The following is Part III in a series of articles by LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac regarding Zionism and the ongoing war in Gaza. Read Part I here and Part II here.
(LifeSiteNews) — From here on, this article series will present statements and videos from many varied Jews on Zionism and Zionist Israel and its dangers and crimes against humanity.
Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro has been prolific in instructing anyone who will listen to him about the generally unknown reality of Zionism and the state of Israel founded to be a Zionist nation. He has been interviewed on numerous secular, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish programs. He has been enormously helpful to me and many others in understanding the complex differences between authentic Judaism and Zionism.
The next article in this series will refer to and quote more from Rabbi Shapiro and several other Jewish rabbis.
Additional parts will present numerous quotes from notable anti-Zionist Jews, both secular and religious.
Is Jerusalem the Capital of the Jews? – Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro
The seven-minute video below presents the main arguments by Rabbi Shapiro on why Israel is NOT a nation of the Jews and is strongly opposed by numerous authentic Jews because of its heretical ideology, many atheistic founders and leaders, and its frequent violations of Jewish laws.
Here is a brief bio of the rabbi as noted in a video interview with him. That video, different from the one below, has two titles: “How Zionism stole Jewish Identity” and “Zionism is the opposite of Judaism.”
Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, is an international speaker, author, and rabbi for over 30 years. Amongst his areas of research are religious philosophy, analytic theology, Talmud, and biblical exegesis. He’s a well-known critic of Zionism, and his most recent work, The Empty Wagon, Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft, is a 1,381-page treatise on the differences between Judaism and Zionism. It is perhaps the most comprehensive work written on the subject.
This will likely be the first time most readers will have ever heard this instruction on the status of Jerusalem in relation to Zionism vs. Judaism, and yet, considering how much is now at stake for world peace, and the millions of lives at risk, we should all become aware of the presented information.
I have found Rabbi Shapiro to be one of the calmest, more impressive and easy-to-follow teachers on this otherwise complex and highly emotional issue.
Below the video is the full text that begins with President Trump’s brief proclamation about moving Israel’s capital to Jerusalem, which, by the way, the Catholic Church has strongly opposed, and then Rabbi Shapiro’s powerful response to what Trump stated.
Full text of video: “Is Jerusalem the Capital of the Jews?”
President Trump: “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”
Rabbi Shapiro’s response:
No.
No.
I was with him until he said the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
President Trump has the right to make whatever foreign policy he wants.
If he feels that Miami Beach is best to recognize as the capital of Israel, that’s his business.
He can do it.
But once he starts talking about the Jewish people, now he’s encroaching upon religion, and now that’s my domain.
There is absolutely no political relationship between the Jewish people and Jerusalem.
It’s merely a holy city.
The Jewish people don’t have a capital.
We never had a capital.
Countries have capitals.
States have capitals.
That’s the definition of a capital.
Capital.
Dictionary.
Noun.
The most important city or town of a country or region.
Now, the Jewish people are not a country or region.
The Jewish people are a religious community.
We pray towards Jerusalem, but we relate to Jerusalem only as a holy city, not as a political capital city of the Jewish people.
And all of those overtures that we make to Jerusalem and the yearning that Jews have for Jerusalem is only as a holy city, not as a capital city.
And because it’s a holy city, it doesn’t matter who has sovereignty over it.
Jerusalem is just as holy and just as much Jerusalem whether it’s under the auspices of the Turks or the Romans or the British or whoever.
It’s important to know that the Zionists were the ones that started this business of the capital of the Jewish people, and it’s an idea that conflicts directly with the teachings of Judaism.
At Mount Sinai in the desert, the Torah says, the Bible says about us, “Hayyim hazeh niyei salaam.”
That’s when we became a people.
The Jewish people aren’t a people because of a land.
We’re not a people because of a language.
We’re not a people because of a culture.
We’re a religion, and when we were deputized into the religion, when we accepted the religion given to us by God, that’s when we became the Jewish people.
We had no land, no territories, we had no capital city, and in fact, our commentators say the reason why God gave the Jews the Torah in the desert, before they went into the holy land, was in order to teach them that land, country, has nothing to do with your Jewishness.
Your Jewishness is because you accept the religion.
A couple of years ago, the Pope went to visit Netanyahu, and Netanyahu was bragging to the Pope, “This is where Jesus lived, in this land, and he spoke Hebrew here.”
So the Pope corrected him.
The Pope said, “No, Aramaic.”
And the Pope was right.
Netanyahu says, “Yeah, yeah, but he understood Hebrew.”
Well, you know, maybe he did, but Hebrew was never the national language of the Jewish people.
It was a holy language, just like the land of Israel was a holy land.
Oh, by the way, if you see the clip and you don’t know which of the two people talking is Netanyahu and which is the Pope, the Pope’s the one wearing the yarmulke.
Even if we were to pretend that the Jewish people have a capital, that would have nothing to do with whether Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, because Israel’s not the Jewish people.
Israel has nothing to do with the old Jewish commonwealth.
It’s a country that was created in 1948. When you hear the Israelis or the Zionists talk about how Jerusalem has a connection with the Jewish people for 2,000 years, 3,000 years, 4,000 years, it’s all true.
But that doesn’t translate to, “Well, therefore, Jerusalem has to be part of Israel.”
People think that Israel is some kind of continuation of Jewish government, but it’s not.
It’s a completely different form of government, completely different values, completely different ideology, and completely different people.
These are not religious Jews that are running the country.
These are atheists.
And yet, the Israeli prime ministers from Ben-Gurion all the way up to Netanyahu use the Bible as an excuse for ownership of the land.
Ben-Gurion, he says, “The mandate is not our Bible, but the Bible is our mandate.”
This is a man that didn’t believe the Bible was given by God.
He didn’t believe God ever spoke to prophets.
He didn’t believe it at all.
Neither does Benjamin Netanyahu.
He says in the Bible, “Watch the Sabbath to keep it holy.”
Netanyahu doesn’t reframe from work on the Sabbath.
It says not to eat non-kosher food in the Bible.
Does Netanyahu do that?
No.
There is nothing holy in the Bible that Netanyahu cares about.
The only thing he cares about is his land.
Restorationist Protestants, we call them evangelical Christians today, they existed hundreds of years before any Jewish Zionist was ever born.
And because the evangelicals, the restorationists, had great influence in Britain, and Britain had the mandate, the Zionists very, very much adopted the Christian evangelical interpretation of the Bible, and that’s what they use today.
You’ll find that Benjamin Netanyahu sometimes even espouses Christian evangelical interpretations of the Bible over the Jewish ones.
A number of years ago, Netanyahu spoke in a site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and he mentioned a prophecy in the Book of Yeheshkel [Ezekiel] about how the prophets saw dried bones rising from the ground and growing flesh and becoming live again.
And Netanyahu said that that prophecy is fulfilled with the state of Israel, because the Jews were dried bones and now they grew flesh and they are real people again.
This interpretation is not found anywhere in any Jewish source, because in Judaism, this is impossible.
But for over a century, this has been a Christian evangelical interpretation.
The Zionists, when they talk about the Bible, they’re not talking about the Judaic version of Judaism and Jewishness.
They’re talking really about the Christian evangelical version.
Netanyahu has no right to claim that his state is mine.
I was born in America, my father was born in Poland, my mother’s family is from England.
We have nothing to do with Israel.
We’re Jews.
We’re observant Jews.
We’re religious Jews.
I wear a yarmulke.
Netanyahu doesn’t.
I keep the Shabbos.
Netanyahu doesn’t.
And Israel is not my nation state in the slightest.
This is a unilateral claim of the Israelis, of the Zionists, and it’s an assault on my religion.
So too, the claim that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people, because it transforms the Jewish people from a religious identity to a national identity, to a political identity.
And it’s an assault on my religion when Netanyahu says that because Jerusalem is so connected to the Jewish people, therefore it must be part of the state of Israel.
Jerusalem’s holiness, Jerusalem’s value to the Jewish people has nothing to do with who owns it, and it certainly has no reason to be part of the state of Israel.
More to follow from Rabbi Shapiro and other rabbis in Part 4 of this series.
