Israel Introduction - history

Israel

Introduction

Jews have lived in the land of Israel for nearly 4000 years, going back to the period of the Biblical patriarchs (c.1900 BCE). The story of the Jewish people, Israel, its capital, Jerusalem, and the Jewish Temple there, has been one of exile, destruction and rebirth. In its 3000 years of history Jerusalem has been destroyed 17 times and 18 times reborn. There has always remained a Jewish presence in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem, and the Jewish people as a whole always dreamt of returning to and rebuilding it.

The concluding words of Israel’s national anthem, Ha Tikvah (The Hope) summarise that aim: “The hope of 2000 years:/ To live as a free people/ In our own land,/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

From Biblical Israel to 70 CE

The story of Jewish life in ancient Israel is recorded in detail in the Hebrew Bible (called the “Old Testament” by Christians). According to the Bible, the history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, and the story of Abraham begins when God tells him to leave his homeland, promising Abraham and his descendants a new home in the land of Canaan. (Gen. 12). Canaan was later renamed Israel, after Abraham’s grandson, Jacob/Israel. The land is also often referred to as the Promised Land because of God’s repeated promise (Gen. 12:7, 13:15, 15:18, 17:8) to give it to the descendants of Abraham. 

When Jacob/Israel encountered the site on Mount Moriah where centuries later the Temple would stand, he said: “How awe-inspiring is this place! It is the House of God! It is the gate to heaven!” (Gen. 28:17). He was told Jerusalem was “the site that the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes, as a place established in His name. It is there that you shall go to seek His presence” (Deut. 12:3).

Jerusalem began to fulfil the function of a spiritual and national capital for the Jews in the 10th century BCE when King David conquered it. He made Jerusalem his seat of judgment and took the Ark of the Covenant to rest there. It was David who conceived the idea of building a Temple there as a permanent house of God, a plan eventually fulfilled by his son Solomon.

The Temple in Jerusalem was the centre of Jewish religion and life from the time of Solomon to its eventual destruction by the Romans in 70CE. It was the one and only place where services and certain other religious rituals were performed. Three times a year, on the harvest holydays of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, the entire Jewish nation would make a pilgrimage there.

It is in the direction of Jerusalem that Jews face when they pray three times daily. The prayers themselves contain numerous references to Jerusalem and Zion. In the Amidah, the Silent Devotion, God is praised as the Builder of Jerusalem. In many other places the prayers echo the messianic belief that God will restore the Jewish people to His holy city. On Passover and the Day of Atonement, Jews conclude services with the fervent hope: “Next year may we be in Jerusalem!”

When the Babylonians destroyed the city in 586 BCE, they also partially destroyed the Temple. The Jews, sent into exile by this event, pledged that they would never forget their beloved Jerusalem or its Temple: 

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and we wept, when we remembered Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy” (Psalms 137:1-6).

In 165 BCE the Temple was rededicated after Jewish soldiers succeeded in recapturing Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed this Second Temple in 70 CE, for them a victory of such significance that they commemorated it by erecting the triumphal Arch of Titus, which still dominates the Roman Forum.

Jerusalem’s famous Wailing Wall is the remains of the western retaining wall of the Temple, and it is as close to the site of the original Sanctuary as Jews can go today. The site of The Temple is currently occupied by a Muslem Mosque called the Dome of the Rock.

When the Emperor Hadrian began planning to replace the destroyed Second Temple with a shrine to Jupiter, a Jewish revolt known as the Bar Kochba Rebellion broke out. In a subsequent revolt in 135 CE some 580,000 Jewish soldiers were killed; and following that revolt the Emperor Hadrian decreed that the name “Judea” should be replaced by “Syria Palestina” – Philistine Syria or “Palestine”.

In the years following the destruction of the Second Temple, the greater part of the Jewish population went into exile as captives, slaves and refugees, although Galilee remained a centre of Jewish institutions and learning until the sixth century CE. For the past 2000 years, on the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av, Jews everywhere have commemorated the destruction of their city and Temple with a 25-hour fast. They sit on low stools in their synagogues and recite Jeremiah’s Lamentations. They recite elegies for the city which is “scorned without her glory”.


The Importance of Jerusalem in Judaism

“Jews care intensely about Jerusalem. The Christians have Rome and Canterbury and even Salt Lake City; Muslims have Mecca and Medina. Jerusalem has great meaning for them also. But the Jews have only Jerusalem, and only the Jews have made it their capital. That is why it has so much deeper a meaning for them than for anybody else….“(Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem from 1965-1993).

Throughout its long and turbulent history, Jerusalem, more than any other city, has evoked the emotions, aspirations, yearnings and religious fervour of civilised mankind. Yet this homage of the world cannot overshadow the consuming and single-minded passion of one particular attachment: that of the Jewish people. For that people, as no other, Jerusalem is not just its one and only religious centre and source of spiritual life; from time immemorial it has been and, still is, the very heart and core of the people – the tangible embodiment of its nationhood, the lodestar in its wanderings, the theme of its prayers each day, the fulfilment of its dreams for the Return unto Zion and indeed the cornerstone of its continuity.

There has been a Jewish presence in the city of Jerusalem over the centuries, despite the massacres and deprivation brought about by its ruling powers and invading armies. The only times Jews did not live in the city were in the period immediately after the Roman destruction and for a short time during the Crusades, which was also the only period when Jerusalem was a capital city for a non-Jewish group: from 1099 with the founding of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The city has always been the designated national capital of the Jews. It was home to the Jewish kings, the Sanhedrin and the High Priests. In 1948 it automatically became the capital of the State of Israel.

In October 1995, the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act which recognised Jerusalem as the united capital of Israel and authorised the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The then US Senate majority leader, Robert Dole, stated: “Yesterday’s vote to relocate the American Embassy to Jerusalem was truly a bipartisan effort… No other city on earth represents the same capital of the same country inhabited by the same people, speaking the same language and worshipping the same God as it did 3000 years ago.” 


Judaism in Israel today

In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the desire is expressed to reflect the historical, cultural and spiritual centrality of the Land of Israel in its statehood, and its openness to Aliyah. This is achieved by Public holidays being observed on Jewish Festivals; the IDF, most hospitals and public services, ensuring that the food they serve is Kosher, and such. The Declaration also promises that the State of Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions…”
 

About one quarter of Israel’s Jewish population observe some traditions, while another 20% say they go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur (=70%) and another 8% (=78%) say that they fast on Yom Kippur but stay at home. A similar percentage observe the Seder gathering in some form on the first night of Pesach. Some other traditional practices observed in a limited way by the Hiloni (secular) of Israel are lighting the Shabbat candles, or keeping kosher to some extent. This is rare practice amongst American Reform Jews, and unheard of among secular American Jews.

Even though this reveals that most Israelis do not formally identify themselves with a movement, Orthodoxy is the only movement that is formally and legally recognised in Israel. Religious councils were served only by Orthodox Jews until very recently, and matters such as marriage, conversions and divorce are controlled by the Orthodox Rabbinate.

There is a strong movement to de-institutionalize Judaism as the state Religion, in terms of its impact on individual free will and practice, issues of pluralism and on personal status.  Under Israel, freedom of religion has been guaranteed for all faiths in Israel and particularly in Jerusalem. By contrast, between 1948 and 1967, under the rule of Jordan in East Jerusalem, 54 synagogues were destroyed in the Old City; gravestones from the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were used as paving stones; and Jews were expelled from the sector. Under Article 8 of the Israeli-Jordanian Armistice agreement of April 1949, free access to the Western Wall and Mount Scopus was supposed to be guaranteed to the Jews, but the Jordanians never allowed it. Immediately after the Israeli reunification of Jerusalem, the Protection of Holy Places Law was passed by the Knesset, on 22 June 1967, guaranteeing the sanctity of all holy sites. This law imposes prison sentences of up to seven years on those who desecrate such places. The 1980 Basic Law on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel reaffirmed the principle of free access to the holy sites of all religions.

Israel permits Christians and Muslims to administer their own holy places and institutions. Jordan still administers the Muslim holy sites in the city. In 1988 King Hussein exempted Jerusalem when he ended his administrative ties with the West Bank, and the October 1994 Israel-Jordanian peace treaty agrees on respecting “the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem”. C. Witton Davies, Archdeacon of Oxford, wrote after a visit to Jerusalem: “From my own personal conversations and observations, I testify that Jerusalem has never been so fairly administered, or made accessible to adherents of all three monotheisms, as well as to the general tourist sightseer or visitor.”

Former US President Jimmy Carter, a devout Southern Baptist and an outspoken exponent of human rights, has acknowledged the freedom of religion in East Jerusalem under Israeli rule: “There is unimpeded access today. There wasn’t from 1948-1967.”

In April 1990, the chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Dante Fascell, noted on the floor of Congress that “since Israel gained control of the (Old) City in 1967, it has been open to worshippers of all faiths.”

Israeli rule has not been perfect, yet it has effectively safeguarded the religious freedom of Christians, Muslims and Jews and their holy places. 

The Historic Jewish Capital of the Historical Jewish Land

For 3000 years Jews have turned towards Jerusalem for spiritual, cultural, and national inspiration. After the destruction of the city, by the Romans almost 2000 years ago, foreign powers ruled the city vanquishing its inner beauty. 

Today the beauty has returned to the city. Jerusalem has once again truly become the centre of the Jewish people. The adage of the Talmudic sages has now been fulfilled: “Ten measures of beauty were bestowed upon the world; nine were taken by Jerusalem.”



Through the centuries of exile, the hope for redemption of Jerusalem and the land of Israel remained a focal point of the Jewish religion and national identity. Today there are about 14 million Jews in the world, of whom nearly five million live in Israel, almost half a million in Jerusalem.



Excerpt from an address by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, given at the inauguration of the Jerusalem 3000 festivities on 4 September 1995 – two months before his assassination.

“Three thousand years of history look down upon us today, as do the dreams which cover the hyssop of the Western Wall and the silent graves of the Mount of Olives and Mount Herzl; the hush of the footsteps of the pilgrims and the thunder of the nailed boots of the ruthless conquerors; whose walls resonate with the prayers of the children and the pleas of the praying; where the exultation of victory mingled with the tears of the paratroopers next to the remnants of the Temple, liberated from the yoke of strangers. Three thousand years of dreams and prayers today wrap Jerusalem in love and bring close Jews of every generation – from the fires of the Inquisition to the ovens of Auschwitz, and from all corners of the earth – from Yemen to Poland. Three thousand years of Jerusalem are for us, now and forever, a message for tolerance between religions, of love between peoples, of understanding between the nations, of the penetrating awareness that there is no State of Israel without Jerusalem, and no peace without Jerusalem united – the City of Peace. On the day that the government offices were moved to Jerusalem, on 13 December 1949, the first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, said: ‘The State of Israel has, and will have, only one capital, Eternal Jerusalem. So it was 3000 years ago and so it will be, as we believe, for eternity’.””

This information has been sourced, with thanks, from the NSWJBD.

Links of interest

Israel 21C

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Israel’s National Photo Collection

Israel Size Comparison Maps

Israel UpClose Videos


Jewish Agency’s Eye on Israel

Knesset 

Mid-East Web Maps

Facts Arabs would rather not Admit - Draiman

Facts Arabs would rather not Admit 
Only one people has ever made Jerusalem its capital and only one people ever established their ancestral and biblical homeland between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea: the Jews. The Jews were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Land for millennia before the Muslim religion was created.

However, most people, because they have been exposed for so long to anti-Israel Arab propaganda, believe that there has not been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land for the last 2,000 years. They are thus unaware that the territory was never Judenrein (that is empty of a Jewish presence). And Arabs would rather you forget also that Jews lived for millennia in Mesopotamia and in what became later known as British created Iraq.

Indeed Jews had resided for 3,000 years in that territory from the Babylonian Captivity onwards. It was when Israel was reborn in 1948 that the Iraqi Arabs drove the Jews from their ancient homes, turning them into refugees who found sanctuary in Israel; an impoverished country barely able to support them at the time. More Jewish refugees were created than Arab refugees as one Arab state after another in the Middle East and North Africa drove out their Jewish populations. A crime, which is hardly ever recognized.

Arabs and their anti-Israel supporters try to convince the world that the Jews just appeared in the early 20th century after being dispersed for two thousand years from their biblical homeland. That is a flat out lie and flies in the face of recorded history. But facts never seem to matter to Arabs and pro-Arabs. So this brief history lesson will be for them an inconvenient truth.

Let me start by quoting from an article written in The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998 by Charles Krauthammer:

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one today advertising ice cream at the corner candy store." 

The Jewish People trace their origin to Abraham, he who is called the Holy Convert, the first Jew, who established the belief in only one God, the creator of the universe. Abraham, his son Yitzhak (Isaac), and grandson Jacob (Israel), are referred to as the patriarchs of the Israelites who lived in what was then the Land of Canaan; later to become known as the Land of Israel. They and their wives are buried in the Ma'arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron, Judaism’s second holiest city. (Genesis Chapter 23).

The name, Israel, derives from the name given to Jacob (Genesis 32:29). His 12 sons were the ancestors of the 12 tribes that later developed into the Jewish nation. The name Jew derives from Yehuda (Judah) one of the 12 sons of Jacob. You will find the names of the tribes listed in Exodus 1:1. Yehuda (Judea) is also the biblical name of the southern region of what the world calls by its Arab name – the West Bank. Shomron (Samaria) is the northern half.

Modern Israel shares the same language, culture, and Jewish faith passed through generations starting with the founding father Abraham and the Jews have had a continuous presence in the land of Israel for the past 3,300 years.
Menorah plundered from the Temple, depicted on the Arch of Titus, Rome.
In 70 AD, Rome destroyed the Holy Temple and conquered the Jewish nation, yet only part of the population was sent into exile. Even after the Second Jewish Revolt against the continuing cruel Roman occupation, Jews, though banned from Jerusalem, survived for centuries in other Jewish towns including Rafah, Gaza, Yavne, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea as well as throughout Galilee and the Golan. Ruins of synagogues built in post-biblical Byzantine times are found scattered throughout the Golan and an epic act of Jewish resistance to the Roman legions took place at Gamla, high upon the Golan Heights. Here again, the Jewish presence predates the modern Syrian claims to the Heights by millennia.

Interestingly, early seventh century battles raged between the Persians and the Byzantines over the Land of Israel. The Byzantines were oppressing the Jews and a Jewish general, Benjamin of Tiberius, was able to raise an army of twenty thousand Jewish men from villages and towns in northern Israel to support the Persian cause against the oppressors. This again points to extensive Jewish life in the land well after the erroneous Arab claim that Jews had not lived in the land during the last 2,000 years.

The height of Jewish prominence was again achieved in the tenth century. In Tiberius, by the shores of Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, a symbol system for Hebrew vowels was created which eventually gained universal acceptance. But with the advent of the Crusades in Israel during the 12th century, and the massacres of thousands of Jews in Jerusalem and throughout the land, the Jewish population reached its lowest point. But Jewish populations again revived, strengthened by new Jewish immigrants arriving constantly from the Diaspora. Many such returnees settled in Safed, Tiberius, Hebron and Jerusalem.

These are the four Holy Jewish cities of the Land with Jerusalem, north, south, east and west, the eternal 3,000 year old Jewish capital and veritable jewel in the crown. Jews traveling from Europe, such as the remarkable medieval explorer, Benjamin of Tudela, had to overcome immense perils while crossing lands at war with one another. They had to avoid death or capture by bandits, or at sea from North African pirates and Crusaders based in Cyprus or Malta. That they came at all, however, remains a tribute to the earliest efforts to keep Israel populated with its aboriginal and ancestral folk and abide by the religious commandments to go up to the land of Israel.

A brief list of Jews returning to the ancestral land reveals a constant arrival of people joining existing Jewish villages and communities, themselves always at the mercy of alien occupiers.

According to the Center for Online Judaic Studies, here are just a few of the names of early Jewish returnees:

1075:1141 Yehuda Halevi, poet.

1135: 1204 Maimonides, philosopher.

1210: Settlement in Israel of three hundred French and English rabbis.

1267: Nachmanides arrives in Israel.

1313: Estory Haparchi arrives: The first geographer of Israel.

1538: Renewal of rabbinic ordination in Safed.

1561: Joseph Nasi leases Tiberius from Turkish sultan.

1700: Yehuda HaChasid and his followers arrive in Jerusalem.

1777: Large Hassidic group settles in Galilee.

1797: Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav’s trip to Israel.

1808: Disciples of Elijah, Gaon of Vilna, settle in Jerusalem.

This very partial list of Jewish immigrants, who arrived well before the 20th century, is an inconvenient truth to the Arab and pro-Arab propagandists who would have you believe their myth that the Jews only arrived much, much later.

The national coins, the pottery, the cities and villages, the ancient Hebrew texts…all support the empirical fact that Jews always had a continuous presence in that land for over 3,000 years and the fact that Jewish villages and towns were to be found in all parts of the ancient homeland and throughout all the preceding years, up until the present time, certainly dwarfs any claims that other people in the region may have; especially the Arabs who today call themselves Palestinians.

Facts the World would rather not Admit

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nothing could attest to that fact more than the Israel-Arab conflict, which in reality is the Israel-Islamist conflict.

This is not a territorial dispute between Israel and those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, though it is framed as such. No, the stark reality of the Muslim war against the Jewish state is rooted in one fundamental fact; namely the unchangeable refusal by Muslims to ever accept a non-Islamic nation in territory once conquered in the name of Allah, even if that nation – the nation of Israel – precedes Islam by millennia.

Peace overtures and endless territorial concessions by tiny Israel to the giant Muslim and Arab world have been, and are, as worthless as a thirsty soul in the desert staggering towards an inviting but delusional mirage.

Entire books have been written about the basic facts of Israel’s place in the family of nations as both a state and a people. Their purpose has been to explain why Israel and its people claim the right to an independent state in a small corner of the Middle East; roughly one quarter of the geographical area known as Palestine and a territory that has never been an independent state by that name in all of recorded history; certainly never an Arab state. Plain an simply, the Palestinians are an invented people.

The basic facts, which should be self-evident, need to be repeated again and again as Golda Meir urged nearly 40 years ago. Perhaps the following is the most basic and pernicious falsehood leveled at the reconstituted Jewish state. It is predictably made by a hostile Muslim and Arab world but it is echoed by their useful idiot supporters in the West.

The charge is this:

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the Jews lost their country and forfeited any right to it by going into exile for nearly 2,000 years.

The answer:

Indeed, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple ended with appalling loss of life. But the Jews maintained a continuous presence in their homeland and it is this continuity which gives them an absolute, inalienable right of self-determination, historically, spiritually and politically in the reconstituted Jewish state.

In AD 132, the charismatic Jewish hero, Simon Bar Kochba, rallied his countrymen against continued Roman persecution and another war of liberation – the second Jewish uprising – was launched against Rome. His Jewish warriors freed large areas of the homeland from the Roman yoke, just as Jewish fighters under Judah Maccabee had similarly freed the homeland from Greco-Syrian occupation in 165 BC, liberating Jerusalem and the Holy Temple and giving the world the festival of lights, Hanukah, which every year falls on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev.

Bar Kochba (known as Son of the Star) also liberated Jerusalem but the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, who wanted to build a giant temple to the god, Jupiter, in place of the Holy Temple, sent an army of 35,000 soldiers against the Jewish warriors. After a three year desperate struggle, the Jewish resistance ended at the fortress of Betar. It is estimated that in the ensuing Roman repression some 500,000 Jews were either killed or sent into slavery throughout the Empire.

Even after this second catastrophe, the Jews nevertheless remained an absolute majority in the land up until the 5th century AD and they were the most important single community up until the Arab conquest under the new banner of Islam in the 7th century.

In 1099 the Crusaders arrived outside Jerusalem, having massacred thousands of Jews along their way from Flanders, through the Rhineland, and on to the Holy Land where both Jews and Muslims were killed. They had come to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. On July 15th, 1099, after enduring a six week siege, the “Franks” broke into the city and the entire Jewish population of Jerusalem was forced into the chief synagogue, the building set on fire, while the Crusaders marched around it singing, “Christ we adore thee,” in a diabolical accompaniment to the screams of the men, women and children burning alive. The bloodbath temporarily ended when Emperor Henry 1V protested to Pope Clement 111 at the abhorrent behavior of those irregular bands of crusaders who had committed the atrocities.

In the ensuing centuries, during which the land was invaded by successive alien conquerors, the Jews maintained themselves in whatever numbers they could sustain. In fact they re-founded the holy Jewish city of Tiberius in Galilee three separate times. In the 16th century, some 18,000 Jews lived in another holy Jewish city, Safed, in Upper Galilee; a center of Jewish mysticism known as kabbalah.

Throughout the dark centuries of exile, Jewish pilgrims and refugees returned again and again to restore the ancestral Jewish homeland. Jewish prayers and festivals recited and celebrated in synagogues throughout the Diaspora, then as now, are based in large part upon the agricultural cycle of ancient Israel: Another testament to the inextricable links to the Land of Israel within the Jewish faith.

In the 1850s the first Jewish agricultural villages were established in what was then largely barren and desolate, neglected and empty territory under Turkish Ottoman occupation. By 1844 the Jews constituted the largest community in their eternal Jewish capital, Jerusalem.

In that year, according to the Prussian Consul, there were 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims, and 3,390 Christians in Jerusalem. Even before the State of Israel was re-established in 1948, Jerusalem was primarily a Jewish city with 100,000 Jews out of a total population of 165,000. Many of the non-Jews were not Arabs at all but Europeans, Armenians, Americans, Ethiopians and other Christians.

The assertion that Jewish ties to the ancestral homeland came to an end in 70 AD is utterly without foundation. It has remained unbroken since Abraham, the first Jew, came to Hebron, the other Jewish holy city, and purchased a burial plot for his wife, Sarah and for his son, Isaac, his grandson, Jacob and their wives: the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish people, most of whom are buried in Hebron.

The truth then is that the indigenous Jews always maintained a continuous presence in their own land despite the depredations of a succession of alien occupiers. There is an absolute continuity between the Israel of the Bible and the Israel of today.

It is the same land, the same people, the same language, the same God, the same prophets, the same holy Book. There has never been a time in the last 35 centuries when there haven’t been Jews living in Israel, sometimes as a sovereign nation, sometimes as isolated enclaves occupied by an enemy power.

And when Jews have been few in number inside Israel itself, they have nevertheless continued to pray for its welfare daily, to pray daily for their return to nationhood, to recount the Biblical promises, and to pray for a quick return.

This is continuity par excellence. This is a basic fact and Newt Gingrich, to his credit, articulated it for all to hear. Why is this important? Because part of the Big Lie of today is to deny Jewish continuity in its ancestral, aboriginal, and biblical homeland and to falsely consider the Jews illegitimate newcomers to the land who can legitimately be pushed out.

More on the truth about Israel and its history can be read about in Victor Sharpe's book, "Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state".

JERUSALEM, THE CITY OF ETERNITY - Draiman

JERUSALEM, THE CITY OF ETERNITY

Peter Wertheim President, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies

JERUSALEM FOREVER

"Jews care intensely about Jerusalem. The Christians have Rome and Canterbury and even Salt Lake City; Muslims have Mecca and Medina. Jerusalem has great meaning for them also. But the Jews have only Jerusalem, and only the Jews have made it their capital. That is why it has so much deeper a meaning for them than for anybody else...."(Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem from 1965-1993).

Throughout its long and turbulent history, Jerusalem, more than any other city, has evoked the emotions, aspirations, yearnings and religious fervour of civilised mankind. Yet this homage of the world cannot overshadow the consuming and single-minded passion of one particular attachment: that of the Jewish people. For that people, as no other, Jerusalem is not just its one and only religious centre and source of spiritual life; from time immemorial it has been and, still is, the very heart and core of the people - the tangible embodiment of its nationhood, the lodestar in its wanderings, the theme of its prayers each day, the fulfilment of its dreams for the Return unto Zion and indeed the cornerstone of its continuity.

Many thousand of years ago, it was in Jerusalem that the priests would offer up daily sacrifices in the Temple on Mount Moriah. It was there in the Temple that the Sanhedrin, the great court of 71 Jewish sages, would sit in judgement. And three times a year on the harvest holydays of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles, the entire Jewish nation would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

It is in the direction of Jerusalem that Jews face when they pray three times daily. The prayers themselves contain numerous references to Jerusalem and Zion. In the Amidah, the Silent Devotion, God is praised as the Builder of Jerusalem. In many other places the prayers echo the messianic belief that God will restore the Jewish people to His holy city. On Passover and the Day of Atonement Jews conclude services with the fervent hope: "Next year may we be in Jerusalem!"

The Jewish connection to Jerusalem harks back to Biblical times. Jacob, encountering the site where the Temple would stand centuries later said: "How awe-inspiring is this place! It is the House of God! It is the gate to heaven!" (Gen. 28:17). Jerusalem was "the site that the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes, as a place established in His name. It is there that you shall go to seek His presence" (Deut. 12:3).

Jerusalem began to fulfil the function of a spiritual and national capital when King David conquered the city in the 10th century BCE. He made it his seat of judgement and brought the Ark of the Covenant to rest there. It was also David who conceived the idea of building a permanent house of God, a Temple, a plan eventually fulfilled by his son Solomon.

DESTRUCTION & REBIRTH

The story of the Jewish people and Jerusalem has been one of exile, destruction and rebirth. In its 3000 years of history the city was destroyed 17 times and 18 times reborn. There always remained a Jewish presence in the city, and the Jewish people as a whole always dreamt of returning to and rebuilding their city.

When the Babylonians destroyed the city in 586 BCE, the Jewish exiles pledged that they would never forget their beloved Jerusalem: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and we wept, when we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in its midst we hanged up our harps. For there they that led us captive asked of us words of song, and our tormentors asked of us in mirth: 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.' How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy" (Psalms 137:1-6). The exiles did not forget their beloved city. They were to return there and rebuild the Temple under the guidance of Ezra and Nehemiah.

When the Seleucids took control over the Land of Israel and placed Greek idols in the Temple, the Jewish Maccabees revolted. They succeeded in recapturing Jerusalem and rededicating the Temple in 165 BCE. The Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE. When the Emperor Hadrian began planning to replace it with a shrine to Jupiter, a Jewish revolt known as the Bar Kochba Rebellion broke out.

For the last 2000 years, on the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av, Jews everywhere have commemorated the destruction of their city and Temple with a 25-hour fast. They sit on low stools in their synagogues and recite Jeremiah's Lamentations. They recite elegies for the city which is "scorned without her glory".

During the periods of exile Jews throughout the world would be linked as they prayed together in their Hebrew tongue all facing in the same direction, maintaining their affinity with their eternal Jerusalem.

Today Jerusalem flourishes once again as the heart and soul of Judaism. It boasts a full range of synagogues, Talmudic academies and institutes of Jewish research. It is home to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel which administers the life cycle events of the nation's Jewish citizens. All varieties of Judaism are represented there. Nowhere else is the spiritual element of the Jewish people so visible as in this "place that the Lord has chosen".

NATIONAL CAPITAL 

Jerusalem was never the capital city of any of its Muslim rulers. It was not the capital for the Umayyad, Abbasid, or Fatamid caliphates who ruled for 400 years. Nor was it the capital for the Mamluks (1260- 1516), Ottomans (1516-1917), or Jordanians who ruled East Jerusalem (1948-1967).

The only time (until 1948) that Jerusalem was a capital over the last two millenia was for a period during the Crusades when it was conquered in 1099 by Godfrey de Bouillon who founded the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Under Jordanian rule, from 1948-1967, East Jerusalem was the provincial capital of "Muhafazat el Quds", the Jerusalem Region. Yet, its mayor was not elected by the twelve city councillors, but appointed by the Minister of Interior in Amman irrespective of the number of votes he received in elections. Furthermore, no ministry had its seat in East Jerusalem. The Jordanian parliament and senate, and the headquarters of all public institutions and banks, were situated in Amman. East Jerusalem was regarded by the Jordanian authorities as a semi-municipal area, with services far below the minimum normal standards for municipalities.

The city has always been the designated national capital of the Jews. It has been home to the Jewish kings, the Sanhedrin, and the High Priest. Since independence in 1948 it has automatically become the capital of the State of Israel. By contrast it is interesting to note that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's founding document, the Palestinian National Covenant of 1964 does not mention Jerusalem even once.

JEWISH PRESENCE 

There has been a Jewish presence in the city continuously over the centuries, despite the massacres and deprivation brought about by its ruling powers and invading armies. The only time that Jews were forced to leave the city was in the period immediately after the Roman destruction and for a short time during the Crusades.

In 1870 - before the waves of Jewish migration from Europe - out of a total population of 22,000, there were 11,000 Jews, 6,500 Muslims and 4,500 Christians. Since the 1875 census, Jews have consistently made up an absolute majority of the city's total population. In 1997, out of a population of 591,000, there were 417,000 Jews.

A CITY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Israel's Declaration of Independence promises that the State of Israel "will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions..."

Under Israel, freedom of religion has been guaranteed for all faiths in Jerusalem. By contrast, between 1948 and 1967, under the rule of Jordan in East Jerusalem, fifty-four synagogues were destroyed in the Old City; gravestones from the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were used as paving stones; and Jews were expelled from the sector. Under Article 8 of the Israeli-Jordanian Armistice agreement of April, 1949, free access to the Western Wall and Mount Scopus was supposed to be guaranteed to the Jews, but the Jordanians never allowed this to take effect.

Immediately after the Israeli reunification of Jerusalem, the Protection of Holy Places Law was passed by the Knesset, on 22 June, 1967, guaranteeing the sanctity of all holy sites. The law imposes prison sentences of up to seven years on those who desecrate such places. The 1980 Basic Law on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel reaffirmed the principle of free access to the holy sites of all religions.

Israel permits Christians and Muslims to administer their own holy places and institutions. Jordan still administers the Muslim holy sites in the city. In 1988 King Hussein exempted Jerusalem when he ended his administrative ties with the West Bank, and the October 1994 Israel Jordanian peace treaty agrees on respecting "the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem".

C. Witton Davies, Archdeacon of Oxford, wrote after a visit to Jerusalem: "From my own personal conversations and observations, I testify that Jerusalem has never been so fairly administered, or made accessible to adherents of all three monotheisms, as well as to the general tourist sightseer or visitor."

Former US President Jimmy Carter, a devout Southern Baptist and an outspoken exponent of human rights, has acknowledged the freedom of religion in East Jerusalem under Israeli rule: "There is unimpeded access today. There wasn't from 1948-1967."

In April 1990, the chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Dante Fascell, noted on the floor of Congress that "since Israel gained control of the (Old) City in 1967, it has been open to worshippers of all faiths."

A CITY REBORN

Since 1967, Israel has restored and repopulated areas in East Jerusalem. As a result of the efforts of Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem from 1965-1993, facilities were provided for Arabs in East Jerusalem beyond anything introduced under Jordanian rule, including sewage, a piped water system, clinics, parks and gardens. Jerusalem's Arabs can work freely in Israel and are entitled to health insurance, hospital access, and other benefits enjoyed by Israeli citizens.

Despite the charges of those who assert that Israel is "Judaising" the city, the fact is that since Israeli reunification, the Arab population has grown rapidly. In 1967 there were 68,600 Arabs living in Jerusalem, whereas in 1995 there were 174,400, a rise of 154%. Whilst the demographic growth has been great, crowding has actually decreased. In 1967 there were 12,200 Arab-owned apartments; by 1995 the number had risen to 27,066, an increase of 122%. The Israeli decision to build housing units in Har Homa in south-east Jerusalem was a response to the fact that the city is naturally expanding. At the same time as approving construction of housing for Jews, the government approved the building of 3,015 housing units for Arabs in ten Arab neighbourhoods in Jerusalem.

A UNITED CITY FOR ALL TIME

Israeli rule has not been perfect, yet it has effectively safeguarded the religious freedom of Christians, Muslims and Jews and their holy places. Under Israel the infrastructure in East Jerusalem has been greatly improved and the Arab population of the city has grown significantly. A redivided city would increase the number of conflict points between Jews and Arabs dissatisfied with the partition, and which, under two ruling authorities, would be a nightmare to control.

In October 1995, the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act which recognised Jerusalem as the united capital of Israel and authorised the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The then US Senate majority leader, Robert Dole, stated: "Yesterday's vote to relocate the American Embassy to Jerusalem was truly a bipartisan effort... No other city on earth represents the same capital of the same country inhabited by the same people, speaking the same language and worshipping the same God as it did 3000 years ago."

For 3000 years Jews have turned toward Jerusalem for spiritual, cultural, and national inspiration. Since the destruction of the city by the Romans almost 2000 years ago, foreign powers ruled the city vanquishing its inner beauty. Today the beauty has returned to the city. Jerusalem has once again truly become the centre of the Jewish people. The adage of the Talmudic sages has now been fulfilled: "Ten measures of beauty were bestowed upon the world; nine were taken by Jerusalem."

Israel - The Miracle, at 60

Israel - The Miracle, at 60

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, May 16, 2008

Before sending Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition to answer. Among them, writes Stephen Ambrose: "What Affinity between their [the Indians'] religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?" Jefferson and Lewis, like many of their day and ours, were fascinated by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and thought they might be out there on the Great Plains.

They weren't. They aren't anywhere. Their disappearance into the mists of history since their exile from Israel in 722 B.C. is no mystery. It is the norm, the rule for every ancient people defeated, destroyed, scattered and exiled.

With one exception, a miraculous story of redemption and return, after not a century or two, but 2,000 years. Remarkably, that miracle occurred in our time. This week marks its 60th anniversary: the return and restoration of the remaining two tribes of Israel -- Judah and Benjamin, later known as the Jews -- to their ancient homeland.

Besides restoring Jewish sovereignty, the establishment of the State of Israel embodied many subsidiary miracles, from the creation of the first Jewish army since Roman times to the only recorded instance of the resurrection of a dead language -- Hebrew, now the daily tongue of a vibrant nation of 7 million. As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is "the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago."

During its early years, Israel was often spoken of in such romantic terms. Today, such talk is considered naive, anachronistic, even insensitive, nothing more than Zionist myth designed to hide the true story, i.e., the Palestinian narrative of dispossession.

Not so. Palestinian suffering is, of course, real and heart-wrenching, but what the Arab narrative deliberately distorts is the cause of its own tragedy: the folly of its own fanatical leadership -- from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (Nazi collaborator, who spent World War II in Berlin), to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser to Yasser Arafat to Hamas of today -- that repeatedly chose war rather than compromise and conciliation.

Palestinian dispossession is a direct result of the Arab rejection, then and now, of a Jewish state of any size on any part of the vast lands the Arabs claim as their exclusive patrimony. That was the cause of the war 60 years ago that, in turn, caused the refugee problem. And it remains the cause of war today.

Six months before Israel's birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it.

With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq -- 650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs.

Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost -- not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life.

You rarely hear about Israel's terrible suffering in that 1948-49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.

But in 1948, there were no "occupied territories." Nor in 1967 when Egypt, Syria and Jordan joined together in a second war of annihilation against Israel.

Look at Gaza today. No Israeli occupation, no settlements, not a single Jew left. The Palestinian response? Unremitting rocket fire killing and maiming Israeli civilians. The declared casus belli of the Palestinian government in Gaza behind these rockets? The very existence of a Jewish state.

One constantly hears about the disabling complexity of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Complex it is, but the root cause is not. Israel's crime is not its policies but its insistence on living. On the day the Arabs -- and the Palestinians in particular -- make a collective decision to accept the Jewish state, there will be peace, as Israel proved with its treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Until that day, there will be nothing but war. And every "peace process," however cynical or well meaning, will come to nothing.