by Victor Janice Sharpe
I was re-reading an article from May 26, 2003 titled, "The Divine Zionist Roadmap" written by Rabbi Eliezer Waldman. It dealt with the liberation of Eretz Yisrael, the
Rabbi Waldman, in writing of the Israeli victory over the Arabs, stated, "...We were then blessed by divine miracles that not only helped us overcome our enemies but united us again with the heartland of
The ancestral and biblical heartland of Yehuda and Shomron (Judea and
Rabbi Waldman had been describing the liberation of the ancestral and biblical homeland that took place in June, 1967. The world, of course, does not call it a liberation, but an occupation. It occurred to me that the first liberation of the Land by Joshua some 3,200 years ago must never, never be forgotten, especially by Israel's present leaders who have shown a tragic disregard of Jewish history in their willingness to abandon the Land to the Arabs in return for a delusional peace. So it is instructive to look back to the only "Roadmap" that matters; what I call, The Great Liberation.
Around 1,200 BC, the pagan city states of Canaan west of the River Jordan lay before the tribes of
The people known to us as the Philistines were to become a formidable enemy of the Jewish clans and warfare continued between the two peoples for some 200 years before the Philistines complete and final defeat by Jewish forces. Under the remarkable general, Yehoshua (Joshua), the Israelites liberated the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, which was to become known as the
This tribal allocation, enshrined in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, represents the subsequent basis for the economic, political, spiritual and religious organization of
As Professor Elazar also pointed out in his study of the texts in the Book of Joshua, "they are permanent and inalienable, even unto the end of days." It is this geographical imperative within the biblical account, which must instruct all Israeli leaders to beware when being pressured by the world to give away Jewish tribal lands to hostile Arabs in fruitless efforts of worthless appeasement. This is God's covenanted possession given to the Jewish people in trust and must never be given away to His enemies.
What then is the territory given by God to the 12 tribes and through them to the Jewish People as everlasting covenanted lands? Chapter 11 of the Book of Joshua completes the epic story of the conquest and liberation of the Land, usually employing the Hebrew word, nahalah, meaning inheritance. Chapter 12 begins by detailing the initial division by lot in the Torah (the first Five Books of the Bible). In Chapter 13, we come to the specific geographical distribution of territory, which today some 3,200 years later includes areas needlessly given away to the Arabs by respective Israeli leaders.
These leaders, from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin down to the present time, have been possessed of an overwhelming desire for an Arab-Israel peace. But their desperation to go down in history as the great peace bringer (with the added bonus, perhaps, of receiving what has now become the grotesquely misnamed Nobel Peace Prize) also has become their grand and tragic delusion with calamitous implications for
Chapter 14 describes the constitutional division of the Land. The lands were divided by Joshua as chief executive, Elazar the high priest, (notice the continuation of the Jewish name, Elazar, over a three thousand year period) and the heads of the tribes, Rashei Avot, (literally the heads of the fathers of the tribes). The tribe of
Though
After the death of King Solomon, the Land was rent in half. The Joseph tribes became in time the nucleus of the northern kingdom of
The
"Sihon king of the Amorites who lived at Heshbon and ruled from Aroer, which is on the edge of the Valley of the Arnon, and from the middle of the valley as far as the river Jabbok, the boundary of the Ammonites, that is half of
"And Joshua gave their land to the tribes of Israel as a possession according to their allotments, in the hill country, in the lowland, in the Arava, in the slopes, in the wilderness, and in the Negev, the land of the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. These are the other kings defeated by Joshua and whose lands were liberated including Jericho; Ai, which is beside Bethel; Jerusalem; Hebron; Jarmuth; Lachish; Eglon; Gezer; Debir; Geder; Hormah; Arad; Libnah; Adullam; Makkadesh; Bethel; Tappuach; Hepher; Aphek; Lasharon; Madon; Hazor; Shimron-Meron; of Achshaph; Taanach; Megiddo; Kedesh; Yokneam in Carmel; Dor in Naphath-dor; Goim in Galilee; Tirzah: In all, the territories of 31 kings."
I deliberately quote in full from the biblical verses in order to more fully provide the geographical extent of the territories involved in the Great Liberation. Subsequent chapters and verses in the Book of Joshua list additional liberated territories as does the following Book of Judges. Much of this ancient land still remains within the present day State of Israel but a significant portion has already been given away to the Palestinian Authority, which occupies territory in the heartland of the original possession of the Twelve Tribes of Israel — Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). In addition, some of the biblical possessions of the Jewish Tribes now lie within the Arab state of
Some of the locations named above that have been reconstituted as Jewish villages after the liberation of 1967 are described by much of the world's media in pejorative terms. They use the term, "settlements," to describe them, which in the English language tends to falsely imply that they are colonial outposts of a people with no roots in the Land. Such charges are routinely used in their deliberate de-legitimizing of both the Jewish residents and of biblical Jewish history itself.
We know, of course, that such previous abandonment has given
In all this, I am reminded of an eminent politician I met at a function who described himself as a "progressive." Heaven protect us from such euphemisms. We fell to discussing the implications of the Two State Solution. "For peace," he said, "I would willingly give away Judea and
Yet this same gentleman expressed total ignorance when I referred to the "Truce of Hudaybiyyah." This is for Muslims the precedent for how not to honor any agreements entered into with non-Moslems. In 628 AD, Mohammed made a "truce agreement" with the Quraish tribe in
This truce between Mohammed and the 'infidels' of
Hamas and Fatah, merely take any opportunity to feverishly arm themselves until they feel strong enough to begin a new round of ever more lethal aggression against the Jewish state. They have a precedent: The Truce of Hudaybiyyah.
The "progressive" politician, who had sadly replaced "The Great Liberation" in exchange for the latest suicidal "roadmap to peace," was finally silenced after I had suggested to him that if Israelis were to follow his advice, the time honored prayer recited at Passover, "Next Year in
Victor Sharpe is a writer on Jewish history and the Islamist-Israel conflict. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book: Politicide — The attempted murder of the Jewish state. The second volume, updated to the end of 2009, continues documenting in some 46 easily readable chapters the relentless war of the Islamist and Arab world against
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment