WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: An internet article this week echoed a longtime wonder of mine – Are Europeans’ troubles with Muslims today payback for their centuries of mistreating Europe’s Jews? We Jews believe in the Almighty’s Hand in history sometimes, and I cite another instance involving Europeans relevant to us American Jews. And it’s my privilege this week to recommend to you the regular postings of my two favorite Escapees from America who joined the millennia-long stream of our Diaspora Returning back home to our people’s homeland.
Jews, God and Europe
An INN article sent around by Gary this week, 7/6/23, Karma for France: Payback For Its Crimes Against the Jews? suggests a cause-and-effect relationship that I’ve long felt in my Jews-God-and-History moments – that, as I put it in one of these weekly emails a few years back, the Almighty has said to Muslim-violence-plagued Europeans, “So you didn’t like Jews living amongst you for two thousand years? Watch This.”
What I found particularly ironic in my writing in #1171 last week about a European Parliament committee’s vote to sic the ICC upon Israel for “war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the occupied Palestinian territories” is that this attack was “spearheaded” by “MEP Evin Incir of the Swedish Social Democrats, the rapporteur for recommendations on the EU’s relations with the Palestinian Authority.” JPost, 6/28/23, European Parliament Committee Calls for War Crimes Charges Against Israel. Charming. But see, e.g., ‘Sweden Will Face Far More Consequences than France,’ Threatens Raza Academy …., organiser.org, 7/7/23.
You would think that Europeans, with all their own problems living alongside Muslims in Europe, would have a modicum of rachmonas these days for our homeland’s Jews. Nope. Never. The Holocaust was no anomaly, but the culmination of centuries of – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – mistreatment by European Christians of Europe’s Jews. The European continent was never a homeland for Jews.
So how about Europeans helping us to go from its shores home? Nope, never, from medieval prohibition of “transport of Jews to the East” down to the pre-, during and post-Holocaust [n.b.] anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade.
But how about Now, now that, not thanks exactly to them, we’re back home, not just from Europe, but from Yemen, Ethiopia, India, so many dispersal places – majority Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, blending into “Israeli,” hardly European colonials. Today’s powerful EU is a major force in the United Nations’ unique Permanent Pogrom against our Jewish homeland of Israel.
What’s going on in Europe today isn’t occasional anomalous Islamic outbreaks. Christian Europe has a real continued Christian identity problem. See, e.g., respected Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, INN, 7/5/23, A Two-State Solution for Terminally Ill France? [ok by me, as long as it whacks up Paris and the “French” side is nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle].
But I, in my Jews-God-and-History moments, envision it this way: When the keys to the last church in Europe are handed over to a Muslim to be turned into a mosque, the last Christian will lament to the Muslim, “You know, this is all the fault of the Jews.” And the Muslim (pocketing the keys) will smile and reply, ‘Yep. You’re right.”
Another Instance of the Almighty’s Hand in History: Where the Ark of the Covenant Stood
Several times recently I’ve read in pro-Israel articles that the Western Wall is “the sole surviving remnant” of Herod’s Temple Mount. Wrong! Read Ritmeyer and see. Most important to us is that a fuller understanding of what’s still there on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount today might awaken a stronger sense in grassroots American Jews that historic Jerusalem, not least its Temple Mount, of which the Western Wall is part of a still-standing retaining wall, is Jews’ and not “Palestinians’” heritage.
In The Quest and shorter BAR version, Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer (per BAR’s Hershel Shanks) makes “quite a case” where the First Temple’s 500 sq. cubit Mount lay, where the First Temple stood on that Mount, where the summit of Mt. Moriah, the Foundation Stone, the “Rock,” stood in its Holy of Holies, and even where on that Rock, in an Ark-sized slot in the Holy of Holies center, the Ark of the Covenant had rested!
For half a millennium following Romans’ destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Romans and their European Christian Byzantine heirs heaped refuse on that site, and it was Omar of the 638-conquering Arabs who cleaned it up, and his Omayyad successors who built the magnificent Dome of the Rock with its under the Dome ambulatory overlooking it. The European Crusaders of 1099, whose atrocities in “the Holy Land” and on the way were particularly bloody chapters in Christian Europeans’ mistreatment of Jews, took over the Dome, and among other disfigurings chipped off pieces of the Rock to sell for gold in Europe, starting from the east side and working up towards that Ark-sized slot in the center. They hadn’t quite reached it when they were defeated by Saladin at the Horns of Hattin in 1187. And so that Ark-sized Slot is still there, visible today under the Dome. So how much imagination does it take to see the Almighty’s Hand in recruiting those most fanatic religious site preservers on Earth to preserve to this day that three millennia-old Ark-sized Slot in the Rock? By me, not a Hell of a lot.
Two Grassroots Aliyah-From-America Israeli Writers: Their Message For Us
A years-ago Apple commercial I really liked pictured two engineering supervisors on a platform overlooking laboring draftsmen at desks each with two computers – a Mac and a PC – below. “Which is better?” one asks the other. “The one that they use.” And so it is with the tons of emails overflowing our inboxes these days. “Which are the best?” The ones that we read.
I want to tell you of two Israelis, escapees decades ago from America, whose regular messages about doings in Israel, aimed back at us grassroots American Jews, I religiously read. These gifted writers understand and can meaningfully speak to both Israelis and us.
One is my friend Steve Kramer, once a “settler” and now a “green line” Israeli, from whose hill town he can see both the old armistice line and the Sea, who writes columns for a couple US Jewish papers, and whose stuff we regularly post under “Guest Columns” on our related website, www.factsonisrael.com. (These weekly rantings of mine are under “Media Watch,” and Lee’s and my PowerPoint talks, e.g., “Misleading Media Expressions,” under “Videos.”)
My personal favorites among Steve’s columns are his and Michal’s hiking and Israel site tours, combining vivid history, archeology, nature, etc., descriptions, but usually current events preempts. Fellow grassrootniks, their by me cogent conservative explanations explain much to us grassroots American Jews. I invite you to follow Steve’s columns on our site, www.factsonisrael.com.
That second formerly American Israeli whose emails I religiously read is Arlene Kushner, a grandmother who I guess is past vigorous hiking in hills, but whose personal contacts and down-to-earth astute analyses are worth every grassroots American Jew’s permanent interest. She covers politics, military and terrorism events and responses, our Jewish people’s historical and legal claim to our homeland, and so much more.
I strongly recommend that you sign up for regular “Arlene From Israel” postings:
https://arlenefromisrael.info/sign-up/ and pass this on to your pals.