On the 7th October, Israelis and the global Jewish diaspora will remember and mourn the worst atrocity committed against them since the Holocaust. It is tragic that this level of violent persecution is something that is all too familiar to Jewish people, and it is an experience that most, if not all have endured throughout history. However this murderous prejudice is simply a consequence of misunderstanding, misinformation and ignorance.
The war against Hamas continues, but they are devious and cunning political operators. They have not only succeeded in capturing the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people, they have also seized the West and inverted, and even perverted their moral sensibilities. Suddenly barbarous acts are justified as “resistance”, even when committed against the most defenceless and vulnerable such as pregnant women, babies and the elderly. The strict rules governing war have been changed to suit their obscene narrative, somehow the armed bandits who steal food and medicine meant for civilians are excused because they are also part of the resistance.
These methods are deliberate, as their ultimate aim is to manipulate and to confuse a global audience. Truth is always the first casualty of war. In this case, the enemy side has obtained the tools and ultimately perfected the skills of mendacity. They have actually killed the truth and turned the propaganda war into a sick kind of art form. Again, this is not new. Every single political and military campaign waged against the Jewish people has employed this black propaganda, and the same tropes are reiterated. It is sad that so many people have fallen for this and believe the negative information propagated by a collective of racist, genocidal terrorists.
Coupled with this, is a complete ignorance of history. Very few people seem to fully comprehend the concept of Zionism and even fewer are aware of the ancient history that shaped it. It is shameful that a lot of people sincerely believe in the pseudohistory. The most egregious claim is that Israel is an entirely modern entity artificially engineered by Europeans to spread white supremacy. This is another inversion of historical truth. What actually happened was that a contingent of Europeans invented a specific ideology. This ideology dehumanised Jews to spread the concept of white supremacy and for thousands of years Jewish people were persecuted, oppressed and forced to live in exile all over the world.
Israel was first occupied and conquered by the Assyrians, and ten out of the twelve tribes of Israel were held hostage before disappearing into the jaws of Mesopotamia. Then Assyria fell to the Babylonians, and immediately the Babylonian King ordered the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple. His army marched into Jerusalem, burned it to the ground and yet again the Jewish people were taken hostage. They were all taken to Babylonia, and were imprisoned until the conquering Persian Empire released them.
Once they returned to Jerusalem there was a fierce determination within the newly liberated people to rebuild the Temple. With the encouragement and assistance of the Persian King, Cyrus the Great, the Second Temple was built. However Jerusalem was conquered yet again, this time by the Romans, and the Second Temple was destroyed.
The future of the Jewish people was in doubt. It was uncertain whether they would endure further subjugation from an imperial power, or whether Jewish leaders could conceivably co-operate with their rulers. In 63 BC, the elites in Judea asked the Roman authorities to be the adjudicators in a civil war that was raging within the Hasmonean monarchy. After 23 years of chaos, the Roman Senate appointed Herod the King of all Judea and gave him military support.
However Herod’s alliance with Rome was never recorded as an act of political expediency to save the Jewish people, it was regarded as a fundamental betrayal. This is the bind that so many political and religious leaders have found themselves in throughout history. This was eloquently expressed by the American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote a fictional biography on him called “Herod the Great”, which reassessed the legacy of this divisive figure. She explains, “There was indeed a conflict in Judea, not between Herod and the people, but that eternal struggle which is inevitable in every nation between change and tradition; between priest and palace-the palace representing the wide world”. Hurston goes further, “for again the ideology of the whole world is in flux. Old institutions and old concepts are in the death throes, and the new being precipitated out; ideologies East and West fight for the minds of men. Identical circumstances provoke similar reactions, human nature being what it is. Herod drew his sword for the West”. Sadly, we are still forced to choose between two swords, East and West and no compromise is on offer. The fate of human civilization is more uncertain now than at any other time in history.
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