To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subcribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #775, 11/8/15
A Happy Day for History and Truth
The sweet moment when archeology and history intersect, and a discovery dug up from the ground confirms what appears in written sources, is a happy day for anyone who deals with historic truth.
The satisfaction is particularly great when the discovery not only contributes to human knowledge, but also attacks the Muslim campaign of denial that in recent years has been trying to erase any and all Jewish ties to Jerusalem. The story of the Acra fortress is a story like that. . . .
– Nadav Shragai, Israel Hayom, Wed Nov 4, 2015
This Week’s Announcement of the Discovery of the Seleucids’ Acra Fortress: Implications For Today’s Fight Against Anti-Israel Media Bias
Ok, I appreciate that you subscribed to a weekly anti-Israel bias-tracking media watch, not to an archeology review, but there are weeks, Bless them, when the two intersect. This week was one.
It was only three weeks ago, BSMW #772, that I quoted the august New York Times shedding less than light on October 8 on what it labeled “an explosive historical question that cuts to the essence of competing claims to what may be the world’s most contested piece of real estate.” That earth-shattering question, the New York Times wrote (emphasis added)
… is whether the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was also the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.
As our #772 reported in calling this above statement “rubbish,” the NYT soon corrected its statement of the question from “whether” the Jewish Temples had stood on the Temple Mount to just “where” on the Mount they had stood. The latter, of course, could hardly have been introduced as “an explosive historical question” on the reality or not of Jewish history there, but BSMW made two further points. First, the NY Times’ expression “both [Jewish Temples] long since gone” conveys a sense of “long since gone without trace,” which is very much not true; and, second, the New York Times’ and same-house (now International New York Times) International Herald Tribune’s prior challenges to Jewish Jerusalem history’s reality show a predisposition to denigrate it. When archeologist Eilat Mazar discovered in Jerusalem in 2005 what may have been King David’s palace, here’s what these respected newspapers wrote (emphasis added). N.Y. Times:
The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem – whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasser Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.
International Herald Tribune’s language went even further, ending that “many Palestinians believe – including the late Yasser Arafat – that the notion of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a religious myth used to justify occupation and colonialism.”
Now, then, this week’s announcement in Jerusalem that archeologists, working for a decade at a parking lot site in the Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David section of Jerusalem, have unearthed the Acra, the Jerusalem fortress of the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great which they built, as Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put it on Tuesday, “in order to control Jerusalem and monitor activity in the Temple which was eventually liberated by the Hasmoneans [Maccabees] from Greek rule.”
First, a quick sense of what was found there. Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “… a section of a massive wall, a base of a tower of impressive dimensions … a defensive sloping embankment ….” And site-dating context making all this vividly real to we non-archeologists:
Lead sling shots, bronze arrowheads and ballista stones that were discovered at the site and stamped with a trident, which symbolized the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, are silent remains of battles that were waged there at the time of the Hasmoneans, in their attempt to conquer the citadel which was viewed as a ‘thorn in the flesh’ of the city.
Before we get to the particular anti-Israel media bias aspect, is this discovery a big deal for us in its own right? I have this from a rabbi resident in Jerusalem’s Old City, deep into archeology in study, teaching, guiding and in his own work:
Chanukah In Our Midst – Part 1
For the first time you can actually see the event of Chanukah. Until now, I would teach the period by holding a coin of the Maccabees in one hand, and of Antiochus IV in the other, even though they were not exactly contemporary. Now you can look at the buildings of the two opponents, with one literally vanquishing the other. . . .
. . . . So the Acra Fortress which faced the Maccabees and fell by surrender to Simon, as described in text, is now visible for all to see. Next to it is a Hasmonean building, built by those who vanquished the Greeks. You can now see the events around Chanukah, represented by the monumental buildings of the opponents.
What Wednesday’s Nadav Shagrai’s Israel Hayom article called “the Muslim campaign of denial that in recent years has been trying to erase any and all Jewish ties to Jerusalem” is reflected in mainstream Western media misdepiction of all three eras of Jewish homeland history – ancient, modern, and the eighteen hundred years in between.
During the course of this media watch, no less influential a Western newspaper than the New York Times has issued at least two denigrating questionings of ancient Jewish Jerusalem presence – whether the “notion” of it amounts to “a myth” used to justify “conquest, occupation and colonialism” (2005), and the “explosive historical question” of “whether” the Jewish Temples actually were on the Temple Mount (October 2015).
The words “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding” were not the precise words of a Western newspaper. They were the words of the President of the United States to the whole world from Cairo, but he likely learned them from the similar words used, over and over and over again, by the Western press on Israel’s 1948 “creation” and “founding,” and on the seemingly one-sided displacement of Palestinian Arabs in “the war that followed Israel’s creation.”
What the Western media does not tell Western publics is that the modern State of Israel is the land’s next native state after the Maccabee-recreated Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that, and that Jews remained in the land – as historian Parkes put it, “in spite of every discouragement” – all during those long, dark, pre-Zionist foreign rule centuries between Hadrian and Herzl.
Given the Western media’s, and not least our hometown Philly Inquirer’s (Inq’s), obsession with reporting on the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine (a place name which Begin rightly said in his Foreword to “Battleground” is not owned by Palestinian Arabs), this week’s announcement of the discovery of the Seleucids’ Acra Fortress, the fall of which partly marked restoration of Jewish homeland independence under the Maccabees, deserved major news articles.
The story I do remember our Inq running on Hannukah is the one I recounted back in BSMW #467 on 12/13/09, under the title “The Hijacking of Hannukah”:
Per the Inq Staff Writer’s article This Week In The Inq (Friday, 12/11/09, B1, 7), Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in West Mount Airy has seized upon the Hanukkah story “about one day’s supply of oil lasting eight days” to ask: “’Can there be a more perfect occasion to focus on energy conservation and breaking our dependence on fossil fuel?’” The rabbi hoped “multitudes of Jews and environmentalists” will show up for a climate-change vigil at Independence Mall” the following night. Maybe they did, and if they did, that being their cause, more (non-fossil-fueled) power to them. But it’s not celebrating Hanukkah.
But Hannukah is about more than “one day’s supply of oil lasting eight days.” It’s about the Jewish people wresting back Jewish homeland independence from the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great, including by conquering the formidable fortress symbol of that foreign rule in Jerusalem.
In our time
*** of Western media touting of “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem,”
*** of relentless Western media denigrating of Jews as “East Jerusalem Jewish settlers,”
*** of Western media granting of credibility to Muslim challenges to Jewish [and ergo Christian] Jerusalem history, including on the core of the core of the core Temple Mount,
it’s time for us to make that fuller meaning of Hannukah clear to Western publics, including by making clear to them that, as the Old City rabbi put it this week, “For the first time, you can actually see the event of Chanukah.”
Regards,
Jerry