Review: Embracing Israel / Palestine

6 Star Top 10%, Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, History, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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Michael Lerner

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Five Stars-A Liberating / Empowering Book,December 6, 2011

1. On first impressions the book is a major slam. The author and publisher have collected some of the most serious testimonials possible–better than any I have seen on a book of this type.

2. Ten chapters, each chapter at least five segments, means over 50 “snapshots, each easy to digest–my only disappointment with this book is that it fails to provide maps at key points. My favorite book in this regard is Nelson's Complete Book of Bible Maps and Charts, 3rd Edition.

3. I cannot do this book justice. The first and most positive impression I get halfway through the book is that this is a Cliff Note's for smart busy people, boiling down history, philosophy, and putting everything in a sensible context. I dismissed the religion requirement in college, now I am finding that religion is “core” to everything I encounter and if I had to do it over again, would take multiple religion courses as part of my liberal arts education. Certainly this book is a phenomenal offering for any student of any age, as well as adult continuing education.

4. Put bluntly, this book skewers the Zionist hypocrites by name, by government, by time period, by deceptive “offering.” This is not a book that does the same for the Palestinians, I certainly would like to see such a book that could also in passing skewer the Arab dictators as well as the European “enablers” that have made it possible for so much genocide and so many other atrocities to occur for so long in Palestine.

5. The book ends with six strategies, a deeply spiritual and totally practical final chapter on values and emancipation, a section on questions and answers, and an appendix on resources for peace.

6. What I had NOT expected at all, was the RADICAL itemization of ideas from the Bible that are not radical as much as they are FUNDAMENTAL, and including to my enormous surprise, both the seventh year sabatical with debt forgiveness, and the fifty year jubilee with total debt forgiveness across the board. These two–and everything else about this book–make it as timely as one could wish for dealing with the global financial crisis that boils down to corrupt banks eating corrupt governments.

7. I have to read this book again. Being nagged (comment below) led me to rush this out, mostly to honor the author and the spirit of the ideas in this book, but this review is shamefully inadequate–I need to do for this book what I did for Daniel Elsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, create a table with key points, keywords, do a sort, and then write a summary. I fear I will not get to that anytime soon, so this is my best for now.

Other books I have reviewed and recommend along with this one:

Poets For Palestine
Surrender to Kindness: One Man's Epic Journey for Love and Peace
Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
Lessons of History 1ST Edition
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

My older preliminary comments:

1. I got to know the author by reading his earlier book, Left Hand of God, The: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis one of a handful of truly brilliant books on religion that are included in my online list at Phi Beta Iota Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Religion. Jim Wallis' God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It is another, and Dave Johnston's Faith- Based Diplomacy Trumping Realpolitik another.

2. What characterizes all books with sensible implementable solutions is one word: INTEGRITY. When politics, intelligence, or commerce lose their integrity, they become corrupt, and as I wrote in my January 2011 letter to The Most Holy Father, “corruption in the secular world is an obstacle to spiritual harmony” and later in the letter, “we need a faith-based global intelligence exchange.” To my enormous surprise, many months later the Vatican pumped out a declaration along these lines (search for Vatican, Ethics, & Truth).

3. There are in my view three “ground-zeros” today for anyone contemplating how to create a prosperous world at peace. The first is Palestine (remember Gandhi: “Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French,”) and what has become an Israeli Zionist plague of genocide and other atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people against the wishes of moderate ethical Jews and all others who wish to see a prosperous safe Israel that is not a caricature of Nazi Germany in how it treats “the other.” The second is the global financial system that the Rothchilds and Goldman Sachs [and the Chinese-Indonesian gold masters] have managed to dominate to the point of its–and our–near-death experience. I am a huge fan of Truth & Reconciliation and seek no retrospective vengeance, but it is time for the Rothchilds and Goldman Sachs to go out of business and be absent from the affairs of men. The third is water. I have reviewed twelve books on water here at Amazon and for UNESCO, any my essay containing all reviews can be found by searching for Reference: WATER-Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls.

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