Bibi In The Lions's Den...Or, Jerusalem and The Gang of Three
by Gerald A. Honigman
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to come to the United States during the week of March 22nd.
On top on the agenda, no doubt, will be a demand from the Obama Administration that Bibi further eat crow because he dared to stand up for his tiny nation's minimal security interests. While Vice President Joseph Biden swore up, down, and sidewise that this administration has those interests dear to its own heart, I believe that claim as much as you should believe that (as I like to say) I'm the Passover Bunny.
As we all know, words are meaningless when actions negate them...over and over and over again.
To better understand what's up, please bear with this, admittedly, rather long analysis. I do believe you will find that is worth your time...
Long before the November 2008 election brought him to the White House, President Obama made it clear that he expected Israel to return to the '49, U. N.-imposed armistice lines--not political borders--which had turned it into a 9-15 mile wide, sub-rump state. Repeatedly, he said that Israel would be crazy--his own words--if it rejected the alleged Saudi Peace Plan.
A key provision of that plan--which Arabs say can't and won't be modified--calls for Israel to ignore the secure, defensible borders (and thus territorial compromise) promised to it by UNSC Resolution 242 in the wake of the '67 War and for it to return to those earlier '49 Auschwitz/armistice lines instead. I just traveled farther than that to take my two Labrador Retrievers to the dog park...President George W. Bush once commented that Texas has some driveways longer than that.
Another provision states that Israel must also allow itself to be flooded by millions of alleged Arab refugees raised on Jew-hatred over the decades and created in the first place as a result of numerous Arab countries invading the reborn, miniscule state of the Jews in 1948. More Jews wound up fleeing "Arab" lands in the aftermath of this invasion than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction...
The difference?
Arabs already had six million square miles of territory (mostly conquered and forcibly Arabized from various non-Arab peoples) and numerous states to call their own (twenty-one states to date), and Jews had nada, zilch, zero up until Israel's rebirth--which the American State Department, along with Arabs, tried real hard to prevent.
So, despite all of the assurances Israel had gotten from American presidents, secretaries of state, and so forth over the years since it turned the tables on another Arab attempt on its life in 1967, the Obama Administration is now determined to ignore all of this and force Israel to yield to its demands.
The episode involving the announcement of Israeli intentions to build more housing units ( in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem) at the same time of Vice-President Joe Biden's recent visit is about this very issue.
While an argument can be made whether it was or wasn't wise to time this announcement as it was done, one should keep this larger issue in mind.
When would the timing have been "good" for Israel to tell the Gang of Three (Obama, Biden, and Clinton), which then spewed venom upon it for not caving in to what they demanded--forsaking the territorial compromise intrinsic in UNSC Resolution 242--that it would not expose its people and endanger its very existence this way?
Good timing or not, the real and more troubling question is why would a bullying America place Israel into such a bind?
Why would an American president and his crew demand that Israel return to a situation which Presidents Johnson and Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz, Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and too many others to list here called suicidal and simply a recipe for renewed warfare?
Why would an American president and his crew act like the very letters Israel received from his predecessor, George W. Bush, dealing with the same issue regarding the creation of that territorial buffer did not even exist?
It is in this context that the events of the last week or so need to be understood.
Prime Minister Netanyahu simply said by this move (planned or accidental) that Israel, too, has minimal lines in the sand beyond which it will not retreat--regardless of who is tightening the screws.
The 22nd Arab state Obama promises for Arabs (and their second, not first, in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine...Jordan sits upon some 80% of the total area) should not be created at the expense of the Jews' sole one.
That was the message Joe Biden received when he arrived in Bibi's Israel for a new round of Jew arm twisting--er, "negotiations." He expected prostration but got a dose of truth instead...
Now, also keep in mind that those proposed apartments aren't just anywhere---they're in Jerusalem...probably the hottest of the potatoes to handle when it comes to Arab/Muslim -Jew peacemaking.
Given all of this, apartments or not, it's time to review some candid facts regarding Jerusalem and those staking a claim to it, for, while Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have ties to the city, these ties are in no way "equal"-- as politically incorrect it may be to say this these days.
In Jewish religious sources, for instance, Jerusalem is mentioned over 600 times. It is never mentioned even once in the Qur'an. It is alluded to in the latter in passages about the Hebrew Kings, David and Solomon, and the destruction of the Temples of the Jews. Arabs deny a Jewish Temple ever existed there. They call the Temple Mount "Buraq's Mount," after Muhammad's supposedly winged horse with the head of a woman. But a mention of Jerusalem itself is nowhere to be found in the Muslim holy book...interesting, since it was recorded in many other places besides the writings of the Jews themselves for over 1,500 years before the rise of Islam.
Furthermore, religious claims of both Christians and Muslims to Jerusalem exist primarily because of those religions' links to the Jews.
Political claims --based upon facts on the ground --are, admittedly, more complicated. Even so, throughout over three millennia since King David conquered it from the Jebusites, renamed it, and gave it its Jewish character, no other people except the Jews has ever made Jerusalem their capital, despite its conquest by many imperial powers, including that of the Arab caliphal successors to Muhammad as they burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and spread in all directions. Damascus and Baghdad were the capital seats of Arab caliphal imperial power, and Mecca and Medina the holy cities. And there was never ever an Arab state of "Palestine."
This is not to say that Jerusalem was ignored by its Arab Muslim conquerors (the Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock/Mosque of 'Umar on the Temple Mount of the Jews, making it Islam's allegedly third holiest city), but it is to say that Jerusalem was and is in no way the focus for Islam that it is for Jews and Judaism.
If the Vatican had been conquered this same way by Arab Muslim invaders, who then built a giant mosque in the center of it, would that mean that the Vatican was then as important to Muslims as it was to Roman Catholics? Or, more accurately, that Catholic claims were totally invalid?
The situation is far worse regarding Jerusalem...It involves an attempt by Arabs to deny the very national identity of Judeans/Jews as a people...a people with, admittedly, a very distinct set of religious and ethical beliefs (which, by the way, sired the above two daughter faiths).
Since David made Jerusalem his capital and it became the site of his son Solomon's Temple, Zion became the heart and soul of Jewish national and religious existence. Jews from all over the early diaspora made their pilgrimages and sent offerings to its Temple. "By the Rivers of Babylon we wept..." and "If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning..." were just a few of the many Biblical expressions of the Jews for Zion. Such yearning persisted throughout subsequent millennia in the Diaspora as well. "Next Year in Jerusalem " sustained the Jew throughout countless massacres, degradations, expulsions, and humiliations--both in the Muslim East as well as in the Christian West--culminating in the Holocaust.
There is no Muslim parallel to these claims, despite efforts to portray Palestinian Arabs (many, if not most, of whom were new arrivals --settlers --in the land themselves), as the "new Jews."
Jews, coming from a hundred different lands (including those native to Israel itself), didn't have almost two dozen states to potentially choose from and suffered dearly for this statelessness.
Most Muslim Arabs want sole rights over Jerusalem the same way they want sole rights over Tel Aviv. In their eyes, only they have legitimate political rights anywhere in a region which they regard as simply purely Arab patrimony and the Dar ul-Islam. North Africa's native Amazigh people ("Berbers"--some thirty-five million of them), who pre-date the Arabs there by millennia, are faced with this same subjugating Arab attitude as they are not even allowed to speak their own native language nor, increasingly, even allowed to name their own children with non-Arab names. Tens of millions of other non-Arab peoples face similar problems as well.
Shifting gears, regardless of whatever theology one clings to, Jesus' historical experiences in Roman-occupied Judaea and Jerusalem were those of a Jew living under extremely precarious conditions. Thousands of his countrymen had already been killed, crucified, and the like in the subjugation/pacification process. The contemporary Roman and Roman-sponsored historians themselves--Tacitus, Josephus, Dio Cassius, and others as well--had much to say about all of this.
Consider, for example, these few of many telling quotes from Vol.II, Bk.V, The Works Of Tacitus:
Vespasian succeeded to the throne...it infuriated his resentment that the Jews were the only nation who had not yet submitted...Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea... commanded three legions in Judaea itself... To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria ... Amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations...
This oppression led to open revolts of the Jews to rid their land of their mighty pagan conqueror--wars which would eventually lead the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, to rename the land itself from Judaea to Syria Palaestina in 135 C.E. in an attempt to stamp out any remaining hopes for Jewish independence and national existence. Judaea was thus renamed after the Jews' historic enemies, the Philistines, a non-Semitic sea people from the area around Crete, to further drive home the point.
For a modern analogy, imagine Lithuania as it was engulfed by the Soviet Union in the latter's heyday of power. Or a Hungarian freedom fighter or Greek partisan taking on the Soviets or the Nazis.
Think of the sympathy and admiration normally given to such situations...And now think about the treatment Jews have received over the ages for longing for this same freedom. Don't you know, they needed just a "Heavenly Jerusalem," not a life of human dignity. How unspiritual those Jews are!
Whatever Jesus did or did not mean in his alleged statement, "render unto Caesar...," this passage and others in the New Testament have been used to belittle this same desire for worldly independence and freedom from oppression among the Jews.
Judaea Capta (not "Palaestina" Capta) coins were issued, and the towering Arch of Titus was erected after the first major revolt in 70 C.E. and shows, among other things, Romans carrying away the giant Menorah and other objects from the Jewish Temple that many, if not most, Arabs and other Muslims claim never existed. It stands in Rome to this very day to commemorate Rome 's victory over the Jews and Jewish Jerusalem. Open the url to my new book to see one of those coins on the book's cover http://q4j-middle-east.com
Another gear shift...
When Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, fled Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. (the Hijrah), the inhabitants welcomed him. Medina had been developed centuries earlier as a thriving date palm oasis by Jews fleeing the Roman assault (the banu-Qurayzah and banu-al-Nadir tribes, etc.), and its mixed population of Jews and pagan Arabs had thus become conditioned for a native prophet speaking the word of G_d. Jews had so much influence in this area that, just to the south, Yemen had a series of Jewish kings not long before the birth of Muhammad.
Indeed, Muhammad learned much from the Jews.
While the actual timing of his decision on the direction of prayer may never be known, during his long sojourn with the Jews of Medina, his followers were instructed to pray towards Jerusalem . Early prominent Arab historians such as Jalaluddin came right out and stated that this was done primarily as an attempt to win support among the influential Jewish tribes (the "People of the Book") for Muhammad's religio-politcal claims.
It is from the Temple Mount of the Jews in Jerusalem that Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to Heaven on his winged horse. A mosque, the Dome of the Rock, would later be erected on this Jewish holy site after the Arab imperial conquest of the land in the 7th century C.E.
There is no doubt among objective scholars that Jews had an enormous impact on both Muhammad and the religion that he founded. The holy sites for Muslims in Jerusalem (i.e. the mosques erected on the Temple Mount of the Jews) are now deemed "holy" precisely because of the critical years Muhammad spent after the Hijrah with the Jews.
The Temple Mount had no prior meaning to pagan Arabs. Period...
While there was some early Christian influence as well, intense scholarship has shown that the Holy Law (Halakha) and Holy Scriptures of the Jews had a tremendous influence on the Qur'an, Islamic Holy Law (Shari'a), and so forth.
Muhammad's alleged "Jerusalem connection" was most likely not established until after the huge impact of his extended stay with his Jewish hosts. This was no mere coincidence...Muslim religious beliefs regarding Muhammad's alleged conversations with the Angel Gabriel ( yes, that same Angel Gabriel of the Jews' Bible) notwithstanding.
When the Jews refused to recognize Muhammad as the "Seal of the Prophets," he turned on them with a vengeance.
Before long, with the exception of Yemen, there were virtually no Jews left on the Arabian Peninsula. The men were all massacred, and the women and children mostly enslaved. Additionally, the direction of prayer was changed away from Jerusalem and towards the Kaaba in Mecca instead...
To say that Jerusalem has the same meaning for Muslims as it has for Jews is to simply tell a lie.
In modern times, Jews constituted the majority of Jerusalem 's population from 1840 onwards.
When Jordanian Arabs--whose nation itself was formed from almost 80% of the original Mandate of Palestine issued to Britain on April 25, 1920 --seized East Jerusalem after their invasion of reborn Israel in 1948, they destroyed dozens of synagogues and thousands of Jewish graves, using tombstones to pave roads, build latrines, and so forth.
When Jews were denied access to their holy sites for almost two decades and not permitted in that part of Jerusalem, the whole world remained silent. Keep all of this in mind regarding the continuing problems Israel is having with the Gang of Three.
After Israel was forced to fight a defensive war in 1967 due to its being blockaded by Egypt 's Nasser at the Straits of Tiran (a casus belli) and other hostile acts, Jerusalem became reunited. Access to all peoples and faiths subsequently became unhindered and has remained so to this day. Yet it was at that very moment that much of the world chose to rediscover Jerusalem--demanding its re-division, internationalization, and so forth.
The American whitewashed "good cops" of Fatah's Abbas have simply decided to play the game better than the "bad cops" of Hamas. The former's late leader, Arafat, indeed taught them well. The millions of dollars he still has in Swiss bank accounts, courtesy of the West, are legendary. It pays to be portrayed as the Arab "moderates."
That Israel now finds itself with leaders with the backbone to resist such unfair pressure from its "friends"--involving Jerusalem or other issues--is a blessing, not an embarrassment.
For centuries, Jews were forcibly converted, expelled, massacred, humiliated, demonized, inquisitioned, ghettoized, declared to the "deicide people," killers of prophets, kilab yahud (Jew dogs) and such in both the Muslim East as well as the Christian West.
They are determined that their rights--building or otherwise-- in the sole capital of the sole, microscopic, reborn state that they possess will not be sacrificed on behalf of any 22nd state created for Arabs, especially since the latter show, in poll after poll, that regardless of how much more Jews will bare their necks for peace, Arabs will not accept the legitimacy of a viable Jewish Israel anyway.
As sad as it is to have to say, the actions of the current folks in Washington will only bring shame (or worse) upon our great nation down the line... http://q4j-middle-east.com
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