Jeffrey Sachs

Well, that all makes sense to me.

But he asked, so where?

And one option was, oh, maybe what is today's Uganda?

Yep.

It wasn't the Holy Land.

It wasn't some religious compulsion or a return to this promised land.

In part, and ironically, again, very weird twists, the rabbis had said that

1,500 years earlier, don't go back to the Holy Land.

Live where you are, stay peaceful.

Someday a Messiah will come and there will be again the Holy Land for us.

But in the meantime, stay calm, live where you are, behave and obey God's laws.

That was the idea of the Jewish religion, of the rabbinic Jewish religion.

So the variant on display now that this is our land, God promised to us, we need to redeem it, God will protect us, is a new variant that came recently.

in the 20th century with the actual founding of the state of israel it was not the original zionist movement which was almost completely secular it had a couple of rabbis which

had some modest influence, and then it especially came after the 1967 war and the conquest of the Palestinian territories then and the occupation of them and the beginning of the settler movements.

And things became radicalized after that.

And some radical rabbis and militant, militarist, violent, violence-preaching rabbis like Meir Kahane, which is an American rabbi who preached violence for the settler cause in Israel, gained a following.

And that group grew with the

illegal settlers in the occupied lands illegal because you're not allowed to settle territory conquered in war according to international law and the u.n security council said repeatedly no you can't have settlers there

I started visiting Israel myself 54 years ago.