Campuses in the US experienced a 40-percent spike in anti-Semitic behavior, with 433 incidents recorded in 2016.
By: Rachel Frommer, The Algemeiner
New York’s Columbia University experienced the highest overall anti-Semitic activity last year among more than 100 US schools studied, a report released Tuesday by a campus watchdog group revealed.
According to the AMCHA Initiative’s second annual report, Columbia also had the largest increase in such episodes, with 29 more incidents in 2016 than in the previous year.
Vassar College came in at a close second, according to the report. In total, the campuses studied experienced a 40 percent spike in anti-Semitic behavior, with 433 incidents recorded last year by AMCHA.
“Jewish students are bearing the brunt of vast and profound campus intolerance,” lead researcher and AMCHA founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner. “Jews are being targeted at heightened levels, but this has to be understood in the context of a more general problem. If administrators could understand and correctly frame the issue of anti-Semitism as one example of a culture of campus intolerance, they could respond to it better, and help all students — Jewish and non-Jewish — have a healthier university climate for free speech.”
Increase in Homicidal ExpressionRossman-Benjamin added that she is particularly “frightened” by another finding in the report.
“Homicidal expression — condoning or calling for the murder of Jews, using language and imagery linked with the Holocaust — is rising at a troubling rate,” she said. “By what we are seeing in the first quarter of 2017, this year will be even worse. Compared with this time in 2016, we’ve already documented a huge uptick in such incidents, especially in the appearance of swastikas.”
According to AMCHA, there was a small decrease in the total number of schools at which all anti-Semitic episodes occurred, with heightened activity concentrated on select campuses, including New York University, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Minnesota andOhio State University.
California universities — including the University of California (UC) system, the University of Southern California and the Claremont Colleges — were listed by AMCHA as among the top 15 schools with the highest incidence of overall anti-Semitic activity, targeting of Jews, anti-Semitic expression and anti-Israel BDS activity. Chicago-area schools featured prominently, as well, based on those four markers.
The report also offers universities six recommendations to reduce intolerance, including reviewing, updating and enforcing policies to ensuring free speech and equal rights on campus, and employing “appropriate disciplinary measures” when those rights are violated.
A Columbia spokesperson told The Algemeiner, “Jewish life and learning is flourishing at Columbia as it has been for decades. This report falsely suggests otherwise by citing allegations of anti-Semitism such as an op-ed in Columbia College’s student newspaper critical of the Israeli government’s policies. Columbia remains committed to freedom of speech, respectful of all members of our diverse community, and vigilant in condemning anti-Semitism.”
Many of AMCHA’s top offenders appeared on The Algemeiner‘s list of the “worst” campuses for Jewish students in 2016.
AMCHA’s report comes nearly a month after an American higher-education-reform group labeled BDS “one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the United States today.”
By: Rachel Frommer, The Algemeiner
New York’s Columbia University experienced the highest overall anti-Semitic activity last year among more than 100 US schools studied, a report released Tuesday by a campus watchdog group revealed.
According to the AMCHA Initiative’s second annual report, Columbia also had the largest increase in such episodes, with 29 more incidents in 2016 than in the previous year.
Vassar College came in at a close second, according to the report. In total, the campuses studied experienced a 40 percent spike in anti-Semitic behavior, with 433 incidents recorded last year by AMCHA.
“Jewish students are bearing the brunt of vast and profound campus intolerance,” lead researcher and AMCHA founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner. “Jews are being targeted at heightened levels, but this has to be understood in the context of a more general problem. If administrators could understand and correctly frame the issue of anti-Semitism as one example of a culture of campus intolerance, they could respond to it better, and help all students — Jewish and non-Jewish — have a healthier university climate for free speech.”
Increase in Homicidal ExpressionRossman-Benjamin added that she is particularly “frightened” by another finding in the report.
“Homicidal expression — condoning or calling for the murder of Jews, using language and imagery linked with the Holocaust — is rising at a troubling rate,” she said. “By what we are seeing in the first quarter of 2017, this year will be even worse. Compared with this time in 2016, we’ve already documented a huge uptick in such incidents, especially in the appearance of swastikas.”
According to AMCHA, there was a small decrease in the total number of schools at which all anti-Semitic episodes occurred, with heightened activity concentrated on select campuses, including New York University, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Minnesota andOhio State University.
California universities — including the University of California (UC) system, the University of Southern California and the Claremont Colleges — were listed by AMCHA as among the top 15 schools with the highest incidence of overall anti-Semitic activity, targeting of Jews, anti-Semitic expression and anti-Israel BDS activity. Chicago-area schools featured prominently, as well, based on those four markers.
The report also offers universities six recommendations to reduce intolerance, including reviewing, updating and enforcing policies to ensuring free speech and equal rights on campus, and employing “appropriate disciplinary measures” when those rights are violated.
A Columbia spokesperson told The Algemeiner, “Jewish life and learning is flourishing at Columbia as it has been for decades. This report falsely suggests otherwise by citing allegations of anti-Semitism such as an op-ed in Columbia College’s student newspaper critical of the Israeli government’s policies. Columbia remains committed to freedom of speech, respectful of all members of our diverse community, and vigilant in condemning anti-Semitism.”
Many of AMCHA’s top offenders appeared on The Algemeiner‘s list of the “worst” campuses for Jewish students in 2016.
AMCHA’s report comes nearly a month after an American higher-education-reform group labeled BDS “one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the United States today.”
Pleased to introduce Jerusalem Jane, Jane Kiel. Please take a few moments and get acquainted and be sure to check out her website: JerusalemJane.com
Never underestimate the Journey by Jerri McGarrah
February 4, 2018
We've packed and repacked at least 3 times trying to think of all the things that we didn't want to forget. My rule of thumb is that if you forget something you have permission to buy it so don't worry about it! That makes our journey even more interesting.
We leave today with another group of travelers who will be experiencing Israel for the first time. Even though I've been there many times, my heart gets just as excited knowing that I get to share this experience with them. I can't wait!
I want to tell you that when you get out of your own comfortable, controlled environment you will pay more attention to your surroundings. It's the perfect opportunity for God to get your attention. That's what Jesus did with His disciples, He got them away from everything safe and familiar and showed them a perspective that they would never have known otherwise.
Religion can become a safe and predictable place to plant yourself if you're not careful. That's when it becomes dangerous - when you think you know it well! It seems that God will take us out of our comfortable, safe place and show us Who He is in the outrageous, unpredictable, unthinkable places in life. What a great place for a miracle!
Take today, set aside your own preconceived notions and pay attention to the moments that He gives you to see Him, to experience His grace and mercy that He extends to a broken and fallen world, and then lavish the world with His great love that He puts in your hands to do!
It's not about you, it's really about Him but He gives it to you to participate with Him! So, it's kind of about you, but not really!
We've packed and repacked at least 3 times trying to think of all the things that we didn't want to forget. My rule of thumb is that if you forget something you have permission to buy it so don't worry about it! That makes our journey even more interesting.
We leave today with another group of travelers who will be experiencing Israel for the first time. Even though I've been there many times, my heart gets just as excited knowing that I get to share this experience with them. I can't wait!
I want to tell you that when you get out of your own comfortable, controlled environment you will pay more attention to your surroundings. It's the perfect opportunity for God to get your attention. That's what Jesus did with His disciples, He got them away from everything safe and familiar and showed them a perspective that they would never have known otherwise.
Religion can become a safe and predictable place to plant yourself if you're not careful. That's when it becomes dangerous - when you think you know it well! It seems that God will take us out of our comfortable, safe place and show us Who He is in the outrageous, unpredictable, unthinkable places in life. What a great place for a miracle!
Take today, set aside your own preconceived notions and pay attention to the moments that He gives you to see Him, to experience His grace and mercy that He extends to a broken and fallen world, and then lavish the world with His great love that He puts in your hands to do!
It's not about you, it's really about Him but He gives it to you to participate with Him! So, it's kind of about you, but not really!
"America's Exceptionalism"
by Casie McGarrah, May 19, 2015
Brigitte Gabriel entered through the side doors to an impressive crowd, all on their feet in excitement and anticipation. You could feel the energy in the air. My first thought as she approached the stage was how tiny she was and so full of power. Then she began speaking, of course talking up Idaho won us over immediately, we didn't need to be told twice how we live in the most beautiful state in the country. We were on the edge of our seats from that moment on.
My son asked me a few days ago, regarding a cartoon he was watching, "why do all the people want to take over the world?" It has been a common theme running through our entertainment industry for children and adults alike, it's always the bad guy trying to rule the world. But it seems beyond reason in the real world to see anyone with such desires actually attempt this. But the reality is that this is exactly the goal that the radical Muslim agenda is striving toward. These extremists are working within our colleges, our local and national governments, as well as media and internet to infiltrate the minds of the impressionable to bend, soften and distract from the violent and deadly truth.
These outspoken Islamic are outwardly preaching peace and community mindedness and garnering sympathies for being persecuted as the underdog who only want good. But as we dig deeper, we uncover the truth and Brigitte Gabriel is sharing their real agenda, while putting her own life at risk. The radicals only want to annihilate anyone who opposes the Islam political and religious agenda and have been successful in bringing ISIS to 17 states and mobilizing an army right here, in our own backyard.
The Muslim Brotherhood that began in Egypt in 1928, has 70 offshoots, continuing their crusade through the Middle East and Europe. No matter what they are calling themselves right now, they are all driven to establish Islamic governments in every nation on earth. And right now, they have set their sights on the United States and are slowly but surely chipping away at everything our forefathers worked so hard to achieve for so many generations: freedom, democracy, justice and equality. I can almost see it changing, right in front of me and know that if we don't act immediately, there will be nothing left of the United States we grew up in for our children to even recognize.
Now that we know the depth of the truth, what do we do? Where do I start? How do I preserve our freedom for the future of my children? Is there any way I can be involved in protecting our nation? You've heard it said that "knowledge is power." If we take the information from Brigitte as our starting point, going in to our immediate community, schools and social groups to spread the truth, we will give her words that much more power and breadth.
ACT for America has been working with its current 280,000 members to defeat terrorism, secure our borders, educate our people, impact national policy and protect our children.
Go to actforamerica.org to learn more and contribute.
To hear her speech in its entirety, visit DeerFlat.org and listen to the podcast.
Brigitte Gabriel entered through the side doors to an impressive crowd, all on their feet in excitement and anticipation. You could feel the energy in the air. My first thought as she approached the stage was how tiny she was and so full of power. Then she began speaking, of course talking up Idaho won us over immediately, we didn't need to be told twice how we live in the most beautiful state in the country. We were on the edge of our seats from that moment on.
My son asked me a few days ago, regarding a cartoon he was watching, "why do all the people want to take over the world?" It has been a common theme running through our entertainment industry for children and adults alike, it's always the bad guy trying to rule the world. But it seems beyond reason in the real world to see anyone with such desires actually attempt this. But the reality is that this is exactly the goal that the radical Muslim agenda is striving toward. These extremists are working within our colleges, our local and national governments, as well as media and internet to infiltrate the minds of the impressionable to bend, soften and distract from the violent and deadly truth.
These outspoken Islamic are outwardly preaching peace and community mindedness and garnering sympathies for being persecuted as the underdog who only want good. But as we dig deeper, we uncover the truth and Brigitte Gabriel is sharing their real agenda, while putting her own life at risk. The radicals only want to annihilate anyone who opposes the Islam political and religious agenda and have been successful in bringing ISIS to 17 states and mobilizing an army right here, in our own backyard.
The Muslim Brotherhood that began in Egypt in 1928, has 70 offshoots, continuing their crusade through the Middle East and Europe. No matter what they are calling themselves right now, they are all driven to establish Islamic governments in every nation on earth. And right now, they have set their sights on the United States and are slowly but surely chipping away at everything our forefathers worked so hard to achieve for so many generations: freedom, democracy, justice and equality. I can almost see it changing, right in front of me and know that if we don't act immediately, there will be nothing left of the United States we grew up in for our children to even recognize.
Now that we know the depth of the truth, what do we do? Where do I start? How do I preserve our freedom for the future of my children? Is there any way I can be involved in protecting our nation? You've heard it said that "knowledge is power." If we take the information from Brigitte as our starting point, going in to our immediate community, schools and social groups to spread the truth, we will give her words that much more power and breadth.
ACT for America has been working with its current 280,000 members to defeat terrorism, secure our borders, educate our people, impact national policy and protect our children.
Go to actforamerica.org to learn more and contribute.
To hear her speech in its entirety, visit DeerFlat.org and listen to the podcast.
Note from Dave 8/6/14
Dave was asked to be one of 51 pastors who would go to Israel with the contingency from CUFI to show solidarity and support for Israel in the face of this war with Gaza and the Hamas. I just wanted to include you in on their adventures and give you his first hand account.
"Hey Jer,
It's 10:23 pm and I've had a really full but OUTSTANDING day! So here's the quick run down
1. Went to the Land of the Bible Museum to have a look at the newest display of really ancient collection that was donated to the Museum. Fascinating
2. Were ushered to the Auditorium to hear from a variety of speakers, all of which were TREMENDOUS
* Dore Gold - a very high profile leader, and former Ambassador to UN for Israel. He leads the Center for Foreign Policy. He was great
* Jonathan Schecter - this is PM Netanyahu's #1 shadow. He brought greetings from the PM who apologized for not being able to meet with us as he is greatly involved in the cease fire negotiations, brokered by Egypt, but wanting to extend it beyond the 72 hours. It's currently held over 45 hours. He was really good and we totally understood that the PM had to do whatever was necessary for his nation. Not a problem. Jonathan was great, and I was able to hand him the cards, letters from people in our flock - he gave me his assurance that the PM would be thrilled and encouraged to hear from these folks. Netanyahu was also giving a statement to the media regarding where Israel stands and what he hopes to have happen. As much as I longed to connect, each of us understood that we needed to be flexible to whatever his schedule would allow.
* Ashley Perry - One of the major figures who works to find every way possible to expose the world to the truth about Israel's dealing with innocent civilians. He was good!
* Akieva Tor - a wonderful guy, the head of World Religions Foreign Affairs. He was interesting and spoke about the need to pull in the younger generations throughout the world that are buying into the media blitz of civilian casualties and painting Israel in a bad light.
Summing up these 4 guys they were very transparent in the deep gratitude that we would make this trip. It spoke volumes to them and the PM. He wanted us to know that, "we (Influential Israel lovers and supporters) were their Iron Dome."
3. We loaded up and drove 58 miles to Sterodt. WOW. Because of the cease fire, they wanted to get us in there. We gave a falafel shop some great business as 60 people came off of 2 buses and ordered lunch. Got some great pictures. Bomb shelters everywhere
4. And overview outside of Sterodt to see GAZA. Yes, I was able to see GAZA very well. we were 5 killometeres away. It was a very special opportunity. I loved it.
5. We went north a little ways and visited the Iron Dome. We were met by 3 IDF soldiers - very prepared - all girls, all fantastic. We got to go where no one gets to go. It was truly a treat.
6. Headed towards Jerusalem and made a pit stop at a little mini mart/gas station. We encountered about 25 young soldiers who had just come from being in Gaze the past 30 days. You would have given each of them a big hug. All young, all tired, all anxious for an ice cream, cold drink, and a falafel. We ended up buying them all their snacks. They were humbled. They interacted with us and we had a chance to pray a blessing over them. They were touched.
7. Arrived back at the hotel at 7, grabbed a very quick dinner and another speaker at 7:30. Got to my room just before 9 and recorded a program with Charlie."
Their day was full and exciting and now we watch God add the ingredients that He wants to add. Your prayers and support also encourage us as go in the Name of our Messiah, Yeshua, Jesus!
Thank you
"Hey Jer,
It's 10:23 pm and I've had a really full but OUTSTANDING day! So here's the quick run down
1. Went to the Land of the Bible Museum to have a look at the newest display of really ancient collection that was donated to the Museum. Fascinating
2. Were ushered to the Auditorium to hear from a variety of speakers, all of which were TREMENDOUS
* Dore Gold - a very high profile leader, and former Ambassador to UN for Israel. He leads the Center for Foreign Policy. He was great
* Jonathan Schecter - this is PM Netanyahu's #1 shadow. He brought greetings from the PM who apologized for not being able to meet with us as he is greatly involved in the cease fire negotiations, brokered by Egypt, but wanting to extend it beyond the 72 hours. It's currently held over 45 hours. He was really good and we totally understood that the PM had to do whatever was necessary for his nation. Not a problem. Jonathan was great, and I was able to hand him the cards, letters from people in our flock - he gave me his assurance that the PM would be thrilled and encouraged to hear from these folks. Netanyahu was also giving a statement to the media regarding where Israel stands and what he hopes to have happen. As much as I longed to connect, each of us understood that we needed to be flexible to whatever his schedule would allow.
* Ashley Perry - One of the major figures who works to find every way possible to expose the world to the truth about Israel's dealing with innocent civilians. He was good!
* Akieva Tor - a wonderful guy, the head of World Religions Foreign Affairs. He was interesting and spoke about the need to pull in the younger generations throughout the world that are buying into the media blitz of civilian casualties and painting Israel in a bad light.
Summing up these 4 guys they were very transparent in the deep gratitude that we would make this trip. It spoke volumes to them and the PM. He wanted us to know that, "we (Influential Israel lovers and supporters) were their Iron Dome."
3. We loaded up and drove 58 miles to Sterodt. WOW. Because of the cease fire, they wanted to get us in there. We gave a falafel shop some great business as 60 people came off of 2 buses and ordered lunch. Got some great pictures. Bomb shelters everywhere
4. And overview outside of Sterodt to see GAZA. Yes, I was able to see GAZA very well. we were 5 killometeres away. It was a very special opportunity. I loved it.
5. We went north a little ways and visited the Iron Dome. We were met by 3 IDF soldiers - very prepared - all girls, all fantastic. We got to go where no one gets to go. It was truly a treat.
6. Headed towards Jerusalem and made a pit stop at a little mini mart/gas station. We encountered about 25 young soldiers who had just come from being in Gaze the past 30 days. You would have given each of them a big hug. All young, all tired, all anxious for an ice cream, cold drink, and a falafel. We ended up buying them all their snacks. They were humbled. They interacted with us and we had a chance to pray a blessing over them. They were touched.
7. Arrived back at the hotel at 7, grabbed a very quick dinner and another speaker at 7:30. Got to my room just before 9 and recorded a program with Charlie."
Their day was full and exciting and now we watch God add the ingredients that He wants to add. Your prayers and support also encourage us as go in the Name of our Messiah, Yeshua, Jesus!
Thank you
THE TIMES OF ISRAEL | www.timesofisrael.com
Christian group has ‘no scintilla of hesitation’ visiting Israel
Others may fear, but 51 pastors — one from each state and DC — say they are happy to land in Israel on a CUFI-sponsored visit
BY REBECCA SHIMONI STOIL August 5, 2014, 6:23 pm
W ASHINGTON — Pastor Jay Bailey of the Solid Rock Assembly of God Church in Midland, GA has been to Israel four times already, but he knew long before he departed from New York for Ben Gurion International Airport on Monday that this
would be his most important trip. This time, Bailey would only be in Israel for a little over two days, and he knew when he left that he might face rocket fire upon arrival. But for Bailey, the moment could not be better.
“I’m packing and looking forward to this – its going to be great” the pastor enthused before his flight. He flew to Israel Monday as part of a solidarity delegation from Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which brought 51 pastors – one from each US state and the District of Columbia – to Israel in a show of solidarity.
The pastors hope to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF soldiers, and to donate blood to Magen David Adom (MDA) during their brief two-and-a-half day sojourn.
CUFI Executive Director David Brog says that the idea for the solidarity mission came together quickly after “a tremendous outpouring of desire to do something.”
Both last week and this week, CUFI took out a series of full-page ads in almost two dozen major American newspapers, defending Israel’s actions and criticizing Hamas. It urged concerned citizens to go to the CUFI website, where they could sign a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry that said that the signer was “deeply troubled by reports that you put the prestige of your office and our nation behind efforts to promote a ceasefire proposal that specifically addressed key Hamas demands — such as the easing of the Gaza blockade — while largely ignoring Israel’s security requirements.”
The advertisements caught the eye of the US State Department, with State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf offering strong criticism of their content.
“Those kind of statements that wholly misrepresent the Secretary’s intentions and efforts do nothing to further the security of Israel because they are so blatantly false,” she told reporters last week.
Brog says such ads are at the center of the organization’s mission, explaining that CUFI’s “job is largely to explain to other Americans” why Israel’s cause is just. CUFI’s outreach so for, under the leadership of high-profile Pastor Jim Hagee, has brought some 1.6 million American voters into their fold.
But, says Brog, CUFI’s highly motivated membership base still looked for additional action beyond the ad campaign.
“This group will come and represent the thousands of Christian supporters of Israel in their communities back home,” Brog explained. “We thought it was important to demonstrate even in the middle of a war that we stand with Israel.”
The group plans to meet with a variety of Israeli figures in order to come back with what Brog described as “a more informed, powerful message of support for Israel.” Brog emphasized that although his group will seek to meet with political leaders, “we don’t want to interfere in any of the responsibilities of this conflict.”
“If Netanyahu has time, we will meet with him – and if he doesn’t, we will understand,” he said.
Bailey, who leads a large church in the suburbs of Columbus, GA, is a veteran participant in CUFI tours – this is his fourth visit with CUFI – but for around one-third of the pastors, this week’s visit will be their first to Israel.
“It might be the shortest trip, but this is the most important trip we’ve ever taken,” asserted the Jamaican-born pastor. He received notice from CUFI about the mission less than a week before he departed for Israel, and told his church leadership of his decision to attend almost immediately.
He waited until Sunday services to share his decision with the broader congregation.
“They love Israel, we are one with Israel and so they will be very excited,” he said shortly before making the announcement. “I have been sharing commentary and stories all along so they understand the context and it is not very difficult for me to explain the urgency and opportunity for me and for Christian leaders to stand with Israel.”
Before he left, Bailey said that he was not at all concerned about his personal safety.
“I feel zero level of risk, zero level of danger,” he asserted. “I do feel a profound sense of moral outrage about what is going on. It is more exacerbated by the perception that there is a moral equivalent between Israel and Hamas, a terror group. The moral fog is absolutely outrageous.”
© 2014 THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
As a result, Bailey is “profoundly motivated to go to Israel to show our solidarity.”
“There is not one scintilla of hesitation – it is my joy, my passion and my sacred obligation,” he added.
Bailey says that he has met with local Jewish leadership in Columbus, with whom he has longstanding ties. He is partnering with area synagogues to hold a night to honor Israel in Columbus in September.
“This is not just a blip on the radar for me – it is my passion,” he asserted.
Shortly before departing, Bailey cited Psalms, writing to his churchgoers: “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.” As God engineered this day from before the foundations of the world, He knew that pastors from all across America on this day would make a journey to Israel to declare our unambiguous and unwavering support for Israel and the Jewish people. I cannot tell you how excited and empowered I feel to be counted among these leaders to stand with Israel. This is our moment in history to stand for who and what is right! I STAND WITH ISRAEL.”
10 Truths about the Gaza Conflict
by Rob Eshman
You’ve read everything, heard everyone, endured every flaming comment on Facebook, bobbed to every talking head on TV and lent an ear to every opinion from Hussein Ibish to Howard Stern. So, what have you learned?
For me, it boils down to 10 truths:
1. This is a fight about extremism. This is not a fight between Jews and Muslims. It is not a fight between Arab and Jew. “Our borderlines no longer separate Jews from Arabs, but people who long to live in peace from those who feed, ideologically and emotionally, on continued violence,” Israeli novelist David Grossman wrote in The New York Times July 27.
2. Israel does not have a blank check for killing civilians. The carnage not only feeds Hamas’ media machine, it also weakens, casualty by casualty, the strong moral basis for Israel’s struggle.
3. If you are pro-Hamas, you are anti-Palestinian. Listen to the words of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who defected from his father’s group due to its use of Palestinians as human shields. “Hamas is not seeking coexistence and compromise, Hamas is seeking conquest,” Yousef told CNN. “The destruction of the State of Israel is not Hamas’ final destination. Hamas’ final destination is building the Islamic caliphate, which means an Islamic state on the rubble of every other civilization.” Support for Hamas is support for continued Palestinian suffering. It is one thing to want Palestinian rights and self-rule: Israel acknowledged both when it withdrew from Gaza in 2005. But by maintaining an ongoing war of annihilation against Jews as soon as Israel withdrew, Hamas ensured the subjugation and blockade of Gaza. Shooting rockets to lift a blockade is like having sex to prevent pregnancy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on July 24. Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters
4. After the smoke clears, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have to answer some tough questions. Why didn’t Netanyahu take advantage of a Hamas-PLO pact that severely curtailed Hamas influence? Did the Israeli security establishment use the kidnapping of three Jews, as the Forward’s J.J. Goldberg has asserted, as a pretext to upset Palestinian unity and scuttle any possibility of a negotiated solution?
“I ask the leaders of my own country: How could you have wasted the years since the last conflict without initiating dialogue?” wrote Grossman in the Times. “Why, for these past few years, has Israel avoided judicious negotiations with the moderate and more conversable sectors of the Palestinian people — an act that could also have served to pressure Hamas? Why have you ignored, for 12 years, the Arab League initiative that could have enlisted moderate Arab states with the power to impose, perhaps, a compromise on Hamas?” The fact that morality is on Israel’s side in this immediate conflict does not absolve its leaders and its supporters from taking correct action when the guns fall silent.
5. Going in now saved Palestinian lives. The discovery of a vast network of tunnels from Gaza into civilian areas of Israel proved just how critical the ground war was — and how lifesaving. Had Israel waited until a surprise, 9/11-style tunnel-based terror attack killed hundreds of Israelis, imagine the response. The Israel Defense Forces would have charged in full bore against an even better prepared Hamas. The death toll among Palestinian civilians and Israelis would have been far greater.
6. Israel may be losing support where it counts most: in the future.In the United States, younger Americans are far less likely to say Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip are justified. According to a Gallup poll last week, only 25 percent of Americans aged 18-29 support the Israeli position. American Jewish philanthropists need to ask what happened to the tens of millions of dollars they’ve spent to make Israel’s case.
Pro-Palestinian rally outside of the Israel Consulate offices in Los Angeles. Photo by Jeffrey Hensiek
7. Hypocrisy is the new normal. Blaming Israel for a disproportionate use of force? How many Iraqi civilians did America kill in the Iraq War? (At least 130,000.) How many American civilians did Iraqis kill? (245.) And where were all these protesters when Bashar Assad was slaughtering his own people? Twice as many Syrians were killed in war as Gazans last month. “If I were Assad right now,” wrote the Pakistani doctor Ali Rizvi on HuffPo, “I’d be thanking God I’m not Jewish.”
8. Israel, American and world Jewry is a community. The outpouring of support for Israeli soldiers, even among those who harbor doubts about the government’s policy, shows the deeper bonds of community — and destiny — that unite us.
9. Europe: Anti-Semitism is calling; it missed you. This war revealed the need for a serious set of government and NGO actions to deal with anti-Semitic forces in Europe, especially among Muslim communities.
Pro-Palestinian protesters burn an Israeli flag in Paris on July 19. Photo by Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
10. There are voices of moderation, reconciliation and peace, and we must strengthen them. Pay no attention to people who think their side is completely blameless and the other side is 100 percent at fault. Pay no attention to people who assert that the conflict between Arabs and Jews is eternal and inevitable. In 1967, who’d have thought Israel’s strongest allies against the hare-brained cease-fire schemes of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry would be Egypt and the PLO? There are moderate voices in Israel, in Palestine and around the world. We must defeat the extremes, and strengthen, support and give hope to the shell-shocked middle.
Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal. E-mail him at robe@jewishjournal.com. You can follow him on Twitter @foodaism.
July 9, 2014
GAZA: A history you may not know
By Victor Sharpe
The nearly four thousand year old association of Jewish life in Gaza is little remembered in today's world. Of course people know of the biblical story of Samson being blinded by the now extinct Philistines and how he brought down the temple to their gods in Gaza. But very few have any idea of the deep Jewish history in the following millennia.
In the Second millennium BC, Gaza served as an administrative city and residence of the Egyptian governor of Canaan. The bible tells us that the Jewish patriarch, Isaac, dug wells in Gerar, an ancient site between Beer Sheba and Gaza, and in the 13th century BC the Philistines or Caphorites (Cretans) annihilated the Avite inhabitants of Gaza and made the city the largest of their five centers.
After the Israelite Exodus from Egypt and entry into the Promised Land, the tribe of Judah was given Gaza as a possession but did not include it fully in their territory. The bible reports in Joshua 15.47 and Judges 1:18 how the city of Gaza, and those of Ekron, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Gat became a possession of Israel but how some of them were among those places 'lying in the remaining country,' i.e., not fully possessed by the Israelites.
Down the centuries, Gaza was captured by Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians and later still by Alexander the Great who incorporated it into his growing empire in the 5th century BC. The strategic territory, lying as it does at the crossroads of two continents, Africa and Asia, has repeatedly fallen since earliest times to invading armies.
In 167 BC, Judah Maccabee led his Jewish fighters to victory over the Syrian-Greek pagan king, Antiochus Epiphanies. Jerusalem was liberated and the defiled Jewish Temple cleansed. The miracle of this event is now celebrated by Jews during the festival of Hanukah. But it was the Hasmonean king, Yochanan, who also liberated Gaza in 145 BC. He was the brother of Judah the Maccabee and it was their other brother, Simon, who sent Jews to repopulate Gaza and its environs.
In the Book of Maccabees: 1:15, it says:
"Not a strange land have we conquered, and not over the possessions of strangers have we ruled, but of the inheritance of our Fathers that was in the hands of the enemy and conquered by them unlawfully. And as for us, when we had the chance, we returned to ourselves the inheritance of our Fathers."
The Roman general, Pompey, conquered Judea in the First century BC and made Gaza a free "polis" but in 61 AD the Roman Governor, Gavinius, evicted the Jews. In the subsequent war against Roman occupation of Judea, between 67 and 70 AD, Jewish forces again liberated the town and its environs before suffering defeat at the hands of Rome's legions.
Continuing Roman excesses against the Jews led to the Second Jewish Revolt under the command of the charismatic Bar Kochba, known in Aramaic as Son of a Star. The Emperor Hadrian's legions destroyed the Jewish state in 135 AD, decimating the Jewish population in an enormous slaughter, and sending thousands into slavery and exile from the Roman slave markets of Gaza.
Under the subsequent harsh Byzantine rule, Gaza's restored Jewish community nevertheless managed to flourish and during the 4th century Gaza served as the primary port of commerce for the Jews of the Holy Land.
It is interesting to note that in 1967, archaeologists discovered the beautiful mosaic floor of a 6th century synagogue situated on the Gaza seashore, attesting to the size and prominence of the Jewish community of the time.
The great medieval kabbalist Rabbi Avraham Azoulai lived in Gaza where he authored his famed work, Hesed L'Avraham, along with a commentary on the Torah (the first five books of the bible). The Jewish inhabitants made Gaza a great center of study and towns and villages from Rafah to Yavne sprung up as centers of Talmudic learning.
Many Jews fled to Gaza at the end of the 15th century where they joined the Jewish community by working in various trades after escaping from the ravages of the Catholic Inquisition.
During the 17th century, Gaza was again home to a thriving Jewish community, which boasted its share of prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Israel Najara, author of Kah Ribbon Olam, the popular hymn sung in Jewish homes around the world every Sabbath. He served as Gaza's Chief Rabbi until his death in 1625. This century also saw the rise in Gaza of Shabbetai Zvi's pseudo messianic movement.
The great scholar, Rabbi Yaakov Emden, ruled centuries ago that Gaza is an intrinsic part of the Jewish people's national heritage. "Gaza and its environs are absolutely considered part of the Land of Israel," he wrote in his work, Mor U'ketziyah, adding, "there is no doubt that it is a mitzvah (commandment and blessing) to live there, as in any other part of the Land of Israel."
Over the millennia Jews have been expelled from Gaza by many different conquerors but have always managed to return. The Crusaders killed many Gazan Jews, leaving few survivors. Ottoman Turks ruled a vast empire from 1517 to 1917, including the geographical backwater known as Palestine. They also frequently expelled the Jewish residents but then allowed them to return. This pattern continued for centuries.
Napoleon, marching through Gaza from Egypt in 1799 failed to restrain many of his French soldiers who were joined by local Arabs in abusing the Jewish residents. As a result of Arab persecution, the ancient Jewish presence in Gaza and the nearby villages died out in the first years of the 19th century only to return yet again in the 1870s.
In August 1929, when Arab rioters threatened to slaughter Gaza's Jews – as they had in Hebron – the British army under the Palestine Mandate forced the community to evacuate their homes. In October 1946, on the night following Yom Kippur, the Gaza Jewish community of Kfar Darom was established on land corresponding to the biblical Jewish village of Darom. It lasted just a year and a half until the outbreak of Israel's War of Independence in 1948, when Egypt overran the Gaza Strip and occupied it.
In June 1967, in a war of self-defense, Israel liberated Gaza from Egyptian occupation, making it possible once again for Jews to reside there. In 2001, during Palestinian Authority control under Yasser Arafat and his Fatah organization, Kassam rocket attacks began to pound the restored Jewish communities in Gaza.
After Arafat's death, rocket fire continued under his Fatah successor, Mahmoud Abbas. But in 2005, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon forcefully evicted from their homes the nearly 10,000 Jewish villagers and farmers from Gaza as part of the Disengagement Plan. At the time, Sharon explained the purpose of the Israeli pull-out:
"These steps will increase security for the residents of Israel and relieve the pressure on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and security forces in fulfilling the difficult tasks they are faced with. The Disengagement Plan is meant to grant maximum security and minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians."
Sharon had believed that by removing the flourishing Jewish villages and farms from Gaza, the Arab residents would build a civilized and peaceful society, thus proving to both Israel and the world that they could live in peace with the Jewish state. It was not to be and Sharon's hopes now lie shattered.
In an election pushed by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza voted eagerly for Hamas and against Fatah knowing full well that Hamas fundamentalist ideology calls for the destruction of Israel or any non-Muslim state existing in territory previously conquered in the name of Allah. Hamas will thus never live in peace with Israel, a Jewish state, even though the Jews are the indigenous and native people of the region and predate Islam by millennia.
Will the pattern that has existed for thousands of years continue; a sequence of Jewish exile from Gaza, followed by inevitable restoration? Those Jews who were driven out by the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and his successor, Ehud Olmert, now wait as refugees for the opportunity to again return.
One such Israeli refugee from Gaza, Rachel Saperstein, spoke at a Jerusalem Conference held in Israel in 2009. At the time, she lived with her husband, a disabled terror victim, in a rundown camp along with five hundred other Jewish families driven from their homes located throughout the Gaza Strip.
In her speech, she lamented that not a thing now grows in the village she was forced to abandon during the Disengagement Plan. The greenhouses that were given freely to the Palestinian Arabs were trashed by them. She added:
"We know the reason why. Only when the Jews return to their land will the land bring forth its bounty. No Israeli government is to give away any of our land ever again ... This is my message."
Despite Gaza's rich Jewish history, little is known of it to most people even as hundreds of lethal Palestinian missiles from Gaza fired by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and even now by the so-called Palestinian moderates of Fatah, land on civilian targets throughout Israel.
And how many people know that since the Jewish residents and villagers in Gaza were driven out in 2005, nearly 20,000 rockets have been fired at Israel with hardly a day free from its looming threat of death and destruction?
© Victor Sharpe
SOVEREIGNTY NOW OR NEVER
“Then said Satan: This besieged one, how shall I overcome him?
He has courage and ability, he has weapons and imagination.
“So he said: I shall not take his strength, nor muzzle nor bridle him.
Nor soften nor weaken his hands, only one thing I shall do;
“I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right.”
So wrote the Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, in his poem, Gone like a Dream. He was expressing his deep anxiety over the weakening resolve of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora to support the reconstituted Jewish state. This inevitably led to the fateful abandonment by so many Israeli politicians and successive governments of the need to include within the reconstituted Jewish state every inch of sovereign ancestral Jewish land from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan.
For 47 long years since the liberation of biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria from illegal Jordanian occupation - territory the world grotesquely prefers to call the West Bank - the beloved Jewish heartland has remained in a political limbo and not been fully or even partially annexed.
Israel’s foolish failure to take sovereign control of its own historical, physical and spiritual heartland has allowed a hostile world to thus assume that Israel itself does not believe it has legal sovereignty in the territory. Like Moshe Dayan’s calamitous decision to give away the keys of the Temple Mount to the Muslim Waqf, this betrayal of the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria has become a living nightmare for Israel. Both acts of searing stupidity could so easily have been avoided, but the seeming need by so many on the left in Israel to appease and placate the international corridors of power has had tragic consequences for the Jewish state.
Has it not been enough to have had to endure since 1922 that base betrayal by the British Colonial Office as it tore away from Jewish sovereignty all the land east of the River Jordan in order to create the artificial Arab entity called at first Trans-Jordan and later Jordan? That act by perfidious Albion left the Jewish people with only the land west of the River Jordan - a mere 17,500 square miles compared to the original Palestine Mandate on both sides of the Jordan extending to over 75,000 square miles.
It is within the remaining mere 40 miles width from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan that yet another Arab entity will be wrenched out of what little remains of the Land of Israel - a Muslim Arab terror state that has never existed in all of recorded history and which arrogates to itself the name Palestine.
A succession of Israeli governments and politicians - many debilitated by corrosive leftwing influences - have allowed so much of the Jewish ancestral and biblical heartland in Judea and Samaria to be disfigured by illegal and rampant building activity by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. The Arabs establish facts on the ground, encroach on state lands, and face little if any consequences from Israeli authorities.
But in stark and deplorable contrast, Jewish villages and villagers (not settlers and not settlements) in the liberated heartland of Judea and Samaria so often face every form of harassment and discrimination from their own Israeli government and politicians – even to the outrageous demolition of Jewish homes in the night with the resulting homelessness of Jewish families with young children.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recently stated that Israel’s Civil Administration, the body responsible for authorizing construction in the “West Bank” had been partially suspended because the United States demanded it, the news site nrg.co.il reported. Netanyahu, who met recently with mayors from 20 Jewish villages reportedly told the mayors that the he had resisted earlier Obama administration demands that “not a single brick be laid, not a single house be built.” And all this while the illegal Arab building frenzy goes unchecked with no doubt a wink and a nod from the White House and the State Department.
But a beacon of shining light remains undimmed.
Faced by radical leftwing NGOs who are supported by the limitless oil wealth of the Arab Persian Gulf regimes and confronted by vast sums showered upon the so-called Palestinian Authority by the European Union and the United Nations - all with the declared aim of demonizing Israel and pressuring Israeli governments to abandon its heartland and accept the delusional and suicidal Two State Solution - the work of two valiant women patriots, Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover, are living the Zionist vision.
Their organization, called the Women in Green, is doing yeoman work in stemming the tide of Palestinian Arab land grabs. I had the distinct privilege of seeing for myself with Nadia Matar the situation that obtains on the ground within Judea and Samaria.
Everywhere we drove, the sight of vast Palestinian Arab illegal building settlement activity smothering the hills and valleys of Judea was disheartening. The Government of Israel knows what is occurring but does nothing to prevent it, fearful always of incurring the wrath of the State Department and a hostile world.
I saw the hillsides of biblical Jewish Judea ripped open and turned into vast quarries from which enormous building blocks were gouged out and dumped onto empty fields; thus making yet more Arab facts on the ground. Some of these huge limestone blocks, torn from the Judean landscape, eventually are exported to the wealthy sheiks in the Persian Gulf states to erect their obscenely lavish palaces.
Many of the villas and veritable Arab mansions dotting the hills and valleys of Judea and Samaria stand empty, the result of vast inflows of Saudi and Persian Gulf Arab oil money, waiting to house the millions of Arabs who will descend upon a newly established Palestinian state ripped out of the Jewish heartland should Israel succumb to the existential threat of a Two-State-Solution.
Then there is Shdema. Here, Women in Green have won a small but significant victory against the Israeli government’s shameful decision to abandon a military base deep in the heart of what is called Area C, the 60% of the Land that is not occupied by the Palestinian Authority. Everywhere one looks from Shdema’s hilltop one sees the ever encroaching Arab settlements and facts on the ground. But for the persistent and valiant efforts of Women in Green, Area C which is Israeli controlled, would have been cut in half thus rendering it lost to the Jewish homeland.
As soon as the IDF base was originally abandoned, hordes of local Arabs gleefully descended upon it, tearing it apart in a frenzied orgy of hate. Only because of pressure applied by Women in Green did the Israeli authorities finally but reluctantly allow a renewed, albeit token, military presence again in Shdema and the advancing illegal Arab settlement activity was stopped.
Today, parts of the base have been restored which allows supporters of Women in Green, including Israeli politicians and rabbis, to attend meetings and conferences in Shdema. But the perilously narrow link comprising a width of mere yards now existing between the two parts of Area C, with Har Choma and Shdema in the north and the Jewish villages and towns of Tekoa, Kfar Eldad and Kfar Etzion in the south, remain an open invitation to the Arabs in the PA occupied Area A to grab it if they can.
For long decades, in the face of unrelenting Arab Muslim hostility and aggression, Jews were imbued with a deep conviction of the justice of their cause. Many still are and fight against an unremitting and hostile world that would consign Israel to the abyss, but far too many today have fallen away and been seduced by an overwhelming onslaught - not of military might - but by a war of ideas, however false and twisted those ideas are. The success of those lies has sapped the will of many and confused many more.
The Muslim Arabs have learned this lesson all too well for they have succeeded in doing what years of Arab and Islamist warfare and terror have failed to do. They have isolated the Jewish state as never before and won millions around the globe to their cause by demonizing Israel with the Goebbelian technique of the Big Lie. The result is a cascade of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel NGOs swarming over the Land like human locusts, aided and abetted by the ever pernicious Israeli Left.
What has become a microcosm of the battle waged to save Jewish sovereignty is taking place in the Fields of Netzer. Here is a large plot of land adjacent to the Jewish town of Elazar, hotly contested by the many NGO supporters of a Palestinian state on the one hand and by loyal and patriotic Israelis on the other who are committed to keeping Jewish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.
On the road to Netzer, we had passed a pumping station surrounded by a high chain link fence. This is taking water from the Judean aquifer for use solely by Arabs. It was built by US Aid and besides it was a large notice with the following words: “This project is a gift from the American people to the Palestinian people.” It was dated 2009, attesting to the length of time such NGOs have been perpetrating their activities in Jewish Judea.
All too often the tiny plots of Israeli and Jewish land at Netzer are sabotaged by Arabs and their mostly leftist European supporters. Trees planted on Jewish land are often torn up or cut down. These are the poisoned and bitter fruits resulting from what Mahmoud Abbas has planted in his viciously anti-Jewish Palestinian Authority media. This is also the lamentable outcome of the Oslo Accords - better called the Oslo War - so loved by the Left which gave the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians 40% of Judea and Samaria and nothing but oceans of Jewish blood and immense political pressure upon the Jewish state.
To return to the words of Natan Alterman. Satan is indeed busy. He hates the light of Israel. He hates the creativity, the progress and the freedoms that Israel spreads throughout the world. Above all, he hates the reconstituted Land of Israel and in particular the precious Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria.
The Women in Green and their supporters need all forms of financial and practical support from Jews, Christians, and all who embrace biblical history and the eternal promise made by the true owner of the Land, the Almighty, to the Jewish people. As Nadia pointed out to me, Women in Green understand that local battles are not going to save all of Judea and Samaria and thus they started four years ago the Sovereignty campaign, which includes conferences and the distribution of the Sovereignty journal in hundreds and thousands of copies all over Israel in Hebrew and English. www.ribonut.co.il
There is also an urgent need to overcome profound ignorance in a world fast succumbing to a false Arab narrative that would leave ancestral Jewish land deserted and in the hands of thieves. The time is long past due for Israeli sovereignty throughout Judea and Samaria, beginning with urgently annexing the 60% of it known as Area C. This is what motivates the blessed work of Women in Green.
The dark forces of Arab and Islamic hate, along with the legions of duped non-Muslim supporters in the West, will not prevail if they fail to extinguish the flickering candle of light in the world. Israel is that illuminating and flickering candle and will surely endure despite Satan’s eternal quest to snuff it out.
As it says in the Apocrypha’s Book of Esdras 2: “I shall light a candle of understanding in your heart, which shall not be put out.”
The hope is that many throughout the world - of all faiths or none - will more than ever support Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover and give Women in Green aid and comfort in their sacred work. They know the eternity of Israel; that it has sovereignty from the Great Sea to the Jordan River, and that the Jewish People are not “foreign conquerors” in their own ancestral and biblical land.
Let us also hope that Natan Alterman’s great fear expressed in the words of Satan, “I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right,” will never come true.
http://www.womeningreen.org/
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One, Two, and Three of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Victor’s books may be purchased or downloaded on line from the publisher www.lulu.com or from www.Amazon.com
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The nearly four thousand year old association of Jewish life in Gaza is little remembered in today's world. Of course people know of the biblical story of Samson being blinded by the now extinct Philistines and how he brought down the temple to their gods in Gaza. But very few have any idea of the deep Jewish history in the following millennia.
In the Second millennium BC, Gaza served as an administrative city and residence of the Egyptian governor of Canaan. The bible tells us that the Jewish patriarch, Isaac, dug wells in Gerar, an ancient site between Beer Sheba and Gaza, and in the 13th century BC the Philistines or Caphorites (Cretans) annihilated the Avite inhabitants of Gaza and made the city the largest of their five centers.
After the Israelite Exodus from Egypt and entry into the Promised Land, the tribe of Judah was given Gaza as a possession but did not include it fully in their territory. The bible reports in Joshua 15.47 and Judges 1:18 how the city of Gaza, and those of Ekron, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Gat became a possession of Israel but how some of them were among those places 'lying in the remaining country,' i.e., not fully possessed by the Israelites.
Down the centuries, Gaza was captured by Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians and later still by Alexander the Great who incorporated it into his growing empire in the 5th century BC. The strategic territory, lying as it does at the crossroads of two continents, Africa and Asia, has repeatedly fallen since earliest times to invading armies.
In 167 BC, Judah Maccabee led his Jewish fighters to victory over the Syrian-Greek pagan king, Antiochus Epiphanies. Jerusalem was liberated and the defiled Jewish Temple cleansed. The miracle of this event is now celebrated by Jews during the festival of Hanukah. But it was the Hasmonean king, Yochanan, who also liberated Gaza in 145 BC. He was the brother of Judah the Maccabee and it was their other brother, Simon, who sent Jews to repopulate Gaza and its environs.
In the Book of Maccabees: 1:15, it says:
"Not a strange land have we conquered, and not over the possessions of strangers have we ruled, but of the inheritance of our Fathers that was in the hands of the enemy and conquered by them unlawfully. And as for us, when we had the chance, we returned to ourselves the inheritance of our Fathers."
The Roman general, Pompey, conquered Judea in the First century BC and made Gaza a free "polis" but in 61 AD the Roman Governor, Gavinius, evicted the Jews. In the subsequent war against Roman occupation of Judea, between 67 and 70 AD, Jewish forces again liberated the town and its environs before suffering defeat at the hands of Rome's legions.
Continuing Roman excesses against the Jews led to the Second Jewish Revolt under the command of the charismatic Bar Kochba, known in Aramaic as Son of a Star. The Emperor Hadrian's legions destroyed the Jewish state in 135 AD, decimating the Jewish population in an enormous slaughter, and sending thousands into slavery and exile from the Roman slave markets of Gaza.
Under the subsequent harsh Byzantine rule, Gaza's restored Jewish community nevertheless managed to flourish and during the 4th century Gaza served as the primary port of commerce for the Jews of the Holy Land.
It is interesting to note that in 1967, archaeologists discovered the beautiful mosaic floor of a 6th century synagogue situated on the Gaza seashore, attesting to the size and prominence of the Jewish community of the time.
The great medieval kabbalist Rabbi Avraham Azoulai lived in Gaza where he authored his famed work, Hesed L'Avraham, along with a commentary on the Torah (the first five books of the bible). The Jewish inhabitants made Gaza a great center of study and towns and villages from Rafah to Yavne sprung up as centers of Talmudic learning.
Many Jews fled to Gaza at the end of the 15th century where they joined the Jewish community by working in various trades after escaping from the ravages of the Catholic Inquisition.
During the 17th century, Gaza was again home to a thriving Jewish community, which boasted its share of prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Israel Najara, author of Kah Ribbon Olam, the popular hymn sung in Jewish homes around the world every Sabbath. He served as Gaza's Chief Rabbi until his death in 1625. This century also saw the rise in Gaza of Shabbetai Zvi's pseudo messianic movement.
The great scholar, Rabbi Yaakov Emden, ruled centuries ago that Gaza is an intrinsic part of the Jewish people's national heritage. "Gaza and its environs are absolutely considered part of the Land of Israel," he wrote in his work, Mor U'ketziyah, adding, "there is no doubt that it is a mitzvah (commandment and blessing) to live there, as in any other part of the Land of Israel."
Over the millennia Jews have been expelled from Gaza by many different conquerors but have always managed to return. The Crusaders killed many Gazan Jews, leaving few survivors. Ottoman Turks ruled a vast empire from 1517 to 1917, including the geographical backwater known as Palestine. They also frequently expelled the Jewish residents but then allowed them to return. This pattern continued for centuries.
Napoleon, marching through Gaza from Egypt in 1799 failed to restrain many of his French soldiers who were joined by local Arabs in abusing the Jewish residents. As a result of Arab persecution, the ancient Jewish presence in Gaza and the nearby villages died out in the first years of the 19th century only to return yet again in the 1870s.
In August 1929, when Arab rioters threatened to slaughter Gaza's Jews – as they had in Hebron – the British army under the Palestine Mandate forced the community to evacuate their homes. In October 1946, on the night following Yom Kippur, the Gaza Jewish community of Kfar Darom was established on land corresponding to the biblical Jewish village of Darom. It lasted just a year and a half until the outbreak of Israel's War of Independence in 1948, when Egypt overran the Gaza Strip and occupied it.
In June 1967, in a war of self-defense, Israel liberated Gaza from Egyptian occupation, making it possible once again for Jews to reside there. In 2001, during Palestinian Authority control under Yasser Arafat and his Fatah organization, Kassam rocket attacks began to pound the restored Jewish communities in Gaza.
After Arafat's death, rocket fire continued under his Fatah successor, Mahmoud Abbas. But in 2005, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon forcefully evicted from their homes the nearly 10,000 Jewish villagers and farmers from Gaza as part of the Disengagement Plan. At the time, Sharon explained the purpose of the Israeli pull-out:
"These steps will increase security for the residents of Israel and relieve the pressure on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and security forces in fulfilling the difficult tasks they are faced with. The Disengagement Plan is meant to grant maximum security and minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians."
Sharon had believed that by removing the flourishing Jewish villages and farms from Gaza, the Arab residents would build a civilized and peaceful society, thus proving to both Israel and the world that they could live in peace with the Jewish state. It was not to be and Sharon's hopes now lie shattered.
In an election pushed by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza voted eagerly for Hamas and against Fatah knowing full well that Hamas fundamentalist ideology calls for the destruction of Israel or any non-Muslim state existing in territory previously conquered in the name of Allah. Hamas will thus never live in peace with Israel, a Jewish state, even though the Jews are the indigenous and native people of the region and predate Islam by millennia.
Will the pattern that has existed for thousands of years continue; a sequence of Jewish exile from Gaza, followed by inevitable restoration? Those Jews who were driven out by the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and his successor, Ehud Olmert, now wait as refugees for the opportunity to again return.
One such Israeli refugee from Gaza, Rachel Saperstein, spoke at a Jerusalem Conference held in Israel in 2009. At the time, she lived with her husband, a disabled terror victim, in a rundown camp along with five hundred other Jewish families driven from their homes located throughout the Gaza Strip.
In her speech, she lamented that not a thing now grows in the village she was forced to abandon during the Disengagement Plan. The greenhouses that were given freely to the Palestinian Arabs were trashed by them. She added:
"We know the reason why. Only when the Jews return to their land will the land bring forth its bounty. No Israeli government is to give away any of our land ever again ... This is my message."
Despite Gaza's rich Jewish history, little is known of it to most people even as hundreds of lethal Palestinian missiles from Gaza fired by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and even now by the so-called Palestinian moderates of Fatah, land on civilian targets throughout Israel.
And how many people know that since the Jewish residents and villagers in Gaza were driven out in 2005, nearly 20,000 rockets have been fired at Israel with hardly a day free from its looming threat of death and destruction?
© Victor Sharpe
SOVEREIGNTY NOW OR NEVER
“Then said Satan: This besieged one, how shall I overcome him?
He has courage and ability, he has weapons and imagination.
“So he said: I shall not take his strength, nor muzzle nor bridle him.
Nor soften nor weaken his hands, only one thing I shall do;
“I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right.”
So wrote the Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, in his poem, Gone like a Dream. He was expressing his deep anxiety over the weakening resolve of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora to support the reconstituted Jewish state. This inevitably led to the fateful abandonment by so many Israeli politicians and successive governments of the need to include within the reconstituted Jewish state every inch of sovereign ancestral Jewish land from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan.
For 47 long years since the liberation of biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria from illegal Jordanian occupation - territory the world grotesquely prefers to call the West Bank - the beloved Jewish heartland has remained in a political limbo and not been fully or even partially annexed.
Israel’s foolish failure to take sovereign control of its own historical, physical and spiritual heartland has allowed a hostile world to thus assume that Israel itself does not believe it has legal sovereignty in the territory. Like Moshe Dayan’s calamitous decision to give away the keys of the Temple Mount to the Muslim Waqf, this betrayal of the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria has become a living nightmare for Israel. Both acts of searing stupidity could so easily have been avoided, but the seeming need by so many on the left in Israel to appease and placate the international corridors of power has had tragic consequences for the Jewish state.
Has it not been enough to have had to endure since 1922 that base betrayal by the British Colonial Office as it tore away from Jewish sovereignty all the land east of the River Jordan in order to create the artificial Arab entity called at first Trans-Jordan and later Jordan? That act by perfidious Albion left the Jewish people with only the land west of the River Jordan - a mere 17,500 square miles compared to the original Palestine Mandate on both sides of the Jordan extending to over 75,000 square miles.
It is within the remaining mere 40 miles width from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan that yet another Arab entity will be wrenched out of what little remains of the Land of Israel - a Muslim Arab terror state that has never existed in all of recorded history and which arrogates to itself the name Palestine.
A succession of Israeli governments and politicians - many debilitated by corrosive leftwing influences - have allowed so much of the Jewish ancestral and biblical heartland in Judea and Samaria to be disfigured by illegal and rampant building activity by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. The Arabs establish facts on the ground, encroach on state lands, and face little if any consequences from Israeli authorities.
But in stark and deplorable contrast, Jewish villages and villagers (not settlers and not settlements) in the liberated heartland of Judea and Samaria so often face every form of harassment and discrimination from their own Israeli government and politicians – even to the outrageous demolition of Jewish homes in the night with the resulting homelessness of Jewish families with young children.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recently stated that Israel’s Civil Administration, the body responsible for authorizing construction in the “West Bank” had been partially suspended because the United States demanded it, the news site nrg.co.il reported. Netanyahu, who met recently with mayors from 20 Jewish villages reportedly told the mayors that the he had resisted earlier Obama administration demands that “not a single brick be laid, not a single house be built.” And all this while the illegal Arab building frenzy goes unchecked with no doubt a wink and a nod from the White House and the State Department.
But a beacon of shining light remains undimmed.
Faced by radical leftwing NGOs who are supported by the limitless oil wealth of the Arab Persian Gulf regimes and confronted by vast sums showered upon the so-called Palestinian Authority by the European Union and the United Nations - all with the declared aim of demonizing Israel and pressuring Israeli governments to abandon its heartland and accept the delusional and suicidal Two State Solution - the work of two valiant women patriots, Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover, are living the Zionist vision.
Their organization, called the Women in Green, is doing yeoman work in stemming the tide of Palestinian Arab land grabs. I had the distinct privilege of seeing for myself with Nadia Matar the situation that obtains on the ground within Judea and Samaria.
Everywhere we drove, the sight of vast Palestinian Arab illegal building settlement activity smothering the hills and valleys of Judea was disheartening. The Government of Israel knows what is occurring but does nothing to prevent it, fearful always of incurring the wrath of the State Department and a hostile world.
I saw the hillsides of biblical Jewish Judea ripped open and turned into vast quarries from which enormous building blocks were gouged out and dumped onto empty fields; thus making yet more Arab facts on the ground. Some of these huge limestone blocks, torn from the Judean landscape, eventually are exported to the wealthy sheiks in the Persian Gulf states to erect their obscenely lavish palaces.
Many of the villas and veritable Arab mansions dotting the hills and valleys of Judea and Samaria stand empty, the result of vast inflows of Saudi and Persian Gulf Arab oil money, waiting to house the millions of Arabs who will descend upon a newly established Palestinian state ripped out of the Jewish heartland should Israel succumb to the existential threat of a Two-State-Solution.
Then there is Shdema. Here, Women in Green have won a small but significant victory against the Israeli government’s shameful decision to abandon a military base deep in the heart of what is called Area C, the 60% of the Land that is not occupied by the Palestinian Authority. Everywhere one looks from Shdema’s hilltop one sees the ever encroaching Arab settlements and facts on the ground. But for the persistent and valiant efforts of Women in Green, Area C which is Israeli controlled, would have been cut in half thus rendering it lost to the Jewish homeland.
As soon as the IDF base was originally abandoned, hordes of local Arabs gleefully descended upon it, tearing it apart in a frenzied orgy of hate. Only because of pressure applied by Women in Green did the Israeli authorities finally but reluctantly allow a renewed, albeit token, military presence again in Shdema and the advancing illegal Arab settlement activity was stopped.
Today, parts of the base have been restored which allows supporters of Women in Green, including Israeli politicians and rabbis, to attend meetings and conferences in Shdema. But the perilously narrow link comprising a width of mere yards now existing between the two parts of Area C, with Har Choma and Shdema in the north and the Jewish villages and towns of Tekoa, Kfar Eldad and Kfar Etzion in the south, remain an open invitation to the Arabs in the PA occupied Area A to grab it if they can.
For long decades, in the face of unrelenting Arab Muslim hostility and aggression, Jews were imbued with a deep conviction of the justice of their cause. Many still are and fight against an unremitting and hostile world that would consign Israel to the abyss, but far too many today have fallen away and been seduced by an overwhelming onslaught - not of military might - but by a war of ideas, however false and twisted those ideas are. The success of those lies has sapped the will of many and confused many more.
The Muslim Arabs have learned this lesson all too well for they have succeeded in doing what years of Arab and Islamist warfare and terror have failed to do. They have isolated the Jewish state as never before and won millions around the globe to their cause by demonizing Israel with the Goebbelian technique of the Big Lie. The result is a cascade of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel NGOs swarming over the Land like human locusts, aided and abetted by the ever pernicious Israeli Left.
What has become a microcosm of the battle waged to save Jewish sovereignty is taking place in the Fields of Netzer. Here is a large plot of land adjacent to the Jewish town of Elazar, hotly contested by the many NGO supporters of a Palestinian state on the one hand and by loyal and patriotic Israelis on the other who are committed to keeping Jewish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.
On the road to Netzer, we had passed a pumping station surrounded by a high chain link fence. This is taking water from the Judean aquifer for use solely by Arabs. It was built by US Aid and besides it was a large notice with the following words: “This project is a gift from the American people to the Palestinian people.” It was dated 2009, attesting to the length of time such NGOs have been perpetrating their activities in Jewish Judea.
All too often the tiny plots of Israeli and Jewish land at Netzer are sabotaged by Arabs and their mostly leftist European supporters. Trees planted on Jewish land are often torn up or cut down. These are the poisoned and bitter fruits resulting from what Mahmoud Abbas has planted in his viciously anti-Jewish Palestinian Authority media. This is also the lamentable outcome of the Oslo Accords - better called the Oslo War - so loved by the Left which gave the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians 40% of Judea and Samaria and nothing but oceans of Jewish blood and immense political pressure upon the Jewish state.
To return to the words of Natan Alterman. Satan is indeed busy. He hates the light of Israel. He hates the creativity, the progress and the freedoms that Israel spreads throughout the world. Above all, he hates the reconstituted Land of Israel and in particular the precious Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria.
The Women in Green and their supporters need all forms of financial and practical support from Jews, Christians, and all who embrace biblical history and the eternal promise made by the true owner of the Land, the Almighty, to the Jewish people. As Nadia pointed out to me, Women in Green understand that local battles are not going to save all of Judea and Samaria and thus they started four years ago the Sovereignty campaign, which includes conferences and the distribution of the Sovereignty journal in hundreds and thousands of copies all over Israel in Hebrew and English. www.ribonut.co.il
There is also an urgent need to overcome profound ignorance in a world fast succumbing to a false Arab narrative that would leave ancestral Jewish land deserted and in the hands of thieves. The time is long past due for Israeli sovereignty throughout Judea and Samaria, beginning with urgently annexing the 60% of it known as Area C. This is what motivates the blessed work of Women in Green.
The dark forces of Arab and Islamic hate, along with the legions of duped non-Muslim supporters in the West, will not prevail if they fail to extinguish the flickering candle of light in the world. Israel is that illuminating and flickering candle and will surely endure despite Satan’s eternal quest to snuff it out.
As it says in the Apocrypha’s Book of Esdras 2: “I shall light a candle of understanding in your heart, which shall not be put out.”
The hope is that many throughout the world - of all faiths or none - will more than ever support Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover and give Women in Green aid and comfort in their sacred work. They know the eternity of Israel; that it has sovereignty from the Great Sea to the Jordan River, and that the Jewish People are not “foreign conquerors” in their own ancestral and biblical land.
Let us also hope that Natan Alterman’s great fear expressed in the words of Satan, “I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right,” will never come true.
http://www.womeningreen.org/
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One, Two, and Three of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Victor’s books may be purchased or downloaded on line from the publisher www.lulu.com or from www.Amazon.com
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Bullying Israel But Bowing to Tyrants
Published: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 4:56 AM
This may be the excruciatingly worst time for Prime Minister Netanyahu to be visiting President Obama who clearly and, perhaps painfully, is aware of the ridicule many in the international corridors of power are heaping upon him.
Victor SharpeVictor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer with many published articles in leading national and international conservative websites and magazines. Born and educated in England, he has been a broadcaster and has authored several books including a collection of short stories under the title The Blue Hour. His three-volume set of in-depth studies on the threats from resurgent Islam to Israel, the West and to Judeo-Christian civilization is titled, Politicide: The Attempted Murder of the Jewish State. www.amazon.com
It is not beyond credulity that Obama will display brute force against Netanyahu – something he has assiduously refrained from doing with respect any other nation state, especially the world’s tyrants.
It is glaringly obvious that in five short years President Barack Hussein Obama has made U.S. foreign policy a figure of ridicule. This president’s red lines have come and gone and left America’s loyal allies, particularly Israel, deeply dismayed and apprehensive. Enemies have been immensely emboldened as the erstwhile policeman of the world has become in the eyes of many a paper tiger.
Whether this was perpetrated deliberately by Obama and his minions or is a display of utter ineptitude remains to be seen. What is happening now with the Ukraine is a de facto annexation by Putin’s Russia, first of the Crimea, with all its vital naval facilities at Sevastapol and, perhaps much of the eastern part of Ukraine.
The strategic control and annexation of Sevastopol, this preeminent warm water port, allows the Russian fleet the wherewithal to control not only the Black Sea but also entry into the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Indeed, Obama’s mishandling of the Egyptian “Arab Winter” has allowed Russia to oust American influence in that strategic area of the Middle East and return the situation to the much earlier period of the Soviet Union’s alliance with Gamal Nasser and, for a time, Anwar Sadat.
In reviewing Obama’s foreign policy disasters, we can add the Libyan debacle (the appalling Benghazi murders by Al Qaeda of the Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador); we can add the pathetic red line Obama warned the Assad regime in Syria not to cross but which disgracefully dissolved into the Syrian sands; we can add the disaster that is now Iraq as it falls remorselessly under Iranian influence; we can revisit Obama’s refusal to support the Iranian people as they rose up against the Iranian fundamentalist regime; we can refer to the ongoing failure by this president to give the go ahead for the Keystone pipeline or his rejection of fracking on public lands, which would make America totally independent of the Arab oil cartel; and we could look at the suffering people in Venezuela who, like the Iranian masses before them, are today pleading for American assistance to help them shake off their oppressors but who, again, are being greeted with deafening silence from the man in the Oval Office.
So, yes, the world is fearful of what the international bullies, like Russia, China and Iran, may yet do, but sees a United States rushing to reduce its armed forces to a level not seen since before World War Two.
This, then, may be the excruciatingly worst time for Prime Minister Netanyahu to be visiting President Obama who clearly and, perhaps painfully, is aware of the ridicule many in the international corridors of power are heaping upon him. If Obama cannot display force against the thugdoms and the world’s bullies and human rights violators then it may well be that he will compensate by imposing bullying threats and savage sanctions against tiny and embattled Israel – the only democracy in the benighted Middle East.
Knowing as he does that there are many in the world who share an animus towards the Jewish state, and having been associated all his life with anti-Israel leftists and Islamists, it is not beyond credulity that Obama will display brute force against Netanyahu – something he has assiduously refrained from doing with respect any other nation state, especially the world’s tyrants.
This is the great test that Netanyahu may well face. Will he display the same dismissive attitude towards the Oval Office occupant that most of the world now does, or will he be the lone head of state who buckles?
But this is also a momentous opportunity for the Israeli Prime Minister to confront Obama and inform him that, finally, the ancestral and Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria will not be abandoned and handed over to a terrorist entity whatever name it chooses to take, be it Palestine or Humpty Dumpty land.
Netanyahu, in a previous premiership, already gave away the second most holy Jewish city - Hevron - and he must not remotely now entertainthe present day blandishments of Obama and Kerry into losing Jerusalem by agreeing to allow the Arabs a capital in the holiest of all Jewish cities and its eternal 3,000 year old capital.
I fear that President Obama may well take the opportunity of applying brutal force against Israel (America’s truest ally) as a counterweight to his abysmal ineffectiveness against the bad actors in the international arena.
The next few days and weeks may well be a time of Jewish glory or of generational heartbreak.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of the acclaimed trilogy, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
This may be the excruciatingly worst time for Prime Minister Netanyahu to be visiting President Obama who clearly and, perhaps painfully, is aware of the ridicule many in the international corridors of power are heaping upon him.
Victor SharpeVictor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer with many published articles in leading national and international conservative websites and magazines. Born and educated in England, he has been a broadcaster and has authored several books including a collection of short stories under the title The Blue Hour. His three-volume set of in-depth studies on the threats from resurgent Islam to Israel, the West and to Judeo-Christian civilization is titled, Politicide: The Attempted Murder of the Jewish State. www.amazon.com
It is not beyond credulity that Obama will display brute force against Netanyahu – something he has assiduously refrained from doing with respect any other nation state, especially the world’s tyrants.
It is glaringly obvious that in five short years President Barack Hussein Obama has made U.S. foreign policy a figure of ridicule. This president’s red lines have come and gone and left America’s loyal allies, particularly Israel, deeply dismayed and apprehensive. Enemies have been immensely emboldened as the erstwhile policeman of the world has become in the eyes of many a paper tiger.
Whether this was perpetrated deliberately by Obama and his minions or is a display of utter ineptitude remains to be seen. What is happening now with the Ukraine is a de facto annexation by Putin’s Russia, first of the Crimea, with all its vital naval facilities at Sevastapol and, perhaps much of the eastern part of Ukraine.
The strategic control and annexation of Sevastopol, this preeminent warm water port, allows the Russian fleet the wherewithal to control not only the Black Sea but also entry into the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Indeed, Obama’s mishandling of the Egyptian “Arab Winter” has allowed Russia to oust American influence in that strategic area of the Middle East and return the situation to the much earlier period of the Soviet Union’s alliance with Gamal Nasser and, for a time, Anwar Sadat.
In reviewing Obama’s foreign policy disasters, we can add the Libyan debacle (the appalling Benghazi murders by Al Qaeda of the Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador); we can add the pathetic red line Obama warned the Assad regime in Syria not to cross but which disgracefully dissolved into the Syrian sands; we can add the disaster that is now Iraq as it falls remorselessly under Iranian influence; we can revisit Obama’s refusal to support the Iranian people as they rose up against the Iranian fundamentalist regime; we can refer to the ongoing failure by this president to give the go ahead for the Keystone pipeline or his rejection of fracking on public lands, which would make America totally independent of the Arab oil cartel; and we could look at the suffering people in Venezuela who, like the Iranian masses before them, are today pleading for American assistance to help them shake off their oppressors but who, again, are being greeted with deafening silence from the man in the Oval Office.
So, yes, the world is fearful of what the international bullies, like Russia, China and Iran, may yet do, but sees a United States rushing to reduce its armed forces to a level not seen since before World War Two.
This, then, may be the excruciatingly worst time for Prime Minister Netanyahu to be visiting President Obama who clearly and, perhaps painfully, is aware of the ridicule many in the international corridors of power are heaping upon him. If Obama cannot display force against the thugdoms and the world’s bullies and human rights violators then it may well be that he will compensate by imposing bullying threats and savage sanctions against tiny and embattled Israel – the only democracy in the benighted Middle East.
Knowing as he does that there are many in the world who share an animus towards the Jewish state, and having been associated all his life with anti-Israel leftists and Islamists, it is not beyond credulity that Obama will display brute force against Netanyahu – something he has assiduously refrained from doing with respect any other nation state, especially the world’s tyrants.
This is the great test that Netanyahu may well face. Will he display the same dismissive attitude towards the Oval Office occupant that most of the world now does, or will he be the lone head of state who buckles?
But this is also a momentous opportunity for the Israeli Prime Minister to confront Obama and inform him that, finally, the ancestral and Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria will not be abandoned and handed over to a terrorist entity whatever name it chooses to take, be it Palestine or Humpty Dumpty land.
Netanyahu, in a previous premiership, already gave away the second most holy Jewish city - Hevron - and he must not remotely now entertainthe present day blandishments of Obama and Kerry into losing Jerusalem by agreeing to allow the Arabs a capital in the holiest of all Jewish cities and its eternal 3,000 year old capital.
I fear that President Obama may well take the opportunity of applying brutal force against Israel (America’s truest ally) as a counterweight to his abysmal ineffectiveness against the bad actors in the international arena.
The next few days and weeks may well be a time of Jewish glory or of generational heartbreak.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of the acclaimed trilogy, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Days of Infamy
by VICTOR SHARPE February 20, 2014
The infamy perpetrated by the Muslim Waqf, occurring daily upon Jerusalem's Temple Mount, cries out for speedy denunciation by the entire world. Tragically it will not happen for a veritable veil of deception has fallen across what is left of the West.
As Giulio Meotti, a journalist with the Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, wrote back in 2012: "The Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all archaeological evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the Temple Mount. The Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, a Waqf sign says "The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.
"Today Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim observers supervising visits, Israeli police, to their shame, have frequently arrested Jews for various "violations," such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper."
What may well be one of the worst crimes against civilization is the ruthless and relentless destruction of Jewish and Christian artifacts and antiquities by the Moslem authorities, the Waqf, who were foolishly given permission by Israel's Moshe Dayan to control the Temple Mount in 1967.
This was done as one of numberless concession by the Jewish state to encourage Muslim peaceful coexistence. It was, and remains, a hope as delusional as a mirage in the desert. Remember the Taliban destruction of the 2,500 year old statues of Buddha in Afghanistan? It is, tragically, the same Muslim arrogance and hatred for all other religions.
Despite Israeli protests, the Waqf is in the process of deliberately desecrating tons of precious archaeologically rich soil. One archaeologist described the disturbed sites as "an archaeological crime" and an assault upon Jewish and Christian history.
Professor Gabriel Barkai, and other Israeli archeologists and volunteers, desperately search through the tons of earth and rubble unceremoniously dumped by the Muslim Authorities in the nearby Kidron Valley. The archaeologists and their helpers have uncovered thousands of rare and important artifacts from the First and Second Temple periods, as well as from Roman and Byzantine periods, among them a rare bulla dating from the First Temple Period.
But each precious find, ripped and torn from its age old location upon the Temple Mount by Palestinian Muslims, fatally compromises what each item can tell us: a most grievous and barbarous sin against history and civilization.
The catastrophe is continuing even now as the Muslim Waqf remorselessly desecrates and gleefully destroys all non-Muslim artifacts and antiquities and as much evidence as it can of Judeo-Christian civilization upon Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
The fear of Islam is so debilitating in Europe that governments are falling over themselves to placate and appease Islamic demands and are fearful of condemning the Palestinian and Muslim desecration on the Temple Mount. Jews who ascend the Mount are enjoined by their faith to do so with the utmost consideration for the sanctity of this holiest of all Jewish religious sites in the world.
But Muslims often stream out of the Al Aksa mosque filled with unholy violence after hearing hateful sermons at Friday prayers. Very often, young thugs throw rocks down upon the heads of Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. Such is the venom by those who follow the "religion of peace."
The fact that young Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, desecrate the site by playing football upon it indicates how hypocritical are the Muslim claims that this is their third "holiest" Islamic site. The very purpose of building the two mosques upon the very place where the two Jewish temples stood and later a church was always a political Islamic decision in order to de-legitimize both Jewish and Christian associations with it and present to the world the "triumph" of Islam over Judaism and Christianity.
Sadly, by bowing to the dictates of the notorious Muslim Waqf, the present persecution of Jews upon their holiest site will continue. As if the wholesale destruction of Jewish antiquities - a crime against history and religion - is not a calamity by itself, the so-called Palestinian Authority has just in the last week or so now also demanded that even the Western Wall, known as the Kotel, be given to them.
We should remember that during the 19 years the Jordanians illegally occupied Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank), and, in particular, the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, Jews were forbidden to pray at the Kotel, which the Jordanians deliberately used as a rubbish dump.
Christian pilgrims, during the 19 year old illegal Jordanian occupation, had to walk along a disgusting garbage strewn Via Dolorosa. Today, under Israeli administration, all faiths are free to worship without hindrance and with full respect except, of course, where the Muslim Waqf exerts its noxious influence.
In addition to the disrespect shown Christian pilgrims under the Jordanian occupation, 57 ancient synagogues were destroyed in the Old City after the Jewish residents had been driven out and the Jewish gravestones upon the Mount of Olives desecrated and used as latrines by the Jordanian Arab Legion.
That will be the fate again of all Jewish and Christian sites if the Palestinian Authority occupies East Jerusalem and again divides the city, which the Obama Administration and the Kerry State Department, along with the European Union and the UN are pushing for.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including The Blue Hour, a collection of short stories, and Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/days-of-infamy?f=must_reads#ixzz2tz0K15FO
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
by VICTOR SHARPE February 20, 2014
The infamy perpetrated by the Muslim Waqf, occurring daily upon Jerusalem's Temple Mount, cries out for speedy denunciation by the entire world. Tragically it will not happen for a veritable veil of deception has fallen across what is left of the West.
As Giulio Meotti, a journalist with the Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, wrote back in 2012: "The Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all archaeological evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the Temple Mount. The Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, a Waqf sign says "The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.
"Today Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim observers supervising visits, Israeli police, to their shame, have frequently arrested Jews for various "violations," such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper."
What may well be one of the worst crimes against civilization is the ruthless and relentless destruction of Jewish and Christian artifacts and antiquities by the Moslem authorities, the Waqf, who were foolishly given permission by Israel's Moshe Dayan to control the Temple Mount in 1967.
This was done as one of numberless concession by the Jewish state to encourage Muslim peaceful coexistence. It was, and remains, a hope as delusional as a mirage in the desert. Remember the Taliban destruction of the 2,500 year old statues of Buddha in Afghanistan? It is, tragically, the same Muslim arrogance and hatred for all other religions.
Despite Israeli protests, the Waqf is in the process of deliberately desecrating tons of precious archaeologically rich soil. One archaeologist described the disturbed sites as "an archaeological crime" and an assault upon Jewish and Christian history.
Professor Gabriel Barkai, and other Israeli archeologists and volunteers, desperately search through the tons of earth and rubble unceremoniously dumped by the Muslim Authorities in the nearby Kidron Valley. The archaeologists and their helpers have uncovered thousands of rare and important artifacts from the First and Second Temple periods, as well as from Roman and Byzantine periods, among them a rare bulla dating from the First Temple Period.
But each precious find, ripped and torn from its age old location upon the Temple Mount by Palestinian Muslims, fatally compromises what each item can tell us: a most grievous and barbarous sin against history and civilization.
The catastrophe is continuing even now as the Muslim Waqf remorselessly desecrates and gleefully destroys all non-Muslim artifacts and antiquities and as much evidence as it can of Judeo-Christian civilization upon Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
The fear of Islam is so debilitating in Europe that governments are falling over themselves to placate and appease Islamic demands and are fearful of condemning the Palestinian and Muslim desecration on the Temple Mount. Jews who ascend the Mount are enjoined by their faith to do so with the utmost consideration for the sanctity of this holiest of all Jewish religious sites in the world.
But Muslims often stream out of the Al Aksa mosque filled with unholy violence after hearing hateful sermons at Friday prayers. Very often, young thugs throw rocks down upon the heads of Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. Such is the venom by those who follow the "religion of peace."
The fact that young Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, desecrate the site by playing football upon it indicates how hypocritical are the Muslim claims that this is their third "holiest" Islamic site. The very purpose of building the two mosques upon the very place where the two Jewish temples stood and later a church was always a political Islamic decision in order to de-legitimize both Jewish and Christian associations with it and present to the world the "triumph" of Islam over Judaism and Christianity.
Sadly, by bowing to the dictates of the notorious Muslim Waqf, the present persecution of Jews upon their holiest site will continue. As if the wholesale destruction of Jewish antiquities - a crime against history and religion - is not a calamity by itself, the so-called Palestinian Authority has just in the last week or so now also demanded that even the Western Wall, known as the Kotel, be given to them.
We should remember that during the 19 years the Jordanians illegally occupied Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank), and, in particular, the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, Jews were forbidden to pray at the Kotel, which the Jordanians deliberately used as a rubbish dump.
Christian pilgrims, during the 19 year old illegal Jordanian occupation, had to walk along a disgusting garbage strewn Via Dolorosa. Today, under Israeli administration, all faiths are free to worship without hindrance and with full respect except, of course, where the Muslim Waqf exerts its noxious influence.
In addition to the disrespect shown Christian pilgrims under the Jordanian occupation, 57 ancient synagogues were destroyed in the Old City after the Jewish residents had been driven out and the Jewish gravestones upon the Mount of Olives desecrated and used as latrines by the Jordanian Arab Legion.
That will be the fate again of all Jewish and Christian sites if the Palestinian Authority occupies East Jerusalem and again divides the city, which the Obama Administration and the Kerry State Department, along with the European Union and the UN are pushing for.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including The Blue Hour, a collection of short stories, and Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/days-of-infamy?f=must_reads#ixzz2tz0K15FO
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
THE COUNTERFEIT ARABS
by Victor Sharpe
They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War 1.
Both of these European powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey's empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain have left a resulting legacy of war and violence ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine.
But there is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history — let alone an Arab independent state of Palestine.
You will search in vain for Palestinian Arab coinage or Palestinian Arab archaeological artefacts specifically related to any Palestinian Arab king or ancient leader. But what you will find are coins, pottery, ancient scrolls, all providing conclusive, empirical and millennial evidence of Jewish civilization dotting the land known correctly as Israel — not Palestine.
The present-day so-called "Palestinians" are an Arab people sharing an overwhelmingly Muslim Arab culture, ethnicity and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions.
Yasser Arafat, the arch-terrorist, who imposed himself undemocratically upon the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, was fond of creating the absurd myth that Palestinian Arabs were descended from the Canaanites and the Philistines. As we know, the bigger the lie the bigger the number of people will believe it. And so Arafat twisted history in order to disinherit the indigenous native people of the land: the Jews.
Canaanites, without doubt, were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel before the first Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, settled there, and before Moses brought their descendants back to the Promised Land during the Exodus from Egypt.
The Canaanites lived both along the coastal plain and in the mountain regions, which run like a spine down the biblical territory of Samaria and Judea. Their language was similar to Hebrew and their territory stretched north into present day Lebanon and included the present day Golan Heights.
The Canaanites were finally subdued during the reign of King David. Most Canaanites were gradually assimilated into the Jewish people and were no longer a distinguishable people.
After the 8th century BC, the Canaanites no longer existed and the only people, therefore, who can trace back an historic link to ancient Canaan are the Jews, not the Palestinian Arabs. So much for Arafat's nonsense and for the on-going attempts by today's Palestinian Arabs, financed by vast Arab oil wealth, to hoodwink the world.
The term "Philistines" provides the source from which the term "Palestinians" is derived. Like the Arabs who gave themselves the concocted name "Palestinian," the Philistines were alien peoples who entered the land from other lands, mostly from the Mediterranean island of Crete. That is why they were also known as the Sea People.
palestinian flags
THE MODERN "PALESTINIAN ARABS" are primarily the descendants of those itinerant Arabs who illegally flooded British Mandatory Palestine from Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). They were attracted during the early decades of the 20th century by new employment opportunities provided by the Jewish pioneers, whose heroic efforts were turning the desert green again and restoring centuries of neglect that the land had endured under a succession of alien occupiers.
Britain, during its Mandate over the territory, turned a blind eye to the flood of illegal Arab aliens entering, while at the same time often arbitrarily limiting Jewish immigration into their ancient, biblical and ancestral homeland. This was a betrayal of the Mandate given to Britain to facilitate a Jewish Homeland in the geographical territory known as Palestine.
The Philistines were non-Semitic peoples who had entered the land from their homes throughout the Aegean Islands in general and from Crete in particular. These ancient Cretans arrived in Southern Canaan and along the Egyptian coastline and were known as "Pelestim and Keretim" by the Hebrew tribes. It appears that their first settlement may have been Gaza. Later they settled in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gat and Ekron: the Pentapolis.
Their territory was primarily along the coastal Mediterranean; interestingly, a territory not dissimilar to the present day Gaza Strip. They attempted at different times to invade Judah but were turned back by the various Jewish biblical heroes and finally defeated by King David. From that time onwards they were diminished as a threat and as a separate people, finally disappearing from history and any "Palestinian" Arab attempt to claim a lineage with them is as absurd as that of links with the early Canaanites.
Moving fast forward to 73 AD, the first attempt of the Jews to reclaim their independence from the repressive yoke of Roman occupation ended when Jewish warriors and their families fled to the fortress of Masada from Jerusalem. The Romans had destroyed the Jewish capital city along with the Second Jewish Temple.
Historically documented and universally recognized, Masada, which rises to great height overlooking the Dead Sea, is where the heroic last stand took place and where the surviving warriors and their families took their own lives rather than be sent as slaves throughout the mighty Roman Empire. The Land where these stirring and epochal events took place was in the province known as Judæa. There is absolutely no mention of any place called "Palestine" before that time.
After the suppression of the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 AD against the Roman occupation, the Emperor Hadrian replaced the name of Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew from where the name Yehudim, Jews, originates) to Syria-Palæstina after the "Philistines" who were the ancient enemies of the Israelites. Hadrian did so with the explicit purpose of effacing any trace of Jewish history.
Ancient Romans, as well as so-called Palestinian Arabs, have fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptural prophecy that declares: "They lay crafty plans against Your People... they say: 'come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more'." — Tehilim 83:3-4 (Psalm 83:3-4). They failed, as Israel is reconstituted as a modern Jewish state in its ancestral and biblical homeland.
No such name as Palestine occurs in any ancient document. It is not written in the Bible, neither in the Hebrew Scriptures nor in the Christian Testament, not even in Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Seleucian or other Greek sources. There is no "Palestinian" people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans that invented the term.
If "Palestinians" allegedly are the historic inhabitants of the Holy Land, why did they not fight for independence from Roman occupation as Jews did? How is it possible that not a single "Palestinian" leader revolted against the Roman invaders or is mentioned in any historic record?
Why is there no Palestinian rebel group mentioned, as for example the Jewish Zealots? Why does every historic document mention the Jews as the native and aboriginal inhabitants, and the Greeks, Romans and others as foreigners dwelling in Judea; but no "Palestinian" people, neither as native or as foreigner? What is more, there is no reference to any "Palestinian" people in the Koran, although Muslims claim that their prophet was once in al-Aksa (meaning the farthest place) which Muslims, for political purposes, chose to be Jerusalem — an event not even mentioned in the Koran.
Saladin, a Kurd, knew the Jews and invited them to resettle in Jerusalem. He had no trouble in recognizing Jerusalem as their eternal capital city and the territory as their rightful Homeland. But he did not know any so-called Palestinians and to claim otherwise that Palestinians are the original people of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is not only counter to secular history but also is opposed to Islamic history.
The so-called "Palestinians" who claim Jerusalem want it so that they can take it away from the Jews for whom Jerusalem, known also as Zion, is the eternal, 3,000 year old Jewish capital.
Perhaps what links the modern day Arabs who call themselves "Palestinians" with the ancient Philistines is that both are invaders. The Philistines wanted to take from the Israelites the Holy Ark of the Covenant, while today's so-called "Palestinian Arabs" want to take from the Jewish people the Holy City of the Covenant — Jerusalem.
A wealth of information about this and related subjects may be found at the following website. I encourage all to read it: http://www.think-israel.org/archives/oldindex.html#featured"
SO LET ME CLOSE, BEGINNING WITH THE WORDS of a Christian Arab, Joseph Farah, who has made his home here in America and who knows of what he writes:
"There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of one per cent of the landmass. But that's too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today... No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough." — Joseph Farah, "Myths of the Middle East"
Let us hear what other Arabs have said:
"There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it." — Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937
"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not". — Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946
"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria." — Representative of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956
Concerning the Holy Land, the chairman of the Syrian Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919 stated: — "The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 AD hardly lasted, as such, 22 years."
The preceding declarations by Arab politicians were issued before 1967 as they had not the slightest knowledge of the existence of any Palestinian people.
How and when did they change their mind and decide that such people existed?
When the State of Israel was reborn in 1948 the Arabs had still not discovered that "ancient" people. They were too busy attempting to annihilate the reconstituted sovereign State of Israel, and did not intend to create any Palestinian entity, but only to distribute the seized Jewish lands among the already existing Arab states.
The Arab armies were miraculously defeated by a tiny handful of Jewish defenders. The Arabs attempted again to destroy Israel in 1967, and were humiliated in only six days, in which they lost the lands that they had previously stolen and usurped in 1948. Those lands included Judea and Samaria, which comprise the biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland, tracing its history back some 4,000 years.
Now the world forgets such empirical history and prefers to name the ancestral Jewish territory, the West Bank, which was illegally occupied by the Jordanian Arabs for 19 years from 1948 until its liberation in 1967.
In all those years, when Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, neither of them created a "Palestinian" state, since the still non-existing Palestinians would have never claimed their alleged right to have their own state.
Paradoxically, during the British Mandate, which lasted from 1920 to 1948, it was not any Arab group but the Jews that were known as Palestinians!
But read what other Arabs declared after the Six-Day War:
"There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity... yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel." — Zuhair Muhsin, military commander of the PLO and member of the PLO Executive Council
"Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people." —Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat
"As I lived in Palestine, everyone I knew could trace their heritage back to the original country their great grandparents came from. Everyone knew their origin was not from the Canaanites, but ironically, this is the kind of stuff our education in the Middle East included. The fact is that today's Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today's Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to 30,000 inhabitants." —Walid Shoebat
During the long years of alien occupation of the Land of Israel, though Jews were always living in the Land in whatever numbers they could sustain, visitors were always struck at how the land had become a barren waste with malarial swamps and a remarkably sparse population. The following reports from travellers to the desolate landscape that had become a mournful waste are quite telling:
"There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilee); not for thirty miles in either direction... One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee... Nazareth is forlorn... Jericho lies a mouldering ruin... Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds... a silent, mournful expanse... a desolation... We never saw a human being on the whole route... Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes... desolate and unlovely..." —Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad", 1867
One wonders, therefore, where were the "Palestinians" hiding so that Mark Twain could not see them? Where was that so-called "ancient" people in the mid nineteenth century? Of course, Arab politicians now attempt to discredit Mark Twain, retreating into that realm of all scoundrels by calling him a racist.
"In 1590 a 'simple English visitor' to Jerusalem wrote: 'Nothing there is to be seen but a little of the old walls, which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds much like to a piece of rank or moist ground'." — Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund
"The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil." — British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s
"Palestine is a ruined and desolate land." —Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian
"The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it." —Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s
"The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population." —James Finn, British Consul in 1857
"The area was under populated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880′s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained "The Holy Land" in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants — both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts... Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen... The plows used were of wood... The yields were very poor... Schools did not exist... The rate of infant mortality was very high... The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert... Many ruins were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants." — The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913
Far too many otherwise decent people have come to accept Arab oil financed falsehoods masquerading as history about the origins of the so-called Palestinian Arabs. These lies now permeate the mainstream media, schools, colleges, and universities and are perpetrated by the tenured leftist professors and the colleges who all too eagerly accept Saudi blood money.
The historical facts given above may be of help to those who have otherwise fallen hook, line and sinker for duplicitous Arab propaganda and what constitutes one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon the world.
by Victor Sharpe
They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War 1.
Both of these European powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey's empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain have left a resulting legacy of war and violence ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine.
But there is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history — let alone an Arab independent state of Palestine.
You will search in vain for Palestinian Arab coinage or Palestinian Arab archaeological artefacts specifically related to any Palestinian Arab king or ancient leader. But what you will find are coins, pottery, ancient scrolls, all providing conclusive, empirical and millennial evidence of Jewish civilization dotting the land known correctly as Israel — not Palestine.
The present-day so-called "Palestinians" are an Arab people sharing an overwhelmingly Muslim Arab culture, ethnicity and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions.
Yasser Arafat, the arch-terrorist, who imposed himself undemocratically upon the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, was fond of creating the absurd myth that Palestinian Arabs were descended from the Canaanites and the Philistines. As we know, the bigger the lie the bigger the number of people will believe it. And so Arafat twisted history in order to disinherit the indigenous native people of the land: the Jews.
Canaanites, without doubt, were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel before the first Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, settled there, and before Moses brought their descendants back to the Promised Land during the Exodus from Egypt.
The Canaanites lived both along the coastal plain and in the mountain regions, which run like a spine down the biblical territory of Samaria and Judea. Their language was similar to Hebrew and their territory stretched north into present day Lebanon and included the present day Golan Heights.
The Canaanites were finally subdued during the reign of King David. Most Canaanites were gradually assimilated into the Jewish people and were no longer a distinguishable people.
After the 8th century BC, the Canaanites no longer existed and the only people, therefore, who can trace back an historic link to ancient Canaan are the Jews, not the Palestinian Arabs. So much for Arafat's nonsense and for the on-going attempts by today's Palestinian Arabs, financed by vast Arab oil wealth, to hoodwink the world.
The term "Philistines" provides the source from which the term "Palestinians" is derived. Like the Arabs who gave themselves the concocted name "Palestinian," the Philistines were alien peoples who entered the land from other lands, mostly from the Mediterranean island of Crete. That is why they were also known as the Sea People.
palestinian flags
THE MODERN "PALESTINIAN ARABS" are primarily the descendants of those itinerant Arabs who illegally flooded British Mandatory Palestine from Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). They were attracted during the early decades of the 20th century by new employment opportunities provided by the Jewish pioneers, whose heroic efforts were turning the desert green again and restoring centuries of neglect that the land had endured under a succession of alien occupiers.
Britain, during its Mandate over the territory, turned a blind eye to the flood of illegal Arab aliens entering, while at the same time often arbitrarily limiting Jewish immigration into their ancient, biblical and ancestral homeland. This was a betrayal of the Mandate given to Britain to facilitate a Jewish Homeland in the geographical territory known as Palestine.
The Philistines were non-Semitic peoples who had entered the land from their homes throughout the Aegean Islands in general and from Crete in particular. These ancient Cretans arrived in Southern Canaan and along the Egyptian coastline and were known as "Pelestim and Keretim" by the Hebrew tribes. It appears that their first settlement may have been Gaza. Later they settled in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gat and Ekron: the Pentapolis.
Their territory was primarily along the coastal Mediterranean; interestingly, a territory not dissimilar to the present day Gaza Strip. They attempted at different times to invade Judah but were turned back by the various Jewish biblical heroes and finally defeated by King David. From that time onwards they were diminished as a threat and as a separate people, finally disappearing from history and any "Palestinian" Arab attempt to claim a lineage with them is as absurd as that of links with the early Canaanites.
Moving fast forward to 73 AD, the first attempt of the Jews to reclaim their independence from the repressive yoke of Roman occupation ended when Jewish warriors and their families fled to the fortress of Masada from Jerusalem. The Romans had destroyed the Jewish capital city along with the Second Jewish Temple.
Historically documented and universally recognized, Masada, which rises to great height overlooking the Dead Sea, is where the heroic last stand took place and where the surviving warriors and their families took their own lives rather than be sent as slaves throughout the mighty Roman Empire. The Land where these stirring and epochal events took place was in the province known as Judæa. There is absolutely no mention of any place called "Palestine" before that time.
After the suppression of the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 AD against the Roman occupation, the Emperor Hadrian replaced the name of Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew from where the name Yehudim, Jews, originates) to Syria-Palæstina after the "Philistines" who were the ancient enemies of the Israelites. Hadrian did so with the explicit purpose of effacing any trace of Jewish history.
Ancient Romans, as well as so-called Palestinian Arabs, have fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptural prophecy that declares: "They lay crafty plans against Your People... they say: 'come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more'." — Tehilim 83:3-4 (Psalm 83:3-4). They failed, as Israel is reconstituted as a modern Jewish state in its ancestral and biblical homeland.
No such name as Palestine occurs in any ancient document. It is not written in the Bible, neither in the Hebrew Scriptures nor in the Christian Testament, not even in Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Seleucian or other Greek sources. There is no "Palestinian" people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans that invented the term.
If "Palestinians" allegedly are the historic inhabitants of the Holy Land, why did they not fight for independence from Roman occupation as Jews did? How is it possible that not a single "Palestinian" leader revolted against the Roman invaders or is mentioned in any historic record?
Why is there no Palestinian rebel group mentioned, as for example the Jewish Zealots? Why does every historic document mention the Jews as the native and aboriginal inhabitants, and the Greeks, Romans and others as foreigners dwelling in Judea; but no "Palestinian" people, neither as native or as foreigner? What is more, there is no reference to any "Palestinian" people in the Koran, although Muslims claim that their prophet was once in al-Aksa (meaning the farthest place) which Muslims, for political purposes, chose to be Jerusalem — an event not even mentioned in the Koran.
Saladin, a Kurd, knew the Jews and invited them to resettle in Jerusalem. He had no trouble in recognizing Jerusalem as their eternal capital city and the territory as their rightful Homeland. But he did not know any so-called Palestinians and to claim otherwise that Palestinians are the original people of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is not only counter to secular history but also is opposed to Islamic history.
The so-called "Palestinians" who claim Jerusalem want it so that they can take it away from the Jews for whom Jerusalem, known also as Zion, is the eternal, 3,000 year old Jewish capital.
Perhaps what links the modern day Arabs who call themselves "Palestinians" with the ancient Philistines is that both are invaders. The Philistines wanted to take from the Israelites the Holy Ark of the Covenant, while today's so-called "Palestinian Arabs" want to take from the Jewish people the Holy City of the Covenant — Jerusalem.
A wealth of information about this and related subjects may be found at the following website. I encourage all to read it: http://www.think-israel.org/archives/oldindex.html#featured"
SO LET ME CLOSE, BEGINNING WITH THE WORDS of a Christian Arab, Joseph Farah, who has made his home here in America and who knows of what he writes:
"There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of one per cent of the landmass. But that's too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today... No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough." — Joseph Farah, "Myths of the Middle East"
Let us hear what other Arabs have said:
"There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it." — Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937
"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not". — Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946
"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria." — Representative of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956
Concerning the Holy Land, the chairman of the Syrian Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919 stated: — "The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 AD hardly lasted, as such, 22 years."
The preceding declarations by Arab politicians were issued before 1967 as they had not the slightest knowledge of the existence of any Palestinian people.
How and when did they change their mind and decide that such people existed?
When the State of Israel was reborn in 1948 the Arabs had still not discovered that "ancient" people. They were too busy attempting to annihilate the reconstituted sovereign State of Israel, and did not intend to create any Palestinian entity, but only to distribute the seized Jewish lands among the already existing Arab states.
The Arab armies were miraculously defeated by a tiny handful of Jewish defenders. The Arabs attempted again to destroy Israel in 1967, and were humiliated in only six days, in which they lost the lands that they had previously stolen and usurped in 1948. Those lands included Judea and Samaria, which comprise the biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland, tracing its history back some 4,000 years.
Now the world forgets such empirical history and prefers to name the ancestral Jewish territory, the West Bank, which was illegally occupied by the Jordanian Arabs for 19 years from 1948 until its liberation in 1967.
In all those years, when Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, neither of them created a "Palestinian" state, since the still non-existing Palestinians would have never claimed their alleged right to have their own state.
Paradoxically, during the British Mandate, which lasted from 1920 to 1948, it was not any Arab group but the Jews that were known as Palestinians!
But read what other Arabs declared after the Six-Day War:
"There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity... yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel." — Zuhair Muhsin, military commander of the PLO and member of the PLO Executive Council
"Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people." —Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat
"As I lived in Palestine, everyone I knew could trace their heritage back to the original country their great grandparents came from. Everyone knew their origin was not from the Canaanites, but ironically, this is the kind of stuff our education in the Middle East included. The fact is that today's Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today's Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to 30,000 inhabitants." —Walid Shoebat
During the long years of alien occupation of the Land of Israel, though Jews were always living in the Land in whatever numbers they could sustain, visitors were always struck at how the land had become a barren waste with malarial swamps and a remarkably sparse population. The following reports from travellers to the desolate landscape that had become a mournful waste are quite telling:
"There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilee); not for thirty miles in either direction... One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee... Nazareth is forlorn... Jericho lies a mouldering ruin... Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds... a silent, mournful expanse... a desolation... We never saw a human being on the whole route... Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes... desolate and unlovely..." —Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad", 1867
One wonders, therefore, where were the "Palestinians" hiding so that Mark Twain could not see them? Where was that so-called "ancient" people in the mid nineteenth century? Of course, Arab politicians now attempt to discredit Mark Twain, retreating into that realm of all scoundrels by calling him a racist.
"In 1590 a 'simple English visitor' to Jerusalem wrote: 'Nothing there is to be seen but a little of the old walls, which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds much like to a piece of rank or moist ground'." — Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund
"The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil." — British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s
"Palestine is a ruined and desolate land." —Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian
"The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it." —Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s
"The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population." —James Finn, British Consul in 1857
"The area was under populated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880′s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained "The Holy Land" in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants — both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts... Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen... The plows used were of wood... The yields were very poor... Schools did not exist... The rate of infant mortality was very high... The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert... Many ruins were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants." — The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913
Far too many otherwise decent people have come to accept Arab oil financed falsehoods masquerading as history about the origins of the so-called Palestinian Arabs. These lies now permeate the mainstream media, schools, colleges, and universities and are perpetrated by the tenured leftist professors and the colleges who all too eagerly accept Saudi blood money.
The historical facts given above may be of help to those who have otherwise fallen hook, line and sinker for duplicitous Arab propaganda and what constitutes one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon the world.
THE CELEBRATION OF CHANUKKAH by Dave McGarrah
Tomorrow, December 8th, begins the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah, the story of which is recounted in 1 Maccabees. Christians are familiar with the eight-day festival of Hanukkah because of its proximity to Christmas. It is commemorated on the twenty-fifth day of of the Jewish month of Kislev, and falls sometime in late November or December. It is the most recent Jewish festival, dating to the second century before Christ.
Although a celebration of Christmas is nowhere to be found in the New Testament (even subsequent to the resurrection of Christ), Hanukkah finds its way into the gospels and serves as an important backdrop in the ministry of Jesus Christ in John 10. To understand the significance of this aspect of His ministry, however, it is necessary to understand Hanukkah.
In 167 B.C., the Syro-Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes began to persecute the Jewish people. Antiochus IV Greek forbade circumcision, burned Jewish Scriptures, forced Jews to eat unclean swine’s flesh, and desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem by commanding an un-kosher sacrifice of swine on the Temple’s altar.
Horrified by the sacrilege of Antiochus IV, an elderly priest Mattathias and his son Judah Maccabaeus (“the Hammer”) formed a militia and waged a war of guerilla tactics against the occupying Greek forces: “Every man who has zeal for the Law and maintains the Covenant, let him follow me!” (1 Macc 2:27). The revolution succeeded and the Temple was rededicated in 164 B.C. on the twenty-fifth day of Kislev. The festival commemorating the event is called Chanukkah, meaning “Dedication.”
The feast of Chanukkah lasts eight days because Judas Maccabaeus wanted to imitate King Solomon. After all, Solomon had dedicated the original temple during the eight-day feast of Tabernacles. However, the feast of Tabernacles falls in the month of Tishri, not Kislev. Instead of waiting another ten months, Judas Maccabaeus decreed that a new eight-day festival be created in imitation of the festival of Tabernacles, beginning on the twenty-fifth day of the Jewish month of Kislev. The book of 2 Maccabees records that Judas Maccabaeus instituted the eight-day festival because, “Solomon also kept the eight days,” when the original Temple was dedicated (2 Macc 2:12).
The Jewish Talmud offers another tradition to explain the eight days of Hanukkah. When the Jews recaptured Jerusalem from the tyrannous Greeks, the Jewish priests did not have enough oil to keep the Temple’s menorah lit. There was only enough sacred oil to burn for one day and it would take at least a week to mix a fresh supply of holy oil. Yet, the one-day supply of holy oil lasted for eight days by a divine miracle. For this reason, faithful Jews light the menorah during the eight days of the festival.
Many Christians are unaware of these connections. As a result, they miss the important “Hanukkah message” of Christ in John’s Gospel. The presence of Christ at the Temple during Hanukkah is important because Hanukkah recalled how the Maccabees dedicated the Temple after the Greeks had defiled it. However, the presence of God’s glory did not manifest itself at the re-dedication of the Maccabees and fill the Temple as it did in the days of King Solomon. Since the time of the Maccabees, God had not inhabited the Temple as He had before the Jews’ Babylonian exile. The presence of Christ in the Temple at Hanukkah shows that God’s presence had once again entered to the Temple.
It was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter and Jesus was walking in the Temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered round him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us openly” (Jn 10:22-24).
It was during Hanukkah that Christ answered them by boldly proclaiming: “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10: 30). Christ entered into the Temple at the feast of Hanukkah and presented himself as the God of Israel. His enemies immediately understood His claim in light of Hanukkah’s significance. We know this because they took up stones to stone him and said “we stone you for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself to be God” (Jn 10:31-33). Hence, the festival of Hanukkah serves as a sign of Christ’s fulfillment of the Temple and the entire Old Covenant. Jesus was not only a gifted rabbi from Nazareth—He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In John 10.22, almost two hundred years later, mention is made of the Feast of Dedication. At that time, one part of the festival included the reading of a portion of Scripture that reminded the people of the unfaithful rulers of the past and the God who would watch over His people. The passage that was read came from the prophet Ezekiel:
“The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: `This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them. “‘Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them. “`For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them’” (34.1-11, NIV, emphases added) This, then, is the context for the incredible statements that Jesus made during the Feast of Dedication during His final winter on earth.
Against this backdrop Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd; and I know My own, and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. . . . My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (Jn 10.14-15, 27-29).
Jesus contrasted Himself with the unfaithful, corrupt shepherds of Israel’s past and declared Himself to be the True Shepherd of God’s people. In so doing, He established the standard for all subsequent shepherds of the people of God and described the responsibilities of leadership: to take care of the flock, to strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring back the strays, search for the lost; to rule gently and kindly, and to keep them from scattering and becoming vulnerable to the enemy.
Yeshua is the Ultimate Shamash - He is our Light who enables us to shine a sacred fire of sacrificial love to the darkened outside world. The shammash candle is the servant candle, that serves the other candles by bringing light to them. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently referred to as “the Light,” and Jesus Himself once said,
“I am the Light of the World. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12
Just as the shammash gives light to the other candles, Jesus came to give the world His Light. As we celebrate Hanukkah, it is good for us be reminded of that light each night as we light our menorahs. As believers in Y’shua (Jesus), Hanukkah should hold precious meaning to us. The miracles we celebrate at Hanukkah – the defeat of an enemy army, the oil lasting for eight days – show how God keeps His light burning in the hearts of His people, even when they face what seem to be impossible odds or situations. With God, all things are possible. His light cannot fail, or go out.
Happy Chanukkah!
Tomorrow, December 8th, begins the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah, the story of which is recounted in 1 Maccabees. Christians are familiar with the eight-day festival of Hanukkah because of its proximity to Christmas. It is commemorated on the twenty-fifth day of of the Jewish month of Kislev, and falls sometime in late November or December. It is the most recent Jewish festival, dating to the second century before Christ.
Although a celebration of Christmas is nowhere to be found in the New Testament (even subsequent to the resurrection of Christ), Hanukkah finds its way into the gospels and serves as an important backdrop in the ministry of Jesus Christ in John 10. To understand the significance of this aspect of His ministry, however, it is necessary to understand Hanukkah.
In 167 B.C., the Syro-Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes began to persecute the Jewish people. Antiochus IV Greek forbade circumcision, burned Jewish Scriptures, forced Jews to eat unclean swine’s flesh, and desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem by commanding an un-kosher sacrifice of swine on the Temple’s altar.
Horrified by the sacrilege of Antiochus IV, an elderly priest Mattathias and his son Judah Maccabaeus (“the Hammer”) formed a militia and waged a war of guerilla tactics against the occupying Greek forces: “Every man who has zeal for the Law and maintains the Covenant, let him follow me!” (1 Macc 2:27). The revolution succeeded and the Temple was rededicated in 164 B.C. on the twenty-fifth day of Kislev. The festival commemorating the event is called Chanukkah, meaning “Dedication.”
The feast of Chanukkah lasts eight days because Judas Maccabaeus wanted to imitate King Solomon. After all, Solomon had dedicated the original temple during the eight-day feast of Tabernacles. However, the feast of Tabernacles falls in the month of Tishri, not Kislev. Instead of waiting another ten months, Judas Maccabaeus decreed that a new eight-day festival be created in imitation of the festival of Tabernacles, beginning on the twenty-fifth day of the Jewish month of Kislev. The book of 2 Maccabees records that Judas Maccabaeus instituted the eight-day festival because, “Solomon also kept the eight days,” when the original Temple was dedicated (2 Macc 2:12).
The Jewish Talmud offers another tradition to explain the eight days of Hanukkah. When the Jews recaptured Jerusalem from the tyrannous Greeks, the Jewish priests did not have enough oil to keep the Temple’s menorah lit. There was only enough sacred oil to burn for one day and it would take at least a week to mix a fresh supply of holy oil. Yet, the one-day supply of holy oil lasted for eight days by a divine miracle. For this reason, faithful Jews light the menorah during the eight days of the festival.
Many Christians are unaware of these connections. As a result, they miss the important “Hanukkah message” of Christ in John’s Gospel. The presence of Christ at the Temple during Hanukkah is important because Hanukkah recalled how the Maccabees dedicated the Temple after the Greeks had defiled it. However, the presence of God’s glory did not manifest itself at the re-dedication of the Maccabees and fill the Temple as it did in the days of King Solomon. Since the time of the Maccabees, God had not inhabited the Temple as He had before the Jews’ Babylonian exile. The presence of Christ in the Temple at Hanukkah shows that God’s presence had once again entered to the Temple.
It was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter and Jesus was walking in the Temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered round him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us openly” (Jn 10:22-24).
It was during Hanukkah that Christ answered them by boldly proclaiming: “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10: 30). Christ entered into the Temple at the feast of Hanukkah and presented himself as the God of Israel. His enemies immediately understood His claim in light of Hanukkah’s significance. We know this because they took up stones to stone him and said “we stone you for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself to be God” (Jn 10:31-33). Hence, the festival of Hanukkah serves as a sign of Christ’s fulfillment of the Temple and the entire Old Covenant. Jesus was not only a gifted rabbi from Nazareth—He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In John 10.22, almost two hundred years later, mention is made of the Feast of Dedication. At that time, one part of the festival included the reading of a portion of Scripture that reminded the people of the unfaithful rulers of the past and the God who would watch over His people. The passage that was read came from the prophet Ezekiel:
“The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: `This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them. “‘Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, therefore, O shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them. “`For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them’” (34.1-11, NIV, emphases added) This, then, is the context for the incredible statements that Jesus made during the Feast of Dedication during His final winter on earth.
Against this backdrop Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd; and I know My own, and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. . . . My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (Jn 10.14-15, 27-29).
Jesus contrasted Himself with the unfaithful, corrupt shepherds of Israel’s past and declared Himself to be the True Shepherd of God’s people. In so doing, He established the standard for all subsequent shepherds of the people of God and described the responsibilities of leadership: to take care of the flock, to strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring back the strays, search for the lost; to rule gently and kindly, and to keep them from scattering and becoming vulnerable to the enemy.
Yeshua is the Ultimate Shamash - He is our Light who enables us to shine a sacred fire of sacrificial love to the darkened outside world. The shammash candle is the servant candle, that serves the other candles by bringing light to them. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently referred to as “the Light,” and Jesus Himself once said,
“I am the Light of the World. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12
Just as the shammash gives light to the other candles, Jesus came to give the world His Light. As we celebrate Hanukkah, it is good for us be reminded of that light each night as we light our menorahs. As believers in Y’shua (Jesus), Hanukkah should hold precious meaning to us. The miracles we celebrate at Hanukkah – the defeat of an enemy army, the oil lasting for eight days – show how God keeps His light burning in the hearts of His people, even when they face what seem to be impossible odds or situations. With God, all things are possible. His light cannot fail, or go out.
Happy Chanukkah!
The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Leviticus 25:23
And the Lord will take possession of Judah as his inheritance in the Holy Land and will again choose jerusalem. Zechariah 2:12