WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The resoluteness of our Jewish people’s claim to historic Jerusalem is a factor influencing nations’, not least currently Britain’s, weighing of the moving of their Israel embassy there. Here’s a short briefing on the tenacity, in spite of every discouragement, of our physical presence there all through the persecuting foreign empire rule centuries, and our relentless return whenever they, temporarily as it turned out, kicked us out.
Will She or Won’t She [move Britain’s embassy]? We Can Help Things Along by Vigorously Contesting the De-Judaizing of Jerusalem
“A growing chorus of political parties and faith leaders” has been “raising reservations in recent days” following new British Prime Minister Liz Truss’ mention of a potential relocation of Great Britain’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Jewish News, “Britain’s Biggest Jewish Newspaper,” this week, Archbishop of Canterbury ‘Concerned’ by Impact of Possible Embassy Move to Jerusalem, 10/7/22.
Whether or not Liz in the end pulls this off, her attitude does mark rather a change from how Britain described Jerusalem on the occasion of Prince William’s 2018 first official Royal visit, as the Royal itinerary put it, “To Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Included:
“The next day’s programme in the Occupied Palestinian Territories will begin with a short briefing on the history and geography of Jerusalem’s Old City from a viewing point at the Mount of Olives.”
It wouldn’t hurt for us American Jews vociferously to make the case, from our Jewish people’s viewing point, that no parts of our homeland of Israel, Old City, Mount of Olives and all, are “Occupied Territories” of a “Palestine” that Palestinian Arabs whom we foolishly join in calling “THE Palestinians” have never ever ruled. Indeed, today’s Jewish Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
Ours is a case based both on uninterrupted Jewish physical presence and international treaty – the UN-adopted 1922 League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, recognizing the historic land of Israel, western Palestine from the River to the Sea, as the Jewish national home (the eastern 78% of Mandated Palestine became Arab Transjordan, today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan).
Speaking of short briefings from viewing points, let’s do one on our Jewish people’s tenacious continuous post-biblical presence in the land of Israel, especially Jerusalem, that, yes British, historian James Parkes averred (Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266) wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
Here’s how I came to know something about it. One night some years ago at a Philly ZOA executive committee meeting around Lori’s ample dining room table, a Philly businessman spoke to us, saying he owned a small non-vanity book publishing house that published unconventional stuff on inter alia “Judaica.” I told him there were two such Judaica books crying out to be published – on the Jewish people’s continuous presence in Palestine, and on how the media skews the news so it skrews the Jews. He said “you research and write those books and I’ll publish them.” I did (with Lee on the latter), and he did. I set the former’s opening scene in 70 CE in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. He fired back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” I replied that if we can’t connect the Jewish presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then King David and all that stuff doesn’t matter. I was wrong about our biblical era anchor, of course (see chapters 1-3), but as Jewish homeland presence during the First and Second Temple periods is generally accepted by the world’s publics as having actually really happened, let’s do a short briefing from my book on Jews’ continued Jerusalem presence, ok with a temporary expulsion, from Hadrian to Herzl.
It’s true that on finally defeating the Jews’ Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, the Romans did make Jerusalem off-limits to Jews. But Jews remained in Galilee and elsewhere in Judaea-renamed-by-Rome-Palestine. Roman-Byzantine period synagogues, Roman recognition until the fifth century of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community, homeland sages’ writing of the Mishnah and Palestinian [Jerusalem] Talmud, and 20,000+ homeland Jews’ self-mustered battalions fighting alongside the Byzantine-fighting Persian invaders of 614 amply attest to this. And, btw, (compare to us saying “East” Jerusalem and “West Bank”) Prof. Wilken recognized in his The Land Called Holy (pp. 196-197):
“[Jews avoided] the designation Palestine (which Christians freely used) as well as Greek and Roman names for cities and towns in Eretz Israel. In their view these names were ephemeral, without root, and, in the face of the eternity of Israel, would one day vanish.”
“For three years,” following Persians’ 614 defeat of the Byzantines, “the Jews were apparently in full control of Jerusalem.” (Ben-Gurion (ed.), The Jews In Their Land, p. 198; see also Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 89.) After fourteen years the Byzantines regained control and went on a Jew-massacring rampage (not the last to befall us in our homeland). Then came the Arab invasion of 638, which the Jews also aided. Jewish presence in Jerusalem was again renewed and “the Jews were appointed guardians of the Temple Mount in return for their aid to the conquering army” (Bahat, The Forgotten Generations, p. 23).
Then came rule of three successive foreign Muslim dynasties – Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid – until the Crusader conquest of 1099. We know a lot about Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine during these Muslim dynasty times. Bahat (pp. 30-31) includes a map of a hundred Jewish communities we know about a millennium later. I cited evidence in my book that “ninth century Jews weren’t just ‘there’ as unconnected stray individuals, but collectively as the Yishuv.” This included the Yeshivat Eretz Israel in Jerusalem as “the central religious authority for the whole region” (Tal, Whose Jerusalem?, p. 102); the Karaite community growing there and urging immigration (Katz, supra, p. 97); and a gaon declaring Palestine’s Jews still the valid owners of Palestine’s land (Ben-Gurion (ed.) supra, p. 203).
A contemporary Crusader account acknowledged that Turks, Arabs and Jews courageously confronted them in Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.” (Ben-Gurion (ed.) supra, p. 214.) And Albert of Aachen wrote of Haifa, which the Jews alone there “defended with great courage [for a whole month], to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians” (Bahat, supra, p. 37). But as historian Parkes put it (supra, p. 97): “Proportionally to their numbers, the Jews probably lost more than any other group” in the blood-curdling slaughters perpetrated by the Crusaders in their conquest of the country.
Parkes also wrote (supra, p. 80), on the defeat of the Crusaders, that “the reversion of the country to Islam, when it came [in 1187 and thereafter], was not to come from Arab sources, but from a fresh wave of Turkish invaders represented by Saladin the Kurd.”
Following waves of Asiatic and Mongol invaders, in which still more Jews were slaughtered, in the Crusaders’ wake, Palestine fell for two centuries under the control of Turk-Circassian Mamluks, ruling from Turkey then Egypt. I included in my book from various footnoted sources a chronology of Jewish presence in Jerusalem during Mamluk times. It is a tale of permanent persecution, but here are a few positive excerpts:
*** “1338 – Visitor Isaac ibn Chelo noted ‘students of medicine, astronomy and mathematics’ and ‘excellent Jewish calligraphers in the city,’ talents, wrote Tal [in Whose Jerusalem?, p.208, in our time] evidencing that ‘secular as well as religious scholarship existed in Jerusalem, even in medieval times.’”
*** “1491 – Christian pilgrim: in Jerusalem ‘not many Christians, but many Jews,’ who claim the Holy Land, and ‘refuse to leave.’ Peters [in From Time Immemorial in our time, p. 166] quoted him that there were more Jews than Christians in Jerusalem, and that they consider the country their land.”
*** “1499 – Christian traveler: ‘Very many Jews in Jerusalem.” They spoke Hebrew. (Katz, supra, p.92)
The Turkish Ottoman Empire misruled Palestine for four hundred years from 1517 to 1917. I devoted four pages of my book, with twenty footnotes citing multiple authorities, to a section on Jerusalem titled “Muslim Persecution and the Staying-Power of the Yishuv.” When Parkes wrote of the homeland Jews’ real-title-deed-writing post-biblical presence having been tenaciously maintained “all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” he was not employing hyperbole.
Jews became once again Jerusalem’s majority population during pre-Zionist-aliyah 1800’s Turkish rule, and famous British archeologist Charles Warren wrote of their secular occupations (e.g., shoemakers, carpenters, silversmiths, bakers, porters, stonecutters). Tal (supra, pp. 232-233): “These facts clearly contradict the myth that 19th century Jerusalem Jews were either old men praying at the Western Wall or religious youth studying the Torah.”
In Britain today, but not only in Britain, is debate raging over the historicity of the Jewish people’s claim to Jerusalem. It’s said we’re today trying to “Judaize” Jerusalem. No place on earth has been more “judaized” over the course of the past three thousand years (e.g., three times native Jewish state capital, Temples which successively stood for a millennium, renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule), and we were living there, Dr. Weizmann, not the least diplomatic of Zionist leaders, told the British, “when London was a marsh.” What our Jewish people’s enemies are up to is attempted DE-judaizing Jerusalem. As Lee and I wrote in our Algemeiner article that was honored by incorporation into the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations’ Daily Alert, during all the long centuries of Jerusalem’s rule by foreign empires between Judaea’s fall in CE 135 and its liberation by Israel in 1967, nobody called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers.”
Whether or not Truss will follow Trump in moving her country’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the very idea of a “two-state solution” along the historic Jerusalem excluding 1967 war vitiated1949 ceasefire lines, save for mutually agreed adjustments, must be summarily rejected by all Jews who sing Hatikva down to its concluding couplet: