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| The Western Wall |
Free Palestine? No thanks. This is a YouTube video referenced in a previous post. I added a few things and didn't give over his whole talk but you can visit Oren at travelingisrael.com
It isn’t as if the history of the Holy Land hasn’t been documented for over three thousand years. (Think the Bible). Thousands of books, mostly about Jews and the land of Israel. Discovered in archeological digs are Jewish coins, Jewish texts, and Jewish artifacts. Nothing about a Palestinian people.
The Christian and or Muslim link is based on the Jewish link. Jesus was a Jewish man. People who eventually subscribed to Islam essentially misappropriated Jewish sites.
Think of directional prayer. Jews, before they pray, look at the sun to determine East. We pray to the east because Jerusalem is East of Chicago. Muslims have traditionally prayed toward Cairo, Damascus or Bagdad, and of course, Mecca, turning their backs to Jerusalem. These are their holy sites. Jerusalem only became important during wars against Christians and Jews. Conquer it, then neglect it.
Jerusalem is mentioned some 600 times in the Jewish bible. Not once in the Quran.
There is discussion in the Quran of Muhammad having ascended from Al-Aqsa. Al-Aqsa translates to the most faraway mosque. Who knows where that might be, but we know that the holiest place in the world to the Jewish people is Jerusalem. The Temples, two of them, built at the top of Mount Moriah, were both destroyed by invaders. First the Babylonians leveled it and exiled the Jews, then the Romans. This place, now a mosque but known to us as the Temple Mount, is where Abraham went to perform God’s will (sacrificing Isaac), well before the Temples existed. Turns out he didn’t have to do that. So it is holy to the Jews from the very beginning of Jewish history. Yet the Muslims control this mosque and bar most Jews from visiting the site. The closest we can get is the Western (Wailing) Wall.
It was the Romans who changed the name of the region from Judea to Palestina, intending to
disconnect the Jews from their land. Then 700 years later Muslims invaded and colonized the Land of Israel. This is when they determined that Muhammad ascended to heaven from the place where the Jewish temples stood.
You may be thinking, how crazy is that? Muslims believing that Muhammad went to heaven on the holiest spot in the world for the Jews and yet this is not written in the Quran?
Nothing, apparently, makes a place more holy than competition with another religion. The Muslims took the place holy to the Jews for 1500 years prior to the existence of Islam and made it their holiest place.
In the Waqd the Muslim authorities say that this is the location of the Temple of King Solomon. Meaning, they admit is.
When we get married, at the end of the ceremony we sing a sad song, the bottom line, that we will not forget Jerusalem. Jews have good memories. We have almost always lived in Jerusalem, even after exiles, even under the harshest of circumstances.
The Islamization of Jewish sites is a real thing. In Hebron, one of the four cities holy to the Jews is the Cave of the Patriarchs where according to tradition Abraham was buried. To humiliate the Jews they could not enter, could walk up to the 7th step only. When Israel liberated Hebron in 1967 this changed. For the first time in 700 years, the place where the matriarchs and patriarchs are buried became accessible. This is the second holiest place for Jews. You may have heard of the slaughter of Jews in Hebron in 1929, a pogrom similar to what happened on October 7, 2023. The hate, the violence against the Jewish people never seems to quit, despite their contributions to humanity. I think I counted them somewhere on this blog, but just google this.
19th Century and Zionism
So, we have this thing. It is a goal. Move to Israel, live in the homeland, make Aliyah, a word that means to go up. Jews have always migrated here. In the 17th and 18th centuries we came from all over the world. Europe, Africa, Yemen in small numbers due to the harsh conditions. But there has always been a steady flow. In the 1850’s there were more Jews than Muslims in Jerusalem.
Even before the start of the Zionist movement there were dozens of Jewish settlements in the land of Israel. They bought land, did not steal it. In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire the Turks sold land to many European powers. Many settled in Israel to speed up the 2nd coming of Jesus. No groups in Israel called themselves Palestinian.
Before 1948 Arabs terrorized the Jews in Israel, this is nothing new, and destroyed Jewish cities like Hebron. Communities such as B’nei Yehuda, Kfar Saba, Kfar Uria, Ruhama, Hartuv, Hulda, Motza, Poria, Bet Shan, many rebuilt. Arabs also killed Christians. John Steinback’s uncle was murdered on his farm outside Jaffa, his wife and daughter sexually assaulted. Mark Twain and Herman Melville wrote about how Arabs had neglected the land, their violence.
From 1917 until 1948 the British and the French controlled the Middle East. Nobody liked them, not Jews, not Arabs, but the British needed to ensure they had oil from Iraq via Haifa and that the Suez Canal remained open. So they were pro-Arab. Colonialism is very fashionable these days but it is in the lexicon. Reclaiming your country is apparently colonialism now, if you believe the professors teaching students on college campuses today.
The British Empire determined the borders, called this homeland Palestine, the Roman name for it and invented two nations that had never existed before, Palestine and Jordan.
Another fact that tends to be ignored is that hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Egypt, Syria, and other places entered in the 1930’s and 40’s to work for the British. These are the people now seen as native Palestinians. At least half the Gazans came there during the British Mandate.
They still have the right to self-determination. But when the UN proposed a division of the Land of Israel, just before the war that made Israel a State, the Arabs refused it and started that war, a war to eliminate the Jews. The morning after the Partition Plan the Palestinians attacked a bus, murdered five Jews, starting the war. When a city fell to Arab hands not one Jew was spared. After 15 months of fighting five invading armies and local Arabs, the Jews won.
700,000 people were displaced as Many Arab villages were destroyed, 700,000 people displaced. This is what happens in a war determined to wipe out neighbors. At the same time 800,000 Jews are brutally expelled from Muslim countries yet little is written about these pogroms which included 14 million Germans, 14 million Hindus, Muslims (the wrong kind, I guess), Ukranians, Armenians, Poles, people from the Balkans, and naturally Jews.
Yes, there’s so much more. But let’s stop here. Let’s just say that Israel has learned that this is not about sharing. Fooled me once, shame on you. Twice? Shame on me. I think that's how the expression goes.
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