Saturday, May 22, 2010

Next year in West Jerusalem

 

by Victor Sharpe

  
It has thus come to this. Jerusalem may well be on the way to being re-divided. History will not look kindly upon those in this generation who have fallen into the trap of media distortion, Arab untruths, peace at any price and sheer apathy.

The Jewish Talmud and Midrash tell us from where the message of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is to be broadcast to the world and from where its radiance is to shine forth. The name Zion is synonymous with Jerusalem and every time the Torah is taken from the Ark, during the synagogue service, Jerusalem and Zion are invoked. "For out of Zion shall come forth the Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem" (Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2).

The word Jerusalem and Zion are mentioned 821 times in the entire Jewish Bible (the Tanach) sometimes also referring to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). Jerusalem is mentioned 154 times in the Christian Bible and Zion seven. Jerusalem is not mentioned by name once in the Moslem Koran. Only well after the Arab invasion of Eretz Yisrael in 638 AD did the Arabs begin to refer to the city by name and then only from the tenth century with names of Jewish origin, e.g. Al Kuds, Arabic for the Hebrew Ir Hakodesh (City of Holiness) and Siyyun, Arabic for the Hebrew, Tsiyon, Zion.

The betrayal of Jewish and biblical history, which began at the Madrid Conference, led remorselessly to the Oslo Accords and to the nonsense called the "peace process" whereby Israel gives away land for peace but in return never receives peace. First Jericho, which Joshua bin-Nun liberated when the Jews entered the Promised Land, went to the Arab arch terrorist Yasser Arafat, then Hebron (the first capital of the Jewish King David), and then in rapid succession Nablus, (Biblical Shechem), and relentlessly the hills, mountains, fields and terraces of biblical Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

All were given away to those who hate the Jews and who endlessly plot the total destruction of the Jewish State. Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denying acolyte of Arafat, is presented to the world as a peace partner for Israel. What monumental sham is this? There are those within the present U.S. Administration who work to uproot perhaps as many as 300,000 Jewish residents from their homes in the outlying communities of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and a further 200,000 living in neighborhoods of north and northwestern Jerusalem. They seem intent upon forcing Israel to give away most of what's left of the ancestral Jewish heartland to the Palestinian Arabs — in return for nothing.

Those within the Left and within the international corridors of power have learned nothing from Israel's arbitrary withdrawal from southern Lebanon or from Gaza. As a result of those Israeli peace overtures to the Arabs, Hezbollah inflicted upon Israel the Second Lebanon War and from Gaza a relentless barrage of missiles upon Israeli towns and villages. On and on has continued the insane juggernaut of concession and abandonment of Israel's biblical and ancestral homeland to the Arabs; urged on at every instance by American Administrations, the European Union, the so-called Quartet and the United Nations until the very gates of Jerusalem may now soon be breached.

Talk of dividing Jerusalem is uttered relentlessly. For the first time in recorded history, large areas of Judaism's capital city would become the capital of a new, hostile and fraudulent Arab state called Palestine. The Temple Mount, the holiest of all Jewish holy sites, is now all but lost, and the prayers and anguished longing by generations of suffering Jews is being dismissed by those who have no love for the Jewish state. The previous Israeli government allowed the Moslem Waqf to blatantly destroy Jewish and Christian antiquities on the Temple Mount and to build a new giant mosque underneath it. Israeli archaeologists pleaded in vain to stop the Moslem bulldozers and desecration. Now ordinary Israelis have to sift through enormous piles of dirt that Muslim Palestinians dumped unceremoniously in the valley below the Holy City. Israelis and visitors from overseas now painstakingly search to see if they can find what remains of Jewish and Christian antiquities. Who knows what priceless archaeological evidence was destroyed by the Waqf. What humiliation is this?

We must not at our peril fool ourselves that the appetite of the Palestinian Arabs and the entire Moslem world will be satisfied by the abandonment of the Temple Mount and the eastern half of Jerusalem. We may be doomed to be the generation that will see before our very eyes the destruction of the Jewish State itself, for even if Israel shrinks to a small city block in Tel Aviv, its presence will still be a provocation to the Arab and Muslim world.

Is there an answer? Yes, but many will find it unpalatable. Most have been brainwashed into thinking that the giving away of ancestral Jewish land and the showering of billions of dollars of aid to the Palestinian Authority will bring "peace in our time." It will not. The growing weakness and crumbling resolve of too many Jews in Israel and the Diaspora only serves to whet the appetite of the Arab world. The Arabs have boasted that they will wipe out what they consider the "insufferable Zionist entity" just as they finally destroyed the Crusader Kingdom.

It does not matter that, unlike the Jews who have returned to their ancient homeland, the Crusaders were foreign adventurers on land that they had no historical ties to. For Muslims, no non-Muslim state or nation that is on land once conquered by Muslim armies in the name of Allah will ever be tolerated.

This is the fatal flaw in the entire concept of the "peace process." For the Muslim Arabs, peace is merely a means to an end — an armistice in place for only as long as the "infidel" is perceived to be strong. Once that perception has vanished, all promises, agreements and undertakings made with the "infidel" are to be ignored and abrogated. This has been the pattern for all the agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and every single undertaking and promise by them has been broken.

Unpalatable as it must be, the only solution for Israel is to make not one additional concession but resolve to face the entire world if need be rather than deny Jewish history, Jewish faith, and the Zionist cause. It is time to give victory a chance, not the endless and self-defeating concessions that have marred so many Israeli governments in the past. It is time — as it always has been — to look for support from the One source of ultimate strength above all: Almighty God.

In biblical times the Jewish people withstood for long periods the attacks of their neighbors, whoever they were. Today Israel faces a new U.S. Administration, which displays a growing hostility and coldness towards Israel. The deplorable manner in which visiting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was treated at the recent meeting in the White House is unprecedented and marks a clear and present danger to Israel's very survival. Add to that the antipathy of the Moslem world, a hostile and deceitful media, the insidious influence of Arab oil power and, alas, latent anti-Semitism that lingers in international chancelleries, and you have a perfect storm of infernal pressure growing upon the tiny, embattled Jewish state. Satan has much to smile about.

There is still a faint glimmer of hope, but the candle's flame is growing dimmer by the hour. Israel still has the precious few supporters who expose the cumulative deceits, the distortions, and the outrageous moral equivalence that is made between the Israeli victims of Arab terror and the Arab perpetrators of terror; so lamentably displayed by many of the media mavens who preside over how the news is presented. And the reconstituted State of Israel has the steadfast support of millions of Christians who have found and rediscovered the inextricable roots of their faith within Judaism. They, along with the many Jews who have not yet succumbed to liberal novelties present a resolute defense of an increasingly isolated and vulnerable Israel.

But if the siren calls of a fraudulent, beguiling and deceptive peace cannot be rejected out of hand then I fear a terrible betrayal of undivided Jerusalem, Jewish history and faith will occur. It will not be long before the time immemorial prayer uttered at the conclusion of the Passover meal, which tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the Covenant with God and the creation of the Jewish nation, will become a bitter joke. Instead of "Next Year in Jerusalem," it will be, "Next Year in West Jerusalem."
 

Victor Sharpe is a featured writer with several websites and writes about Jewish history and the Arab-Israel conflict.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

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