from his acts of the old. From the old time, anointed from the head, from the eastern [types of wisdom; sf. Is2:6] of the earth.”
Leviticus 23:10: “You shall bring the sheaf of the first-fruits of your harvest to the priest.” Reading reshit as first-fruits makes the commandment counter-productive: the first fruits are the worst. It’s rather, the choice fruits. Similarly, in Deuteronomy 33:21 it means that the ruler receives the best, rather than the first part of the animals.

For ancients, the terms beginning and principal were related. Firstborns were the principal children; antiquity was equated with authority (time-tested and therefore true, in the absence of other tests for truth). The original sense of reshit as principal was extended to beginning.
Bara is usually translated as “created.” It is a rare word with no cognates. The root cell bet-reish relates to cleaning or choosing. The third letter, aleph, being the first letter of the alphabet, suggests the strongest action. The root cell reish-aleph relates to standing above or seeing.
Etymologically, bara doesn’t mean creation ex nihilo, but rather separation or cutting from something. Sort of like Michelangelo releasing his statues from pieces of marble.
The traditional reading “In the beginning, God created” contradicts the context. Every day, God made a single type of work. On the first day, he made the light; there was no beginning before the first day. When therefore was the “beginning,” when God made heaven and earth? Etymological reading does away with that incongruity.

Genesis 1:2 clearly describes the starting point of Creation: “And the earth, [it] was unformed and void,…. and spirit of God, [it] hovered above the waters.” If God had created the heaven and the earth in Genesis 1:1, how come they are still void in the next verse? Etymological reading makes sense of Genesis 1:1: “Most importantly, God shaped the heaven and the earth.” They were initially without form (Genesis 1:2) and God shaped them—not in the beginning, but in Genesis 1:6-8 and 1:9-10, respectively. (God is external to the World Created rather than permeating it, or he would have had to shape himself.)
Isaiah 65:18 similarly employs bore et with unmistakable sense of re-creation: “For behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing…”
Genesis 1:1 emphasizes the in regards to the heaven and the earth. The Torah makes clear that the universe is not limited to this heaven and this earth

What is the heaven created? Genesis 1:6 describes it as “rakiya inside waters.” Rakiya is often understood as firmament, but it is not. This rare word occurs only in the context of heaven. Lacking a variety of contexts to compare, its meaning can only be reconstructed etymologically. The root cell reish-kuf means “broken, empty.” The immediate cognate reish-kuf-ayn means “to stamp upon,” thus the relevant hiphil flexion, “to spread out.” In Exodus 39:3, the cognate means “to flatten (to empty out),” rather than “to beat [the gold into thin sheets].” That rakiya lacks the sense of firmament is clear from Job 37:18, where the hiphil flexion is joined with dust, or Psalm 150:1, which says, “praise him in the rakiya of his power” instead of “on the rakiya.” Rakiya is a shaped space. The author of Genesis doesn’t espouse the primitive concept of a firm heavenly sphere.
Rakiya is not a heavenly sphere like Aristotle’s spheres. Genesis 1:7: “divided the waters below rakiya from the waters above rakiya.” Rakiya, therefore, spreads from sea surface unto the upper clouds. God created the lower atmosphere.
While Genesis 1:1 insists that the heaven and the earth were shaped, the atmosphere was established (Genesis 1:7). Unlike the other acts of Creation, the formation of the atmosphere lacks the addendum, “And God saw that [it is] good.” A metaphysical explanation is that the heavenly realm is above good and evil. On a practical plane, God is not said to have created heaven, but to have established it from chaos. Only the act of creating something truly new merited the appellation “good.”
The text’s unusual insistence on the prepositions mem and lamed necessitates a stricter reading of Genesis 1:7: “And God established the atmosphere, and divided the waters which are in the deep relative to the atmosphere from the waters which are in the high relative to the atmosphere; and it was so.”
The atmosphere in question is the lower troposphere—the level below the clouds (”the water which is above”). The Bible is clear that clouds are made of water (”water above”) and are very heavy (Job 37:18: “… dust [clouds], strong as molten mirror”). Hebrew etymology of heaven (shamaim) is shm+maim, “there” + “water.”

Wayomer should not be translated as “And he said,” but “And he conceived.”
In Genesis 1:9, ikavu is usually translated, “let them [waters] gather.” In other contexts, kuf-waw-hey always means, “to hope for someone.” Jeremiah 3:17 is properly read, “and all the nations will set hopes onto it [Jerusalem]…” Obviously, the prophet didn’t imagine all nations actually moving into Jerusalem. The waters were directed (“longed”) to a single region. The preposition el also conveys a sense of moving to, rather than statically gathering at.
The ancients thought of the earth as an island surrounded by sea. The land could be called “gathered to one place” but the water was obviously not “gathered in one place”—there are many watery places around.
Makom is not necessarily a geographical place, but rather an area. It is conceivable that waters were directed to heaven in the cycle of evaporation and rain. The water was originally in a chaotic state everywhere—perhaps after a major upheaval—and God first calmed down the atmospheric storms (divided heaven and earth), and later calmed down surface storms, allowing for earth to reappear. Genesis 1:10 disproves this conjecture, explicitly calling the “water gathering,” seas. Genesis 1:10, however, is an interpretative text, employing a newer word, mikveh, which means “pool.”
Genesis 1:9: “And God conceived, ‘The waters under the heaven will be directed to a single area, and dry land will be seen.’ And it was so.”

Imagine a situation in which a group of human rights activists—such as the ones who send humanitarian boats from Cyprus to Gaza—dock a large ship somewhere in Africa. A month before, they announce their intention to save Darfurians and other political refugees. Tens of thousands stream to the port, board the ship, and sail to the United States. In New York harbor, they swim to the shore. What would the US Border Guard do?

Naturally and legally, the refugees would be prohibited from entering the United States. Naturally because everyone’s obligation to help is limited; in fact, there is no such obligation at all. Help is commendable while absence thereof is non-condemnable. Legally because every country guards its borders with a visa system. Refugees cannot act criminally: just as they cannot kill border guards and rob stores, they cannot enter the country illegally. Crossing the border illegally is a crime on a par with theft: the migrants steal a valuable franchise—a residence permit.

During WWII, the British prevented Jewish refugees from entering Palestine without visas. Switzerland, the United States, and scores of other countries closed their borders to refugees without visas. Either recognize that policy as criminal and demand reparations from them or accept the harsh legal notion of visas. But once the visa requirement is abandoned for refugees, tens of millions would stream into affluent lands. During the Iran-Iraq war, tens of millions people could have been classified as refugees; Turkey would have been rather unhappy to accept them all.

The process of granting visas separates refugees from economic migrants. Some imagine that Darfurians are refugees; by that token, Dresdeners were also refugees—both started hostilities and suffered from them. But fine, let’s treat them as refugees. But here we have half of Africa streaming into Sinai. If they think themselves refugees—fine, go apply for an Israeli refugee visa in a consulate. No African country borders Israel—the migrants have ample opportunity to apply for visas while in Egypt. Instead, we have here a Robin Hood story: common criminals who pretend to rectify human rights abuses.

Normally, illegal migrants are deported to their home countries. Here we have a situation when they don’t have passports. Any legal proceedings around them are senseless: even in Israeli jails they are far better off than in their home jungles. Leftists have educated the African mob, and they enjoy idleness on charity and governmental funds. Children of African migrants study in Jewish schools: not only do they consume scarce resources (university tuition fees keep rising), but the quality of education declines to accommodate them.

In the worst case, if Israel decides to accommodate the illegal migrants—thus inviting many more of them—why allow them in Tel Aviv, where they occupy bomb shelters which Jews might need badly one day? Drop them in Umm al Fahm, and let Israeli Arabs enjoy their new neighbors.

Where is the UNRWA? Scores of UNRWA personnel are stationed in Israel, and many UNRWA camps are located within Israel and near her borders. Why not dump the Africans in UNRWA camps? This is the very organization which deals with refugees—enjoy. What is the problem with loading them on trucks and driving them into Gaza?

We already have here a hundred thousand Ethiopian Christians and pagans. There is no need for the Jewish state to become a dumping ground for hostile, culturally divergent, economically worthless, HIV-ridden criminals.

The proliferation of rabbinical legislation created a rift between Jewishness and productive life. A person who strives to be a good Jew studies Judaism—thousands of volumes of halacha and commentaries, and never has time for secular education. If we only followed the law of the Torah, and perhaps also the Oral Torah, Mishnah, and relegate all the commentaries to a matter of curiosity, then Jews would have time both for religious and professional fulfillment. Judaism was never meant to be a monastic religion that precludes productive employment.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews reasonably consider themselves to be the best Jews, and so arouse feelings in secular Jews reminiscent of anti-Semitic sentiment toward Jews. Just as anti-Semites hate us because we believe ourselves chosen—and thus higher than they are—so atheist Jews despise the ultra-Orthodox for their proud superiority. It is obscene that ultra-Orthodox Jews, our religious beacons, don’t pay their dues to society. The Israeli military budget is $5 billion, a thousand dollars per every Jew. Ultra-Orthodox Jews have to pay their share. The anti-Zionists among them cannot argue that they would be at peace with the Arabs if not for the Zionists, who should thus bear the financial burden. Arabs killed ultra-Orthodox Jews even in the nineteenth century, when there was no Zionism, and terrorists kill them now.

There should be a minimal tax obligation for every citizen; no able person must be allowed to pay less. Just as everyone has to pay municipal expenses, so everyone must pay IDF’s expenses.

There’s no need to discuss the point that Arab citizens of Israel must pay lump-sum taxes, too. Rather, they must be expelled.

Most Orthodox Jews refuse to believe that the past sixty years signify the Redemption and ask for a miracle to prove the point. They lack faith.

In Egypt, Moses was a fugitive wanted for murder. The return from Midian to Egypt in order to save the Hebrews spelled tremendous danger for him. But when God told Moses to go back to Egypt, Moses didn’t ask for miraculous proof. True, there was the burning bush, but very few Orthodox Jews would have been convinced by a bush fire. Moses, we can deduce, had faith in God. Not so the pharaoh: he demanded a miracle. The Jews of Egypt sided with the pharaoh and also demanded a miracle: like their modern brethren, they lacked faith. And just like the generation of the Holocaust which refused to move to the Promised Land, no less than 80 percent of Egyptian Jews rejected the Exodus and perished.

Lot believed the angels who came to take him out of Sodom. They offered him no miracles, but he acted on his common sense: the sin around him surely suggested imminent destruction. Not so the great rabbis and pious Jews who refused to leave the Sodom of Exile for the Promised Land before 1941.
Sages have said that God doesn’t perform miracles violating the laws of nature and the Scripture mentions miraculous events only for the sake of their rational interpretation. Every miracle can be explained away, and on the other hand, everything that God demands of us can be deduced rationally, without circus-like miracles.

God performs miracles without violating the laws of nature but by adjusting probabilities. The miracle consists in making the improbable happen repeatedly. When assimilation skyrocketed and the desecration of God’s name reached its peak, God gave Jews the solution. He started the Redemption, proved it with a string of improbable events, and expected us to follow on.

As the ultimate empirical proof of divine action, a miracle is the antithesis of faith. And what miracle do you imagine? When Hebrews crossed the Reed Sea, an eastern wind made the marshes shallow and allowed them to cross on foot while heavy Egyptian carriages stuck in the mud; not much of a miracle, huh? Or would you believe an erupting volcano on Sinai giving you the law? Surely not. Hey, you don’t believe David Copperfield’s miracles, why would you believe any other ones are for real?

Faith involves the readiness to make a leap of faith, to believe that God must have done this or that. And when we see a mass of events so improbable as those which have taken place in the last sixty years, it makes sense to have faith.

Of course we can bring sacrifices without the Temple. In fact, we must offer them even when Levites are absent as, for example, Samson’s father Manasseh did. But Jews should stop waiting for the heavenly Temple—none is forthcoming. Go build one yourself.