#849 4/9/17 – This Week: Christians and Jews as Indigenous People of the Mideast

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: This morning’s murderous Palm Sunday bombing of Coptic churches in Egypt is but the latest challenge to the rightfulness of Christian and Jewish presence in the Mideast.  Western media terminology disparaging post-biblical Jewish connection to an Israel that was “created” and “founded” in 1948, and calling Jews “settlers” and “occupiers” in historic Jerusalem and “the West Bank,” contributes to Western belief that Jews have no indigenous rights beyond 9-miles-wide-in-the-middle “1967 borders,” and no really indigenous rights inside them.  We have to make our continuous presence case to ourhomeland. 

This Week:  Jews and Christians as Indigenous People of the Mideast

This morning’s Palm Sunday bombings of two Coptic Christian churches in Egypt, killing close to 50 holy day worshippers, were not random attacks, but part of a pattern of rejection of members of this anciently-rooted religion as entitled to secure indigenous presence in the Middle East.  The fanatical perpetrators of these attacks harbor even deeper rejection of Jews.  There is no case we can make that will mitigate their hostility towards us.  What we can do, I think, is a more effective job of convincing the western world, and perhaps some people elsewhere, that the State of Israel is not “the colonial Zionist entity” but the uninterrupted three-millennia homeland of the Jews.

In case you doubt that much needs to be done, not least by those of us who decry “anti-Israel media bias,” here’s four things to take a quick look at.

***  Russia this week became unique` in the world in saying it would recognize “west” Jerusalem as Israel’s capital IF “east” Jerusalem – the historic city with all of its holy places – is recognized as Arab “Palestine’s” capital.  The U.S. has not yet declared “west” Jerusalem “Israel.”

***  The New York Times, during the time of this media watch, told the world (8/5/05) regarding archeologist E. Mazar’s discovery of what may be King David’s Jerusalem palace:

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 Tribunes 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.” [emphasis added a little]

***  President Carter wrote in the Historical Chronology intro to his Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid book that in 135 CE the Romans forced “almost all Jews of Judaea into exile,” and didn’t mention Jews again in that Historical Chronology again until 1917.

***  We Jews go along with the mainstream Western media’s messaging of Jewish connection to Palestine such as “Israel’s founding in 1948 … Israel’s capture/seizure of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 … Israeli-occupation of Palestinian territories … Israeli settlers and settlements vs. Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages … etc., etc.”

What we need to do is make the case plainly to the world that the Romans did not exile the Jews, who were then disconnected from the land for eighteen hundred years, but that Jewish connection to the land of Israel, including homeland-claiming physical presence connection, continued throughout post-biblical times.

I wrote a book on it. Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Philadelphia, Pavilion Press, Inc., 2005).  Don’t let me stop you from rushing to AmaAzon (or www.pavilionpress.com), but here is that uninterrupted physical presence connection while you stand on one leg.

Roman-Byzantine Period (135-636):  The Romans did not exile the Jews on defeating the Bar Kochba Revolt.  Remains of Roman-Byzantine era synagogues all over the land testify to this.  The Romans recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Yishuv until the fifth century.  The Mishna and Palestinian Talmud were written.  Twenty-thousand or more homeland Jews fought in self-mustered battalions alongside the 614 Persian invaders.

Foreign Muslim Dynasty Period (636-1099):  Parkes and other historians wrote that the Byzantine-conquering Muslims took over a land populated almost entirely by Christians and Jews.  Bahat, in The Forgotten Generations, included a map showing close to a hundred ninth century Jewish communities.

Crusader Period (1099-1187):  The Crusaders wrote that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  They wrote that Jews, fighting alone “with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians,” held them off at Haifa for almost a month.  A professor writes: “There is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”

Mamluk Period (1260-1517):  These non-Arab Turk-Cirsassians ruled much of the Mideast, following Mongol invasions in the Crusaders’ wake, for over two centuries.  We know about Jews in Jerusalem then, and in Acre, their then-principal community, and elsewhere in the land.  There was much Jewish immigration, especially during the European Inquisitions.

Turk Period (1517-1917):  We know much about the Jews in their four holy homeland cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land, during these four centuries of misrule so bad that it drove the land’s population by the early 1800’s to its lowest of all recorded times.  We know that Jews became again Jerusalem’s majority population in pre-Zionist 1800’s Ottoman rule times, of the Yishuv breaking out from the walled city and founding new residential and agricultural communities, and that it was to an already reviving Yishuv that beginning in the late 1800’s the Zionists came.

We cannot accept the mainstream western media calling Jews in Jerusalem “settlers” and Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria “Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.”  We have to make the case that the land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem, is the homeland of Jews.  Acquiescing in the media calling these places “East Jerusalem and the West Bank beyond Israel’s 1967 borders” will not get us there.