My life-circumstances have gifted me with opportunities to become familiar with the Jewish religion. I have studied the Kabbalah under a Rabbi (when I lived in New York City). I have read several great Jewish thinkers and spiritual leaders, such as Gershom Scholem, Abraham Heschel, Eric Gutkind, and Martin Buber. I have experienced wonderful Passover Seders in which the family group recites: “Let all who suffer from oppression be our oppression. Let all who are downtrodden and crying for redemption be our burden and commitment for redemption.” The Seder connects Judaism with a universal compassion and struggle for human liberation.

Judaism is the worship of “the God who is coming” to all humanity. The “wandering Jew”, is an emblem of the need of humankind for a vertical exodus into direct awareness of divinity. The Jew “wanders,” according to Gutkind, because nation-states are not, and cannot be, his or her home. He writes: “Again the Jew hears the call of the ‘lech lecha’, ‘go away from all of that.’” Yet this time only one way is open, the Vertical Way…. The very land of the Jews must make its declaration of independence and must walk out from the plane where the nations stand…. The Founded People has the intrinsic capacity of reaching this next madrigal, and once reached it will be open to all mankind”.1

The “plane where the nations stand” is not where Jewish liberation lies. In religious terms, the nation-state of Israel is the result of a profound confusion. It is an attempt to force something that should be transcendent and redeeming onto the filth, violence, and degradation of the system of militarized, imperialistic nation-states. That is why the attempt to do something religious through the state of Israel is necessarily an abomination.

It is an abomination to the solidarity of humankind through its violent displacement, cruelty, and rape of the peoples surrounding Israel, including its present military attack on Iran in coordination with its partner in criminality: the United States. And it is an abomination on the Jewish religion itself, dragging this illuminating and elevating faith in God down into the mud of violence, hatred, and cruelty. Martin Buber states the essential command of God in the Torah: “I must act lovingly toward…every man with whom I deal in the course of my life…. I must love him not merely with superficial gestures but with an essential relationship”.2 Such a loving existence would make the militarized state of Israel impossible.

But there is another dimension to the paradox of the state of Israel that is perhaps non-religious and purely political: that state was created as a tool of British imperial arrogance and, with the fall of the British Empire, has become a tool of a similar American imperial arrogance.

In 1917, toward the end of World War I, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, taking advantage of the chaos among national entities engendered by the war, to simply declare a new nation in the midst of the already existing nation of Palestine. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made this promise to Zionist advocate Lord Rothschild. Note how this works: a person of high government authority in the Empire (Balfour) caters to the desires of a person of British royalty (Rothschild) without the slightest regard for the hundreds of thousands of people actually living in Palestine.

The result by 1948 was the Nakbah—the forcible displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes—the destruction of whole villages to have them stolen by Jewish colonial-settlers, a process of cruelty and theft that continues to this day.

With the Second World War, the mantle of global empire had transferred from the British to the Americans. The view that protecting the state of Israel was essential to “US strategic security” developed with exceptional force during the Cold War, when the US government was obsessed with defeating Communism and imposing its exploitative capitalism on the world. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USA government decided it was not the time for a new era of world peace but rather that it was time to secure its military and economic domination over the entire planet.

This was stated explicitly in the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992. Israel was again designated as a “strategic asset” in the endeavor to control and conquer the Middle East (and ultimately, much of Asia). This primarily means military funding. The USA gives Israel some 3.8 billion US dollars annually. Since the war with Hamas began on October 23, 2023, the US has supplied an additional 21 billion in military aid.

This immense, unconditional flood of money to a tiny nation of about 8 million people has allowed the Israeli apartheid government not only to establish the most powerful military in the Middle East. It also serves to supply its Jewish population with a very high quality of life. Israel has free, quality health care as well as free, high-quality, mandatory education for its Jewish population.

In the meantime, US citizens struggle with a horrific, expensive healthcare system and expensive, variable-quality education for the population. US tax dollars are given to a foreign nation supporting its very high quality of life, while the people who pay those taxes in the US are impoverished and forced to endure a low quality of life.

But this is not all that this flood of money to a tiny entity halfway around the world produces. The money indirectly, and through devious channels, comes back to the US in the form of AIPAC campaign-funding for US elected officials. The AIPAC (American-Israeli Political Action Committee) website boasts that “96% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general election races in 2024.” The USA supplies Israel annually with billions of dollars, which helps them colonize our electoral system to ensure that they control US foreign policy in the service of Israel.

So, elected officials in the US not only promote the illusion that the state of Israel is a “strategic asset” in the US drive for imperial world domination, but their very jobs are conveniently supported by Israel-linked money giving them a double incentive to support this small state which itself is dedicated to imperial expansion and cruel apartheid policies everywhere it imposes its brutal regime.

Israel has also been a major force behind the US destruction of the governments of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and whatever other surrounding Middle East nations or movements have expressed hostility to the expansionist project. The “Costs of War Project” estimates3 that the human and financial costs of the wars in Iraq and Syria alone were 2.9 trillion US dollars and between 550,000 and 580,000 people killed.

The people of the US are deprived of a decent quality of life because their tax dollars are spent on foreign wars, many of which are a consequence of the Israel lobby within the US government targeting Israel’s perceived enemies, such as Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

The Zionist fanaticism of displacing ever more people and taking possession of ever more land for a “greater Israel” is compounded by American imperial arrogance that believes that a world system under its domination will magically appear out of a chaos of bombs and missiles destroying the lives and stability of peoples across the globe.

But Iran is somewhat different. Iran is not a weak, small nation like Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, or Cuba, easily dominated and destroyed by the machinations of the empire. Iran, for one thing, is considered a strategic partner in the emerging BRICS movement (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in which some of the world’s largest nations are joining hands to move out from under US economic domination, in which the US dollar functions as the global reserve and trade currency. Both Russia and China have been helping Iran beef up its military might in preparation for this attack. Iran is also a key component in the Chinese “New Silk Road” of globalized trade throughout Asia.

It has 90 million people and is technologically sophisticated with some of the world’s finest universities. Russia and China believe that the loss of Iran to an Israeli-US puppet regime would be a devastating blow to their security as well as their trade. We do not know if Iran’s sophisticated drone and ballistic missile system will be able to inflict serious losses on the aggressors (the US and Israel), who have violated International Law point-blank in this unprovoked attack.

Since Iran has been a zero military threat to the US, there is no reason on Earth for attacking Iran except that a tiny Israel of eight million people is wagging the dog once again. Zionist fanatics (like Christian “white-nationalist” fanatics) want the US to destroy Iran, and, as fanatics, they do not care if this engenders a World War III nuclear holocaust.

Christian fanatics think such a holocaust would hasten the Second Coming of Christ (their white-skinned, imperialist, America-first, MAGA Christ). But perhaps the rest of us do not participate so easily in this sick and ugly madness. (I am not using language rhetorically. The facts described here are literally true; they are also stated by such eminent thinkers as Jeffrey Sachs.)4

President Trump, diagnosed by psychiatrists repeatedly as a “malignant narcissist,”5 has zero compassion for the people of Iran who are being murdered in this war. He has zero imaginative ability to seriously entertain the meaning of the nuclear holocaust that might wipe out humanity. He only respects money and power (such as AIPAC), since he has no values other than these things himself. He is surrounded by ignorant fanatics like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessant, who are incompetent amateurs at running a government but are also omnicidal fanatics when it comes to US imperialism and the possibility of World War III.

And the genocidal monster Benjamin Netanyahu has been flying to Washington repeatedly to bend the President’s ear in favor of endless wars and genocides in the service of the tail that knows it can wag the dog anytime it wants. If you don’t believe me, just look at the history of the US devastation in the Middle East at the behest of Israel, some of which I recited above. Zionist Israel sits like a poisonous viper at the very heart of the US government.

Will the people of the US ever be free? This is an open question with no easy answer. But one thing should be clear to any sane, rational person—we must do everything in our power to stop this war on Iran that carries with it at every moment the possibility of escalation into World War III and nuclear holocaust. The best alternative to our broken world order is to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.6

Perhaps the Jewish people have a special role in trying to protect the good people of Iran and humankind as a whole from complete devastation. God promises them a future of universal awakening to one humanity, as Erich Gutkind declares. Martin Buber alike recognizes that the biblical God is the God of all humanity. There is only One God, the same for Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and all religions.

For Buber, the revelation is to all humanity, and it calls to us through each historical crisis: “History is a mysterious approach to closeness. Every spiral of its path leads into deeper corruption and, at the same time, into more fundamental return. But the God-side of the event whose world-side is called return is called redemption”.7 After this corruption and crisis, will we be able to move closer to “redemption”? Only if the USA envisions One Humanity.

Let us raise our voices in the attempt to transcend this madness of the Israel-USA fanatical conspiracy against all of humanity. The struggle to restore democracy and end the Trump tyranny within the USA must envision something entirely new beyond the old US imperialism of world conquest. It must envision One Humanity under a democratic Earth Constitution8 that embraces all nations and peoples. Zionism is dead; imperialism is dead. Long live our common human reality of unity in diversity—of freedom, peace, and justice! The only way to prevent World War III is to embrace all of humanity. That is precisely what these Jewish thinkers declare.

Notes

1 Choose Life, 1952, p.310-11.
2 Eclipse of God, 1979, p. 57.
3 Blood and Treasure: United States Budgetary Costs and Human Costs of 20 Years of War in Iraq and Syria, 2003-2023 at The Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
4 Jeffrey Sachs speech.
5 Trump is a malignant narcissist by Dr. John Gartner at YouTube.
6 Earth Federation Model at Earth Constitution Institute.
7 I and Thou, 1970, p. 168.
8 Earth Federation Model at Earth Constitution Institute.