Posts tagged Two-state solution
Wrong use of the ‘P word’
Sep 15th
By Victor Sharpe
The American Thinker
Throughout the Arab, and most of the Muslim world, the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea is called Palestine while the name, Israel, is blotted out.
The so-called moderate wing of the Palestinian Authority displays a wall map behind the desk of its Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, showing the State of Israel in its entirety but named Palestine.
Indeed, the PA too often refuses to use the name, Israel, preferring to call it “the Zionist entity.” In doing so, it should remove from the minds of objective observers any faith in the Arabs’ interest in making a true peace. If the Arabs cannot even bring themselves to name their partner, then the entire peace process is a farce: a disaster waiting to happen.
But the general use of the term, Palestine, in a geographical and historical biblical context is often used just as insidiously as that employed routinely by the Palestinian Authority.
Christian and even Jewish writers, many eminent and admirable, often use the word Palestine along with or even instead of Israel, Judea and Judah when referring to the biblical period. This, consciously or unwittingly, helps to belittle the inextricable links of the Jewish people to their biblical and ancestral homeland.
It is time to restore historical correctness and dispose, once and for all, of the literary and present day propagandistic use of the term Palestine when referring to the biblical period.
Nowhere in the Jewish Bible is the word Palestine used. Nor is it ever used in the Christian Bible. Read the New Testament texts and look for the word, Palestine. It does not exist. But Israel is used. For instance in Matt. 2:20-21:
And he arose and took the young child and his mother, and came into the Land of Israel.
The Bible, both Jewish and Christian, never employs the name Palestine in reference to biblical times. Any Bible commentary that refers to the biblical period as ‘in Palestine’ is either committing an historical error or is making a determined and sinister effort to deny the Jewish biblical names of Judah, Israel, Judea, Samaria and Galilee – especially that of Israel. It is, therefore, necessary to review some brief history to understand the monumental error being committed.
During the First Jewish uprising against the Romans, the Roman general, Titus, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. Subsequently Rome issued coins with the phrase, Judea Capta, meaning that the Jewish province of Judea had been captured. However, they did not use the term, Palestine, for it was as yet unknown and certainly never employed in Roman coinage of that time.
The second Jewish Revolt against Roman occupation of Judea broke out under the banner of Bar-Kochba in 132 AD. It was eventually crushed in 136 AD after years of heroic resistance against the legions of Rome’s emperor, Hadrian Publius Aelius.
Incidentally, a discovery of 120 coins minted by followers of Bar Kochba, who was known as the Son of a Star, have just been found by Israeli archaeologists near the Dead Sea where the Jewish defenders made their final stand against Rome. The coins all had the words, ‘Freedom for Jerusalem’ imprinted on them.
It is intriguing to consider that if the British tribes, at the other end of the empire, had risen in revolt at the same time, both peoples may have prevailed and history would be very different from what it became.
Hadrian destroyed Jewish Jerusalem, plowing the city under and filling the furrows with salt. He renamed it Aelia Capitolina, in part after his own name, and built a shrine to the Roman god Jupiter on the site where the Holy Jewish Temple had once stood.
But he also chose to rename Judea with that of the hated ancient enemy of Israel; the now long extinct Philistines. This was done as a lasting insult to the Jewish people. Hadrian thus renamed the land Philistia, later Latinized into Palestina and, in time, becoming Palestine.
We should note that the Philistines were known as the “Sea Peoples” whom, it is believed, originated from Crete. They settled along much of the south eastern Mediterranean coastline and certainly had nothing to do with the ancestry of any Arabs — despite the deluded imaginings of the late arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat.
The usage of the Hadrianic term, Palestine, was subsequently absorbed into the lexicon of the Church, which has continued to use the historically incorrect term, Palestine, when referring to biblical history in maps and literature: often replacing the word, Israel.
Interestingly, when the Crusader King Frederick II obtained a lease of much of the Holy Land from the Egyptian Sultan, Al-Kamil, including Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, he called it the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
When Great Britain was awarded the Mandate for the territory in 1920 by the League of Nations, it immediately employed the term, Palestine, on both sides of the River Jordan.
The British term became the geo-political usage for several decades and the Jewish community was obliged to use terms such as the Palestine Post for today’s Jerusalem Post and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra for today’s Israel Symphony Orchestra. The historically correct name, Israel, was finally revived after the reconstituted State of Israel proclaimed its independence in 1948.
No such place as Palestine existed in Christ’s time or at the time of the biblical Jewish Judges or Kings. The Jewish patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, never lived in a place called Palestine, nor did any of the biblical prophets. Canaan would be accurate for patriarchal times but the Canaanites, the Philistines, and a host of other pagan tribes had already long disappeared by later biblical times. Indeed, as we know, no independent state called Palestine has ever existed in recorded history, certainly not an Arab one. Palestine – like, for instance, Patagonia or Siberia – has always been merely a geographical area.
Those still believing in historical correctness, not the dubious and transitory concept known as political correctness, might wish to urge publishers and writers to restore historical correctness to the nomenclature in their works.
It is sad to witness glaring historical errors in such titles as: Palestine in Biblical Times; Palestine under the Time of the Judges; Palestine in the Times of the Kings or Jesus’ Palestine, when a geographical territory called Palestine did not even exist during those times.
After all, we do not write of Alexander the Great’s journey through Bactria as Alexander in Afghanistan. Nor do we describe the invasion into Carthage of Scipio Africanus as Scipio in Tunisia. So why use the term, Palestine, to describe a historical period and location when that word had not yet been invented?
Surely the use by authors and bible commentators of a name that never existed until at least 135 AD can finally begin to be corrected.
After all, historical correctness must always trump political correctness.
Victor Sharpe is the author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/wrong_use_of_the_p_word.html at September 15, 2009 – 07:05:20 AM EDT
Obama bulldozing Israel’s future
Aug 14th
By Victor Sharpe
The American Thinker
President Obama is demonstrating an alarming hostility toward the Jewish state and has gone out of his way to describe Israeli homes in Judea and Samaria and in parts of Jerusalem, as “illegitimate.”
The British government and the European Union are equally determined to deny legitimacy to Israeli construction of homes and schools in the biblical and ancestral Jewish homeland. They do so while actively encouraging with financial and diplomatic means the enormous unchecked building activity of Arab construction in and around Jerusalem and throughout Judea and Samaria. Indeed, many of these new Arab homes are luxurious villas financed with Saudi money, contrasting starkly with the humble homes in which most Israelis live.
President Obama, along with the State Department, Britain and the EU are clearly engaged in de-legitimizing existing Jewish owned properties as well as new construction. This policy has been highlighted by the grotesque outpouring of hostility towards the recent removal of Arab squatters from Jewish owned homes in Jerusalem. The homes in question had been purchased decades ago by their Jewish residents who had subsequently been dispossessed of them by the Jordanian Arab occupiers after the 1948 Arab-Israel War.
I was visiting England and watching BBC television news as it reported on the removal of the Arab squatters. The BBC’s spin was so biased against Israel — no surprise there — that it almost seemed as if the reporter was in a parallel universe.
After many years of going through the Israeli court system and repeatedly serving notice on the Arab culprits to vacate the premises, the police finally took action. In Britain, squatters are given short shrift by society and the police, but if the miscreants happen to be Arabs in Jerusalem then the BBC displays an altogether different set of values.
Of course the BBC and most of the international mainstream media ignored the Jewish ownership of the properties in question. Such facts would complicate an otherwise delicious story of ‘wicked Israelis’ evicting ‘innocent’ Arabs. It would also be an inconvenient truth to refer to the legal title owned by the dispossessed Jews.
After illegally annexing the West Bank (recognized by only two countries, Britain and Pakistan) the Jordanian occupiers of east Jerusalem held the Jewish owned homes under a government entity known as the, “Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property.” This in itself clearly implied that the Jordanians considered the Jewish occupants as enemies. This was also an implicit admission that these homes were Jewish owned. Again the BBC predictably ignored that vital fact.
I spoke to several Brits after the BBC had aired the news report and all believed the story as it had been spun. They were completely unaware that the Arab squatters were in the homes illegally. One problem in Britain is that there is no Talk Radio as there is here in the United States. Thus, most folks have little recourse to verifying the truth or otherwise of BBC broadcasts.
It was only after Israel defeated its Arab enemies in the defensive June, 1967 Six-Day War that the lands and properties earlier stolen from the Jews by the Arab aggressors had the opportunity, at last, of being returned to their rightful owners. Much of this land was purchased in the 19th century when Jerusalem was a remote and impoverished provincial town of the Ottoman Empire with a population of less than 40,000.
According to the eminent British historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, in his book, Jerusalem Illustrated History Atlas, the estimated population of Jerusalem in 1845 as evidenced by Dr. Schultze, the Prussian Consul, comprised 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. Sir Martin adds that by 1889 the population of Jerusalem had risen to 39,175 of whom Jews totaled 25,000, Christians 7,175 and Muslims 7,000.
There are scores of Jewish properties, illegally occupied by Arabs, scattered throughout areas of east Jerusalem. They have remained in legal limbo because of international pressures against successive Israeli governments. This has led to endless delays in the return of the land and properties to their rightful owners. Sadly, the Obama Administration and the State Department are at the forefront of this continuing pressure.
It is too soon to know whether President Obama will shed his anti-Israel animus. It is, perhaps, too soon to learn if he is even aware of the earlier positions of American Administrations and the Congress with respect to the Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act of 1955. That bill underlined previous American understandings that “Jerusalem should remain undivided.
While the Obama Administration is busy bulldozing through policies inimical to the American way of life, buoyed by an impregnable Democrat voting majority, it is also reaching out to enemies of America, such as Syria and Iran, while betraying and discomfiting loyal allies of the United States.
Its negative attitude toward Israel, its most loyal ally in the Middle East, is but one example of a deeply alarming policy shift. Others include the reluctance to support openly the mostly young protestors in Iran who bravely took to the streets to vent their outrage at the stolen election by Ahmadinijad and the mullahs. Obama remained disturbingly quiet while the protestors were brutally beaten in the streets of Tehran.
However, our same president felt it necessary to voice his support to the ousted leftwing President Zelaya of Honduras who had attempted to illegally run for another term of office and who was poised to trash the Honduran constitution in the same way Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has done in his country.
Obama now has his own Afghanistan War, which according to Stephen Tanner, the author of Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War with the Taliban, has proven to be a part of the world no foreign power has ever conquered.
Such disturbing policy shifts by this president may yet come to haunt the security of the United States for decades to come.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.