The Bible Isn't God's Word, 1

The bible isn't God's word: at least the larger half of it. The Old Testament. That part is definitely the word of the sons of Israel, with a lot of quotations and deeds attributed to God. Jews have always been excellent poets, in addition to many other alluring attributes and have had little trouble turning what is essentially history into a document that tickles human faith and spiritual yearnings. That is why we must take with a pinch of salt statements quoted to a religious leader in the US, relying heavily on quotations from the bible, that God, more than three thousand years ago, ordained Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel. If we resist the temptation to delve into long history, Tel Aviv has been the capital of Israel for some time now and nothing catastrophic has happened to the Jewish state. Now, in case the resistance crumbles, the time Jerusalem has not been capital of Israel far outstretches the period it has and nothing distinctly evil has been attributed to that displacement. There has been pogroms, genocides, even a holocaust suffered by the race in between but Armenians also suffered genocides at the hand of Turkey and that disaster has never been linked to the failure or non-observation of a divine will of a place being capital or not. At any rate, Russian Jews should be more interested in Moscow being capital of Russia that Jerusalem being capital of Israel. French Jews should be more interested in Paris... Millions of Jews are there all over the world who don't all that care much for Jerusalem. This is what Trump knows distinctly well and it is a bit difficult arguing with his critics that in moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, he was only trying to fulfill electoral promises made to his core political base which included orthodox Jews and right-wing American Christians. This is what Palestinians should have seen through. They rather allowed themselves to be blinded by needless emotions and 58 of them have been killed in another ruinous confrontation with their arch-enemy.
Apropos of things catastrophic. May 15 is al-Nakba or Catastrophe for Palestinians, the most mournful date in their calendar. On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate ended in Palestine and Israel declared war the following day. In the battles that ensued, more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in territories now occupied by Israel and they have not been able to return home since then. Many of them now live as refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and so on. It is certainly a loss of epic proportions but no more catastrophic than the slaying by David, who later became a great Israeli king, of the giant Goliath, commander of the Philistines, ancestors of the present Palestinians. Going back to the bible, so to say. Jews and Palestinians have both suffered mind-numbing catastrophes in course of their entwined histories, yet they have multiplied. The rhetorics of destruction should now sound a bit tiring on both sides. It is too late for that. That urge is a bit more strident on the Palestinian, at least Hamas, side but they should now realize they have more than 8.5 million Jews to destroy in Israel alone. A huge task, potentially catastrophic considering the fact that their enemy has scores of nuclear weapons. It will do very few people harm changing the tune to new rhetorics now