Zionism Affirms the Physical and
Spiritual Survival of Jewry
Israel and the entire Jewish people are
engaged in a struggle for survival. That struggle consumes enormous human and
material resources, so that many features of Jewry’s cultural and social
development are frequently shunted aside to await more auspicious times.
Paradoxically, alongside the struggle for survival, for the past two centuries
Jews have been accomplices in their own long-term collective disintegration
(Vital, 1999). I wish to address three sources of this complicity and to
recognize the nature of their impact on Jewish life and survival. These
sources are not regularly identified as a potential threat:
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The widespread conception of Jewish spirituality as distinct from Jewry’s
physical territorial survival;
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The Galut remains one of the
main threats to Jewish long-term survival through the medium of cultural and
national assimilation;
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The pressure exerted by some Jewish groups in Israel to cultivate a multicultural
society in which Muslims are given equal political and cultural status.
I
Israel Jewry’s Awareness of its Historical Roots
Disregard of Israel’s Jewish character
and culture must concern us as an essential element in its struggle for
survival precisely because apathy toward that dimension of our national life
has fatal consequences no less than other dangers. There are those who say
that, if Jews reside in Israel, their Jewish consciousness, awareness of their
heritage, understanding of Jewry’s historical-political-cultural condition,
are secondary and largely dispensable. Such disregard or apathy toward our
Jewish historical-cultural development conveys the profoundly erroneous view
that Jewry’s physical survival can somehow be disengaged or separated from its
spiritual-cultural preservation. That view expresses one aspect of Jewry’s
complicity in its own destruction (Vital, 1999).
Human spirituality, in all of its
outstanding manifestations is co-existent with physical existence, albeit, as
we all know, not necessarily in the body of the same person over the course of
time. Material products of our spiritual existence, such as those written on
paper, or painted on canvas, survive beyond their mortal creators.
Nevertheless, the catastrophic decimation of European Jewry should have
ingrained in our minds the lesson that the physical termination of Jewry means
the ultimate termination of Jewish history itself. Disruption of the
historical continuity of the generations constitutes the demise of the
nation’s spiritual-cultural existence, whatever it transmitted in writing or
in other material form.
During the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, many thinkers and
writers granted only limited recognition to the significance of Jewry’s
physical survival by contrast with those writers’ preoccupation with the
intellectual-moral-religious (or theological) affairs of the Jewish people
(Belfer, 2004). In the late 20th and early 21st
century, this odd preference for the spiritual versus the physical aspects of
life appears not merely naive but bewilderingly insensitive and unrealistic.
To place that “spiritualistic” approach
in perspective we must recall that it predates the onslaught of German
anti-Semitism on the physical existence of the Jewish People in Europe. For
the Jewish intellectuals, scholars and writers of the 19th
and early 20th centuries, millions of
unassimilated Jews still lived in Eastern Europe. Only a precious few of our
great intellectuals and poets in the 20th
century, such as Chaim Nahman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Zalman Schneur,
Uri Zvi Greenberg, Yehezkel Kaufman, or Ze’ev Jabotinsky and several others
had an intimation of the impending disaster (Halkin, 1950). Others were unable
to assess the endemic hatred of Jews in Europe and the pogroms of the late 19th
and early 20th century as harbingers of a
future catastrophe. The outcry of the few Cassandras and Laocoans went
unheeded by the many.
Some critics have claimed erroneously
that Zionism embodied the transition from a spiritual conception of Judaism to
a secular and physical one. Herzl and his followers did not relinquish their
immersion in the Jewish intellectual-spiritual-cultural world despite their
alienation from the beliefs of their ancestors. Zionism was not a move to a
materialist as opposed to a cultural-spiritual view of Jewish life. Rather,
Zionism made a transition from a given form of Jewish
spiritual-religious-cultural life in which territorial messianism had been
relegated to an etherealized abstraction, to a different form of
cultural-intellectual life in which territorial messianism was an inherent
element of the faith.
In 17th
century Sabbateanism, much the same dynamic was played out. The flame of
messianism had long smoldered close to the surface of overt behavior on the
part of a large number of Jews, and it finally erupted onto the stage of
history. To that extent, Shabbatai Zvi was a forerunner of Herzl. Herzl was
greeted as the new Messiah, and Zionism is certainly the new Jewish
messianism, however much some Jews consider that term an anathema precisely
due to its visionary idealism. Even today Zionism, formally at least, remains
committed to the vision of kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the
exiles. Contemporary Jews, who adopted universalist or socialist views,
continue to invoke the notion that Israel’s Zionist character requires that it
strive for a higher morality than other countries as justification for its
existence. That morality is defined as social justice affirmed by many as the
essence of social responsibility.
Clearly, for Zionism, a singularly
Jewish, not universalist, mission was at the heart of its faith, namely the
messianic mission to redeem the Jewish People from its geographic dispersion
in order to secure the survival of the People in the face of persecution and
assimilation. That mission was, and is, simultaneously, a moral and a
national-territorial mission. It is no less moral than any specific value
considered essential to the concept of social justice. Indeed, the nation
itself is both a territorial-political and a moral-cultural-spiritual
enterprise, and Jewry’s collective existence on its territory is a lofty moral
value.
No form of social justice for Jews qua
Jews can ever be realized in the historical world without the physical
survival of the Jewish People as an identifiable ethnic-national group. Jews
in the Galut can practice and experience the highest forms of social justice
as citizens of their adopted country, but not as the nation of the Jews.
Social justice in the Galut contributes to the welfare of the dominant nation,
but not to the welfare of the Jewish collectivity. One has only to examine
critically the proclamations by Jewish institutions in Europe and the United
States over the past two hundred years or the sermons preached by rabbis in
synagogues there, to hear repeated endlessly the assertion that Jewry’s
mission in the world is to practice the universal values of social justice in
the countries of its residence for the betterment of all mankind. Those
proclamations do not emphasize or mention the survival and enhancement of the
Jewish body politic per se.
In the case of Israel, the primacy of
survival as a national territorial and concomitantly as a spiritual
value, is particularly prominent. That prominence derives from the unique
condition of Israel as the result of the ideologically-driven effort of
Zionism to remove Jewry as much as possible from many countries. The goals
were, and are, at one and the same time: To preclude persecution, pre-empt
assimilation and concentrate Jewry in its territory to safeguard its
physical-political and cultural-religious survival. The famous spokesman for
Israel as a spiritual entity, Ahad Ha’am, eventually relinquished his
one-sided view and embraced the political Zionism of Theodore Herzl, his
erstwhile “antagonist”, alongside his own theory of the need for spiritual
revival. He realized that spiritual Jewish life requires a
political-territorial-physical dimension, and he left England to live in Tel
Aviv. Some Jews in the West continue to express an Ahad Ha’amian “spiritual”
approach, ignoring Ahad Ha’am’s own change of heart.
Following the decimation of European
Jewry in WWII, the continued decline of the world Jewish population, alongside
its massive assimilation into the gentile population of Western countries,
constitute a distinct threat to long-term Jewish survival. The Jewish
population of Israel presently (2006) encompasses 40% of the living Jewish
people. This proportion will most likely increase in coming decades as it
receives new olim, (perhaps tens of thousands)
from France, South America, England and the United States. That prediction
takes into account the number of Jews (including many native born “sabras”
with tenuous Jewish roots) who leave Israel. Also, Diaspora Jewry is
experiencing a rapid decline in numbers stemming primarily from intermarriage
and the disintegration of its communal structures. The process of assimilation
proceeds over generations, but its toll is palpable and relentless. Only those
Jews throughout the West who are singularly determined and relatively
insulated will ward off the inevitable end of Jewish collective survival in
the Galut, some time in the not too distant
future, even in the absence of any form of violent persecution. That is
precisely what Zionism predicted long ago (Kaufmann, 1930-1932). Loudly touted
declarations of optimism about the future of Jewry in the US (e.g. Silverman,
1985; Heritage, May, 2005) fly in the face of careful documentation. Large
sectors of Jewry in Western countries, not to speak of the scattered pockets
of Jews in Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries, face
incontrovertible demographic disaster. Nevertheless, in some countries Jews
don’t have the means or perhaps the desire, to leave, and in most Western
countries they shrug their shoulders and continue their daily routine
unperturbed.
Ben-Gurion asserted unequivocally
(Shapira, 1997) that kibbutz galuyot was the fundamental goal of
Zionism. An economically and politically viable Israel requires the
significant concentration of Jews in the country. Safeguarding the security of
its citizens is not possible today with a small Jewish population as it was a
half century ago when Israel was founded. Israel’s capacity to protect its
citizens has improved enormously during the past two decades aided by the
arrival of a large immigration from the former Soviet Union and other
countries. Unfortunately, Israel’s glaring political ineptitude has frequently
squandered the spectacular achievements of its defense forces.
II
The Galut Remains Jewry’s Primary Assimilator
Jews who seek to make the case for a
creative Jewish life in the Galut (Biale, 1986; Eisen, 1986) noted that
Jewish communities there are unencumbered by the need to invest their human
and material resources in self-defense, as is required of Israel. The spurious
nature of that comment is evident in the basic fact that no form of Jewish
self-defense can exist in sovereign countries outside Israel, and there is no
force that can be employed, except in peripheral ways, to protect Jews from
far-reaching assimilation and communal disintegration. When emancipation
reached Poland and Russia, where Jewish life was deeply entrenched for
centuries, the vast majority of Jewish schools emptied out of their hundreds
of thousands of students in the space of a few short years. How many Jews are
aware of the fact that the combined registration of the Reform and
Conservative rabbinical schools in the United States (including the Jewish
Theological Seminary, The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion,
and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles) numbers barely 300 people to
serve the Reform and Conservative movements in the United States with a total
membership (often just nominal) of approximately two million Jews. Orthodox
Jewry still maintains yeshivot in several cities in the United States,
including Baltimore, Brooklyn and Chicago, but the number of their students
has declined markedly in recent years. Judaic Studies are offered in American
universities. They are certainly not institutions devoted to the perpetuation
of the Jewish people, or even of Jewish learning per se. The students’ goal is
to achieve a post-graduate degree to improve their earning power (as is true
for students in many subjects studied in universities).
A comparison of Israel and American Jewry
highlights several principles of Jewish life today:
-
The absence of the political-territorial dimension of Jewish life
facilitates assimilation and reduction of Jewish life to a bare minimum for
the overwhelming majority of Jews, with notable exceptions. The alternatives
that appeared to be possible during most of the 20th
century, through synagogue membership, active membership in various Jewish
secular organizations, and so forth, began their steep decline in the
sixties and continue today on that path. No viable alternative appears
possible except adherence to orthodoxy and affiliation with an orthodox
community, socially and geographically. All orthodox religions (such as
Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Islam, and Mormonism) and not only
Jewish orthodoxy contain the elements of social theological insulation that
can withstand assimilation of the faithful over long periods of time. The
Conservative and Reform movements in Judaism are shrinking. The collapse of
divine authority attributed by Jews to the Torah and the Law opened the
floodgates to assimilation in all countries where social-political
conditions allowed for Emancipation (Kaufman, 1930; Vital, 1999).
-
The concentration of Jewry in Israel can provide the social political
context for the cultivation of a modern Jewish culture, whatever may be its
defining features.
-
The territorial basis of Jewish life in Israel creates the conditions
necessary for the continued implementation of kibbutz galuyot.
The Jewish population of Israel today has
not yet reached a distinct level of stability. It will continue to expand
beyond the rate of natural reproduction. Political decisions regarding
Israel’s relations with the Arabs must not be based on the assumption that
current demography dictates sovereignty. To do so is to de-Zionize the Jewish
state in the deepest sense of that term. Kibbutz galuyot, as an
ideal that affects Israel’s behavior in reality through the Law of Return,
links contemporary Jewry to all previous generations of our forebears from
late Biblical times, through all phases of Jewish society in the Talmudic
period, the Middle Ages, and the growth of Jewish nationalism in the 19th
and 20th centuries. Once Jewry has regained
its possession of the Land of Israel, the Torah can no longer serve as Jewry’s
ambulatory patrimony as it did in the past, regardless of one’s personal
beliefs.
The distinction between the spiritual and
territorial-physical aspects of Jewish life and thought can and has been used
by several authors to great intellectual and scholarly advantage (Belfer,
2004). However, it is not very productive to continue to conceive of Jewish
existence in terms of the spiritual-material dichotomy. True, the Western
world is powerfully dominated by the Greek distinction between body and soul,
a distinction not adopted by Judaism until Hellenistic times. Admittedly,
Judaism cannot revert to its basically monistic conception of the human being.
Yet, Jewry expressed a distinct preference for a monistic view of life so
obvious in its conception of God. In contemporary psychological terms, all
humans think, all thought is a spiritual phenomenon arising from an
anatomical/physiological substructure, and all thought is symbolic and abstract
with its roots in the physical and concrete, regardless of who thinks the
thoughts or where that person is located. Our conceptions of the
earthly-territorial domain are infused with non-earthly notions of our own
finitude, of the future, of man-in-the-world, of the Jewish nation through the
ages (i.e. through history). Those Jews who pray and those who do not pray but
who act as Jews, continue to perpetuate the Jewish people in order to live its
own life as itself and not as some other nation.
III
Multiculturalism and Israel’s Survival
Lurking on the periphery of Israel
society is another suicidal impulse that occasionally rears its ugly head to
express its demands, namely – the call for
multiculturalism in Israel that would grant equal cultural and political
status to the Arabs/Muslims with the Jews and Judaism in the Jewish state.
Multiculturalism in the United
States. The term multiculturalism has a very different meaning in the
United States than it does in Europe. Americans generally understand the term
to refer to their recognition of black peoples’ cultural heritage as enjoying
acceptance and legitimacy as part of the culture of the multi-ethnic
population of the United States. Some of the better known aspects of black
culture include distinct patterns of speech, a genre of music, forms of body
movements, the blacks’ history of being slaves particularly in the southern
states, and so forth. With all of these and more distinctive cultural
features, there was never any question that black Americans (except for
extremists of the Black Muslim movement) have sought integration within the non-black
population, have adopted the majority culture, and have always displayed their
American patriotism in the many wars in which they fought. Blacks did not
attempt to organize their own separatist political party. Instead, they
functioned within the existing political structure, albeit with heavy
concentration in the Democratic party. Nor has there been any suspicion of
blacks inciting to some form of rebellion against American governmental
institutions or attempting to alter the nature of those institutions in order
to establish a black nation. Black Americans do not seek to exchange the
principles and goals of American democracy for some other form of regime or
body of laws. The same can be said for other ethnic minority groups in the
United States, such as the Chinese and Japanese, Mexicans, Jews, Native
Americans, and so forth, all of whom proclaim their loyalty to the United
States and do not aspire to gain control of governmental bodies.
Multiculturalism in Europe.
Moving over to Europe, multiculturalism has assumed a radically different
meaning, and its application is first and foremost in respect to the Muslims
now living in Europe. Islam cannot be comprehended when viewed through the
prism of Western liberal democracy or on the assumption that, like
Christianity, Islam in Europe has acceded to a separation of church and state.
Islam encompasses almost the entire totality of human behavior, unlike the
relatively limited domain of Christianity current in the West (Bat Ye’or,
2005; Bukay, 2007; Israeli, 2006). Muslims in Europe retain their allegiance
to the Arab/Muslim world even if they were born in Europe, they oppose
cultural diversity, they seek adherence to Muslim law (Shari`a) as
superseding the law of the dominant nation, and in some places they go so far
as to call for the downfall of the nation in which they reside (Bawer, 2006;
Fallaci, 2002; Philips, 2006).
At the very least, European
multiculturalism entails passivity toward the prejudicial beliefs of Islam
about democracy, Christians, Jews and Jewish history, and about Jewish
sovereignty in Israel. Britain and Scandinavia have accepted Muslims’
attitudes as legitimate. They are unwilling to censure Muslims’ ideas or
confront what is perceived to be the principles of Islamic religion (Bawer,
2006; Philips, 2006). In fact, as Melanie Philips has stated, Britain does not
acknowledge that religion is the source of Islamic radicalism (Philips, 2006).
Indeed, “...the British police say they do not use the phrase ‘Islamic
terrorism’ only ‘international terrorism’” (page 53). Recent conviction (April
2007) by the British court of British-born Muslims for engaging in or planning
acts of terrorism might heighten public awareness of the ethnic problem
threatening security in Britain, but the Media and government are sure to
downplay its significance.
The gruesome consequences of the Oslo
Accords continue to unravel before our eyes. The murder of over 1,500 Jews in
Israel subsequent to those accords seems incapable of convincing Israel Jewry
that the Palestinian Authority, originally under the arch PLO terrorist Arafat
and now in the hands of Hamas terrorists, will not make peace with Israel.
Like the war with Hizbullah in Lebanon, the struggle of Hamas against Israel
is motivated by Islamic religious hatred not by specific material-territorial
claims which, if settled would solve the problem. Misled leaders in Israel
tragically retain the illusion that ceding territory to the Arab Palestinians
will alter their relationship toward Israel and the Jews.
Muslim groups
and nations are waging an unconditional war with Israel and with the Jews
because of WHO we are not just because of Where we are.
There are plentiful
examples from the past of Jewry’s failure to buy off its sworn enemies and of
the tragic consequences for those who tried (Fallaci, 2002; Vital, 1999).
Scandinavia, along with the Benelux
countries, with their Leftist political orientation, insists on practicing
tolerance of the intolerant. It, along with other European countries, displays
a condescending or even supportive attitude toward Muslim terrorism, and
relinquishes basic democratic principles for the sake of “industrial calm”. It
remains to be seen if some recently shocking events of Muslim terrorism in
Holland and elsewhere, will affect those attitudes. Thus far, Muslim terrorism
against Jews in Israel has not aroused signs of moral outrage in Europe, to
say the least.
Multiculturalism in Europe has brought
about an historical irony, to put it mildly. According to classic
anti-Semitism disseminated in Europe for several centuries, the Jews allegedly
subordinated all of life to their religion. Consequently, they remained
faithful to their homeland in Palestine to which they would ultimately be
restored. They also considered themselves to be subject to their own laws not
unlike the Muslims of today in Europe. Hence, it was inappropriate to consider
Jews as citizens of equal status to non-Jews since the former could not
possibly be considered loyal to the nation.
That accusation leveled against the Jews
was egregiously and transparently fallacious. Jews eagerly paraded their
patriotism in various countries and not a few lost their lives fighting in the
armies of European nations up to and including WWII. The Jews had largely
abandoned their desire for national redemption and for their return to their
ancient homeland, as stated repeatedly by European Jewish spokesmen
everywhere, in particular by an august body of rabbis who participated in the
so-called Napoleonic Sanhedrin in 1805. The Land of Israel was etherealized by
post-Emancipation Jewry almost as completely as it was by Christianity in its
concept of the heavenly Jerusalem. Furthermore, while Jewish Law was certainly
observed by a vast majority of Jews throughout the 19th
century in Europe, Jews did not seek to substitute Rabbinic Law for the Law of
the land.
Ironically, the truly political
monotheistic religion is Islam that, since its inception, sought political
power and domination of many nations’ territory as testified repeatedly by
Islam’s long history of conquest in Europe and across the globe. The
contemporary slaughter of non-Muslim blacks (animists) in southern Sudan by
the Muslim regime in the north of the country is a direct expression of
Islam’s persistent and relentless doctrine of dar el harb, of
the Islamic imperative to conquer non-Muslim peoples when possible: Ultimately
the world must come under the control of Islam.
Muslims in Europe oppose any criticism of
Islam on the basis of democratic principles, such as the complete equality of
men and women. The Muslim invasion of Europe strongly emphasizes Islam’s
over-arching allegiance to the Umma or Arab/Muslim Global Nation.
Multiculturalism actually blocks Europeans from focusing on or even mentioning
the political goals of Muslims. The patriotic, de-politicized and
de-nationalized Jews of Europe were decimated in WWII. By contrast, in our
day, the highly political and conquest-oriented Arabs have become powerful
invaders. They are proceeding to undermine European Westernism without any
protest or anti-Islamic outcry by politically correct, multicultural,
Europeans (Bawer, 2006; Bukay, 2007; Philips, 2006; Vital, 1999; Ye’or, 2002,
2005).
And now there are Jews in Israel who seek
to promote a European type of multiculturalism for the State of Israel
(Margalit and Halbertal, 1998). Israel’s Arab population has organized its own
political parties who publicly voice their opposition to Israel, who parade
their allegiance to Arab nations, deny Jewish history and denounce the Jewish
state. That has been the case for many years as well as during the recent
conflict with the Hizbullah in Lebanon. The existing multiculturalism in
Israel has never led to an integration of Arabs into Israel’s body politic, as
is the case with the integration of blacks in the United States. In Israel, unlike Europe,
multiculturalism was never a question of language: Arabs learn and speak
Hebrew. It has always been a question of political sovereignty,
religion, conceptions of history, and ethnicity all combined.
Israel is an ethnic democracy like many
countries in Europe. Israel was founded and built by Jews on its historic land
for the preservation of the Jewish people. It was precisely in that sense that
Jewry was granted the Balfour Declaration by England. The legal status of the
Balfour Declaration was ratified first by the League of Nations and then by
the United Nations. Multiculturalism in Israel, far from being the melting-pot
variety known in the United States, has created divisive and destructive
political conditions with Arab members of Knesset inciting against the
country. Israel tolerates that incitement contrary to all logic and in the
face of potentially severe consequences. Those consequences are being avoided
today in Europe only because Europe continues to pay a heavy price to obtain
“protection” from the Muslims (Ye’or, 2005). That price includes a Muslim
revision of history that effectively distorts the culture and history of
Christian nations and, of course, of the Jewish nation.
Almost all European countries (except
Norway) have much larger indigenous ethnic populations than Israel. They do
not perceive themselves as being threatened by the eventuality of becoming a
minority in their own countries as a result of continued Muslim immigration.
Multiculturalists in Europe appear not to comprehend the demographic
implications of their opinions. In addition to a very high birthrate among
Muslims (Fallaci, 2002, 137-138) Muslim men must find Muslim brides, and to do
so they must turn to Muslim countries from which to import their future wives.
This situation is called “fetched marriages” (Bawer, 2006, p. 190). It leads
to a rapid rise in the Muslim population above and beyond the rate of
reproduction. That is the prevailing state of affairs in Scandinavia. At this
writing, the absolute numbers of Muslims in Scandinavia and the Benelux
countries is still relatively small, but Muslims need not become a numerical
majority to dominate political life in Europe. Muslims strive for the
introduction of the Shari`a as the legal code regulating their lives,
and not the non-Muslim law of the land. If Muslim immigration continues at the
present pace, along with their high rate of natural reproduction, Muslim
political influence will dominate some European countries in the not too
distant future. Muslims already number 10% of the total population of France.
Such a large proportion of the electorate in any country can dictate the
outcome of elections, endowing the Muslim population with de facto
status of a “nation within a nation” whose historical-religious-ethnic goals
differ radically from those of the majority. That situation is incompatible
with the fundamental principles of the modern democratic ethnic nations (i.e.
excluding the US, Canada and Australia that are multi-ethnic/national
nations). The election of Nicholas
Sarkozy as president of France might signify a French reaction to the Muslim
encroachment on Christian sovereign rule in France.
Under no circumstances can tiny Israel
possibly tolerate that danger by adopting a transparently suicidal policy of
multiculturalism. To do so is to walk open eyed into an abyss, as some Jews
would prefer (Margalit and Halbertal, 1998). Jewry’s complicity in its own
destruction must end here.
Conclusion
Israel’s long-term survival requires that
it safeguard its territorial and historical-cultural identity. The Jewish
identities of Israel’s territory and of its historical heritage are
interdependent: One will not survive long without the other. Israel cannot be
preserved as a body without a soul or as a disembodied spirit lacking a
physical presence. Jewry outside its homeland faces inevitable and drastic
erosion at an ever increasing pace, more so now in the days of accelerated
assimilation than in the past. Finally, Israel’s geographical location in the
Middle East and the relatively small size of its Jewish population compared to
the Muslim/Arab populations surrounding it, dictate that its territorial
sovereignty and historical identity rely exclusively on its social-ethnic
integrity. Those determining features of Israel Jewry’s existence now and in
the future can be seriously compromised if we imitate the so-called
multicultural trend that has overtaken Europe. That trend threatens Europe’s
Western and democratic character and is rapidly transforming the continent
into Eurabia.
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