Stating The Obvious
What a surreal world. As I read this week’s Torah portion, which - more than 3300 years ago - gives the Jews legal parameters for Jewish ancestral lands in Israel, my first thought was “You see! Jews have been in Israel for thousands of years!” That's sad. The truth is patently obvious, despite surreal efforts to claim otherwise. Like the 2012 report from Iran’s Ahlul Beyt News Agency: “Chairman of the Supreme Islamic Council in Jerusalem, Dr. Ekrima Sabr, has declared that after twenty-five years of digging, archaeologists are unanimous that not a single stone has been found related to Jerusalem’s alleged Jewish history.” Huh??? Or Yasser Arafat angering President Bill Clinton by claiming there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. How was he not laughed off the world stage? Do we really need to cite historic Muslim texts - written before the radicalism of the past 75 years - which plainly state the commonly-known fact that Jews are indigenous to Israel and that Israel has always been our spiritual center (even as colonialist invasions, which often banished Jews, didn’t always allow it to be our geographical home)? Syrian-American Professor Philip Hitti (Princeton), when he testified before the Anglo-American Committee exploring Jewish immigration to Palestine after World War II, reportedly stated, “there is no such thing as a country of 'Palestine' in history.” Professor Hitti, who was adamantly against European-Jewish migration to Israel, saw Israel as southern Syria which was commonly accepted at the time. For many centuries, there was an independent country called Judea/Israel. When the Romans conquered it and turned it into a territory of the Empire, they named the area ‘Palestina’, referring to the Philistines, who were already an extinct people. The Philistines weren’t indigenous to the land (they seem to have hailed from Greece or Crete), but they created communities on Israel’s coastal plain and became an implacable foe of the Jews. Hence, the Romans del
- An Open Letter To President Claudia Sheinbaum
- Stating The Obvious
- The Dangerous Game Of Plausible Deniability
- Because We're Not Okay
- Welcome Home
- The Stranger
- Stand Strong
- Amalek Begone
- The Man, Moses
- Make It Last
- Time To Speak Up
- I Am Jew. Hear Me Roar
- Can We Have An 'I Am Joseph' moment?
- Still Seeking Peace
