Pop Quiz, Girls & Boys!
Question #1 (50 points): What’s the most meaningful Jewish holiday this year, 2023?
Answer: Hanukkah (starts this Thursday evening, December 7)
Question #2 (other 50 points): Why?
My Answer: We celebrate Hanukkah, first, to honor the key event symbolizing the Maccabees’ decades long war of independence, the homeland Jewish army’s recapture, cleansing and rededication of Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple. But there’s a deeper meaning to Hanukkah. The Maccabees rose up at one of those fateful moments when the continuity of Jewish homeland and peoplehood hung by a thread. They preserved it, and for that we Jews of today honor them.
How we today honor the Maccabees matters. Personally, I cannot abide the idea of an “electric menorah.” I light the increasing number of candles each night, and sit in a room darkened but for them, contemplating our homeland-defending heroes of long ago, and of not so long ago.
But that’s just a start. What the Maccabees, and those later Jewish homeland defenders, enable us to say to the world, and we must strongly say it, is that our Jewish people’s claim to our homeland, the land of Israel, didn’t end with Assyrian and Babylonian defeat of our biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Some of us remained in the land and with the half-century-later returnees rebuilt the Temple, centuries later re-wresting back our homeland independence from Alexander’s Seleucid successors. And then we fought four wars (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-135 CE) against Rome. Where were our “descended-from-the-Canaanites ever-present Palestinian” playmates through all of this?
And no we weren’t fully “exiled” by Rome, evidenced by synagogue and other Jewish remains all over the land throughout the Roman-Byzantine era. And our scholars compiled the Mishnah and then Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud during that period, during which until the fifth century the Roman overlords officially recognized our Patriarch as head of our homeland Jewish community. And twenty thousand or more homeland Jews fought in self-mustered battalions in 614 alongside the Jewish-autonomy-promising Persian invaders against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. Yes, the Persians reneged and then the Byzantines regained control and went on a homeland Jew-slaughtering rampage, not the last to befall our homeland Jewish Yishuv.
Then in the 630’s the Arab-led Muslims came, and we aided them and received rewards. Foreign Muslim dynasties ruled from 638 to 1099, and our homeland Yishuv stayed in the land. Archeologist Bahat, includes in The Forgotten Generations a ninth century map showing a hundred homeland Jewish communities in this small land the size of New Jersey.
The 1099 Crusaders themselves recorded of Jerusalem:
“And here, in front of us, were the foreigners, Jew, Turk and Arab, fighting for their lives with slingstones, with catapults, with fire and venom … and when the end came upon the foreigners, they withdrew from one battlefront, only to find a second battlefront facing them. And though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword; the Turk, the Arab, and the Jew were among the fallen. The Jew is the last to fall.”
And the Jews, fighting alone, held out against the Crusaders in Haifa for a month. Albert of Aachen: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” Professors writing in Ben-Gurion edited The Jews In Their Land: “
“Apart from a few places in the south, we have no information about Jewish participation in the defense of other Palestinian towns; but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”
The Crusader authority Runciman wrote that the Crusaders’ massacres greatly reduced the Jewish community. Parkes wrote that “proportionally to their numbers, the Jews probably lost more than any other group on the conquest of the country,” Bahat of “the destruction of entire [Jewish] communities by the First Crusade.”
It was not Arabs but Turks led by Saladin the Kurd who restored Islamic rule. After Mongol and other Asiatic invasions, Turk-Circassian Mamluks ruled the area for more than two centuries, followed by Ottoman Turks for four. Jews remained in the land, in Jerusalem and for long periods in their other holy cities – Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere. Jews again became Jerusalem’s majority population during pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule, and they were engaged in work and professions, not simply religious rites.
Twentieth century eminent British historian Parkes asserted (Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p.266):
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”
Samuel Katz, in his classic work Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, acknowledging Parkes, wrote that “the gap between what is generally known and the facts of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” is an “astonishing area of Jewish neglect.” Then Prime Minister Begin, in his 1977 Foreword to Battleground’s second edition: “The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine.” So taken was I with all this that I wrote my own book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine. (Bargain hunters: There are some used copies kicking around Amazon’s used book market. Ones that I signed go for less than the ones that I didn’t.)
In 1947, when the UN sought to partition the land of Israel, western Palestine, into Arab and Jewish states, its population was c. only a million Arabs and 650,000 Jews. Why weren’t there more Jews? Well, there were Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Muslim and other foreign invader massacres of homeland Jews, unending persecution and some partial expulsions. There were restrictions on land purchase by Jews, culminating in the British during the Mandate barring it in almost all of the country. There were foreign ruler restrictions on Jewish immigration, from medieval European barring of “transport of Jews to the East” through the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust [!] anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade.
In 1948 today’s Israel became the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. We’ve never given up our homeland claim, not only through prayers every day through eighteen hundred years, but through uninterrupted homeland physical Jewish presence. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel (and to the broader Mideast). We’re not “occupiers.” Here’s Victor Davis Hanson this week, Jewish Voice, 11/30/23, The Unhinged Among Us, commenting on “pro-Palestinian” protests: “Few protestors knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia.”
Let Hanukkah be your inspiration to vigorously contest canards that Israel’s presence in Judea-Samaria, even in historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) is “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory” (which “Palestinians” have never ever ruled). Two weeks ago, in #1191, I quoted six “occupation” canards by world leaders [!] (emphasis added).
*** Abbas: “May there be a curse upon the OCCUPATION ….”
*** Obama: “… the OCCUPATION and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable ….”
*** Saudi Crown Prince MBS: “… the violations of international law by the Israeli OCCUPATION authorities ….”
*** UN Sec. Gen. Guterres: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating OCCUPATION.”
*** AP: “… the situation in the OCCUPIED West Bank since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war nearly three weeks ago, after a brutal rampage by Hamas gunmen from Gaza ….”
*** UNSC 2334: “… the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory OCCUPIED since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
And here’s Hamas this week: Its kidnapping of 10-month-old and 4-year-old siblings was “because of the OCCUPATION.” (Jerusalem Post, 12/1/23, Hamas: It Doesn’t Matter How Many Hostages are Still Alive)
Where’s this heading? See columnist Hana Levi Julian, Jewish Press, this Thursday, 11/30/23, US Secy Antony Blinken Arrives to Pressure Israel into Longer Ceasefire, ‘Two-State Solution’:
“The Secretary added that he also planned to discuss the future of Gaza on ‘the day after’ the war ends, and to once again pressure Israel into accepted [sic] a ‘two-state solution’ that would create another Palestinian Authority terrorist state on Israel’s borders.”
Of what would that “two-state solution” consist? Here’s what “a spokesman for the US Embassy in Jerusalem told JNS” last week, JNS, 11/24/23, US: Palestinians Must Choose Own Leaders, Even as Poll Shows Massive Support for Hamas:
“’We continue to believe that a negotiated two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually-agreed-to swaps is the best way to advance a sustainable peace,’ he continued. (emphasis added)
I.e., a Six Day War reversal, no historic Jerusalem, no Judea-Samaria. So do you think we need to contest “Occupation”?