The recent war by the Israeli military on the civilian population of Gaza, which claimed over 1300 lives and left over 50,000 homeless, has made understanding some of the roots of that conflict vitally important for anyone interested in the news coming out of that part of the world.
The Israelis, and their supporters, have shown themselves to be past masters at playing on the emotions of the world and of spinning history in order to justify Israel's actions, no matter how egregious.
One such article, trying to justify Israel's actions by claiming deep Jewish roots in Gaza recently appeared on the Right Wing blog site “The American Thinker” by pro-Israeli propagandist Victor Sharpe. Mr. Sharpe’s chief claim to fame, aside from writing a handful of other pro-Israeli screeds for “The American Thinker,” is his membership in the
Israel Hasbara Committee, a pro-Israeli blog spot that now appears to be defunct.
Mr. Sharpe’s February 1 article
“Gaza's Rich Jewish History” is a particularly egregious example of shoddy research, undocumented claims, absurd conclusions and fact twisting to fit this propagandist’s goals. Normally I would not deign to notice it but since it has been offered as “proof” of some really bizarre claims the only thing to do is to refute it point by point.
Mr. Sharpe starts his article where most people ignorant of history do, with the claim that
'The four thousand year old association of Jewish life in Gaza is little remembered in today's world.”
The reason for this of course is that even the most credulous supporter of the mythical history of the Jews does not claim that Jews lived in the land that far back nor even that there were “Jews” at all until many centuries after this date. What confuses these people is their attempt to treat the Bible as though it were a history book instead of a completion of writings with a generally religious agenda and no verifiable connection to real events until sometimes around the 8th century Before the Common Era.
For almost a century Biblical archaeologists have been searching the land desperately looking for evidence that would support the earliest stories in the Bible. So far they have come up empty.
By far the oldest mention of “Israel” or its people is the Merneptah Stele which dates to sometime around 1213 BCE, a full millennia after the mythical date offered by Sharpe and his ilk. Even this source is, at best, ambiguous since it does not mention a land of Israel, but only a people called “Isrir” who may, or may not have been the ancient Hebrews.
The Merneptah Stele. Does it mention Israel?
The stele’s mention of Isrir comes amid a list of other defeated nations in Canaan, such as Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam and would seem to indicate that it had been destroyed. The part of the inscription to mention Isrir reads:
Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is wasted, bare of seed.
Having made an unsupported claim to a four thousand year history for Jews in Gaza Mr. Sharpe promptly skips over this mythical history and goes directly to the Maccabee Rebellion of 167 BCE but we shall not allow this “fast forward” to take place without first examining this four thousand year claim in a bit more detail.
While few modern scholars accept the Exodus account of the Egyptian captivity or the genocidal war to capture Canaan that followed, it is nonetheless a pivotal story in the mythical history of Israel. According to the Bible the Philistines were already living in the land when the Hebrews showed up. Since we have very good archaeological evidence as to when the Philistines arrived this helps us date the Biblical campaign by the Hebrews to capture Canaan.
Philistines entering the Levant
Archaeologists have linked the Philistines to a mass migration of the “Sea Peoples” which took place in the reign of Ramesses III of the Twentith Dynasty, around 1180 to 1150 BCE. It is from the Philistines that we get the modern name Palestine, which is far more accurate that calling it “Israel.”
If, as the Bible claims, the Hebrews did not arrive in Canaan until after the Philistines were well established enough to have built cities then their time in the land cannot be dated to much before the Eleventh Century BCE, a full thousand years after Mr. Sharpe’s absurd claim.
Even then the Hebrews failed to capture Gaza, and the other lands held by the Philistines until centuries later. As late as the 7th century BCE, a full four hundred years after the “blitzkrieg” campaign depicted in the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah is still railing against the Philistines and promising that sooner or later God will get around to destroying them:
"For the LORD will spoil the Philistines, the remnant of the country of Caphtor."
Jeremiah 47:4
So, according to the Bible, the Israelites never managed to capture the land of the Philistines until centuries after the last possible date for the “United Kingdom.” By the time of Jeremiah there was no such thing as a united “Israel.” Instead, there were two rival kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judea in the south, where Gaza is.
In neither of these kingdoms were members of the Hebrew religion the only people, nor was their religion consistently the dominant one. The other religions continued to flourish clear up until the late Hellenistic era which followed the death of Alexander the Great. The Old Testament is filled with references to the persistence of these religions and even of their worship coexisting with the Hebrew religion to the point of sharing the great temple of Jerusalem.
It was the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great and the introduction of Hellenistic culture and religion that followed him that posed the greatest threat to the Hebrew religion up until that date, one that eventually led to the Maccabean Revolt and an attempt to impose the Hebrew religion by force on the residents of Palestine.
Alexander the Great and the rise of Hellenism.
The religion and culture of the Greeks proved to be one of the most important factors in the spread of Hellenistic culture, an appeal that was so strong that its rediscovery during the Renaissance helped drag Europe out of the Dark Ages. Its persistent appeal was so powerful that it led to the development of democracy (a Greek term) in America and helps explain why, to this day, so many of the key buildings in Washington DC look like ancient Greek temples.
The enduring appeal of Hellenism
Unlike the Hebrew religion, however, Hellenism was an inclusive culture. All one had to do to become a “Greek” was to speak Greek and adopt the culture of the Greeks and you were in.
Unfortunately for the Hebrews one of the key parts of Greek culture was attendance at the gymnasium, for which one had to be nude. Greeks found circumcision obscene and were greatly offended by the sight of the
glans, meaning the exposed head of the penis.
Greek athelete wearing a kynodesme (dog leash) to prevent the exposure of the glans.
To gain acceptance a very large number of Hebrews gave up circumcision, which was usually preformed in adolescence at this time, or subjected themselves to the very painful process of
epispasm, or reverse circumcision.
The appeal of Hellenism and the steady decline in the numbers of Hebrews greatly worried the traditionalist.
13: Then certain of the people were so forward herein, that they went to the king, who gave them license to do after the ordinances of the heathen:
14: Whereupon they built a place of exercise at Jerusalem according to the customs of the heathen:
15: And made themselves uncircumcised, and forsook the holy covenant, and joined themselves to the heathen, and were sold to do mischief.
1 Maccabees 13:15
It is with the Maccabean revolt that Mr. Sharpe finally picks up the story again, but only to note that the Hasmonean king Yochanan armies captured Gaza in 145 BCE. Modern historians consider the war to have been “
less as an uprising against foreign oppression than as a civil war between the orthodox and reformist (Hellenistic) parties in the Jewish camp.”
The war started with the murder of a Hellenized Jew by Mattathias, father of Judah Maccabee, the leader of the revolt.
23: Now when he had left speaking these words, there came one of the Jews in the sight of all to sacrifice on the altar which was at Modin, according to the king's commandment.
24: Which thing when Mattathias saw, he was inflamed with zeal, and his reins trembled, neither could he forbear to shew his anger according to judgment: wherefore he ran, and slew him upon the altar.
1 Maccabees 2:23-23
The war pitted traditional Jews against Jews who chose to abandon the old ways in favor of the far more attractive Hellenistic culture. It was a fight to impose Judaism by force on an unwilling population and led the Maccabee rebels to “valiantly” circumcise all children, Jewish or not, against their parent’s will and to force any adult they captured to be circumcised or be killed.
And what children soever they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised, those they circumcised valiantly
.
1 Maccabees 2:46
The Hasmonean dynasty (140-37 BCE) that was founded by the Maccabees led to a united and
independent Jewish state that lasted all of 25 years, one of the few times that Jews were the dominate political and religious party in Palestine.
However, even at the height of the Hasmonean period Jews were by no means the only people living in the land, nor even the most numerous. The Greeks remained the dominate cultural force, even under the Jewish kings, which is why the Old Testament had to be translated into Greek, since so few Jews were able to speak or read Hebrew.
Civil war between the Pharisee and Sadducee factions led the Romans to intervene and led eventually to Palestine becoming a province of Rome. Far from oppressing the Jews, however, the Romans bent over backwards to humor them and to give them their way as much as possible. It was one such case of Romans giving into Jewish demands that led to the crucifixion of Jesus.
So friendly were the Romans towards the Jews that a huge number of Romans from throughout the empire, converted to their religion.
In the first century of the Christian era, for example, the Jewish population more than doubled, from 4 million to between
8 to 10 million within the confines of the Roman Empire, in good part as a result of a wave of conversion.
This is a key concept to keep in mind whenever the topic of a Jewish “right” to Palestine comes up. More than half of the Jewish population of the ancient world had no connection with Palestine at all. Indeed, Alexandria, Egypt and the island of Cyprus both had Jewish populations larger than that of Jerusalem, almost none of whom had any Hebrew heritage whatsoever.
Despite this, Jewish nationalists rose up against Roman rule and began forcibly circumcising their prisoners again. It was during this revolt that “Palestinian terrorism” was born. Jewish terrorist, known as the “
Sicarii” a faction of the Jewish Zealots, waged a campaign of murder against the Romans, Herodians, wealthy Jews and any anyone who supported Roman rule. These terrorists came to a well deserved end when they allegedly committed suicide during the Roman siege of Masada.
With the capture of Masada the Jewish revolt was over and, while there were reprisals against the Jewish zealots who had captured and held Jerusalem against the Romans, most Jews who lived in Palestine continued to do so without any hindrance by the Romans. Quite the contrary. By the First Century of the Common Era Rome was experiencing a “craze for Judaism.” So many curious Pagans attended Jewish services that some synagogues had to be outfitted with special galleries to accommodate them. In time the Jews became such the darlings of the Romans that one tenth of the entire population of the Roman Empire became Jews by conversion.
Indeed, the Jews were so well favored by the Roman Pagan authorities that, unlike the Christians who went out of their way to seek martyrdom, the Jews were able to strike a compromise with the authorities that allowed them to practice their religion and still avoid persecution. Unlike the Christians, the Jews agreed to pray FOR the emperor instead of TO him as most Pagans did.
From that day forward a small Jewish population continued to live in the land of Palestine but they were dwarfed in numbers and in importance by the vastly larger population of “Jews” by conversion who lived in other parts of the Roman Empire. After the fall of Rome, European and North Africans whose ancestors had converted to Judaism became the root stock of modern, non Middle Eastern, Jews.
Whether or not the Emperor Constantine ever actually converted to Christianity or not is a topic of hot debate by scholars, but there is no doubt that eventually the entire Roman Empire became Christian and, following the death of Emperor Julian, the last Pagan Emperor of Rome, the central government began a series of persecutions of the Pagans that dwarf the more famous persecution of the Christians conducted by a mere handful of Emperors, with the half-hearted backing of their provincial governors and generals. One Roman proconsul, shocked and offended by the determination of a group of Christians to be martyred despite his best efforts to save them, finally cried out in frustration:
Unhappy men! If you are so weary of your lives is it so difficult for you to find ropes and precipices?
Edward Gibbon "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
Christians seemed to go out of their way to get themselves martyred.
In the centuries that followed the fall of the empire in the west, Byzantine rule in the east came to be resented by many of the empire's outlying provinces. Resistance movements grew up and, for the most part, centered themselves around one or another heretical sect of Christianity, with different provinces each favoring a different “national” heresy.
In the capitol itself, where heresy was tantamount to suicide, opposition or support of the government coalesced around chariot racing teams instead of religion, and the team colors served the same function as heresy did in other provinces. In the provinces, opposition to the Byzantine government became so intense that many Christians and Jews living in Palestine welcomed the arrival of the Muslim armies with open arms. Indeed, it was often Jewish or heretical Christians who opened the gates of their cities to the Muslim armies which helps explain the rapid spread of their “conquest.”
Although the Muslims in the early centuries did not proselytize, and indeed put obstacles in the way of conversion to Islam, a great many Jews and Christians nonetheless found ways to convert. The Arabs themselves were always a minority in their new empire and soon the clever people of the Levant had taken over the religion and the empire from the real Arabs, most of whom returned to their deserts.
It is these people, the descendants of thousands of years of local residents, including the Jews, mixing and mingling with subsequent waves of invaders, that became the Palestinians.
Judaism was never a very power force within the Levant itself and was forever competing, usually unsuccessfully, with more advanced civilizations and religions. Biblical Scholar Jonathan Kirsch described the matter thus:
“The God of Israel is rejected by the majority of the Israelites, the very people whom he has chosen as his “treasured possession,” and not just at the moment when they worshiped the golden calf, but repeatedly over the long and troubled history of ancient Israel. Indeed, the Bible can be read as a bitter song of despair as sung by the disappointed prophets of Yahweh who tried but failed to call their fellow Israelites to the worship of the True God. Fatefully and tragically, the prophets respond to rejection in exactly the same way that God is shown to react to the worship of the golden calf—they are roused to a fierce, relentless and punishing anger toward any man or woman whom they find to be insufficiently faithful.”
Jonathan Kirsch "God Against the Gods"
Jews were always on the outside of society in the Levant, even during the brief periods that they actually ruled the land. Whether one believes the Bible story of the Jews being outsiders, or the modern scholarly view that they developed out of Canaanite culture, it is clear that Jews have always shared the land with people of different religions, cultures and ethnic origins. Even then the struggle to force Jews to remain Jews was an uphill battle and over time many, but by no means all, converted to other religions and were absorbed into the population of the land, becoming today’s Palestinians.
Those outsiders calling themselves “Jews” today are, for the most part, not descendants of any Levantine ethnic groups but rather the descendants of non Hebrew converts. They have no historical claim on the land. Their invasion and the subsequent setting up of the artificial state of “Israel” is unjustified by history and has led to the dispossession of the real descendants of the historical population of the land.
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