The Israelis I knew in my 1952 and 1953 Assignment are Gone
Israeli religion and patriotism lost to god of Secular Prosperity
Welcome to the Gentile god Mammon which motivates Voters
And caters to carnal man’s immoral desires that destroy Him!
You’re the Apple of God’s Eye, But It is Full of Political Worms
After 63 years your politicians are as corrupt as the Gentiles!
Both Jew and Gentile are to Be Judged for Serving Mammon!
Not for Possessing Mammon, But for Serving it Like it is God!
Mammon has become a god man places before the true God
Come, My People, Enter Thou into Thy Chambers – Isaiah 26
July 31, 2011
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The Israeli people I first met during my 1952 and 1953 assignment in the Middle East were very friendly, patriotic, and dedicated to hard work and sacrifice directed toward establishing a nation and society of freedom, which would give generations following them a land of both spiritual and physical milk and honey. However, I noticed a change in the people beginning in the late fifties, which began to accelerate in the mid sixties, especially after the 1967 war. This change in the Jewish secular materialistic attitude became even more apparent each trip I made to Israel after I retired from the NSA in 1971. Each trip I made to Israel after my retirement to the end of the 20th Century showed a rise in immorality, graft, and crooked politicians. My last trip to Israel in this Century was in 2009.
The engulfing secular character of the governments and population has degenerated into a covetous nation of greed and love of money more their God. Covetousness has become Israel’s idol and god as well as the idol god of the Gentiles.
Exodus 20:3 – Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Colossians 3:5 – Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
Luke 16:13 – No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
I Timothy 6:6-10 – But godliness with contentment is great gain. [7] For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. [8] And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. [9] But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. [10] For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
Colossians 3:6 – For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience:
Malachi 4:1,2 – For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. [2] But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.
Isaiah 26:13-20 – O Lord our God, other lords besides thee have had dominion over us: but by thee only will we make mention of thy name. [14] They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish. [15] Thou hast increased the nation, O Lord, thou hast increased the nation: thou art glorified: thou hadst removed it far unto all the ends of the earth. [16] Lord, in trouble have they visited thee, they poured out a prayer when thy chastening was upon them. [17] Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in thy sight, O Lord. [18] We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen. [19] Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.
Daniel 12:1-3 – And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. [2] And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. [3] And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.
Isaiah 26:20 to 27:3 – Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. [21] For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. [1] In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. [2] In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine. [3] I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.
Zechariah 14:9 – And the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one.
Begin Excerpt from Haartz
Jerusalem & Babylon / Neither Marx nor Moses
The Jewish war is over, secular capitalism won, and we all just want a decent standard of living.
Haartz
By Anshel Pfeffer
Published 02:19 29.07.11
I suppose it’s a good thing, but these haven’t been fruitful weeks for us military correspondents. Used to ruling the front pages, along with our colleagues on the diplomatic and political beats, we have been pushed to the back by the new “civil agenda.” Newspapers are feeding the public a steady diet of housing protests, with the doctors’ strike on the side. It’s been 15 days since the first tent was pitched on Rothschild Boulevard, and dessert is nowhere in sight.
It might end very soon, when Israelis sink into their customary August stupor. (Perhaps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will suddenly agree to a prisoner exchange deal for the release of Gilad Shalit, cutting off the tent dwellers’ crucial oxygen supply of media attention. ) But if the wave of protests endures, generating real change in the political landscape, sociologists and political scientists will be arguing for decades over the causes of this sudden awakening of Israel’s middle class.
I think I have isolated the real motive for the outpouring of angst. It is not simply the disparity between income and expenses, nor is it just spiraling housing costs. Overdrafts have always been a way of life in Israel, and the housing market is cyclical. I think the key is in something one of the instant “leaders” of the housing protest said on the radio on Monday: “We deserve the same standard of living as in other Western countries.”
Hold on, I thought, where does it say that in Israel’s Declaration of Independence? I’m under 40, yet I distinctly recall a time when living here implicitly meant being worse off materially than in the United States or Western Europe.
Next month it will be 30 years since my family made aliyah from Britain. Even then I knew that in order to reach that great, intangible Jewish and Zionist fulfillment you had to exchange your large house with a garden for a small, stuffy apartment with thin mattresses and no air-conditioning. When you’re eight you don’t understand salaries and mortgages and tax burdens.
I noticed other things, like having only one, black-and-white television channel, instead of three color stations. I wondered why we couldn’t find smoked salmon for love or money. Instead of having bottles of milk delivered to our door we had to walk to the shop down the street and fish an unwieldy plastic bag from a tub of watery sour milk, checking for holes. Before asking our phone number, we were first asked whether we had a phone. We did, but many Israelis had been waiting for years. These were among the details denoting the dip in the standard of living that was part of moving to Israel, from the “First World,” in 1981.
Even then Israel was not a Third-World country, but few expected a high standard of living. It was almost a matter of pride.
For many of my classmates their first airplane was the one they parachuted from, their first visit to a foreign land made by armored personnel carrier, to Lebanon. Israel was expected to be a world leader in national collective endeavors, such as the army and the greening of the desert. No outing to the northern border or the Jordan Valley was complete without someone saying, “How green our side is, theirs is desolate.”
Some people are nostalgic for those simpler times, when children wanted to be farmers, doctors and engineers, not stockbrokers and fashion models. I’m not. How easy it is to forget today the poverty in almost every neighborhood. Every class had kids who came in the same patched clothing every day, whose parents could not afford to buy them textbooks.
Petty corruption was part of every transaction with officialdom, and it’s not as if cabinet ministers only began taking bribes and raping their secretaries in the 21st century. The difference is that it was rarely investigated. Schoolchildren often dropped out to support their families, or were herded into vocational schools to train for a life of menial labor. Higher education was a minority pursuit. Yes, there was public housing and apartments were more affordable, but so many were in soulless, Soviet-style tenements and “development” shanty towns. Most of these ills still exist, but the scope is much smaller.
In the mid-1990s, just after Israel successfully absorbed one million immigrants from the disintegrating Soviet Union and just before the twin burst bubbles of the Oslo Accords and the first dotcom wave, Israelis suddenly discovered that traveling abroad was as cheap as vacationing in Eilat, and that a new car was a legitimate middle-class purchase. Over the next 15 years Israeli consumerism accelerated to warp speed. Within just a few years, material aspirations and expectations underwent a transformation.
Until recently there were two Jewish ideals. The socialist founders saw Israel as a “model society,” fusing a pseudo-biblical heritage with collectivism. They saw no problem with sacrificing individual comfort for the sake of the new society.
The religious leaders and part of the Revisionist right, in contrast, adopted Bilam’s poisoned blessing of “a nation dwelling unto itself,” which over generations of exile and assimilation came to mean willing isolation from gentile temptations and aspirations.
Despite being on polar extremes ideologically, both camps essentially preached the same thing: self-denial and the greater good, whether as a “light unto the nations” or in a self-imposed ghetto. And while the socialists were the Zionist vanguard for decades and the religious right is now ascendant, the socialists were always a minority. It was the much-maligned, largely nonideological Fourth Aliyah of 1924-1931, with its petit-bourgeois shopkeepers who preferred Tel Aviv to the kibbutzim, who gave the real impetus to the development of the Jewish economy in Palestine. But they never got the credit.
When the kibbutzim went bankrupt, in the 1970s and ’80s, and nearly an entire generation fled to the cities, they were forced to transform themselves into privatized real-estate entities. It turned out that hedonistic Tel Aviv, for all its faults, had been the engine of Israel’s prosperity all along.
The West Bank settlement movement is mainly the preserve of the religious, but the great majority of observant and Haredi Israelis are pursuing the suburban dream, preferably near Tel Aviv.
Since the only subsidized housing built in the past 20 years has been for the ultra-Orthodox or in the settlements, the current protest is overwhelmingly secular. But the religious are part of the middle class today, and share the same concerns. Bialik, the quintessential Tel Avivan, famously wrote that Israel would not be a normal nation until there were Jewish thieves and prostitutes, and he was right. The socialist utopia failed, as will the attempts to theocratize Israel. The only sustainable way to realize the goals of Zionism is to strive for a better quality of life in Zion.
This story is by Anshel Pfeffer
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