Thinking
Jerusalem
by Gerald A. Honigman
2005/11/25
On the
campaign trail, Arafat's former chief marionette, Holocaust-denying Mahmud Abbas,
offered Arab terrorists, who specialize in deliberately disemboweling Jewish
babes and other innocents, protection and integration into his own forces;
demanded that Israel consent to its own destruction by agreeing to be inundated
by millions of allegedly "returning" real and fudged Arab refugees
(one half of Israel's Jews were refugees from "Arab" /Muslim lands);
and continues to insist that Israel not be recognized as a Jewish state.
The current darling of the West was
quite open about all of this and has repeatedly stated that destroying
Israel
"democratically" is his goal since it would be better accepted and
bring about less bad press than blowing up buses, restaurants, and such.
While expecting
Israel
to cave in to all of their demands, Abbas & his fellow Arafatian moderates
offer
Israel
a temporary hudna--ceasefire--not peace and call all such dealings with the
Jews a "Trojan Horse."
Good thing they're moderates.
So, if you thought the fence and
Gaza
were hot potatoes, just wait...
While it keeps getting shoved onto
the back burner for fear of the intense heat that it will generate, there's no
doubt that
Jerusalem
will be one of the most difficult issues to resolve in any so-called peace
process.
Indeed, as
Gaza
's Jews were recently being ethnically cleansed, they could hear Arabs chanting
in the background, "first
Gaza
, next
Jerusalem
."
A bit earlier, Yossi Beilin and
some other fellow delusional Israelis brought the subject up in their
Geneva
fiasco with some of Arafat's conscious and unconscious manipulatives. As with
the rest of that initiative, Jews would give up concrete tangibles--in this case
sacred ones--in return for vague Arab promises a la
Oslo
.
Given all of this, it's time to
take a look at some blunt facts regarding
Jerusalem
, despite the risk of ruffling even some friendly feathers.
While Christians, Muslims, and
Jews all have ties to Jerusalem, these ties are in no way "equal"-
despite Arafat's apparently wanting to have a quasi shrine erected for himself
upon his passing on the Temple Mount.
In religious Jewish sources, for
instance,
Jerusalem
is mentioned over 600 times, but it is never mentioned even once in the Koran.
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. Arafat and
Co.
deny a Jewish Temple ever existed there. They call the
Temple
Mount
"Buraq's Mount," after Muhammad's supposedly winged horse. But a
mention of Jerusalem itself is no where 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.
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. This is not to say that Jerusalem was ignored by its Muslim
conquerors (i.e. the Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock/Mosque of 'Umar on the
Temple Mount 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.
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 degradations and humiliations
culminating in the Holocaust.
There is no Muslim parallel to
these claims, despite efforts to portray Palestinian Arabs (many 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 twenty-two other states to potentially choose from and
suffered dearly for this statelessness. Most Muslim Arabs want sole rights over
Jerusalem
today, the same way they want sole rights over Tel Aviv. In their eyes, only
they have legitimate political rights anywhere in what they regard as the Dar
al-Islam.
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 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... he 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..."
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