Lazlo Toth
A Disturbance in the Force
Wired for Terror:
On the Trail of the “Men” Who Brought Down the Towers
PART TWO A: Judaism vs. Zionism – Sages and Scholars Warn Their People and Leaders About the Curse of Militarism
Dr. Lazlo Toth
October 6, 2007
INTRODUCTION
Involved at the top levels of the ‘9/11 Conspiracy’ are men and women who were not “born of Jewish mothers,” and yes, Al Franken, there is more than one person involved in this operation, thus semantically qualifying it as a bonafide “conspiracy.” Thus, before we proceed, we must again, at the outset, burn down the straw-man question of, “so you’re saying the Jews did 9/11?!” I personally know that Mr. Friedman, who owns the deli on the corner, was not involved in this conspiracy, so again, further proof that the Jewish people did not blow up Larry Silverstein’s buildings and ram remote-controlled airplanes into them. If, by the end of this four-part article, or mini-book, one still does not understand the diametrically opposed positions of “Zionism” and “Judaism,” and still believes that the thesis presented here is “the Jews did 9/11,” then English reading comprehension courses may be in order. Having said this, and before proceeding any further, we will re-state the basic thesis behind this entire multi-part article, which is: The ‘false-flag’, military/intelligence, ‘black-op’ terror operation known as “9/11” was ultimately encouraged, planned, executed, and covered up by men and women who subscribe to an agenda defined by the modern, political ideology of militant, right-wing Zionism. Some of these people are masquerading as Jews, and some as Christians. These highly funded and well-organized Zionist ideologues have literally and historically used the innocent people of their Faiths as “human shields” in the execution of their mission of materialistic hegemony and modern Empire. In other words, it’s not so much about the oil as it is about the long-held, Middle Eastern geo-political and economic agenda of Israel and its long-considered, neo-colonialist plans to dominate the Arab and Persian worlds through fear and military intimidation. The U.S. and Britain, in this deceptively clever and often vicious agenda, are both Israel’s weapons and its dupes.
Because of the fact that this socio-political ideology of Zionism forms the kernel around which many of the major historical events and agitations of the last century have accumulated and formed, an understanding of what exactly “Zionism” actually is becomes essential, to not only comprehending the possible motivations behind an event such as 9/11, but indeed, to any full and accurate historical understanding of the entire scope of 20th and early 21st century history and their major events. Therefore, in the second part of this four-part article, we will examine many of the major themes and ideas found in the core document, or manifesto, enshrined at the root of this ideology – Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”), published in 1896.
As we look at the historical and ideological development of Herzl’s Zionist national project, we will also, at the same time, pay particular attention to the sagacious voices of Judaism that were raised against the material creation of a Jewish state with its own, now very aggressive, military. The voices of Jews who understand what Judaism is, and who actually follow the tenets of that Faith are seldom heard in this history, but their voices will be given space here. And their voices, as you will see, are very angry and full of outrage at the hijacking of their Faith by the Godless, militant zealots of this modern ideology known as Zionism.
To fully understand, however, the root causes of a socio-political ideology such as Zionism, it is also essential to understand some of the major historical events that form its backdrop so that the later, quasi-historical myths and tall tales, developed by the architects of Zionism for the manipulation of the Jewish people, can be seen in the light of modern historical research and archaeology. So even before we look at the founding document of Zionism and its ideas, we will take a fascinating and very revealing tour through the story of how the innocent, common folk of the Jewish masses have historically and consistently been made the scapegoats of suffering, which was usually brought upon them as a result of the stupidity, vanity, and arrogance of their leadership’s decisions to seek power through military conquest and rebellion against the superpowers of the ancient world. Within this history, the pattern just spoken of is evident, and it will be seen that the prophets from among the people, who were punished by the Jewish kings, warned their leaders, but always to no avail. The following history of bad leadership decisions will show that the path of violence, force, and intimidation has only brought great disaster upon the Jewish peoples, who have been oft betrayed and used by their political leadership throughout their history. Although the warnings of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and their calls for peace are of long ago, new Warners to the Jewish people not to repeat the follies of history are among us now, but, as is ‘par for the course’, the leadership is old, deaf, mindless, and without conscience. Read on and weep. Those who know and understand history cannot be fooled by the charlatans of the corporate media.
926 BCE – 135 CE: A MILLENNIUM OF BAD LEADERSHIP AND UNHEEDED PROPHETS
Commenting on an ancient and persistent pattern seen in the politics of Iron Age Palestine, Andrew J. Hurley writes in his 1991 “Israel and the New World Order” –
“The Likud government, by its blind and ruthless policies, is leading Israel down a suicidal path, which will inevitably end in the kind of disaster which has so frequently and tragically befallen the Jewish people under other irresponsible, unwise, and unworthy leaders in the course of its turbulent history. The leaders of the Likud would do well to heed the admonition of Santayana, so often quoted, that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”(1) The Likudnik path of Israeli domestic and foreign policy Hurley refers to, closely resembling that now being followed by the U.S. itself, under marked Israeli influence, was once described by the distinguished historian Barbara Tuchman as a “pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest.”(2) In the following history, we will see this again and again, once more proving Santayana’s dictum correct.
IN THE BEGINNING...
In the late second millennium BCE a Semitic tribal confederation from the east began migrating westward into the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a place known as Canaan. These tribal groups became known as the Hebrews because of their language, and as Israelites because they claimed descent from an eponymous ancestor named Israel (Jacob). Their tribal traditions of origin describe their migration into Canaan as escaped slaves from bondage in Egypt who then became conquerors in Canaan, but archaeologically and textually (outside of the Torah), there is no evidence of any massive “Exodus” of Hebrew slaves at any point in Egyptian history. (cf. renowned Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, William G. Dever’s “Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?” Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003.)
Along the lines of pursuing a fuller understanding of the past as a key to gaining a clearer understanding of the present, we will begin our historical tour at a point in time scholars of the Middle East have designated as the beginnings of the “Iron Age.” By roughly 1100 BCE, the world’s three superpowers – the Babylonia of the Kassite kings, the Anatolia of the Hittites, and Ramesside Egypt – basically ran out of gas, so to speak, and gave way to a political power vacuum whereby new kingdoms and smaller powers took advantage of the situation and developed themselves into independent polities without the usual interferences of the three larger powers, who were all now in decline. By this time, the tribes called Israel had, as is shown by Syro-Palestinian archaeology, conquered most of the hill country of Canaan, and by ca. 1010 BCE, the Israelites were able to establish an independent kingdom in Canaan under David, who in turn was succeeded by Solomon around 970 BCE. With the death of King Solomon in 926, his son Rehoboam took the throne of Israel. Unfortunately, King Rehoboam was a headstrong and ambitious leader who shunned the wise counsel given to him by the elders of his father’s court. With only the tribes of Benjamin and Judah on his side, he provoked the ten northern tribes of Israel into a revolt, which was led by the future king of the north, Jeroboam. When this unified kingdom, built and maintained for eighty-four years by David and Solomon, was split into two rival, hostile polities – the northern one of “Israel” under King Jeroboam and the southern “Judah” (including Jerusalem) under King Rehoboam – a period of history began when a series of critically bad political decisions were made by the leaders of the Hebrew tribes, and these decisions affected, for centuries, the lives of the common people, who always seem to have to bear the suffering which comes as a result of their leaders’ headstrong follies in politics and war.(3)
The rivalry between these two small kingdoms – Israel and Judah – was so great that King Jeroboam of Israel established two temples of worship, one in Bethel, and one in Dan, just to keep his people from going to Jerusalem in the south. To separate his kingdom’s religion from the practices of Judah, he also instituted the worship of Yahweh in the form of a golden calf. He installed one golden calf-Yahweh in the temple at Bethel and another in the temple he had built at Dan.(4) Within the 5th or 6th century BCE oral traditions and collective ‘historical memories’ of the scribes and scholars who wrote down and compiled the books of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the Jews in the “Book of Exodus,” who while waiting for Moses to return from the top of Mount Sinai, reverted to paganism and began to worship the “graven image” of a golden calf, could very well have had its origins in the historical 9th century BCE religious innovations and heresies introduced by King Jeroboam.
ASSYRIAN POWER, THE PROPHET ISAIAH, AND A DISASTROUS TALE OF TWO KINGDOMS
After two centuries of political instability in the northern kingdom of Israel, due to a series of revolts, political assassinations, and general palace intrigues, King Pekah of Israel, in 734 BCE, foolishly decided to join a coalition of other small kings and kingdoms so as to stage a rebellion against the ruler of the number one world superpower of the time – King Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BCE) of the Assyrian Empire, an empire headquartered in the royal capital of Kalhu in what is now northeastern Iraq. Right off the bat, anyone familiar with the history of the Assyrian kings and their vast, well-equipped armies would have had to advise King Pekah and his little alliance that their decision to take on Assyria was a really bad move. How the two-step, royal Assyrian action-and-reaction program basically worked was:
A) Challenge the King of Assyria, Ruler and Controller of the Four Quarters of the World, and
B) Then you die and your people get deported to the four corners of the Assyrian Empire.
The Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III naturally crushed King Pekah and his alliance, and he then renamed the northern Kingdom of Israel, “Samaria.”(5) By 724 BCE, after two more invasions by the new Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V (726-722 BCE), the northern kingdom of Israel came under full Assyrian control, and much of its population was deported and scattered throughout the Assyrian empire, i.e. the Middle East. From these Assyrian deportation events, we have the origins of the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” tradition.(6) As was the Assyrian imperial practice, the deported people of the northern kingdom of Israel were replaced by transplanted and resettled people brought in from around the Assyrian Empire. Among these were Cathaeans, Babylonians, Elamites, and Sushanites from southwestern Iran. These people, who the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V had transplanted into his new province of Samaria, became collectively known as the Samaritans. Many of them, such as the Elamites and Babylonians, spoke Semitic languages.(7)
During this period of Assyrian consolidation of the northern kingdom, the king of the southern kingdom of Judah, King Hezekiah, decided wisely not to provoke the mighty and vast armies of the Assyrian kings. For a while, he counseled his people in the ways of peace, but militant courtiers and military men within Hezekiah’s administration eventually clamored for, and plotted, a full rebellion against the new Assyrian monarch, Sargon II (721-705 BCE). They did this by seeking alliances with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. At Hezekiah’s court, the Prophet Isaiah begged the king to stick to the path of peace and shun the advice of his anxious, frothing courtiers and military advisors. Getting no audience at the Palace for his message of peace and non-alliance, Isaiah took his message beyond the Palace to the streets of Jerusalem, where he wandered in protest, barefooted and wearing sackcloth, begging the people not to rebel against the power of the Assyrian Empire. He had already personally seen the ruination of the northern kingdom of Israel through its rebellions against two previous Assyrian kings.
Despite all wise counsel, in 714 BCE King Hezekiah gave in to the “war party” and joined the alliance of the Phoenicians and the Egyptian armies of the 25th Dynasty under the Nubian Pharaoh, Shebitku (or Djed-Ka-Ra). In 701 BCE, Sargon II’s successor, the new king of Assyria, a ruler named Sennacherib (704-681 BCE), crushed this triad alliance, sacked Jerusalem, and carried off King Hezekiah’s daughters to his new Assyrian royal capital at Nineveh.(8) Huge carved reliefs of this conquest (now in the British Museum) were found by 19th century archaeologists on the walls of King Sennacherib’s southwest palace at Nineveh in northern Iraq. King Hezekiah in these reliefs is shown kissing the feet of the Assyrian king in vassal-like submission. In the next section of this history we will look at other kings of Judah who neglected to listen to the advice of a famous Prophet.
JEREMIAH AND THE KING OF BABYLON, NEBUCHADNEZZAR II (604-562 BCE)
Only a century after Judean king Hezekiah’s decision to take on the might of the Assyrian empire, in 597 BCE a militant rebel faction within the palace of the southern kingdom of Judah, again began to plot with neighboring kingdoms and city-states against the ruler of the newest Middle East superpower - that of the Neo-Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II. Again, in the spirit of Isaiah, perhaps one of history’s earliest anti-war protesters, another prophetic voice of wisdom spoke up against the evils of military alliances and coalitions. This was the Prophet Jeremiah. He sent sermons and letters to the king of Judah pleading that he follow the path of peace and not challenge the mighty, well-equipped and highly trained armies of Babylonia - a course that could only bring certain destruction and tragedy upon the people of Judah. Jeremiah’s letters to the king were angrily destroyed by this ruler, and the priesthood, the militants of the palace “war party,” and even the people of Jerusalem denounced the prophet as a traitor to his people. At that time, Jeremiah was nearly executed by them. King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon removed this rebellious king and replaced him with a puppet ruler named Zedekiah. At this time, the Babylonian king, following the previous tactical examples set by the kings of Assyria, deported a large portion of the population from Judah to Babylonia (modern Iraq). Ten years later, this puppet king, Zedekiah, like his predecessor, also decided to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar II, a monarch who happened to have ruled for a lengthy forty-two years. In 587 BCE, the armies of Babylon came back to the walls of Jerusalem once more and began a siege of the city. The prophet Jeremiah advised King Zedekiah to surrender and save his people, but the king responded by beating, jailing, and starving the prophet because of his words of peace.(9)
After holding out for two and a half years against the forces of the Babylonian king, Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple of Yahweh was burned to the ground, and much of the citizenry of Jerusalem was deported to Mesopotamia. Five years later, in 582 BCE, the Babylonian governor of Judah was assassinated by Jewish militants. Nebuchadnezzar II then invaded for the third time in fifteen years, and finished the deportations of Judah he began back in 597 BCE.(10) Thus began the Biblically famous “Babylonian Captivity and Exile.” Although they do not get mentioned as often as the deportations to Babylon, deportations into Mesopotamia of citizens of the northern kingdom of Israel, as we have seen, first occurred one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier, back in 724 BCE, with the rebellions of the kings of Israel against the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V.
This deportation of the citizens of conquered lands was done to prevent rebellions in the newly conquered territory, and this tactic also served as an empire’s “human resource” supply of agricultural workers, builders, craftsmen, and domestic slaves, as well as scholars, scribes, and administrators. As an example of “human resource” usage by the Babylonians, the scholars, scribes, and royal administrators deported from Judah in the 6th century BCE were not working in the fields and crying by the rivers of Babylon. They were comfortably employed within the administrative apparatus of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, a power that had in fact, with the help of the Medes of Iran, brought about the end of the hated Assyrian control of the Middle East, with the 612 BCE sacking of the royal Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northeastern Iraq.
Although the experience of deportation and exile at the hands of conquering empires was common to many of the Semitic peoples of the ancient Near and Middle East, the Israelite scribes and scholars have nonetheless mythically transformed their own people’s experience of this type of trauma into an almost historically singular and unique experience. The Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform administrative documents of the time, however, reveal that basically everybody in the ancient Middle East, at one time or another, suffered some type of deportation or exile from their original homelands. This deportation strategy used by emerging empires in the ancient Middle East was common, and its practice is seen as far back as the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia of Sargon the Great (2334-2193 BCE), whose popular birth story, written in Akkadian cuneiform, seems to have been adopted by the later Hebrew authors of the Book of Exodus as a model for the birth story of Moses. This Hebrew model, based on the Akkadian, then seems to be later employed by the Greek authors of the birth story of Jesus. But I digress. See footnote for story.(11)
539 BCE – CYRUS THE MESSIAH AND THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD BEGINS
The last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire – King Nabonidus (555-539 BCE) – wandered off the throne of Babylon and into the deserts of northern Arabia for ten years to devote himself to the worship of the Mesopotamian moon-god, and the citizens of Babylonia were not able to hold their renowned New Year’s festival with its recitation of “The Seven Tablets of Creation” (the Enuma Elish), all because their king was not present in Babylon to conduct the ceremonies. So when Cyrus the Persian and his army entered the great city of Babylon in 539 BCE without an arrow fired, Cyrus was greeted as a liberator by the Babylonians, and as the Messiah by many in the Jewish community throughout Babylonia. Cyrus the Great gave the Jews of the fifty-year ‘Babylonian Exile’ the freedom to return to Judah and rebuild their Temple of Yahweh destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II. Some 40,000 returned, but most remained in Babylonia to work under Persian, and later, Greek administrations.(12) Babylon thus became a great center of Jewish culture and learning for a millennia thereafter.(13) Some sections of the Babylonian Jewish community of this period, instead of Judah, chose to emigrate to Persian Egypt, and they created there a thriving and prosperous community.
Back in Judah, the so-called “Samaritans” – a multi-ethnic, tribal mix of peoples who had been brought by the Assyrians into the northern kingdom of Israel to settle on the West Bank of the Jordan in the late 8th century BCE – were despised as a “mongrel race” by the returning ‘Babylonian exiles’ of the late 6th century. The Samaritans offered to help the returning Jews rebuild the Temple, but their offers were vehemently rejected. The Jews considered the Samaritans “enemies of Judah” or “friends of the enemies of the Jews,” and they were forbidden to have any social or religious contact with them, and absolutely forbidden to intermarry.(14) On this ancient issue of Samaritans and other types of verboten people, Rabbi Moshe Leib Diskin once said: “The rabbis of the generation should gather together and issue a writ of excommunication against the Zionists and eject them from the Jewish People, and make decrees against their bread and wine, and to forbid marrying with them, just like our sages did with the Samaritans.”(15)
GREEK CONTROL OF JUDAEA AND THE MACCABAEAN REVOLT
By 327 BCE, Alexander the Great of Macedonia and his armies had conquered and taken control of the entire Persian Empire – from Egypt to northwestern India. After Alexander died at Babylon in 323 BCE, apparently leaving no heir to the throne, his empire was “divided up” amongst his generals. One of these generals, Seleucus I, took control of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia eastward through Iran to northern India. Another general, Ptolemy I took control of Egypt and Judah-Israel, or Judaea.
In 201 BCE, after a decade of battles, the grandson of General Seleucus, Antiochus III, who was then king of Greek Syria, finally defeated the Greek-Egyptian army of Ptolemy V, and as a result, brought Judaea under the control of his rebuilt Seleucid empire. Thirty-three years later, after another Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, occupied Jerusalem in 168 BCE to quell yet another Jewish rebellion, the Samaritans, as a final cultural revenge for their rejection and isolation by the returning Jews of “the Exile,” dedicated their temple – built at Mount Gerizim at Shechem (modern day Nablus on the West Bank) – to the supreme Greek god, Zeus. As the new Overlord of Judaea, Antiochus IV in 167 BCE tried to impose Hellenistic culture, customs, and religious practices upon the Jews, even re-dedicating the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem to Zeus. These policies, as you might imagine, did not sit very well with many, and a priest named Mattathias, along with his five sons, went into the mountains and organized a rebellion against the Greeks. After Mattathias’ death around 166 BCE, his group of Jewish fighters, under the leadership of one of his five sons, Judas Maccabaeus, revolted in an organized guerilla campaign against the Seleucid Greeks and their Syrian army in Judaea. Maccabaeus and his forces were able to wrest Jerusalem from Greek control and re-consecrate the Temple in 164 BCE. These events are now celebrated in the festival of Hannukah.(16) The victory over the Seleucid Greeks by Judas Maccabaeus and his men initiated the century-long, priest-king, Hasmonean Dynasty of the Maccabees, which lasted until 63 BCE, when a political group of scholars known as the Pharisees begged the Roman General Pompey to bring Roman rule to Judea in order to restore order to a land of warring Jewish princes.
Circa 160 BCE, Judas Maccabaeus was killed in battle against Seleucid Greeks in Syria. His brother Jonathan Maccabaeus then became High Priest in Jerusalem and officially established the Hasmonean Dynasty. Jonathan was assassinated around 142 BCE and was succeeded by his brother Simon, who was then recognized as the High Priest of all Judaea. In 134 BCE, Simon was also assassinated, and his son John (later to call himself Hyrcanus I) ascended the priestly throne of a prosperous kingdom. He became, however, seduced by desires for empire, and he also decided, for the first time in the history of religion, to spread his faith by the sword. He persecuted the Samaritans and destroyed their temples to Zeus. He also attacked the Semitic tribal confederation of the Edomites and gave them the choice of exile and deportation, or conversion to Judaism. Hyrcanus I’s son, Aristobulus, like his father, consolidated and expanded the Hasmonean kingdom of Judaea by conquering the territory of the former northern kingdom of Israel into the Galilee.
During this time, a political organization of religious scholars known as the Pharisees, who had come together in the 2nd century BCE to oppose the pagan influences of Hellenistic culture on Jewish society, voiced their protest against the now militant imperialism of the Hasmonean monarchy. This Jewish priest-king dynasty, which had, over a century, come to control most of Israel-Judah, or Judaea, was supported in its program of expansionism and religious persecution by a group of conservative, priestly social elites known as the Sadducees. As to the supreme authority in Jewish law, the Sadducees rejected the Oral Law (the Talmud) in favor of the Torah only. The Pharisees, on the other hand, accepted both the Torah and the Oral Law.(17) This, however, was not the primary reason why a civil war broke out between the supporters of these two groups during the reign of Aristobulus’ brother and successor, Alexander Jannaeus. The reason for this conflict was that the Pharisees saw the imperial and religious persecution policies of the Hasmonean rulers as detrimental to Judaism and the Jewish people, and the Sadducees, being quite comfortable with their social positions within the Palace power structure, naturally supported and endorsed its policies. For their opposition to royal policy, the Jewish, Hasmonean king, Alexander Jannaeus, put 6,000 Pharisees to death, exiled another 8,000 to Egypt, and CRUCIFIED the 800 Pharisee rebels who had captured one of his forts. As they hung from their crosses and slowly perished, the throats of their wives and children were slit before their eyes. As Jewish kings went, Jannaeus was certainly a far cry from the wise King Solomon of the 10th century BCE. Upon his death, Jannaeus’ queen, Alexandra, succeeded him. It was she who then favored the Pharisees. Of course, now that they were the ones favored by the Palace and the Queen, the Pharisees then started a persecution campaign against some of their old enemies. This campaign began with a series of judicial murders, and finally, in 63 BCE, it was the Pharisees who appealed to the Roman General Pompey to abolish the rule of the Hasmonean dynasty over the country; to stop the dynastic warring of its princes; and to place the country’s management under that of Rome.(18)
THE ROMANS COME TO TOWN
Even under the first decades of Roman rule, the warring factions of the Hasmonean princes still continued to create civil strife until a quarter century later in 37 BCE, when a new Jewish dynasty of rulers came into being under King Herod the Great who, with Roman help, put an end to the Hasmoneans. His thirty-three year reign brought a great peace and a flowering of both spiritual and material culture. With Herod’s death in 04 BCE, however, the chaos would return once again.
The millions of Jews spread throughout the Roman empire at this time were given special privileges under a fairly liberal Roman rule – they had their own independent system of taxation and courts, and were also the only subjects of Rome not required to recognize the divinity of the Roman Emperor and offer sacrifices to him. Out of respect for the Jews’ prohibitions against “graven images,” Roman legions, by edict, were not allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem carrying their golden eagle standards. Because of these liberal and respectful conditions, most of the Jews living in the Roman province of Judaea, and throughout the Roman Empire, did not see the Romans as enemies and oppressors in the same way that a relatively substantial minority of persistent, militant zealots among them did. It was this violent minority of Jewish extremists and nationalists that periodically provoked the Romans throughout their rule, and by so doing, ultimately purchased for themselves and the Jewish population of Jerusalem a one-way, no-return bus ticket to ‘Final Exile’ in 135 BCE. Ungovernable and irrationally turbulent is how the Romans came to eventually view the Jews of Palestine. Case in point - the three groups of underground Jewish guerilla groups who opposed the Romans, also bitterly hated each other.(19)
THE JEWISH WARS AGAINST ROME
In year 66 of the Common Era (CE), a group of Jewish rebels began their Revolt against Rome by capturing the Roman fortress of Masada, located on a hill overlooking the Dead Sea in southeastern Palestine. Upon capturing Masada, this rebel group put to the sword all the Roman soldiers at the fort. These militants subsequently captured another Roman outpost, the fortress “Antonia.” Having heard of the massacre at Masada, these Roman soldiers asked for terms of surrender and to be allowed free passage out of Judaea. The Jewish militants agreed to the terms of surrender, but as soon as the Romans had surrendered their weapons, the militants slaughtered them all as they had previously done at the fortress of Masada.(20) This slaughtering of unarmed people after an act of surrender will also be seen later in our sad historical tour at the 1948 massacre of the unarmed Arab villagers of Dayr Yasin by the Zionist guerilla groups, Irgun Zvai Le’umi (the Irgun) and Le’umi Herut Israel (the LeHI).
THE SIEGE AND DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE ROMAN LEGIONS OF TITUS
The ancient city of Jerusalem had a security system consisting of an external set of three protectively surrounding walls, all replete with defensive gates and numerous towers where archers kept watch, so it was not a city easily conquered. After a string of these incidents, such as the merciless slaughters of Roman soldiers at Fortresses Masada and Antonia, the Roman general (soon-to-be Emperor) Titus and his legions eventually came to the walls of Jerusalem. General Titus sent into the walled city a small group of emissaries to ask nicely if the rebel leaders would care to surrender the city, and thus protect the life of its people. Of course, as it has been ‘par for the course’ so far in our quick tour through a thousand years of Jewish history, the rebel leadership controlling the city chose the most fatal and WRONG decision that they could possibly make under the obvious circumstances by which they were surrounded – They MURDERED the Roman emissaries and threw their bodies from the city walls. At this point, in the minds of General Titus, his officers, and men, the final fate of these ungovernable people of Jerusalem was sealed, and the siege of Jerusalem by Titus began.
Just as was satirically, yet accurately, portrayed by the Monty Pythons in their film “Life of Brian,” the three separate Jewish rebel groups operating in Jerusalem in the 1st century actually did hate each other as much as they hated the Romans. Thus, during the long Roman siege of Jerusalem, these three rebel groups began fighting against each other. This, of course, gave the Roman legions the chance to finally take the city, because Jerusalem’s rebel defense forces had turned away from fighting them, and instead, fought each other during street riots, and through the assassinations of the members of each other’s leadership. Thus in 70 CE, after the common people of Jerusalem had suffered under this long siege – again, suffering as the result of bad decisions made by their militant leadership – the city gates finally broke down, the walls were scaled, and the very angry legions of the Roman Empire poured into the city. Jerusalem was burned to the ground, the Second Temple of Yahweh was almost completely destroyed, and a million Jews in the city were either killed or sold into slavery.(21) An eyewitness to these events, the Jewish historian Josephus, in “The Jewish War,” blames the entire war and its disastrous aftermath on the nationalist militant groups who were a minority among the Jewish people during the entire Roman period.
THE POST-‘SECOND TEMPLE’ WORLD, THE BAR-KOKBA REBELLION, AND “FINAL EXILE”
Over a period of nearly half a century after the Fall of Jerusalem to Titus, the Jews adjusted to the great loss of their Temple, but again came to live in peace within the empire and enjoyed the general prosperity of the era. During this time, with Roman permission, the Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai established an academy at Jabneh to preserve and teach the sacred texts of his people. With regards to this humble, hardly noticed historical event, Professor Abram Sachar comments, “The life-blood of the nation was the law and the traditions which had grown up about it. The truest defenders of the faith were now, not the desperate zealots who sacrificed themselves with sublime stupidity, but the scribes and sages who devoted their lives to teaching the masses the meaning of the ancient heritage.”(22) Sachar’s point here is also amplified by the Talmudic story of the “Guardians of the City” (“neturei karta” in Aramaic)(23) which describes an incident in which Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Nassi (Rabbi Judah the Prince) sent Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Ashi on a pastoral tour of inspection. In one town they asked to see the “guardians of the city” and the city guard was paraded before them. They said that these were not the guardians of the city but its destroyers, which prompted the citizens to ask who, then, could be considered the guardians. The rabbis answered, “The scribes and the scholars,” referring them to Tehillim (“Psalms”) Chap. 127.
Unless the LORD builds the house,
its builders labor in vain on it;
unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman keeps vigil in vain.(24)
In 115 CE, while the Roman emperor Trajan was occupied with fighting the Parthian king of Iran, the still smoldering Jewish underground took advantage of Rome’s military preoccupation with Parthia and began inciting uprisings and riots against their Roman overlords in Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus. After the Romans quelled these rebellions and burned the towns on the island of Cyprus to the ground, no Jew, by imperial edict, was permitted to settle on the island for the remainder of Roman history.(25)
In 117 CE Trajan died, the Jews partied, and Trajan’s nephew and protégé, Hadrian, took the throne. He immediately decided to build on the ruins of Jerusalem a new city called Aelia Capitolina, and he also decided to issue an edict against circumcision, a practice he considered barbaric. These two decisions by Emperor Hadrian set the match to the powder keg of the final historic Jewish rebellion against a superpower of the ancient world. These new recruits to the old militant cause, led by Rabbi Akiba and a young warrior and military strategist named Simon Bar-Kokba, believed this battle would be the last one before the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth. Many of Bar-Kokba’s followers believed him to be the moshiach (Messiah) who had returned for the “Final Liberation.” Between 132 and 135 CE the Bar-Kokba guerilla movement was successful and had cleared the Romans out of the country. It was also able to hold and control Jerusalem for three years. The campaigns of Bar-Kokba, the Messiah of the sword, were finally, and brutally, put down in 135 CE by Rome’s best general, Severus of Britain, who set upon a vengeful campaign of extermination after his experiencing four years of heavy casualties to his men in this fight. On these events, Abram Sachar writes, “It is not improbable that a half million lives were sacrificed in the hopeless cause. Those who escaped death were rushed to the slave markets of the East or to the gladiatorial arenas of the chief cities of the West.” Upon the ruins of the Second Temple, a sanctuary of Jupiter Capitolina was built, and the name of Judaea was replaced by a new designation for this land – It was now the Roman province of Syria-Palestine. Because of the Bar-Kokba rebellion, the Emperor Hadrian issued an edict that, on pain of death, no Jew shall be allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem. This edict held until the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in the year 410. (26)
THE MORAL OF THIS LONG STORY IS...
These patterns of militant violence, religious fanaticism, and rebellion, and the serious political policy mistakes and miscalculations of ancient Jewish leadership – clearly illustrated in this brief overview of Jewish political history from the death of King Solomon in 926 BCE to the final fall of Jerusalem to Hadrian in 135 CE – seem to form a long historical parable of warning to the Jewish people to keep to the principles of their Faith, and in adherence to the wisdom of their sages, to keep a check on the militancy and materialistic lusts for power and domination that their leadership, and indeed all leaderships, can so often be prey to. In fact, renowned Israeli professor and historian Yehoshafat Harkabi in his book “Facing Reality” has echoed this idea and noted that the militant situation of Israel today closely parallels the militant fanaticism that existed in the Israel of the ancient past - in the period just before the fall of Jerusalem to Hadrian, for example. As an AP report from Tel Aviv (“Israeli Historian Warns of Peril in Masada’s Example”) published in the October 18, 1988 edition of the Los Angeles Times explained:
“In his 107-page book, “Facing Reality,” Harkabi portrays the [Bar-Kokba] revolt as a disaster from start to finish, whipped up by rabble-rousing zealots blind to the realities of power in the Roman Empire. The result, he writes, was the destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter of 500,000 of the 1.3 million Jews living there.”
The article then goes on to explain how Harkabi sees in the Israel of today the same two camps as existed there in the time of Bar-Kokba – “the realistic and sane camp” and the “blind, euphoric, and unrealistic camp,” a camp which minimizes the weight of the world’s powers, as was so often done by the Jewish leadership in the times of the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Greek, and Roman empires. Professor Harkabi writes, “The problem is not where Bar-Kokba erred. The problem is how we came to worship his error and how it affects our national thinking.”
THE MYTHS AND REALITIES OF “DIASPORA” AND “EXILE”
To understand the myths and the realities behind the idea of a Jewish Nation forming a global Diaspora of “exiles,” two particular events from history must be noted:
A) The siege and fall of Jerusalem to Titus after Jewish guerillas began a series of campaigns against Roman forts. Their massacres of unarmed Roman soldiers and emissaries resulted in a million innocent Jews, who happened to live in Jerusalem, being put to the sword or sold into slavery. This revolt, waged by a minority of hotheads among the people, also resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple of Yahweh in 70 CE.
AND
B) The Bar-Kokba Revolt of 132-135 CE resulting in a final deportation of Jewish residents of Jerusalem to the slave markets of the East and the gladiatorial arenas of the West. This revolt, ironically, instead of bringing about the Final Messianic Liberation, brought about the issuing of a Roman imperial edict forbidding any further residency of Jews within the city of Jerusalem.
The modern, global Diaspora of Jews has often been mythicized and romanticized as a “Nation of people exiled from their Homeland.” The common Jewish people who were sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem to Severus in 135 CE are often portrayed as representing, in a single group, all the Jews ever historically deported throughout the Middle East by the kings of Assyria and Babylonia. In this way, the image of the destroyed Temple from 70 CE; the image of the common Jews of Jerusalem being sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE; and the image of the resulting imperial edict that prohibited Jews, not from residing within Palestine, but only within the city of Jerusalem; have all mythically transformed themselves within the collective consciousness into a single event which is used to explain the genesis and existence of the modern Jewish Diaspora. As our brief tour of 1,061 years of Jewish history has demonstrated, this notion of a global Diaspora formed by “a people exiled from their homeland” is a myth, and is historically without any foundation. As we have seen, whole generations of Jews – long before the rise of Roman power – grew up in lands under Babylonian, Persian, and Greek rule. They often worked within the royal administrations of these empires and naturally preferred to stay where they were. They had comfortable and honored positions in the countries of their birth and upbringing, and had no deep-seated need to move to Judah, a faraway place and society they had never known. The Jews of Babylonia who migrated to Egypt in the late 6th century BCE, just after Cyrus the Persian was crowned King of Babylon in 539, came to number just over one million. At one point, the Hellenized Jewish population of Ptolemaic Alexandria in Egypt, second largest city in the world, made up 40% of the total population. In VI, p. 8 of the “Encyclopedia Judaica,” it is explained that during the Second Temple period – a 600 year period between 539 BCE (the end of the “Babylonian exile”) and 70 CE (the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus) –
“The vast majority of Jews, by choice, did not, and never had, lived in Eretz Israel. They were not exiles in any sense of the word. Centuries before the fall of Jerusalem [in 135 CE] their ancestors had emigrated from Israel voluntarily and had colonized the major centers of population around the Mediterranean and beyond. These Jewish communities were highly successful and prosperous.”
Twenty-two years before the destruction of the Second Temple, and eighty-seven years before the Roman edict forbidding Jews further residence in the city of Jerusalem, primary sources show us that most Jews were not living in Palestine at all, and that they did not, as a “Nation,” get exiled from their “homeland” as a single group in 135 CE. In his “History of the Jews,” professor Paul Johnson writes:
“At the time of the Claudian census in A.D. 48 some 6,944,000 Jews were within the confines of the Roman Empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 percent of the Roman Empire. This expanding nation and teeming Diaspora were the sources of Jerusalem’s wealth and influence.”(27)
“The Diaspora, through which Paul and others traveled, was vast. The Roman geographer, Strabo, said that the Jews were a power throughout the inhabited world. There were a million of them in Egypt alone. In Alexandria, perhaps the world’s greatest city after Rome itself, they formed a majority in two out of five quarters.”(28)
History shows us that, in the rising and clashing of Middle Eastern empires, the Jews, along with many other Semitic and non-Semitic peoples, periodically suffered from imperial programs of deportation and the experience of being sold into slavery as spoils of conquest and conflict. History also shows that in the periods of peace, i.e. when a minority of militants weren’t foolishly trying to challenge the empire-of-the-moment, Jews lived throughout these empires as relatively non-persecuted, often privileged, and respected people. As we will see later, all this history will be distorted and manipulated by the secular ideologues of Zionism, who will create the myths of a single Jewish Nation and a Jewish Diaspora of Exiles in order to promote the creation of their Jewish State, and to promote the mass emigration of world Jewry to Palestine in order to make Theodor Herzl’s “National Project” a reality. This pillar of Zionist ideology, based upon a tragic-romanticist distortion of real history, is called the “aliya” to Israel or the “Ingathering of the Exiles.”
THE MODERN, CATALYTIC EVENTS BEHIND THEODOR HERZL’S IDEAS OF FORMING A JEWISH STATE
Upon this background of history just discussed, there are more events, closer to our time, which catalytically, and more directly, contributed to Theodor Herzl’s devising of a plan for the modern, political creation of a Jewish State. Such events as the 12th and 13th century persecutions of Jewish villages by Christian crusaders as they moved through Europe on their way to the Holy Land to kill the “heathen Saracens” (Muslims), and the ghettoizing of European Jews beginning in 1570, were the results of ignorant Christian religious hatred based upon myth and superstition, not politics. With the development, in the 18th century, of a rationalist period of thought known as the ‘European Enlightenment’, Jews in Europe finally gained their long overdue, full rights as citizens and emerged out of the ghetto conditions of the late Middle Ages. This new atmosphere of European rationalism, however, was not a universal condition – old religious prejudices die hard, and are easily exploited by rulers and politicians – and in the 1880s, the Jews of Russia were subjected to religio-political persecutions by Czar Nicholas II and his family’s supporters. The word “pogrom” is Russian for “devastation,” and these pogroms against the Jews were encouraged by Czarist policy, but carried out, or supported, by local authorities. In 1881, in Kiev and other Russian cities, a general persecution was carried out because of false rumors spread about possible Jewish involvement in an assassination attempt on Czar Nicholas II. Over the next twenty years, from 1882 to 1902, Russian government attacks on Jews were limited and few in number, but in 1903 forty-five Jews were murdered, and fifteen hundred Jewish homes were looted in the city of Kishinev in Moldova. After a failed Russian revolution in 1905, thousands of Jews were killed in Odessa as “fifth columnists” who plotted revolution against the Czar, and in the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), thousands of Jews were murdered by the White Guard in the Ukraine.(29) Again, we find the suffering of the Jewish masses stemming from a minority’s involvement with militant political activity against a large superpower. To be fair and complete, however, we must add that the Romonov Dynasty to which Russia’s last Czar, Nicholas II, belonged, were brutal tyrants, and both of Russia’s revolutions (1905 and 1917) were waged against the hated Romonovs by the Russian people, not just the Jews of Odessa. Jewish participation in the revolutions, however, was most probably used as an excuse by Russian imperial elites and their goon squads to exercise some good old-fashioned religious hatred under the guise of a convenient political persecution.
On top of these more recent layers of European history, the catalytic event which was to be the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” for a young Hungarian journalist in Paris named Theodor Herzl, was what became known at the time as the Dreyfus Affair. On December 22, 1894, a Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), who had been accused of passing French military secrets to the Germans, was convicted of treason. The anti-Semitic factions of the French press had throughout the trial proclaimed his guilt and called for Dreyfus to be exiled to Devil’s Island in the Caribbean. Two years later, however, in 1896, a Lieutenant Colonel in the French army discovered that Dreyfus had been framed by a Major. This whistle-blowing Lieutenant Colonel was dismissed, the Major who framed Dreyfus was acquitted, and Parisian intellectuals accused the army of a cover-up. The Catholic nationalists still believed Dreyfus guilty, while the French socialists considered the whole affair a huge miscarriage of justice. In 1898 – two years after Theodor Herzl had published his Zionist manifesto “Der Judenstaat,” (“The Jewish State”), and a year after his newly formed World Zionist Congress held its very first meeting in Basle, Switzerland – another French army officer, Major Henry, committed suicide after admitting that he had forged most of the “evidence” used in the Dreyfus trial. Captain Dreyfus in 1899 was given a full presidential pardon and was officially cleared of all charges in 1906.(30)
With all the events spanning the historical periods we have looked at herein, and the final straw of the Dreyfus Affair as backdrop, a Hungarian Jew, born into a liberal, secular, or “progressive” family in Budapest in 1860; trained as a lawyer in Vienna, but who worked as a journalist in Paris; a man who wanted to be a modern, secular, Moses to his people; this man in his mid-thirties, Theodor Herzl, sat down to devise an immediate political solution to what he called “the Jewish Question.” His plan is found in a book written in German called “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”). It was first published in 1896 and has now gone through eighty editions in eighteen languages. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 “Communist Manifesto” was to the ideology of Communism, so the manifesto of Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” is to the ideology of Zionism – an ideology which brought about the creation of the modern state of Israel and all the events which have occurred in its aftermath, and as a reaction to its establishment. To understand these events, it is necessary to understand what modern “Zionism” is, as opposed to what the Faith of “Judaism” is, and with that in mind, in Part Two B of this piece – to be published next Friday October 12th at http://www.wtcdemolition.com/blog – we shall turn our attention to the foundational manifesto of this “hot topic,” socio-political ideology – Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” and we will look at what the Rabbis of the time had to say about his ideas, and what Jewish and Christian scientists have had to say about the mythical Zionist notions of a “Jewish race.”
REFERENCES
(1) Andrew J. Hurley, “Israel and the New World Order.” Santa Barbara: Fithian Press. 1991, p. 9.
(2) Barbara W. Tuchman, “The March of Folly.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 4.
(3) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 43.
(4) Ibid. pp. 44-5.
(5) Nathan Ausubel, “Book of Jewish Knowledge.” New York: Crown. 1964.
(6) Paul Johnson, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Harper & Row. 1987, p. 70.
(7) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 57.
(8) Ibid. p. 57.
(9) Ibid. p. 84.
(10) Marc Van De Mieroop, “A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC .” Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2004, p. 259.
(11) The Sargon-Moses birth story is based upon the mythic motif of the hunted or persecuted ‘savior’ child who must be hidden from its enemies, and thus is tossed out upon the river in a basket only to be discovered downstream by a humble, childless couple who lovingly raise the abandoned child and future hero, king, or savior. This abandoned and hidden hero returns later to claim his rightful kingship (Sargon’s name actually means “the true king”), or in Moses’ case, lead his true people to the freedom of the ‘promised land’. The Sargon birth story motif of ‘escape from danger and safe return of the hero to glory’ is also seen in the ancient Egyptian story of the birth of the falcon- headed deity Horus. In this mythic drama, after hiding him in the marshes of the Nile, the goddess Isis must then take her newly born son Horus and flee into the desert to save him from an assassin. Horus is the true heir to the throne of Isis’ husband Osiris, who was murdered by his own brother, Seth. Uncle Seth, to seize the throne of Egypt, must find and kill Horus, who was secretly born to Isis by miraculous conception. His mother, the revered goddess Isis, protects the Hero so that the throne of Egypt does not fall into the hands of Seth, a deity representing Chaos.
An English translation of the “Legend of Sargon” can be found in “The Ancient Near East, Volume 1 – An Anthology of Texts and Pictures.” James B. Pritchard (Ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1958, pp. 85-6.
(12) Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine,” 4th ed. Revised. New York: Olive Branch Press. 1991, p. 31.
(13) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 84.
(14) Ibid. p. 105.
(15) http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/rabbonim.html
(16) “Encyclopedia of World History,” ed. Patrick K. O’Brien, et al. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2000, p. 250.
(17) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 105.
(18) Ibid. p. 106.
(19) Ibid. pp. 118-19.
(20) Ibid. p. 119.
(21) Ibid. pp. 118-119.
(22) Ibid. p. 120.
(23) Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Hagiga, 76c.
(24) “Tanakh, the Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text.” Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985. p. 1264.
(25) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 121.
(26) Ibid. p. 123.
(27) Paul Johnson, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Harper & Row. 1987, p. 112.
(28) Ibid. p. 132.
(29) “Encyclopedia of World History,” ed. Patrick K. O’Brien, et al. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2000, p. 329.
(30) “Encyclopedia of World History,” ed. Patrick K. O’Brien, et al. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2000, p. 122.
On the Trail of the “Men” Who Brought Down the Towers
PART TWO A: Judaism vs. Zionism – Sages and Scholars Warn Their People and Leaders About the Curse of Militarism
Dr. Lazlo Toth
October 6, 2007
INTRODUCTION
Involved at the top levels of the ‘9/11 Conspiracy’ are men and women who were not “born of Jewish mothers,” and yes, Al Franken, there is more than one person involved in this operation, thus semantically qualifying it as a bonafide “conspiracy.” Thus, before we proceed, we must again, at the outset, burn down the straw-man question of, “so you’re saying the Jews did 9/11?!” I personally know that Mr. Friedman, who owns the deli on the corner, was not involved in this conspiracy, so again, further proof that the Jewish people did not blow up Larry Silverstein’s buildings and ram remote-controlled airplanes into them. If, by the end of this four-part article, or mini-book, one still does not understand the diametrically opposed positions of “Zionism” and “Judaism,” and still believes that the thesis presented here is “the Jews did 9/11,” then English reading comprehension courses may be in order. Having said this, and before proceeding any further, we will re-state the basic thesis behind this entire multi-part article, which is: The ‘false-flag’, military/intelligence, ‘black-op’ terror operation known as “9/11” was ultimately encouraged, planned, executed, and covered up by men and women who subscribe to an agenda defined by the modern, political ideology of militant, right-wing Zionism. Some of these people are masquerading as Jews, and some as Christians. These highly funded and well-organized Zionist ideologues have literally and historically used the innocent people of their Faiths as “human shields” in the execution of their mission of materialistic hegemony and modern Empire. In other words, it’s not so much about the oil as it is about the long-held, Middle Eastern geo-political and economic agenda of Israel and its long-considered, neo-colonialist plans to dominate the Arab and Persian worlds through fear and military intimidation. The U.S. and Britain, in this deceptively clever and often vicious agenda, are both Israel’s weapons and its dupes.
Because of the fact that this socio-political ideology of Zionism forms the kernel around which many of the major historical events and agitations of the last century have accumulated and formed, an understanding of what exactly “Zionism” actually is becomes essential, to not only comprehending the possible motivations behind an event such as 9/11, but indeed, to any full and accurate historical understanding of the entire scope of 20th and early 21st century history and their major events. Therefore, in the second part of this four-part article, we will examine many of the major themes and ideas found in the core document, or manifesto, enshrined at the root of this ideology – Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”), published in 1896.
As we look at the historical and ideological development of Herzl’s Zionist national project, we will also, at the same time, pay particular attention to the sagacious voices of Judaism that were raised against the material creation of a Jewish state with its own, now very aggressive, military. The voices of Jews who understand what Judaism is, and who actually follow the tenets of that Faith are seldom heard in this history, but their voices will be given space here. And their voices, as you will see, are very angry and full of outrage at the hijacking of their Faith by the Godless, militant zealots of this modern ideology known as Zionism.
To fully understand, however, the root causes of a socio-political ideology such as Zionism, it is also essential to understand some of the major historical events that form its backdrop so that the later, quasi-historical myths and tall tales, developed by the architects of Zionism for the manipulation of the Jewish people, can be seen in the light of modern historical research and archaeology. So even before we look at the founding document of Zionism and its ideas, we will take a fascinating and very revealing tour through the story of how the innocent, common folk of the Jewish masses have historically and consistently been made the scapegoats of suffering, which was usually brought upon them as a result of the stupidity, vanity, and arrogance of their leadership’s decisions to seek power through military conquest and rebellion against the superpowers of the ancient world. Within this history, the pattern just spoken of is evident, and it will be seen that the prophets from among the people, who were punished by the Jewish kings, warned their leaders, but always to no avail. The following history of bad leadership decisions will show that the path of violence, force, and intimidation has only brought great disaster upon the Jewish peoples, who have been oft betrayed and used by their political leadership throughout their history. Although the warnings of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and their calls for peace are of long ago, new Warners to the Jewish people not to repeat the follies of history are among us now, but, as is ‘par for the course’, the leadership is old, deaf, mindless, and without conscience. Read on and weep. Those who know and understand history cannot be fooled by the charlatans of the corporate media.
926 BCE – 135 CE: A MILLENNIUM OF BAD LEADERSHIP AND UNHEEDED PROPHETS
Commenting on an ancient and persistent pattern seen in the politics of Iron Age Palestine, Andrew J. Hurley writes in his 1991 “Israel and the New World Order” –
“The Likud government, by its blind and ruthless policies, is leading Israel down a suicidal path, which will inevitably end in the kind of disaster which has so frequently and tragically befallen the Jewish people under other irresponsible, unwise, and unworthy leaders in the course of its turbulent history. The leaders of the Likud would do well to heed the admonition of Santayana, so often quoted, that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”(1) The Likudnik path of Israeli domestic and foreign policy Hurley refers to, closely resembling that now being followed by the U.S. itself, under marked Israeli influence, was once described by the distinguished historian Barbara Tuchman as a “pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest.”(2) In the following history, we will see this again and again, once more proving Santayana’s dictum correct.
IN THE BEGINNING...
In the late second millennium BCE a Semitic tribal confederation from the east began migrating westward into the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a place known as Canaan. These tribal groups became known as the Hebrews because of their language, and as Israelites because they claimed descent from an eponymous ancestor named Israel (Jacob). Their tribal traditions of origin describe their migration into Canaan as escaped slaves from bondage in Egypt who then became conquerors in Canaan, but archaeologically and textually (outside of the Torah), there is no evidence of any massive “Exodus” of Hebrew slaves at any point in Egyptian history. (cf. renowned Syro-Palestinian archaeologist, William G. Dever’s “Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?” Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003.)
Along the lines of pursuing a fuller understanding of the past as a key to gaining a clearer understanding of the present, we will begin our historical tour at a point in time scholars of the Middle East have designated as the beginnings of the “Iron Age.” By roughly 1100 BCE, the world’s three superpowers – the Babylonia of the Kassite kings, the Anatolia of the Hittites, and Ramesside Egypt – basically ran out of gas, so to speak, and gave way to a political power vacuum whereby new kingdoms and smaller powers took advantage of the situation and developed themselves into independent polities without the usual interferences of the three larger powers, who were all now in decline. By this time, the tribes called Israel had, as is shown by Syro-Palestinian archaeology, conquered most of the hill country of Canaan, and by ca. 1010 BCE, the Israelites were able to establish an independent kingdom in Canaan under David, who in turn was succeeded by Solomon around 970 BCE. With the death of King Solomon in 926, his son Rehoboam took the throne of Israel. Unfortunately, King Rehoboam was a headstrong and ambitious leader who shunned the wise counsel given to him by the elders of his father’s court. With only the tribes of Benjamin and Judah on his side, he provoked the ten northern tribes of Israel into a revolt, which was led by the future king of the north, Jeroboam. When this unified kingdom, built and maintained for eighty-four years by David and Solomon, was split into two rival, hostile polities – the northern one of “Israel” under King Jeroboam and the southern “Judah” (including Jerusalem) under King Rehoboam – a period of history began when a series of critically bad political decisions were made by the leaders of the Hebrew tribes, and these decisions affected, for centuries, the lives of the common people, who always seem to have to bear the suffering which comes as a result of their leaders’ headstrong follies in politics and war.(3)
The rivalry between these two small kingdoms – Israel and Judah – was so great that King Jeroboam of Israel established two temples of worship, one in Bethel, and one in Dan, just to keep his people from going to Jerusalem in the south. To separate his kingdom’s religion from the practices of Judah, he also instituted the worship of Yahweh in the form of a golden calf. He installed one golden calf-Yahweh in the temple at Bethel and another in the temple he had built at Dan.(4) Within the 5th or 6th century BCE oral traditions and collective ‘historical memories’ of the scribes and scholars who wrote down and compiled the books of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the Jews in the “Book of Exodus,” who while waiting for Moses to return from the top of Mount Sinai, reverted to paganism and began to worship the “graven image” of a golden calf, could very well have had its origins in the historical 9th century BCE religious innovations and heresies introduced by King Jeroboam.
ASSYRIAN POWER, THE PROPHET ISAIAH, AND A DISASTROUS TALE OF TWO KINGDOMS
After two centuries of political instability in the northern kingdom of Israel, due to a series of revolts, political assassinations, and general palace intrigues, King Pekah of Israel, in 734 BCE, foolishly decided to join a coalition of other small kings and kingdoms so as to stage a rebellion against the ruler of the number one world superpower of the time – King Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BCE) of the Assyrian Empire, an empire headquartered in the royal capital of Kalhu in what is now northeastern Iraq. Right off the bat, anyone familiar with the history of the Assyrian kings and their vast, well-equipped armies would have had to advise King Pekah and his little alliance that their decision to take on Assyria was a really bad move. How the two-step, royal Assyrian action-and-reaction program basically worked was:
A) Challenge the King of Assyria, Ruler and Controller of the Four Quarters of the World, and
B) Then you die and your people get deported to the four corners of the Assyrian Empire.
The Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III naturally crushed King Pekah and his alliance, and he then renamed the northern Kingdom of Israel, “Samaria.”(5) By 724 BCE, after two more invasions by the new Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V (726-722 BCE), the northern kingdom of Israel came under full Assyrian control, and much of its population was deported and scattered throughout the Assyrian empire, i.e. the Middle East. From these Assyrian deportation events, we have the origins of the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” tradition.(6) As was the Assyrian imperial practice, the deported people of the northern kingdom of Israel were replaced by transplanted and resettled people brought in from around the Assyrian Empire. Among these were Cathaeans, Babylonians, Elamites, and Sushanites from southwestern Iran. These people, who the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V had transplanted into his new province of Samaria, became collectively known as the Samaritans. Many of them, such as the Elamites and Babylonians, spoke Semitic languages.(7)
During this period of Assyrian consolidation of the northern kingdom, the king of the southern kingdom of Judah, King Hezekiah, decided wisely not to provoke the mighty and vast armies of the Assyrian kings. For a while, he counseled his people in the ways of peace, but militant courtiers and military men within Hezekiah’s administration eventually clamored for, and plotted, a full rebellion against the new Assyrian monarch, Sargon II (721-705 BCE). They did this by seeking alliances with the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. At Hezekiah’s court, the Prophet Isaiah begged the king to stick to the path of peace and shun the advice of his anxious, frothing courtiers and military advisors. Getting no audience at the Palace for his message of peace and non-alliance, Isaiah took his message beyond the Palace to the streets of Jerusalem, where he wandered in protest, barefooted and wearing sackcloth, begging the people not to rebel against the power of the Assyrian Empire. He had already personally seen the ruination of the northern kingdom of Israel through its rebellions against two previous Assyrian kings.
Despite all wise counsel, in 714 BCE King Hezekiah gave in to the “war party” and joined the alliance of the Phoenicians and the Egyptian armies of the 25th Dynasty under the Nubian Pharaoh, Shebitku (or Djed-Ka-Ra). In 701 BCE, Sargon II’s successor, the new king of Assyria, a ruler named Sennacherib (704-681 BCE), crushed this triad alliance, sacked Jerusalem, and carried off King Hezekiah’s daughters to his new Assyrian royal capital at Nineveh.(8) Huge carved reliefs of this conquest (now in the British Museum) were found by 19th century archaeologists on the walls of King Sennacherib’s southwest palace at Nineveh in northern Iraq. King Hezekiah in these reliefs is shown kissing the feet of the Assyrian king in vassal-like submission. In the next section of this history we will look at other kings of Judah who neglected to listen to the advice of a famous Prophet.
JEREMIAH AND THE KING OF BABYLON, NEBUCHADNEZZAR II (604-562 BCE)
Only a century after Judean king Hezekiah’s decision to take on the might of the Assyrian empire, in 597 BCE a militant rebel faction within the palace of the southern kingdom of Judah, again began to plot with neighboring kingdoms and city-states against the ruler of the newest Middle East superpower - that of the Neo-Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II. Again, in the spirit of Isaiah, perhaps one of history’s earliest anti-war protesters, another prophetic voice of wisdom spoke up against the evils of military alliances and coalitions. This was the Prophet Jeremiah. He sent sermons and letters to the king of Judah pleading that he follow the path of peace and not challenge the mighty, well-equipped and highly trained armies of Babylonia - a course that could only bring certain destruction and tragedy upon the people of Judah. Jeremiah’s letters to the king were angrily destroyed by this ruler, and the priesthood, the militants of the palace “war party,” and even the people of Jerusalem denounced the prophet as a traitor to his people. At that time, Jeremiah was nearly executed by them. King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon removed this rebellious king and replaced him with a puppet ruler named Zedekiah. At this time, the Babylonian king, following the previous tactical examples set by the kings of Assyria, deported a large portion of the population from Judah to Babylonia (modern Iraq). Ten years later, this puppet king, Zedekiah, like his predecessor, also decided to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar II, a monarch who happened to have ruled for a lengthy forty-two years. In 587 BCE, the armies of Babylon came back to the walls of Jerusalem once more and began a siege of the city. The prophet Jeremiah advised King Zedekiah to surrender and save his people, but the king responded by beating, jailing, and starving the prophet because of his words of peace.(9)
After holding out for two and a half years against the forces of the Babylonian king, Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple of Yahweh was burned to the ground, and much of the citizenry of Jerusalem was deported to Mesopotamia. Five years later, in 582 BCE, the Babylonian governor of Judah was assassinated by Jewish militants. Nebuchadnezzar II then invaded for the third time in fifteen years, and finished the deportations of Judah he began back in 597 BCE.(10) Thus began the Biblically famous “Babylonian Captivity and Exile.” Although they do not get mentioned as often as the deportations to Babylon, deportations into Mesopotamia of citizens of the northern kingdom of Israel, as we have seen, first occurred one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier, back in 724 BCE, with the rebellions of the kings of Israel against the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser V.
This deportation of the citizens of conquered lands was done to prevent rebellions in the newly conquered territory, and this tactic also served as an empire’s “human resource” supply of agricultural workers, builders, craftsmen, and domestic slaves, as well as scholars, scribes, and administrators. As an example of “human resource” usage by the Babylonians, the scholars, scribes, and royal administrators deported from Judah in the 6th century BCE were not working in the fields and crying by the rivers of Babylon. They were comfortably employed within the administrative apparatus of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, a power that had in fact, with the help of the Medes of Iran, brought about the end of the hated Assyrian control of the Middle East, with the 612 BCE sacking of the royal Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northeastern Iraq.
Although the experience of deportation and exile at the hands of conquering empires was common to many of the Semitic peoples of the ancient Near and Middle East, the Israelite scribes and scholars have nonetheless mythically transformed their own people’s experience of this type of trauma into an almost historically singular and unique experience. The Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform administrative documents of the time, however, reveal that basically everybody in the ancient Middle East, at one time or another, suffered some type of deportation or exile from their original homelands. This deportation strategy used by emerging empires in the ancient Middle East was common, and its practice is seen as far back as the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia of Sargon the Great (2334-2193 BCE), whose popular birth story, written in Akkadian cuneiform, seems to have been adopted by the later Hebrew authors of the Book of Exodus as a model for the birth story of Moses. This Hebrew model, based on the Akkadian, then seems to be later employed by the Greek authors of the birth story of Jesus. But I digress. See footnote for story.(11)
539 BCE – CYRUS THE MESSIAH AND THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD BEGINS
The last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire – King Nabonidus (555-539 BCE) – wandered off the throne of Babylon and into the deserts of northern Arabia for ten years to devote himself to the worship of the Mesopotamian moon-god, and the citizens of Babylonia were not able to hold their renowned New Year’s festival with its recitation of “The Seven Tablets of Creation” (the Enuma Elish), all because their king was not present in Babylon to conduct the ceremonies. So when Cyrus the Persian and his army entered the great city of Babylon in 539 BCE without an arrow fired, Cyrus was greeted as a liberator by the Babylonians, and as the Messiah by many in the Jewish community throughout Babylonia. Cyrus the Great gave the Jews of the fifty-year ‘Babylonian Exile’ the freedom to return to Judah and rebuild their Temple of Yahweh destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II. Some 40,000 returned, but most remained in Babylonia to work under Persian, and later, Greek administrations.(12) Babylon thus became a great center of Jewish culture and learning for a millennia thereafter.(13) Some sections of the Babylonian Jewish community of this period, instead of Judah, chose to emigrate to Persian Egypt, and they created there a thriving and prosperous community.
Back in Judah, the so-called “Samaritans” – a multi-ethnic, tribal mix of peoples who had been brought by the Assyrians into the northern kingdom of Israel to settle on the West Bank of the Jordan in the late 8th century BCE – were despised as a “mongrel race” by the returning ‘Babylonian exiles’ of the late 6th century. The Samaritans offered to help the returning Jews rebuild the Temple, but their offers were vehemently rejected. The Jews considered the Samaritans “enemies of Judah” or “friends of the enemies of the Jews,” and they were forbidden to have any social or religious contact with them, and absolutely forbidden to intermarry.(14) On this ancient issue of Samaritans and other types of verboten people, Rabbi Moshe Leib Diskin once said: “The rabbis of the generation should gather together and issue a writ of excommunication against the Zionists and eject them from the Jewish People, and make decrees against their bread and wine, and to forbid marrying with them, just like our sages did with the Samaritans.”(15)
GREEK CONTROL OF JUDAEA AND THE MACCABAEAN REVOLT
By 327 BCE, Alexander the Great of Macedonia and his armies had conquered and taken control of the entire Persian Empire – from Egypt to northwestern India. After Alexander died at Babylon in 323 BCE, apparently leaving no heir to the throne, his empire was “divided up” amongst his generals. One of these generals, Seleucus I, took control of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia eastward through Iran to northern India. Another general, Ptolemy I took control of Egypt and Judah-Israel, or Judaea.
In 201 BCE, after a decade of battles, the grandson of General Seleucus, Antiochus III, who was then king of Greek Syria, finally defeated the Greek-Egyptian army of Ptolemy V, and as a result, brought Judaea under the control of his rebuilt Seleucid empire. Thirty-three years later, after another Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, occupied Jerusalem in 168 BCE to quell yet another Jewish rebellion, the Samaritans, as a final cultural revenge for their rejection and isolation by the returning Jews of “the Exile,” dedicated their temple – built at Mount Gerizim at Shechem (modern day Nablus on the West Bank) – to the supreme Greek god, Zeus. As the new Overlord of Judaea, Antiochus IV in 167 BCE tried to impose Hellenistic culture, customs, and religious practices upon the Jews, even re-dedicating the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem to Zeus. These policies, as you might imagine, did not sit very well with many, and a priest named Mattathias, along with his five sons, went into the mountains and organized a rebellion against the Greeks. After Mattathias’ death around 166 BCE, his group of Jewish fighters, under the leadership of one of his five sons, Judas Maccabaeus, revolted in an organized guerilla campaign against the Seleucid Greeks and their Syrian army in Judaea. Maccabaeus and his forces were able to wrest Jerusalem from Greek control and re-consecrate the Temple in 164 BCE. These events are now celebrated in the festival of Hannukah.(16) The victory over the Seleucid Greeks by Judas Maccabaeus and his men initiated the century-long, priest-king, Hasmonean Dynasty of the Maccabees, which lasted until 63 BCE, when a political group of scholars known as the Pharisees begged the Roman General Pompey to bring Roman rule to Judea in order to restore order to a land of warring Jewish princes.
Circa 160 BCE, Judas Maccabaeus was killed in battle against Seleucid Greeks in Syria. His brother Jonathan Maccabaeus then became High Priest in Jerusalem and officially established the Hasmonean Dynasty. Jonathan was assassinated around 142 BCE and was succeeded by his brother Simon, who was then recognized as the High Priest of all Judaea. In 134 BCE, Simon was also assassinated, and his son John (later to call himself Hyrcanus I) ascended the priestly throne of a prosperous kingdom. He became, however, seduced by desires for empire, and he also decided, for the first time in the history of religion, to spread his faith by the sword. He persecuted the Samaritans and destroyed their temples to Zeus. He also attacked the Semitic tribal confederation of the Edomites and gave them the choice of exile and deportation, or conversion to Judaism. Hyrcanus I’s son, Aristobulus, like his father, consolidated and expanded the Hasmonean kingdom of Judaea by conquering the territory of the former northern kingdom of Israel into the Galilee.
During this time, a political organization of religious scholars known as the Pharisees, who had come together in the 2nd century BCE to oppose the pagan influences of Hellenistic culture on Jewish society, voiced their protest against the now militant imperialism of the Hasmonean monarchy. This Jewish priest-king dynasty, which had, over a century, come to control most of Israel-Judah, or Judaea, was supported in its program of expansionism and religious persecution by a group of conservative, priestly social elites known as the Sadducees. As to the supreme authority in Jewish law, the Sadducees rejected the Oral Law (the Talmud) in favor of the Torah only. The Pharisees, on the other hand, accepted both the Torah and the Oral Law.(17) This, however, was not the primary reason why a civil war broke out between the supporters of these two groups during the reign of Aristobulus’ brother and successor, Alexander Jannaeus. The reason for this conflict was that the Pharisees saw the imperial and religious persecution policies of the Hasmonean rulers as detrimental to Judaism and the Jewish people, and the Sadducees, being quite comfortable with their social positions within the Palace power structure, naturally supported and endorsed its policies. For their opposition to royal policy, the Jewish, Hasmonean king, Alexander Jannaeus, put 6,000 Pharisees to death, exiled another 8,000 to Egypt, and CRUCIFIED the 800 Pharisee rebels who had captured one of his forts. As they hung from their crosses and slowly perished, the throats of their wives and children were slit before their eyes. As Jewish kings went, Jannaeus was certainly a far cry from the wise King Solomon of the 10th century BCE. Upon his death, Jannaeus’ queen, Alexandra, succeeded him. It was she who then favored the Pharisees. Of course, now that they were the ones favored by the Palace and the Queen, the Pharisees then started a persecution campaign against some of their old enemies. This campaign began with a series of judicial murders, and finally, in 63 BCE, it was the Pharisees who appealed to the Roman General Pompey to abolish the rule of the Hasmonean dynasty over the country; to stop the dynastic warring of its princes; and to place the country’s management under that of Rome.(18)
THE ROMANS COME TO TOWN
Even under the first decades of Roman rule, the warring factions of the Hasmonean princes still continued to create civil strife until a quarter century later in 37 BCE, when a new Jewish dynasty of rulers came into being under King Herod the Great who, with Roman help, put an end to the Hasmoneans. His thirty-three year reign brought a great peace and a flowering of both spiritual and material culture. With Herod’s death in 04 BCE, however, the chaos would return once again.
The millions of Jews spread throughout the Roman empire at this time were given special privileges under a fairly liberal Roman rule – they had their own independent system of taxation and courts, and were also the only subjects of Rome not required to recognize the divinity of the Roman Emperor and offer sacrifices to him. Out of respect for the Jews’ prohibitions against “graven images,” Roman legions, by edict, were not allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem carrying their golden eagle standards. Because of these liberal and respectful conditions, most of the Jews living in the Roman province of Judaea, and throughout the Roman Empire, did not see the Romans as enemies and oppressors in the same way that a relatively substantial minority of persistent, militant zealots among them did. It was this violent minority of Jewish extremists and nationalists that periodically provoked the Romans throughout their rule, and by so doing, ultimately purchased for themselves and the Jewish population of Jerusalem a one-way, no-return bus ticket to ‘Final Exile’ in 135 BCE. Ungovernable and irrationally turbulent is how the Romans came to eventually view the Jews of Palestine. Case in point - the three groups of underground Jewish guerilla groups who opposed the Romans, also bitterly hated each other.(19)
THE JEWISH WARS AGAINST ROME
In year 66 of the Common Era (CE), a group of Jewish rebels began their Revolt against Rome by capturing the Roman fortress of Masada, located on a hill overlooking the Dead Sea in southeastern Palestine. Upon capturing Masada, this rebel group put to the sword all the Roman soldiers at the fort. These militants subsequently captured another Roman outpost, the fortress “Antonia.” Having heard of the massacre at Masada, these Roman soldiers asked for terms of surrender and to be allowed free passage out of Judaea. The Jewish militants agreed to the terms of surrender, but as soon as the Romans had surrendered their weapons, the militants slaughtered them all as they had previously done at the fortress of Masada.(20) This slaughtering of unarmed people after an act of surrender will also be seen later in our sad historical tour at the 1948 massacre of the unarmed Arab villagers of Dayr Yasin by the Zionist guerilla groups, Irgun Zvai Le’umi (the Irgun) and Le’umi Herut Israel (the LeHI).
THE SIEGE AND DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE ROMAN LEGIONS OF TITUS
The ancient city of Jerusalem had a security system consisting of an external set of three protectively surrounding walls, all replete with defensive gates and numerous towers where archers kept watch, so it was not a city easily conquered. After a string of these incidents, such as the merciless slaughters of Roman soldiers at Fortresses Masada and Antonia, the Roman general (soon-to-be Emperor) Titus and his legions eventually came to the walls of Jerusalem. General Titus sent into the walled city a small group of emissaries to ask nicely if the rebel leaders would care to surrender the city, and thus protect the life of its people. Of course, as it has been ‘par for the course’ so far in our quick tour through a thousand years of Jewish history, the rebel leadership controlling the city chose the most fatal and WRONG decision that they could possibly make under the obvious circumstances by which they were surrounded – They MURDERED the Roman emissaries and threw their bodies from the city walls. At this point, in the minds of General Titus, his officers, and men, the final fate of these ungovernable people of Jerusalem was sealed, and the siege of Jerusalem by Titus began.
Just as was satirically, yet accurately, portrayed by the Monty Pythons in their film “Life of Brian,” the three separate Jewish rebel groups operating in Jerusalem in the 1st century actually did hate each other as much as they hated the Romans. Thus, during the long Roman siege of Jerusalem, these three rebel groups began fighting against each other. This, of course, gave the Roman legions the chance to finally take the city, because Jerusalem’s rebel defense forces had turned away from fighting them, and instead, fought each other during street riots, and through the assassinations of the members of each other’s leadership. Thus in 70 CE, after the common people of Jerusalem had suffered under this long siege – again, suffering as the result of bad decisions made by their militant leadership – the city gates finally broke down, the walls were scaled, and the very angry legions of the Roman Empire poured into the city. Jerusalem was burned to the ground, the Second Temple of Yahweh was almost completely destroyed, and a million Jews in the city were either killed or sold into slavery.(21) An eyewitness to these events, the Jewish historian Josephus, in “The Jewish War,” blames the entire war and its disastrous aftermath on the nationalist militant groups who were a minority among the Jewish people during the entire Roman period.
THE POST-‘SECOND TEMPLE’ WORLD, THE BAR-KOKBA REBELLION, AND “FINAL EXILE”
Over a period of nearly half a century after the Fall of Jerusalem to Titus, the Jews adjusted to the great loss of their Temple, but again came to live in peace within the empire and enjoyed the general prosperity of the era. During this time, with Roman permission, the Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai established an academy at Jabneh to preserve and teach the sacred texts of his people. With regards to this humble, hardly noticed historical event, Professor Abram Sachar comments, “The life-blood of the nation was the law and the traditions which had grown up about it. The truest defenders of the faith were now, not the desperate zealots who sacrificed themselves with sublime stupidity, but the scribes and sages who devoted their lives to teaching the masses the meaning of the ancient heritage.”(22) Sachar’s point here is also amplified by the Talmudic story of the “Guardians of the City” (“neturei karta” in Aramaic)(23) which describes an incident in which Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Nassi (Rabbi Judah the Prince) sent Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Ashi on a pastoral tour of inspection. In one town they asked to see the “guardians of the city” and the city guard was paraded before them. They said that these were not the guardians of the city but its destroyers, which prompted the citizens to ask who, then, could be considered the guardians. The rabbis answered, “The scribes and the scholars,” referring them to Tehillim (“Psalms”) Chap. 127.
Unless the LORD builds the house,
its builders labor in vain on it;
unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman keeps vigil in vain.(24)
In 115 CE, while the Roman emperor Trajan was occupied with fighting the Parthian king of Iran, the still smoldering Jewish underground took advantage of Rome’s military preoccupation with Parthia and began inciting uprisings and riots against their Roman overlords in Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus. After the Romans quelled these rebellions and burned the towns on the island of Cyprus to the ground, no Jew, by imperial edict, was permitted to settle on the island for the remainder of Roman history.(25)
In 117 CE Trajan died, the Jews partied, and Trajan’s nephew and protégé, Hadrian, took the throne. He immediately decided to build on the ruins of Jerusalem a new city called Aelia Capitolina, and he also decided to issue an edict against circumcision, a practice he considered barbaric. These two decisions by Emperor Hadrian set the match to the powder keg of the final historic Jewish rebellion against a superpower of the ancient world. These new recruits to the old militant cause, led by Rabbi Akiba and a young warrior and military strategist named Simon Bar-Kokba, believed this battle would be the last one before the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth. Many of Bar-Kokba’s followers believed him to be the moshiach (Messiah) who had returned for the “Final Liberation.” Between 132 and 135 CE the Bar-Kokba guerilla movement was successful and had cleared the Romans out of the country. It was also able to hold and control Jerusalem for three years. The campaigns of Bar-Kokba, the Messiah of the sword, were finally, and brutally, put down in 135 CE by Rome’s best general, Severus of Britain, who set upon a vengeful campaign of extermination after his experiencing four years of heavy casualties to his men in this fight. On these events, Abram Sachar writes, “It is not improbable that a half million lives were sacrificed in the hopeless cause. Those who escaped death were rushed to the slave markets of the East or to the gladiatorial arenas of the chief cities of the West.” Upon the ruins of the Second Temple, a sanctuary of Jupiter Capitolina was built, and the name of Judaea was replaced by a new designation for this land – It was now the Roman province of Syria-Palestine. Because of the Bar-Kokba rebellion, the Emperor Hadrian issued an edict that, on pain of death, no Jew shall be allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem. This edict held until the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in the year 410. (26)
THE MORAL OF THIS LONG STORY IS...
These patterns of militant violence, religious fanaticism, and rebellion, and the serious political policy mistakes and miscalculations of ancient Jewish leadership – clearly illustrated in this brief overview of Jewish political history from the death of King Solomon in 926 BCE to the final fall of Jerusalem to Hadrian in 135 CE – seem to form a long historical parable of warning to the Jewish people to keep to the principles of their Faith, and in adherence to the wisdom of their sages, to keep a check on the militancy and materialistic lusts for power and domination that their leadership, and indeed all leaderships, can so often be prey to. In fact, renowned Israeli professor and historian Yehoshafat Harkabi in his book “Facing Reality” has echoed this idea and noted that the militant situation of Israel today closely parallels the militant fanaticism that existed in the Israel of the ancient past - in the period just before the fall of Jerusalem to Hadrian, for example. As an AP report from Tel Aviv (“Israeli Historian Warns of Peril in Masada’s Example”) published in the October 18, 1988 edition of the Los Angeles Times explained:
“In his 107-page book, “Facing Reality,” Harkabi portrays the [Bar-Kokba] revolt as a disaster from start to finish, whipped up by rabble-rousing zealots blind to the realities of power in the Roman Empire. The result, he writes, was the destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter of 500,000 of the 1.3 million Jews living there.”
The article then goes on to explain how Harkabi sees in the Israel of today the same two camps as existed there in the time of Bar-Kokba – “the realistic and sane camp” and the “blind, euphoric, and unrealistic camp,” a camp which minimizes the weight of the world’s powers, as was so often done by the Jewish leadership in the times of the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Greek, and Roman empires. Professor Harkabi writes, “The problem is not where Bar-Kokba erred. The problem is how we came to worship his error and how it affects our national thinking.”
THE MYTHS AND REALITIES OF “DIASPORA” AND “EXILE”
To understand the myths and the realities behind the idea of a Jewish Nation forming a global Diaspora of “exiles,” two particular events from history must be noted:
A) The siege and fall of Jerusalem to Titus after Jewish guerillas began a series of campaigns against Roman forts. Their massacres of unarmed Roman soldiers and emissaries resulted in a million innocent Jews, who happened to live in Jerusalem, being put to the sword or sold into slavery. This revolt, waged by a minority of hotheads among the people, also resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple of Yahweh in 70 CE.
AND
B) The Bar-Kokba Revolt of 132-135 CE resulting in a final deportation of Jewish residents of Jerusalem to the slave markets of the East and the gladiatorial arenas of the West. This revolt, ironically, instead of bringing about the Final Messianic Liberation, brought about the issuing of a Roman imperial edict forbidding any further residency of Jews within the city of Jerusalem.
The modern, global Diaspora of Jews has often been mythicized and romanticized as a “Nation of people exiled from their Homeland.” The common Jewish people who were sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem to Severus in 135 CE are often portrayed as representing, in a single group, all the Jews ever historically deported throughout the Middle East by the kings of Assyria and Babylonia. In this way, the image of the destroyed Temple from 70 CE; the image of the common Jews of Jerusalem being sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE; and the image of the resulting imperial edict that prohibited Jews, not from residing within Palestine, but only within the city of Jerusalem; have all mythically transformed themselves within the collective consciousness into a single event which is used to explain the genesis and existence of the modern Jewish Diaspora. As our brief tour of 1,061 years of Jewish history has demonstrated, this notion of a global Diaspora formed by “a people exiled from their homeland” is a myth, and is historically without any foundation. As we have seen, whole generations of Jews – long before the rise of Roman power – grew up in lands under Babylonian, Persian, and Greek rule. They often worked within the royal administrations of these empires and naturally preferred to stay where they were. They had comfortable and honored positions in the countries of their birth and upbringing, and had no deep-seated need to move to Judah, a faraway place and society they had never known. The Jews of Babylonia who migrated to Egypt in the late 6th century BCE, just after Cyrus the Persian was crowned King of Babylon in 539, came to number just over one million. At one point, the Hellenized Jewish population of Ptolemaic Alexandria in Egypt, second largest city in the world, made up 40% of the total population. In VI, p. 8 of the “Encyclopedia Judaica,” it is explained that during the Second Temple period – a 600 year period between 539 BCE (the end of the “Babylonian exile”) and 70 CE (the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus) –
“The vast majority of Jews, by choice, did not, and never had, lived in Eretz Israel. They were not exiles in any sense of the word. Centuries before the fall of Jerusalem [in 135 CE] their ancestors had emigrated from Israel voluntarily and had colonized the major centers of population around the Mediterranean and beyond. These Jewish communities were highly successful and prosperous.”
Twenty-two years before the destruction of the Second Temple, and eighty-seven years before the Roman edict forbidding Jews further residence in the city of Jerusalem, primary sources show us that most Jews were not living in Palestine at all, and that they did not, as a “Nation,” get exiled from their “homeland” as a single group in 135 CE. In his “History of the Jews,” professor Paul Johnson writes:
“At the time of the Claudian census in A.D. 48 some 6,944,000 Jews were within the confines of the Roman Empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 percent of the Roman Empire. This expanding nation and teeming Diaspora were the sources of Jerusalem’s wealth and influence.”(27)
“The Diaspora, through which Paul and others traveled, was vast. The Roman geographer, Strabo, said that the Jews were a power throughout the inhabited world. There were a million of them in Egypt alone. In Alexandria, perhaps the world’s greatest city after Rome itself, they formed a majority in two out of five quarters.”(28)
History shows us that, in the rising and clashing of Middle Eastern empires, the Jews, along with many other Semitic and non-Semitic peoples, periodically suffered from imperial programs of deportation and the experience of being sold into slavery as spoils of conquest and conflict. History also shows that in the periods of peace, i.e. when a minority of militants weren’t foolishly trying to challenge the empire-of-the-moment, Jews lived throughout these empires as relatively non-persecuted, often privileged, and respected people. As we will see later, all this history will be distorted and manipulated by the secular ideologues of Zionism, who will create the myths of a single Jewish Nation and a Jewish Diaspora of Exiles in order to promote the creation of their Jewish State, and to promote the mass emigration of world Jewry to Palestine in order to make Theodor Herzl’s “National Project” a reality. This pillar of Zionist ideology, based upon a tragic-romanticist distortion of real history, is called the “aliya” to Israel or the “Ingathering of the Exiles.”
THE MODERN, CATALYTIC EVENTS BEHIND THEODOR HERZL’S IDEAS OF FORMING A JEWISH STATE
Upon this background of history just discussed, there are more events, closer to our time, which catalytically, and more directly, contributed to Theodor Herzl’s devising of a plan for the modern, political creation of a Jewish State. Such events as the 12th and 13th century persecutions of Jewish villages by Christian crusaders as they moved through Europe on their way to the Holy Land to kill the “heathen Saracens” (Muslims), and the ghettoizing of European Jews beginning in 1570, were the results of ignorant Christian religious hatred based upon myth and superstition, not politics. With the development, in the 18th century, of a rationalist period of thought known as the ‘European Enlightenment’, Jews in Europe finally gained their long overdue, full rights as citizens and emerged out of the ghetto conditions of the late Middle Ages. This new atmosphere of European rationalism, however, was not a universal condition – old religious prejudices die hard, and are easily exploited by rulers and politicians – and in the 1880s, the Jews of Russia were subjected to religio-political persecutions by Czar Nicholas II and his family’s supporters. The word “pogrom” is Russian for “devastation,” and these pogroms against the Jews were encouraged by Czarist policy, but carried out, or supported, by local authorities. In 1881, in Kiev and other Russian cities, a general persecution was carried out because of false rumors spread about possible Jewish involvement in an assassination attempt on Czar Nicholas II. Over the next twenty years, from 1882 to 1902, Russian government attacks on Jews were limited and few in number, but in 1903 forty-five Jews were murdered, and fifteen hundred Jewish homes were looted in the city of Kishinev in Moldova. After a failed Russian revolution in 1905, thousands of Jews were killed in Odessa as “fifth columnists” who plotted revolution against the Czar, and in the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), thousands of Jews were murdered by the White Guard in the Ukraine.(29) Again, we find the suffering of the Jewish masses stemming from a minority’s involvement with militant political activity against a large superpower. To be fair and complete, however, we must add that the Romonov Dynasty to which Russia’s last Czar, Nicholas II, belonged, were brutal tyrants, and both of Russia’s revolutions (1905 and 1917) were waged against the hated Romonovs by the Russian people, not just the Jews of Odessa. Jewish participation in the revolutions, however, was most probably used as an excuse by Russian imperial elites and their goon squads to exercise some good old-fashioned religious hatred under the guise of a convenient political persecution.
On top of these more recent layers of European history, the catalytic event which was to be the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” for a young Hungarian journalist in Paris named Theodor Herzl, was what became known at the time as the Dreyfus Affair. On December 22, 1894, a Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), who had been accused of passing French military secrets to the Germans, was convicted of treason. The anti-Semitic factions of the French press had throughout the trial proclaimed his guilt and called for Dreyfus to be exiled to Devil’s Island in the Caribbean. Two years later, however, in 1896, a Lieutenant Colonel in the French army discovered that Dreyfus had been framed by a Major. This whistle-blowing Lieutenant Colonel was dismissed, the Major who framed Dreyfus was acquitted, and Parisian intellectuals accused the army of a cover-up. The Catholic nationalists still believed Dreyfus guilty, while the French socialists considered the whole affair a huge miscarriage of justice. In 1898 – two years after Theodor Herzl had published his Zionist manifesto “Der Judenstaat,” (“The Jewish State”), and a year after his newly formed World Zionist Congress held its very first meeting in Basle, Switzerland – another French army officer, Major Henry, committed suicide after admitting that he had forged most of the “evidence” used in the Dreyfus trial. Captain Dreyfus in 1899 was given a full presidential pardon and was officially cleared of all charges in 1906.(30)
With all the events spanning the historical periods we have looked at herein, and the final straw of the Dreyfus Affair as backdrop, a Hungarian Jew, born into a liberal, secular, or “progressive” family in Budapest in 1860; trained as a lawyer in Vienna, but who worked as a journalist in Paris; a man who wanted to be a modern, secular, Moses to his people; this man in his mid-thirties, Theodor Herzl, sat down to devise an immediate political solution to what he called “the Jewish Question.” His plan is found in a book written in German called “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”). It was first published in 1896 and has now gone through eighty editions in eighteen languages. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 “Communist Manifesto” was to the ideology of Communism, so the manifesto of Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” is to the ideology of Zionism – an ideology which brought about the creation of the modern state of Israel and all the events which have occurred in its aftermath, and as a reaction to its establishment. To understand these events, it is necessary to understand what modern “Zionism” is, as opposed to what the Faith of “Judaism” is, and with that in mind, in Part Two B of this piece – to be published next Friday October 12th at http://www.wtcdemolition.com/blog – we shall turn our attention to the foundational manifesto of this “hot topic,” socio-political ideology – Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” and we will look at what the Rabbis of the time had to say about his ideas, and what Jewish and Christian scientists have had to say about the mythical Zionist notions of a “Jewish race.”
REFERENCES
(1) Andrew J. Hurley, “Israel and the New World Order.” Santa Barbara: Fithian Press. 1991, p. 9.
(2) Barbara W. Tuchman, “The March of Folly.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 4.
(3) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 43.
(4) Ibid. pp. 44-5.
(5) Nathan Ausubel, “Book of Jewish Knowledge.” New York: Crown. 1964.
(6) Paul Johnson, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Harper & Row. 1987, p. 70.
(7) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 57.
(8) Ibid. p. 57.
(9) Ibid. p. 84.
(10) Marc Van De Mieroop, “A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC .” Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2004, p. 259.
(11) The Sargon-Moses birth story is based upon the mythic motif of the hunted or persecuted ‘savior’ child who must be hidden from its enemies, and thus is tossed out upon the river in a basket only to be discovered downstream by a humble, childless couple who lovingly raise the abandoned child and future hero, king, or savior. This abandoned and hidden hero returns later to claim his rightful kingship (Sargon’s name actually means “the true king”), or in Moses’ case, lead his true people to the freedom of the ‘promised land’. The Sargon birth story motif of ‘escape from danger and safe return of the hero to glory’ is also seen in the ancient Egyptian story of the birth of the falcon- headed deity Horus. In this mythic drama, after hiding him in the marshes of the Nile, the goddess Isis must then take her newly born son Horus and flee into the desert to save him from an assassin. Horus is the true heir to the throne of Isis’ husband Osiris, who was murdered by his own brother, Seth. Uncle Seth, to seize the throne of Egypt, must find and kill Horus, who was secretly born to Isis by miraculous conception. His mother, the revered goddess Isis, protects the Hero so that the throne of Egypt does not fall into the hands of Seth, a deity representing Chaos.
An English translation of the “Legend of Sargon” can be found in “The Ancient Near East, Volume 1 – An Anthology of Texts and Pictures.” James B. Pritchard (Ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1958, pp. 85-6.
(12) Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine,” 4th ed. Revised. New York: Olive Branch Press. 1991, p. 31.
(13) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 84.
(14) Ibid. p. 105.
(15) http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/rabbonim.html
(16) “Encyclopedia of World History,” ed. Patrick K. O’Brien, et al. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2000, p. 250.
(17) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 105.
(18) Ibid. p. 106.
(19) Ibid. pp. 118-19.
(20) Ibid. p. 119.
(21) Ibid. pp. 118-119.
(22) Ibid. p. 120.
(23) Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Hagiga, 76c.
(24) “Tanakh, the Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text.” Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985. p. 1264.
(25) Abram Leon Sachar, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984, p. 121.
(26) Ibid. p. 123.
(27) Paul Johnson, “A History of the Jews.” New York: Harper & Row. 1987, p. 112.
(28) Ibid. p. 132.
(29) “Encyclopedia of World History,” ed. Patrick K. O’Brien, et al. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2000, p. 329.
(30) “Encyclopedia of World History,” ed. Patrick K. O’Brien, et al. New York: Facts on File, Inc. 2000, p. 122.