Peace, Peace, but there is no Peace! By Victor Sharpe
http://thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2019/05/06/peace-peace-but-there-is-no-peace-
The Jewish prophet Jeremiah said those words millennia ago and it is telling when applied to peace between Israel and the Arab aggressors, yet still the hope for a true and lasting peace is resurrected again and again. But is it a case of “blessed are the peacemakers” or just another attempt to disinter a rotting corpse, just like Chamberlain’s “peace in our time?”
As I write this article, more than 500 missiles have been launched against the embattled Jewish state and Israeli civilians have been killed and wounded. The hate riddled junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, takes “credit” for this relentless act of genocidal war. This is reality, and it is upon this chimera that we wait for the Middle East peace proposal that President Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, has said, “is realistic … it’s executable and it’s something that I do think will lead to both sides being much better off.”
Kushner also noted that the peace plan, which is expected to be unveiled in June, “will provide answers to the final status issues” between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs – whatever that means.
If only we could believe such words would indeed bring peace, but Jeremiah’s own words still thunder in our ears and peace between Islam and the non-Muslim world is as real as a mirage in the stony desert. Why? Because the words of Mohammed will not allow it. Want evidence?
The so-called Palestinian Authority (PA) has been boycotting the US ever since Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December of 2017 and has rejected the US peace plan before it has even been unveiled.
So let us turn to the Obama Administration, one which exhibited decidedly pro-Muslim and anti-Israel attitudes. Barack Hussein Obama attempted to create a new Arab state called Palestine within the heartland of ancestral Jewish territory. This hallowed ground is known by its Biblical names: Judea and Samaria. But most of the world chooses to know the area by the Arab name, West Bank; a name first applied by its Jordanian illegal occupiers between 1948 and 1967.
Sadly, too many Israeli leaders, politicians and journalists have repeatedly used this Arab name instead of insisting upon using the Biblical and ancestral Jewish names, which in Hebrew are Yehuda and Shomron. In doing so, they have foolishly been guilty of unconsciously ceding much of their history and patrimony.
In fact, Arabs don’t like the name Yehuda because it is the Hebrew name meaning Judea and for them it is the inconvenient truth that Jews, Yehudim, originate from Judea – Yehuda – the southern region of the territory they now demand for their Arab state. Twenty one Arab states already exist, constituting a land mass greater than that of the Unites States of America. Tiny Israel, on the other hand, is no larger than Wales or New Jersey.
Israelis and even pro-Israelis have fallen into the trap of using what has become in the English language the pejorative term “settlements” instead of villages for the Jewish communities established and re-established in Judea and Samaria. This has been a self- inflicted wound, which carries with it the premise that these communities are imposed upon another peoples’ land. That could not be further from the truth.
Many of the Jewish communities within Judea and Samaria are built upon ancient Jewish villages and towns that existed in biblical and post-biblical times. They are merely the rebuilt and re-constituted habitations where Jewish ancestors lived millennia ago. But the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, want all the land and the expulsion of all Jews living in it. Apartheid: Arab style.
Apart from the patriotic Jewish souls who have returned to the biblical heartland and whom the world, especially the Left, vilify as “settlers,” many Israelis still make the mistake of using terms such as “West Bank” or beyond the “Green Line,” meaning beyond the old 1947/48 Israeli armistice lines, which at its most populous region was only nine miles wide.
George Bush, when Governor of Texas, visited Israel and reportedly remarked about the tiny width then of Israel by saying” ‘Why, in Texas, we have driveways longer than that.”
There are only two occasions when the geographical territory known as Palestine had a political association. The first was after Rome defeated the second Jewish uprising against Rome. The Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea in Latin, Palaestina, eventually becoming Palestine, as an insult to the Jews by using the name of their ancient biblical enemy, the Philistines. This term lasted from 135 AD until the Arab invasion in the 7th century.
The next time the territory was called Palestine in a political context was during the British Mandate in the first decades of the 20th century. But throughout history, no independent, sovereign nation called Palestine ever existed. Certainly there was never an Arab state with such a name. In fact, from the time of the Arab conquest until the British occupation and Mandate, it was never a name on the world’s political map.
The territory was always a portion of some greater empire, be it Mamluk or Turkish. The few inhabitants who wandered across its empty and neglected landscape never considered themselves a national entity. It was merely a territory primarily warred over by conflicting Islamic dynasties ruling from Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul or Damascus. A Kingdom of Jerusalem existed during the Crusader period, created by Christian knights but with no historic claim or ancestral roots to the land.
The first Jew, Abraham, entered Canaan, modern day Israel, some 4,000 years ago and purchased land in Hebron – one of Judaism’s four holy cities; the others being Tiberias, Safed and, the jewel in the crown, Jerusalem. Abraham, his son Isaac, and grandchild, Jacob, along with all but one of their wives, are buried there. You can read the biblical passage in Genesis 12: verses1 to 3 and 12.
The Jewish faith is unique in that it enshrines a people, a national group, in an inseparable bond with a special land: the Land of Israel. Its geographical position along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea lies between Asia and Africa, and between the river valleys of the Nile and Euphrates. This meant that it was fated to be a bridge between warring empires: Egypt to the southwest and, in turn, Assyria, Babylonia and Persia to the East.
When Rome became the controlling empire of the lands adjoining the Mediterranean basin and beyond, it controlled both the Nile Valley and the approaches to the eastern territories. This reduced the importance of Judea to a minor province.
Theologically, and historically, the Land of Israel is the birthplace of first Judaism and secondly, Christianity. The followers of Islam, realizing the attachment of Jews and Christians to their respective historic holy sites in the land, chose to claim that Mohammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse to Al-Aksa, meaning the farthest place, but in later years – for Islamic triumphalist reasons – they predictably chose it to be Jerusalem.
Thus a political claim on the Holy City was falsely established, which was made tangible by the Muslim mosques of Al-Aksa and the Dome of the Rock built upon the very site of the two ancient Jewish temples. Mosques are routinely and triumphally built throughout the world upon the holy places or hallowed sites of non-Muslim faiths.
This is Islamic practice and it is important to take note when we witnessed the failed Islamist attempt to build a victory mosque a mere 600 feet from hallowed Ground Zero where Muslim terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers.
After Hadrian’s defeat of Judea and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews, with many more taken as slaves, the land was almost denuded of its inhabitants. However, Jews remained in whatever numbers they could sustain and there is ample archaeological evidence of Jewish villages and synagogues existing throughout the Byzantine period from the Golan in the north to southern Israel; including in Gaza.
It is false to believe that Jews only returned in the late 19th century. On the contrary throughout the nearly two thousand years of exile, Jews never stopped returning to join existing communities in the land.
Despite often brutal alien conquests of the land – from the Babylonians in 586 BC, Muslim Arabs in 637 AD, Crusaders in 1099 – up until the British capture of the land from Ottoman Turkey in 1917 – there has been a continuous Jewish presence.
In the Diaspora, Jews found refuge wherever they could and retained a spiritual bond with their ancestral homeland. In synagogues around the globe, Jews face towards Jerusalem, which is synonymous with Zion, and utter prayers for a return to Zion and Jerusalem.
The vast majority of Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine in 1947 were not the descendants of Arabs who had lived in the land for thousands of years as Arab and pro-Arab propagandists would have you believe.
Rather, the Arabs were immigrants, or children of immigrants, overwhelmingly illegal, who came in the late 19th century and early 20th century from Egypt, Syria, and even as far as Sudan, to take advantage of the opportunities in agriculture and industry the Jewish pioneers were creating. These Arabs immigrated to a new land from their stagnant countries of origin; the Jews, on the other hand, were returning to their ancestral homeland.
The eternal Jewish capital, Jerusalem, is demanded by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. In repeated “peace talks” Judea and Samaria are always in grave danger of being turned into an Islamist terrorist bridgehead, which will threaten what is left of Israel just as Gaza, which Israel gave away to the Arabs in 2005, has become a nightmare for the Jewish state.
The Arabs demand that Jerusalem be re-divided as it was during the illegal Jordanian occupation from 1948 to 1967. And the world applauds these demands, desiring to celebrate the re-division of Jerusalem even as it celebrates the reunification of Berlin. How strange, but we live in strange times. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any people other than the Jews and never, in all recorded history, has it ever been the capital of an Arab state.
It was only a matter of time before Israel was predictable and falsely blamed by the Obama regime for any failure of the peace talks. A Christian journalist, Stan Goodenough, whom I admire immensely, wrote an excellent article on this very subject.
It is long overdue, therefore, for the Jewish state to do what I and many others have been urging for so long and which Mr. Goodenough so tellingly implored in this portion of his 2010 article in which he justifiably deplored the use of Arab terminology. He too was shocked at the use of pejorative words such as “settlements” and “West Bank.” He wrote:
“West Bank settlements!” instead of Jewish communities in Samaria and Judea. It’s as if almost too many Israelis have resigned themselves to calling their land ‘not our land.’ This course has been followed for so long now. And truly, in the world of 21st century international politics, it is hard, some would say impossible, to reverse.
“Whose is the land? This is the battle: You have to announce, declare, proclaim, and assert: Samaria and Judea is our land. It is Jewish land. It is the cradle of our nationhood, the home and the burial place of our founding fathers, the geographical furnace in which our nation was formed and forged. Our roots are irremovably planted here and they will not be severed.
“And you have to vow: We will build on this land; we will develop it; we will live in it, we will grow in it, and we will die in it. We will never give one inch of it away.”
This then is the stark but long overdue choice before all Israelis who have been seduced into using the nomenclature of a world which exults in delegitimizing the Jewish presence in its tiny homeland. Israelis did this because they yearned for peace. But from the Muslim Arabs, peace will never come.
Finally, remember these words written by Ruth Wisse in her book: If I am not for myself.
“Arabs, having conquered more civilizations than any other people in history, are in the weakest position of all to deny the rights of a single, tiny Jewish state. Indeed, Jews have more concurrent rights to their land than any other people on this earth can claim: aboriginal rights, divine rights, legal rights, internationally granted rights and pioneering rights.”
Ms. Wisse has also stated that, “Jews have set themselves up as a comfortable punching bag for the rest of the world.”
She is correct. The time is now long overdue for Israel to be the lion; to finally end once and for all the nonsense that peace talks with the Arab and Islamic world represent, and no longer be the international sacrificial lamb.
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