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36. Return To The Promised Land
Written and performed by Johnny Cash
From the CD Return To The Promised Land (Renaissance Records, USA 1992)

 

 

There is harmony we’ve yet to sing
There’s love we’ve yet to share
Come go with me to the Promised Land
So much is waiting there

Across the Sea of Galilee in Canaan we shall stand
Return with me to a brighter day
We must love and understand
And the sunset on the Jordan will paint us gold
As we return to the Promised Land

A place I know you’d love to go
Come on and let’s depart
We go in search of perfect peace
And joy will fill your heart

Across the Sea of Galilee in Canaan we shall stand
Return with me to a brighter day
We must love and understand
And the sunset on the Jordan will paint us gold
As we return to the Promised Land

On Americans in Israel

One

‘This is our fifth time here, it’s a great place to come to visit for a vacation, and we feel perfectly safe here and totally at ease and very happy.’

Source: Johnny Cash interviewed on arrival in Israel, from the video Return to the Promised Land [World Wide Pictures, USA 1992]

Two

‘In the year 1610, George Sandys, a son of the Archbishop of York, was 32 years old, ‘restless and eager to escape for a time from his surroundings.’ Sandys had suffered through a disastrous marriage and saw the wealth his father had accumulated dissipate in a flurry of litigation. Sandys departed for a trip to the East. On Aug. 20, 1610, three years after the founding of the Jamestown settlement by the London Company, he left Venice to journey through Greece, Turkey, Egypt and the Holy Land. What makes Sandys so significant is not that he was a well-to-do gentleman ‘who, following the routes opened up by the Levant Company, voyaged out of curiosity to the classic lands of Greece and the Aegean, the biblical lands of Palestine and Egypt, and the fabled wonders of Constantinople, ancient seat of the Eastern Empire.’ George Sandys is notable because he was the earliest firsthand connection between the Holy Land and America.

To Sandys, the Holy Land was ‘where God himself did plant his own Commonwealth, gave laws and oracles, inspired his Prophets, sent Angels to converse with men; above all where the Son of God descended to become man; where he honoured the earth with his beautiful steps, wrought the work of our redemption, triumphed over death, and ascended to glory … but which has become the most deplored spectacle of extreme misery … which calamities of them so great and deserved, are to the rest of the world as threatening instructions.’ ’

Source: To See a Promised Land – Library of Congress Specialist Uses Collections for Book on Americans in Holy Land, by Lester I Vogel
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/93/9319/holy.html

Three

‘As late as 1882, one American consul-general, J. Augustus Johnson, offered a discouraging assessment of the Holy Land’s tourist environment.’ The climate,’ Johnson wrote, ‘is unfavourable for the foreigner, and is often fatal to the tourist. The graves of modern travellers and explorers may be seen from Dan to Beer Sheba, and from Jerusalem to Damascus.’ ’

Source: To See a Promised Land – Library of Congress Specialist Uses Collections for Book on Americans in Holy Land, by Lester I Vogel
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/93/9319/holy.html

Four

‘There are approximately 110,000 North American immigrants in Israel. There has been a steady flow of olim from North America since Israel’s inception in 1948. Record numbers arrived in the late 1960s after the Six-Day War, and in the 1970s. Many immigrants began arriving in Israel after the Intifada, with a total of 3,052 arriving in 2005 — the highest number since 1983.’

Source: Aliyah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah#North_American_Aliyah

Five

‘JERUSALEM — Israel is offering new incentives to attract more American immigrants in response to its steadily declining Jewish majority.

Immigration is at an 18-year-low, and members of Israel’s Arab minority are having children at a faster rate than Jews. Some lawmakers are keen to protect Israel’s identity as a predominantly Jewish state. The drop in immigration is of great concern, said Aryeh Eldad, an Israeli parliament member with the National Union Party. ‘This will no doubt have a negative effect on the demographic balance in the country,’ he said.’

Source: Israel tries to increase immigration, by Yakov Katz and Barbara Slavin, USA Today. Posted 2/20/2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-02-20-israel-immigration_x.htm

On Jews in America

One

‘American Jewish history commenced in 1492 with expulsion of Jews from Spain. This action set off a period of intense Jewish migration. Seeking to escape the clutches of the Holy Inquisition, some Jews in the 16th century sought refuge in the young Calvinist republic of The Netherlands. A century later, hundreds of their descendants crossed the ocean to settle in the new Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil, where Jewish communal life became possible for the first time in the New World. When Portugal recaptured this colony in 1654, its Jews scattered. Refugees spread through the Dutch Caribbean, beginning fresh Jewish communities. A boatload of about 23 Jews sailed into the remote Dutch port of New Amsterdam and requested permission to remain. This marked the beginning of Jewish communal life in North America.’

Source: The American Experience through the 19th Century: Immigration and Acculturation, by Jonathan D. Sarna & Jonathan Golden, Brandies University, the National Humanities Centre http://www.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/judaism.htm

Two

‘The trouble, says Mr Bennett, is that the mainstream American Jewish institutions were born to make the case for Israel and to fight anti-Semitism. Young Jews today, however, are searching for identity, spirituality, meaning and roots. Unlike their grandparents, they are not concentrated among other Jews but spread out across society. They do not meet people in synagogues or other Jewish forums, but form their own networks. ‘Jewish’ is just one part of their multi-faceted American identity, and Israel does not seem that relevant.

An ambitious attempt to resist assimilation and the loss of Jewishness is the ‘birthright Israel’ programme, sponsored by a group of Jewish philanthropists, which since 1998 has given over 100,000 young Jews from around the world a free ten-day trip to the country. It aims less to promote aliyah than to give an instant hit of Jewishness. Surveys show it works. Mark Hanis, an Ecuadorean-born 24-year-old who did the trip in 2001, calls it ‘transformative’, a word Jewish leaders love. ‘The big impact for me’, he relates, ‘was seeing children in the streets playing soccer like you always saw in Ecuador, but wearing yarmulkes instead of crosses.’

Ironically, though, many returning birthrighters have embarked on a search for new ways of what is colloquially called ‘doing Jewish’ that have little to do with Israel or even religion. A lot of it is based on tikkun olam, literally ‘world repair’, the Jewish duty of social activism. Thus Mr Hanis, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, decided that Jews have a duty to fight genocide, and founded the Genocide Intervention Network, a campaign against the killings in Darfur.’

Source: Israel and the Jews; Second thoughts about the Promised Land, The Economist, Jan 11th 2007
http://www.acbp.net/About/PDF/ARTICLE-Second%20thoughts%20about%20the%20Promised%20Land.pdf

On Africans in (and out of) Egypt

One

‘Israel is increasingly become a popular transit point for African asylum seekers. The Israeli government in August 2007 returned to Egypt migrants from Darfur who sought asylum, a decision challenged by some human rights groups noting the paradox of Israel, born of the Holocaust, turning back refugees. At least two million Sudanese, including many from Darfur, have migrated to Egypt, and some have continued across the Sinai to Israel. Israel sent the Sudanese back to Egypt without giving them interviews or hearings to determine if they were in need of asylum.’

Source: ‘Displaced Africans see Israel as the Promised Land,’ by Carolynne Wheeler, Globe and Mail, September 11, 2007. ‘Fearful of Restive Foreign Labor, Dubai Eyes Reforms,’ by Jason DeParle, New York Times, August 6, 2007, reported in Migration News, October 2007 Volume 13 Number 4
http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/comments.php?id=3332_0_3_0

Two

‘KADESH BARNEA, 22 August 2007 (IRIN) – Israel deported to Egypt on 19 August some 50 asylum seekers who had illegally crossed the border over the weekend. The move has been legalised by the state’s attorney-general but criticized by rights groups.

Most of the asylum seekers were from the war-torn Darfur region in Sudan. Dov Khanin, an opposition member of Israel’s Knesset (parliament) told reporters: ‘This is against international law. Israel has no guarantee that Egypt will not deport these asylum seekers back to Sudan and other countries where their lives will be in great danger.’ Some 2,500 African refugees and asylum seekers have entered Israel in the past two years. About 1,800 are from Sudan, including some 500 from Darfur, government data indicated. The rest are from various African countries (mostly conflict zones), including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone Many complained of ill-treatment while in Egypt – from daily discrimination and racism to extreme harassment and violence.

Some of the 50 entered the country before dawn on 16 August, while most came through the following night. Menachem Mazuz, the attorney general, said the asylum seekers were not ‘expelled’ from Israel but rather ‘prevented entry.’ ’

Source: Deportation of 50 Africans from Israel Sparks Human Rights Concern irinnews.org August 23 2007, 9:21 am, via politicalaffairs.net Marxist Thought Online. www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5760/

Three

‘In Sudan, 2.5 million people have died in the country’s 22-year-long civil war, and another 2.5 million have been displaced in the western region of Darfur alone since 2003, according to Human Rights Watch. Sudanese who visit the Jewish state risk execution if they return home.’

Source: Africans lost in ‘The Promised Land’, by IPS, Human Rights Tribune
http://www.humanrights-geneva.info

 

 

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