This is appalling. An unprovoked, violent crime against a stranger on the street, only identifiable by Jewish clothing, is being âjustifiedâ by accusations against Israel. First of all, unprovoked violence against innocent victims is evil. Second, it was based on stereotyping. Third, the alleged motive is to side with Hamas and Hezbollah. Both of these entities have been recognized as Foreign Terrorist Organizations since 1997. Fourth, the accusations against Israel arenât even true.
This widely publicized act was akin to Roe v. Wade. Using definitions from uncertified and unelected pundits, rather than the law as written, the court rewrote the law whole cloth in order to get their desired outcome. There, it was to turn abortion into a constitutional right. Here, it was to libel and ultimately destroy Israel.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/critics-accused-of-quietly-rewriting-meaning-of-genocide-to-fling-charges-at-israel/
The commission cited Amnesty International and BâTselem. These have no legislative authority, and themselves admitted that under UN precedents Israel could NOT be convicted because there was no proof of a plan to genocide, nor any proof that genocide, rather than self-defense, was Israelâs intent. The commission just pretended that their desired reading was the law itself.
If a majority votes to rewrite the history books, that does not make them right. If the entire Arab world decides to rewrite UN precedents and obfuscate their citations, that does not change that G.d gave the Holy Land to the His people.
But the UN will do so anyway, despite the Arabâs own scriptures and the Biblical scriptures accepted by nearly the entire faithful world.
A brief history of the Jewish connection to Israel
The Bible
Some 3700 years ago, Abraham and his descendants were promised the land to which G.d had guided him in Genesis. G.d then told Abraham that Isaac, the firstborn son of Abrahamâs only wife at the time, was to inherit from him. The other sons were sent away during Abrahamâs lifetime. While Esau was born first to Isaac, Esau sold his birthright as the firstborn to Jacob, who inherited the Holy Land. These three, the Matriarchs aside from Rachel, and (according to Jewish tradition) Adam and Eve were buried in Hebron, in the cave purchased by Abraham.
After centuries of enslavement in Egypt, G.d redeemed the descendants of Jacob and returned them to their land to inherit it. There, in Jerusalem, King David and King Solomon built the First Temple, which stood for over four centuries. Briefly destroyed by the Babylonians, the Jews returned and rebuilt the Temple on the same site, where it again stood for over four centuries before the Romans destroyed it and plowed Jerusalem, shortly after the founding of Christianity.
The Roman Era through the Ottoman Empire
The Romans persecuted Jews and disbanded their Sanhedrin, and the centers of Jewish scholarship moved to Sura and Pumbeditha. Yet, these centers in their rites and liturgy continued to revere the Land of Israel, which the Romans insultingly renamed âSyria Palaestina.â Insulting, as it was so-named after a long-defeated mortal foe of the Jews, the Philistines. These were not Arabs, but a seafaring people who arrived from the Greek archipelago. Prior to the rise of the first Jewish kingdom, they disarmed and subjugated the Jews in their own land (I Samuel 13:19-22). The later Roman renaming was a scheme to erase Jewish history and demoralize the defeated Jews.
With the majority of Jews now living in the Diaspora, there nevertheless remained communities of Jews in the Holy Land. These are mentioned in the history of the Crusades, for example, and the memoirs of Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) who visited in 1867, when the Ottoman Turks ruled it (they did not call it Palestine, but Syria).
Early modern period
When the Ottoman Empire fell and the British administered Mandatory Palestine (reviving the pre-Ottoman name of the place from the Roman era) Arab hatred of the Jews continued. In 1929 Hebron, where the Biblical Patriarchs are buried, Arabs rioted and slaughtered 67 Jews, most of whom were dumped in a mass grave. In 1941, the Jew-hating Grand Mufti of Jerusalem signed a declaration of cooperation with the Nazi regime, to which Hitler responded that eventually, after eliminating the Jews from Europe, he would do the same in the Arab lands. These are just some highlights (or rather, low-lights); pogroms occurred regularly in the Holy Land, prior to the founding of the State of Israel.
Up until around when PLO adopted the demonym âPalestinianâ, it is worth noting that the term was an artifice of the British administration, starting around 1917. The British applied it to all residents of the territory, whether Jewish, Arab or Christian. Prior to Israelâs founding in 1948, Jews enthusiastically applied the term to themselves, naming institutions after it like the Jewish-founded âAnglo-Palestine Bankâ (later the National Bank of Israel), âThe Palestine Postâ (now the Jerusalem Post), and the mostly-Jewish âPalestine Symphony Orchestraâ (later the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra). Several historical overviews of the term during the British mandatory period even say that âPalestinianâ overwhelmingly meant a Jew.
In contrast, pre-PLO Arabs rejected the term âPalestine.â
- Through the 20s and 30s, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi told the British that âPalestineâ was ânot an Arab wordâ, and that âThere is no such country as Palestine! âPalestineâ is a term the Zionists invented.â
- In 1946, pro-Arab spokesman/historian Philip Hitti likewise declared, âThere is no such thing as âPalestineâ in history, absolutely not.â
- In 1976, Hafez al-Assad told the PLO, âThere is no Palestinian people, no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria.â Other rulers like Prince Faysal in 1918 said similarly that the geographic area of Palestine has no history as an Arab nation, only as a part of Syria. Echoing him, the Arab Christian professor and former MK Azmi Bishara said on a televised interview:
Well, I donât think there is a Palestinian nation at all. I think there is an Arab nation. I always thought so, I never changed my mind⌠I think this is a colonialist invention, a âPalestinian nation.â When were there ever Palestinians?.. I think that until the end of the 19th century, âFilastinâ was Greater Southern Syria.
The turning point, when âPalestinianâ came to mean an Arab, came decades after Israelâs founding. Walid Shoebat writes, âOn June 4, 1967, I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian.â In 1977, PLO politician Zuheir Mohsen emphasized during a newspaper interview:
The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity⌠Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct âPalestinian peopleâ to oppose Zionism.
As can be seen from these quotes, there have now been several layers of rewriting history. First, the Romans in reviving the name of an extinct nation to spite the defeated Jews. Nowadays, it is buried, inconvenient history, that Arabs used to reject the name âPalestinian,â while Jews overwhelmingly adopted it until Israel was founded. To the Jews, the British situation must have been vastly better than living under Islamic rule, and the term carried no Arabic overtones; the Arabs had not used the term for themselves before, only as the name of the area. For centuries, the predecessor to the Babylonian Talmud had been known as the Palestinian Talmud, so âPalestinianâ likely even had traditional Jewish vibes, a synonym for historical Eretz Yisraâel, the Land of Israel. Because the term was favorable to Jews at the time, the Arabs claimed it to be a Zionist invention (rather than a Roman invention). But today, Arabs have adopted the label as a âtactic,â and have done an about-face to even claim ancestry to the extinct Philistines.
The Jews, in contrast, have not rewritten history to suit themselves (and we lack the majority influences to do so, even if we had such a need, which we donât).
The founding of Israel
The point of Zionism and the founding of Israel was so that Jews would be left alone. Through a decades-long propaganda campaign, Arabs and their friends have convinced a majority of the world that Zionism somehow is racist, and that it supposedly calls for the elimination of other groups from Israel, when it does no such thing. Much like how the American colonists demanded the right to defend themselves and determine their own fate, Zionism seeks the same for the Jews.
However, the Arab world considered the existence of a Jewish speck to be grave insult. One must bear in mind that up until now, Jews in these nations lived in dhimmitude. This meant, among other things, they were required to pay a non-Muslim tax called the jizya, could not build houses of worship taller than the local mosque, were prohibited from holding any position of power or honor, and were of course disadvantaged should any legal dispute arise. Thereâs more to say about the humiliation to which Mizrachi Jews were subjected, but suffice it to say that this is a drop in the bucket.
Immediately after the founding of Israel, Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen launched a simultaneous attack on the fledgling nation, promising to wipe it out. By the grace of G.d, the Jews survived, despite their severe lack of arms and manpower.
Several similar wars occurred in subsequent years, where the Arabs attempted to eradicate Israel and destroy its civilians, including the Suez Crisis of 1956, where Egypt blockaded Israelâs primary shipping artery; the Six-Day War of 1967, where again Egypt attempted a military blockade with support from Syria, Jordan and Iraq; the Yom Kippur War of 1973, where Egypt and Syria jointly attacked Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year when Jews fast for 26 hours; and the First Lebanon War of 1982, in reaction to a series of PLO and Hezbollah invasions into Israel from the north since 1967.
To be continuedâŚ
- Hezbollah and the PLO
- The first and second Intifada
- The Gaza withdrawal
- The October 7 Massacre, Rape and Kidnapping
More to be said. Overall, the Israeli experience is one of constant existential threats to Jewish survival. Hamas and Hezbollah/Hizballah, the Iranian terror network are just the latest iteration. With vast funding networks, the Islamic terrorists have mastered the art of hyperbolic obfuscation, doublespeak, and âceasefiresâ as a component of military strategy.
Israel cannot afford to let its guard down.
