EARLY HISTORY PALESTINE ORIGIN : Jewish Point of View

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_name_origin.php

Where did the name Palestine come from?

Photo © Jack Hazut

Seashore near Rosh Hanigra Northern Israel near the border with Lebanon

The name Palestine refers to a region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee lake region in the north. The word itself derives from "Plesheth", a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into English as "Philistine". Plesheth, (root palash) was a general term meaning rolling or migratory. This referred to the Philistine's invasion and conquest of the coast from the sea. The Philistines were not Arabs nor even Semites, they were most closely related to the Greeks originating from Asia Minor and Greek localities. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs.

The Philistines reached the southern coast of Israel in several waves. One group arrived in the pre-patriarchal period and settled south of Beersheba in Gerar where they came into conflict with Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. Another group, coming from Crete after being repulsed from an attempted invasion of Egypt by Rameses III in 1194 BCE, seized the southern coastal area, where they founded five settlements (Gaza, Ascalon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gat). In the Persian and Greek periods, foreign settlers - chiefly from the Mediterranean islands - overran the Philistine districts.

From the fifth century BC, following the historian Herodotus, Greeks called the eastern coast of the Mediterranean "the Philistine Syria" using the Greek language form of the name. In AD 135, after putting down the Bar Kochba revolt, the second major Jewish revolt against Rome, the Emperor Hadrian wanted to blot out the name of the Roman "Provincia Judaea" and so renamed it "Provincia Syria Palaestina", the Latin version of the Greek name and the first use of the name as an administrative unit. The name "Provincia Syria Palaestina" was later shortened to Palaestina, from which the modern, anglicized "Palestine" is derived.

This remained the situation until the end of the fourth century, when in the wake of a general imperial reorganization Palestine became three Palestines: First, Second, and Third. This configuration is believed to have persisted into the seventh century, the time of the Persian and Muslim conquests.

The Christian Crusaders employed the word Palestine to refer to the general region of the "three Palestines."

After the fall of the crusader kingdom, Palestine was no longer an official designation. The name, however, continued to be used informally for the lands on both sides of the Jordan River. The Ottoman Turks, who were non-Arabs but religious Muslims, ruled the area for 400 years (1517-1917). Under Ottoman rule, the Palestine region was attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. The name Palestine was revived after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and applied to the territory in this region that was placed under the British Mandate for Palestine.

The name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine" is not an Arabic name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Roman "Palaestina". Quoting Golda Meir:

• The British chose to call the land they mandated Palestine, and the Arabs picked it up as their nation's supposed ancient name, though they couldn't even pronounce it correctly and turned it into Falastin a fictional entity. [In an article by Sarah Honig, Jerusalem Post, November 25, 1995]

Sources and additional reading on this topic:

• Reading the Old Testament
• What did Rome call the Land of Israel and where were its borders?
• Palestine: History
• Ottoman Rule (1517-1917)
• The Many States of Palestine
• The History and Meaning Of "Palestine" and "Palestinians"
• The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Basic Facts, Nationhood
• Politically motivated mythology of "Palestine"
• Arafat's Jesus
• Israel or Palestine? Which is it?
• The Palestinian Misnomer
• Strong's Hebrew Dictionary

WHAT DID ROME CALL THE LAND OF ISRAEL -- & WHERE WERE ITS BORDERS? -by Elliott A Green

http://www.esek.com/jerusalem/iudaea.html

by Elliott A Green The name "Palestine" flies around a great deal nowadays in the press and political discussion. Syria too is much in the news. Yet neither Palestine nor Syria is an indigenous name for the country either is nowadays supposed to represent. These were originally names given by outsiders, sailors and merchants coming from the west, to loosely defined regions along the eastern Mediterranean coast and their hinterlands. Syria was the more inclusive term of the two and indeed, as used by early Greeks and by later Greeks and Romans, it included the notion of Palestine, as we see from Herodotos, who wrote of "Palestinian Syria" (using the word as an adjective, not a noun). Hence for him it was merely a section of Syria. Typically the name "Syria" for classical writers loosely referred to a large region at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It included the Syria of today, plus Israel, Lebanon, the settled western part of Jordan, and much of southeastern Turkey. Syria was mainly a broad geographic term for the Greeks. It was not seen as the land of one nation or people. Syria was distinct from Assyria, although for some classical writers, Syria included Assyria and Babylonia far to the east. Yet the indigenous peoples of this region did not see one country but several lands with separate names. The natives called the coastal strip of Lebanon and Syria Canaan (Greeks called it Phoenicia); inland Syria was called Aram; Israel (on both sides of the Jordan) was divided into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. Also in place were the smaller states of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, northeast, east, and south of the Dead Sea. Pleshet in the Hebrew Bible (Philistia) occupied the coastal strip south of Jaffa. The Bible gives us Canaan, Israel, Aram, and other names, in addition to yet others in various ancient sources, Egyptian, Greek, etc. (including archeological finds). However, since "Palestine" has come down to the modern West through Rome (and to the modern Arabs through the West), the circumstances of its adoption as a Roman official name need to be considered. On the same grounds, the Roman name for the Land of Israel when Rome had its closest contact with the Jews and their land seems most significant for political discussion today. Judea (Iudaea) was the Roman name for the Land of Israel during the heyday of the Roman Empire. This meant not only the area called Judea in Israel today; it included the whole area ruled and/or chiefly inhabited by Jews. We can see this usage in various writers in Latin and Greek of that period. Consider Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus in Latin, and Plutarch as well as the geographers Strabo and Ptolemy in Greek. Judea stretched along both sides of the Jordan and included, besides Judea proper, most of the coastal plain, Samaria, most of the Galilee, the Golan Heights of today and considerable land to the east of there (areas called in Latin Gaulanitis [=Golan], Batanaea [=Bashan], Auranitis [=Hawran], and Trachonitis). The Romans called this land as a whole Iudaea (from the Greek Ioudaia). The land was mainly inhabited by Jews and was ruled by Jews. Therefore, Lord Robert Cecil, acting British foreign secretary, was right to use the name Judea for the whole land in his famous remark: "Our wish is that Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians, and Judea for the Jews" (December 2, 1917). We should look at what some of the ancient authors had to say about Judea to get the flavor of how they saw the land. Pliny the Elder, whose great work, the Natural History, aspired to present universal knowledge, wrote admiringly of Judea's capital and religious center: "Jerusalem, by far the most illustrious city of the East, not merely of Judea." This description reflects a view of Judea as an important country. Pliny described Machaerus this way: "Machaerus, formerly the fortress of Judea next in importance to Jerusalem" (both in Natural History, V:xv:70 and 72). Machaerus was east of the Dead Sea (now in Jordan). It fell to the Romans in 72 CE in the first Jewish revolt, the last stronghold to fall before Masada (in 73 CE). Tacitus, a Roman historian, also indicates Judea's geographic expanse. He tells us: "Judaea was divided: the Samaritans came under Felix and the Galileans under Ventidius " (The Annals, XII:54; M. Grant tr.). Thus Tacitus clearly placed both Samaria and Galilee within Judea. Strabo the geographer does likewise. He writes: "Phoenicia is a narrow country and lies flat along the sea, whereas the interior above Phoenicia [going from west to east-EAG], as far as the Arabians, between Gaza and Antilibanus [from south to north, between Gaza and the Anti-Lebanon mountain range--EAG], is called Judaea" (Geography, 16:2:21; Loeb ed.). Strabo's Judea is larger than that which Tacitus indicated here. It also includes the Golan and a strip of land on the east bank of the Jordan. Elsewhere in Strabo, Judea's southern borders reach into the Sinai, touching on Egypt (16:2:34 & 17:1:51). The Latin and Greek authors used Judea in a broad sense, although Rome changed Judea's outer and inner political borders from time to time, assigning parts of the whole to various Herodian princes or Roman officials. Plutarch, by the way, also used "Palestine," but in the sense of Philistia, a coastal region adjacent to but distinct from Judea.(1) The name "Palestine" was not used officially by the Romans before Hadrian (135 CE).  Moreover, we clearly see that the Greco-Roman usage of Judea was much broader than the Jewish notion of Judea. The latter was Judah (Yehudah), the southern kingdom after the split of the kingdom of David and Solomon. A certain confusion now arises between the narrow Jewish and the broad Greco-Roman usages. The rough Jewish equivalent for the latter broad usage is the Land of Israel. The New Testament exacerbates the confusion among modern Westerners, since it uses Judea in both ways, although in different places. It usually follows the Jewish notion, as where it mentions Judea in contrast to other sections of the country. However, several places in Luke and Acts imply the broader Greco-Latin usage (Luke 23:5; Acts 10:37, and several others). It is of interest, in view of the present attitudes of many churches toward what Israel's borders should be, that the NT uses the name "the Land of Israel" twice (Matt. 2:20-21) never using the name "Palestine," nor the adjectival form "Palestinian." One must wonder about certain supposedly faithful Christians of today, often men of the cloth, who insist on using a name for this country not found in the NT while rejecting the names (Judea and the Land of Israel) that the NT does use. Before we explain the origin and reappearance of the name Palestine, we ought to trace Judea as a geographic-political name and give a brief political sketch of Israel and the ancient Jews. We also ought to clear up one more complication: Idumaea. The Israelite kingdom reached its greatest extent under David and Solomon (1004-928 BCE). It ruled over much of Aram including Damascus. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom split in two: Judah in the south and Israel in the north, thereby losing much of its power. Nevertheless, the two Israelite kingdoms continued to exist side by side, usually in cooperation, for two hundred years. In 722 BCE, Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. Judah lasted for another 136 years until it was defeated by Babylonia, Assyria's successor, in 586 BCE. In both kingdoms, the leadership of the people were exiled while the common folk remained, although Assyria settled other peoples in Samaria, part of the former northern kingdom. Babylonia in turn was replaced by the empire of Medes and Persians. These were just some of the empires that subdued or ruled over the Jews, although the Jews as a people outlived them all. The same is true for the later empires of Alexander the Great, his Macedonian/Hellenistic successors, and Rome. The Jews began a comeback under Cyrus the Mede, who allowed the restoration of exiled Jews to Judah, about 538. An autonomous district called Yehud was set up in Judah.(2) This district, called a pahawa in Persian, was actually smaller than the earlier, pre-exilic kingdom of Judah, but expanded later, especially after the achievement of independence by the Maccabbees which brought Jews and others elsewhere in the country (including areas east of the Jordan) into the state of Judea.(3) After Alexander's conquest, if not earlier, the name Yehud had become known to the Greek-speaking world in the form of Ioudaia(4) and this became the Latin Iudaea (Judea), or perhaps the name came from the people, now called Judeans instead of "Syrians" (as by Herodotos and Theophrastos). Felix Abel, an erudite scholar (based at the French Catholic Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem), believed that the Greek geographic name Ioudaia derived from Yehoudaié (or Yehudaya), an Aramaic plural meaning "Jews" (consider Daniel 3:8 & Ezra 4:12). In this case, it would have applied to all mainly Jewish-inhabited areas, including and beyond the pahawa of Yehud.(5) Aramaic was the official language of the western portions of the Persian Empire. As to Idumaea, after the Babylonian conquest, the Edomites had settled in the southern part of Judah, especially west of Hebron. They were fleeing from the Arab conquest of their original homeland, Edom (south and southeast of the Dead Sea). Their new settlement area was later called Idumaea in Hellenistic times but was distinct from the original Edom. The Edomites' original language was a Canaanite tongue close to Hebrew. They were converted to Judaism in Hasmonean times and were considered Jews from then on. King Herod was a Jew of Idumaean descent. Palestine obviously derives from Philistia (Pleshet in Hebrew), the southern coastal area of the country. The great French scholar, Victor Bérard, fighting to stem the aryanist tide in classical studies earlier in this century, saw the names Palestine and Syria as both resulting from the same phenomenon. The names originated among merchants and sailors coming from the West. They came first to coastal cities. Abel has described the phenomenon as follows:

Thus from the territory of the Philistines, the name Palestine was extended to the whole hinterland of Southern Syria. By a process familiar to the ancients, the name of the closest, most accessible tribe was applied to the whole country.

(6) Bérard pointed out that Syria is derived from an alternate Greek pronunciation of the name Tyre (consider Tsor in Hebrew and Sour in Arabic).(7) Tyre was long seen by the Greeks as the chief Phoenician city. Adding the Greek suffix -ia to the name, they affixed the newly formed name to the city's hinterland and subsequently to the whole region, including Israel. Thus the name Syria originally applied to Tyre and its surroundings. One reason that Herodotos could call the Jews/Israelites "Syrians" (specifically "Palestinian Syrians") was because their language, which we call Hebrew, was linguistically so close to that of the Tyrians and other Phoenicians. Linguists identify Hebrew, Phoenician (some say this includes Ugaritic and Eblaite), Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite as members of the Canaanite family of languages. Some hold that these were more in the way of dialects of the same tongue, rather than separate languages. The language group takes it name from Canaan, the apparently original name of the country. Isaiah speaks of the "lip of Canaan" (19:18) as the language of the Israelites. The Egyptians too sometimes used a name for the country derived from Canaan. Bérard and others have pointed out Phoenician linguistic influence on Greek, especially on place names in Greece and the Aegean. However, it was long fashionable to minimize this influence (which suggests cultural influence), despite the identification of Thales, the first Greek philosopher, as a Phoenician by Herodotus. This Aryanist or antisemitic prejudice has given way in some recent studies to the recognition that both Thales and another early philosopher, Pythagoras, were Phoenicians. What is still generally overlooked is the likely Jewish influence on ancient Greek culture. Consider for example the rarely recognized Jewish parallels in Thales and Pythagoras.(8) After Alexander's conquest of the Land, the Greek name came to be Ioudaia,(9) however the name Coele-Syria was often used by both Greek and Latin writers. Koyleh-Suria (Coele-Syria) was more inclusive than Ioudaia. It meant Hollow Syria and originally referred to the Biq`a of Lebanon and, apparently, the Jordan Valley --segments of the Syrian-African Rift. Eventually it seems to have included the cities of the Decapolis (that is, Damascus and other Hellenistic cities in Transjordan and their surroundings), and perhaps Phoenicia.(10) For the Greek Polybius and the Roman Livy, it refers to the area between Egypt and northern Syria, the long-disputed battleground of rival Macedonian dynasties, the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt.(11) By the time the Romans conquered the country, in 63 BCE, the kingdom of Judea, ruled by the Hasmonean dynasty, stretched along both sides of the Jordan and controlled, besides Judea proper, most of the coastal plain, Samaria, most of the Galilee, and the Golan Heights. While Herod ruled Judea, Augustus Caesar awarded Judea vast tracts of land running far to the east of the Golan of today. The Romans called this land as a whole Iudaea. The land was mainly inhabited by Jews and was ruled by Jews. Herod's Roman title was "a king, ally and friend of the Roman people" (rex, socius et amicus populi romani), a standard formula for client kings. He had cleverly usurped the kingship from the Hasmoneans through loyalty to the Romans (and married a Hasmonean princess). After Herod's death, the Romans divided the kingdom into several parts, giving Herod's surviving sons a chance to show their capacity for rule. The land as a whole was now called Iudaea by Latin and Greek authors. This meant the lands ruled and/or chiefly inhabited by Jews, as we have discussed above. Roman hegemony meant several political reorganizations of the country after Herod's death. The first great Jewish revolt (66-73 CE) ended in Roman victory in the course of which the Temple was destroyed (70 CE). The Romans now again reorganized the country, which was already designated the province of Judea (Provincia Iudaea).(12) Some 65 years later, however, in the year 135 CE, when the Emperor Hadrian's forces had suppressed the Jewish revolt led by Bar-Kokhba, the emperor renamed the province Provincia Syria Palaestina. The name change had obvious political implications. This becomes even clearer when we bear in mind that at the same time Hadrian forbid Jews to live in a large zone in the heart of Judea around Jerusalem. Furthermore, Rome planted colonists in the zone who belonged to various foreign peoples, chiefly Syrians and Arabs, according to Michael Avi-Yonah.(13) Another historian, Mary Smallwood, writes: "The bulk of the new settlers were Greco-Syrians."(14) Other colonists were veterans of the Roman legions, no doubt including many Europeans. The Arabs surely deserved a reward from the Romans since the Province of Arabia had "provided the Romans important military support in the suppression of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt and as we know contributed the only complete legion they had for this operation."(15) Rome was in dire need of manpower, since Bar-Kokhba's forces had wiped out at least one legion, perhaps two, so it seems from the documents.(16) To appreciate the feelings of some of those who replaced the Jewish population in the forbidden zone we may get some indication from an ancient writer's remark, which in fact concerns the aftermath of the First Revolt (66-73 CE): "After Titus had taken Jerusalem, and when the country all around was filled with corpses, the neighboring races offered him a crown..."(17) On the other hand, the ancient writer Dio Cassius and some modern historians point to non-Jewish cooperation with the Jewish rebels led by Bar-Kokhba.(18) The early Christian historian Eusebius (ca. 270-340 CE) captured the poignancy of the situation: "When the Jewish revolt again grew to formidable dimensions, Rufus, governor of Judaea... took merciless advantage... confiscating all their lands... From that time on [of the Jewish defeat, 135 CE], the entire race has been forbidden to set foot anywhere in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, under... a law of Hadrian which ensured that not even from a distance might Jews have a view of their ancestral soil... When in this way the city [polis] was closed to the Jewish race and suffered the total destruction of its former inhabitants, it was colonized by an alien race." [Ecclesiastical History, IV:6, tr. Williamson-Louth] The zone forbidden to Jews took in four toparchies (districts) according to Avi-Yonah (or only three, dixit Smallwood). The zone ran from just north of Hebron to a point halfway between Shekhem (Nablus, ancient Neapolis) and Jifna (ancient Gophna). On the east-west axis it ran from about Kfar Adumim to near Sha`ar HaGai. The name of Jerusalem was also changed. It was now Aelia Capitolina, and had the status of a Colonia (colony) and a polis together with the zone as a whole, which shared the new name of the city. This extreme change in name and demography had profound effects on history. Nevertheless, many Jews remained in the country outside the zone, especially in the Galilee and Golan, but also in Jericho just east of the zone, and elsewhere. Despite the official change in name, Greek and Latin writers after Hadrian (i.e., Ptolemy the Geographer, Dio Cassius [cf. LV:23; LXIX:13:1 & 14:2], and Eusebius) continued to use Judea along with Palestine. Judea was sometimes used officially by Rome even after Hadrian. Eusebius, writing around 300 CE, summarizes the changes of name: "... Hebrews... inhabited the neighboring country to Phoenicia, which itself was called Phoenicia in old times, but afterwards Judaea, and in our time, Palestine."(19) The Arab treatment of geographical names after their conquest of the country (635-640 CE) was paradoxical. The Quran mentions the Holy Land divinely assigned to the people of Israel (Sura V:12, 20-21). However, the Arabs later on did not see this land as a separate country. They typically considered the country merely an undifferentiated part of Bilad ash-Sham (usually translated as Syria or Greater Syria). This view lasted until the end of the British mandate period, as we see from Arab writings and political declarations (such as Arab testimony before the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine, 1946). Before the Crusades the Arabs did use the name Filastin. However, this name referred only to the southern region of the country, what the Romans had called Palaestina Prima.(20) After the Crusades the name was not used by the Muslim Mamluk rulers. The Crusaders had typically called the country the Holy Land (Terra Sancta), sometimes using the Land of Israel (Terra Israel) or other names. Holy Land was still the usual Western name for the country in the nineteenth century, although it alternated with Palestine, Judea, Zion, the Land of Israel, Land of the Bible, etc., and the Land was sometimes seen as part of Syria, the Levant, or other geographic notions. The highly respected Enciclopedia Italiana (Vol. 26, "Palestina"; ca. 1930) tells us that the name "Palestine" came "to prevail in modern times" over other names. This change apparently took place out of the "scientific" motive to avoid the religious connotations of Holy Land. Thus Palestine was again a Western name as it had been in ancient times. "Palestine" was first officially applied to the country in modern times in 1920 when the peace negotiators at the San Remo Conference juridically established the country as the Jewish National Home. Before World War I it was an administratively indistinct area of the Ottoman Empire and was shared among various Ottoman administrative departments. So is Palestine the proper or rightful name of the country? The name of a country, any country, has to be looked at as a historical object, for if otherwise, a land might as well be called XYZ or No. 14. A country's name is associated with events and personalities and sentiments. "Palestine" too must be scrutinized in that light. The Roman change of name was part of a complex of related oppressive measures of national despoliation, punishment, and oppression. From the start the name was laden with connotations of Roman hatred for rebels (and for Jews in particular), the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the war and through the legionaries' vengeful acts, the ruin of hundreds of villages and towns, the enslavement of survivors, expulsion of a people from its homes and lands (nowadays called "ethnic cleansing"), etc. The name "Palestine" cannot be divested of the negative overtones of its history, from the circumstances of its Roman official origin. It cannot be considered a "neutral, value free," purely "scientific" term, as some would have it (regardless of its use even by some Zionists). This is not only because of its current use as an anti-Israel slogan, but because of the context of its origin as a Roman official name. Felix Abel, the noted Catholic historian of the country, frankly states that the name change was "another indication of the anti-Jewish orientation of imperial policy."(21) Should the continued use today of the name "Palestine" be seen otherwise? NOTES (You can surf back to the foot note's location by use of the (Back) link.
A version of this article was originally published in Midstream, 11/95.
1. See in Plutarch his lives of Pompey and Antony, such as "Antony" 36:3.(Back)
2. Yehud, later called Ioudaia, was autonomous to some extent or other under Persians and Macedonians (Alexander, the Diadochi, the Ptolemids, and the Seleucids), a period of some 400 years, though it was an administrative unit forming part of larger governmental divisions (first the Persian satrapy of Eber-Nahara, later the Ptolemaic and Seleucid divisions to be named below in note 11). Seth Schwartz, "On the Autonomy of Judaea in the 4th and 5th Centuries BCE," Journal of Jewish Studies, Autumn 1994. Schwartz points to the distinct coinage of Yehud and Ioudaia as important evidence of autonomy, among other proofs. (Back)
3. Michael Avi-Yonah describes this process in his Geografya Historit shel Erets-Yisrael (Jerusalem 1984), pp. 17-48.(Back)
4. F-M Abel traces the usage of Ioudaia back as early as 320 BCE (by Clearchus of Soli, a pupil of Aristotle). F-M Abel, Géographie de la Palestine, II (Paris 1938), pp. 313-314. Assuming a factual background to Clearchus' story about Aristotle and the Jewish sage, then the name Ioudaia goes back in Greek usage to before Alexander's conquest of the Land of Israel (332 BCE), albeit otherwise unattested for that period. The story is set in the time when Aristotle was living in Asia Minor (347-344 BCE). In another place Aristotle locates the Dead Sea in "Palestine."(Back)
5. Abel, Géographie..., I, pp. 314-315. In a parallel deduction, Abel indicated that the name Arabaya, an Aramaic plural meaning "Arabs," applied to Arab-inhabited areas. Ibid., III, p. 113.(Back)
6. F-M Abel, Ibid., II (Paris 1938), p. 313. "Donc du territoire des Philistins, le nom de Palestine s'est étendu tout l'arrire pays qui forme la Syrie Méridionale. Par un procédé familier aux anciens on appliquait au pays entier le nom de la peuplade la plus proche et la plus accessible..." One may consider other geographic names, such as Asia and Africa which originally applied to countries, not to continents.(Back)
7. V. Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée, (Paris, 1927); tome I, p439, and tome II, pp 40, 54 & 376. F-M Abel, unlike Bérard, sees the name "Syria" as a corruption of Assyria. F. Abel, Géographie..., II (Paris 1938), pp. 310 & 313.(Back)
8. See Bronson Feldman, "The Genesis of Science," Midstream (August/September, 1983); Elliott A Green, "Did Pythagoras Follow Nazarite Rules?" The Jewish Bible Quarterly (Fall 1991; Jerusalem).(Back)
9. F-M Abel traces this broad usage of Ioudaia back as early as 320 BCE (by Clearchus of Soli, a pupil of Aristotle). He adds: "Il est donc vraisembable que ce mot [Ioudaia au sens large] fut en usage parmi les Grecs et surtout chez les Alexandrins ds le IVe sicle avant notre re." He attributes this to the fact that Jews lived throughout the country outside Judea proper. Abel, Ibid., II, pp. 314-315. However, Menahem Stern dates the broad meaning of Judea to the time of Alexander Yannai (103-76 BCE) when the state of Judea expanded. He writes: "Judea now became the accepted designation of the country as a whole and continued as its official name..." EJ, VIII, 632. Perhaps Stern is chiefly referring to official usage. M. Stern, in H.H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 226.(Back)
10. For the varying boundaries of Coele-Syria, see, inter alia, Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p.423 n. 36; Aryeh Kasher, "Milhamot Hordos baNabatim," Divrey HaAkedemya haLeumit haYisraelit le'Mada`im, VII, Booklet no. 4 (1985-86), p. 121 n. 23; Abel, op. cit., pp. 310-12; Avi-Yonah, ibid., pp. 25-6.(Back)
11. Coele-Syria was the common Greek appellation in literature for the area we have described, and this is the usage that we have focussed on here. M. Avi-Yonah, Ibid., pp. 26. The Ptolemaic dynasty's official name for their holdings in and around Israel, what has been described here as Coele-Syria, was "Syria and Phoenicia." The official Seleucid name for the same area after they captured it under Antiochus III, was "Coele-Syria and Phoenicia." Menahem Stern in H.H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 191; cf. Avi-Yonah, ibid., pp. 26 & 32.(Back)
12. Stern, Encyclopedia Judaica, VIII, 639; Idem., in H.H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), op. cit., p. 246.(Back)
13. Michael Avi-Yonah, The Jews of Palestine (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), pp. 16 and 31 note 7.(Back)
14. Mary Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1981), pp.460 and 473. By "Greco-Syrians" she may have meant Greek-speaking Syrians or Greeks living in Syria, or a mixture of both.(Back)
15. Aryeh Kasher, Jews, Idumaeans, and Ancient Arabs (Tubingen 1988), p208.(Back)
16. Graham Webster allows that one legion "may have been lost... in the Jewish Revolt under Hadrian." He refers to the Legion XXII Deiotariana, which disappeared from the army rolls after Hadrian's time. G. Webster, The Roman Imperial Army (London 1969); p. 114.(Back)
17. A passage from Philostratos. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VI:xxix (Loeb ed).(Back)
18. Dio Cassius wrote: "Many outside nations, too, were joining them [the rebels]" (Roman History, 69:13:1; Loeb ed.; S. Safrai's article in EJ, v.9, 247, gives another translation: "They were moreover helped by non-Jews." Also see Idem, in H.H. Ben-Sasson [ed.], op. cit., p. 331, for yet another translation).(Back)
19. Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, x:v (Gifford tr.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1903). This quote also points to the identity between Phoenicia and Canaan.(Back)
20. See "Filastin" in Encyclopedia of Islam; also see André Miquel in Third International Conference on Bilad al-Sham: Palestine, 19-24 April 1980, II (University of Jordan-Yarmouk University, 1984).(Back)
21. F-M Abel, Géographie..., p. 163. "Un autre indice de l'orientation anti-judaique de la politique impériale..."(Back)

Discussion between Ben Abrahamson and Irshad Alam

Ben Abrahamson

www.facebook.com/ben613

Irshad Alam

 www.facebook.com/mim786  

=======================

 

Ben Abrahamson 

When I visited Surat, I was told that there are more Muslims living in India than in Pakistan.

There is no doubt the application of true justice, and fear of Allah SWT, would help alleviate much of the misery in the Palestinian-Israel confli...ct.

I do not know, however, that as long as the governments of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are secular - without God fearing judges - how any credible justice system can be set up to solve these problems?See More

November 7 at 2:49pm ·




Irshad Alam

i really appreciate it that you acknowledge this and that shows that you are truly an honest and upright believer (in our common God).

However, its the allegedly "religious Jews" esp. the "israeli religious parties" that support these injus...tices!See More

November 7 at 5:04pm
Ben Abrahamson

Don't underestimate the number of people who unhappy with the secular, humanist government. There are many in the religious parties are honestly working for change, but the rules of government and politics have been set up by the secularist...s - so change is very slow in coming, and even a Rabbi can be corrupted by political power.

We need to increase awareness of Allah SWT both among Jews and Muslims, and all the people of the area, so that belief will be strong and people will no longer be satisfied with a hollow, secular system.

We must actively pray for, and yearn for, the coming of the King Messiah / Mahdi to be revealed quickly, and in our days.See More

November 7 at 9:24pm
Irshad Alam also, from the Torah standpoint --- whats the confines of the promised land? is it todays Israel or does it include Syria, Iraq?November 7 at 9:28pm
Irshad Alam then the question is that when these "religious" parties chant we should not surrender an inch of israel, why dont they include Syria, Iraq there?

according to the tafsir I study (tafsir al-mazhari) promised land includes syria, iraq
 November 7 at 9:30pm

Ben Abrahamson

In the Torah, the Prophet Abraham AS was promised the land "from the Nile to the Euphrates", but the commentaries explain that this will only occur in the end of times.

When King David AS and Solomon AS conquered land including Syrian and Da...mascus, this was not considered permanently part of the land of Israel because the conquest was done through war.

When Ezra and Nehemiah returned after the Babylonian Exile, they were given permission to settle, and they lived in the land without conquest by war. This is the land that most Jews talk about today, this is the area that contains most of our history.

However, there have always been "God fearers", non-Jews who lived in the land of Israel. During the second temple period they were called Kenites, or Children of Shuʻayb (Jethro), and in Aramaic they were always called Salamai or Muslamai.

The Land of Israel belongs to the Children of Israel, Children of Moses and the God fearers.

Psalm 115:9-11 says: "Israel (Children of Israel), trust in the Lord; He is their help and their shield. House of Aaron (Children of Moses), trust in the Lord; He is their help and their shield. Those who Fear the Lord (God fearers), trust in the Lord; He is their help and their shield."See More

November 7 at 9:56p

By the Torah, you may resolve the Israel conflict

by Irshad Alam on Friday, November 19, 2010 at 11:43pm

 

 I had a good meeting with a Hasidic Lubavitcher Rabbi from Brookline about resolving the middle-east conflict. I said that it would be a easy problem to solve if we follow the Torah. The Rabbi asked me, “How will you solve it?”

In answer, I narrated this real-life story. In 1947, British India was subdivided into India and Pakistan and granted independence. A sufi teacher left Kolkata, India and moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh which was then a part of Pakistan. A disciple advised him, “There are many rich Hindus who has left Dhaka for Kolkata. The government has taken over their houses and it is now allocating those houses to Muslim refugees from India. All you need to do is to apply to the government and they would allocate you one of those houses.”

The sufi saint answered, “Will that Hindu give me his permission to live in his house?” The answer was something like, “Who cares for that Hindu's permission? That Hindu is not even around anymore, he has left for India. The government has taken over the house, the government will hand you over the house and that is all the permission that you will ever need.” The sufi master answered, “The law of the government may permit me to live in that Hindu's house, but the law of God/Allah does not allow me to live in someone's house without the permission from its owner.”

The Rabbis feigned that he still does not understand. I explained further, “I met a Palestinian-American in Dallas who narrated that he fled his home that was on the outskirts of Jerusalem because Jewish terrorist gangs [like Haganah, Stern etc.] attacked the neighborhood and was killing all non-Jews. The official Israeli party line has been that the non-Jews (both Muslim and Christians) intentionally fled but they could not even claim that in his case because that area was not supposed to become a part of israel, it was supposed to have become a part of the proposed UN-administered territory of Jerusalem. His ancestral home is still standing and he even showed some pictures of that house that a friend of his took recently.

Now he is successful real-estate developer in Dallas owning a palatial home and he is even willing to give that mansion to the current occupants of the house because he wants to live his last days in that house in which he grew up. But he can not as the Israeli government has given that house to a Jew. Look! He even dares to call himself a Jew. But in violation of the Torah, the halacha, the ten commandments, the Noachide laws, the sharia, the Koran, the code of Hammurabi, the laws of Manu, or in violation of every sacred law ever known to mankind, that Jew is living in that Palestinian's house, without any permission from its owner.” So the solution lies in the Torah. The solution lies in the firm following of the law of Moses. And the only way that a rabbi can undo it is through rank sophistry.

By the way, that sufi story is for real. The sufi saint was Abdus-salam Ahmad of Narinda, Dhaka, Bangladesh and this story is contained in his biography Sublus-Salam published by the Narinda Khanqa. The author of that book was Sufi Ghulam Muhyiuddin and he told me that he himself was that disciple.

Israelis sometimes rationalize their racist “We here; you there” policy by claiming that India and Pakistan was subdivided so that the Muslims can immigrate to Pakistan and the Hindus to India. That is absolutely false. The official position was that people of either community can live in any of the countries. Yes! There was a lot of violence in parts of Pakistan and western India between Hindus and Muslims. But not so in Bangladesh or Eastern parts of India. Few people there changed countries, most stayed where they were living.


 

Mamilla Cemetery and the Simon Wiesenthal Center -By LAWRENCE SWAIM

http://www.counterpunch.org/swaim11192010.html

Weekend Edition
November 19 - 21, 2010
Mamilla Cemetery and the Simon Wiesenthal Center
Israel's War Against the Dead

By LAWRENCE SWAIM

In June, 2005, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles began construction in Jerusalem of an ambitious new facility. This project was variously referred to by Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and “dean” of the SWC, as the “Center for Human Dignity,” the “Center for Human Dignity—Jerusalem” and most pretentiously, the “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance.” (Ground-breaking on the construction site had occurred in 2004, giving Arnold Schwarzenegger an opportunity to fly to Israel for one of his many photo ops with Rabbi Heir.) This sprawling structure was to be built on a parking lot that was supposedly adjacent to a historic Muslim ceremony; but which actually turned out to be directly on top of a part of it.

The cemetery, called the Mamilla Cemetary (Ma’Man Allah in Arabic), was an extremely old Muslim burial ground that was once the most important in Palestine, and in the Middle East generally. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, in a petition to the UN and other international organizations to stop construction of the Wiesenthal Museum, wrote as follows: “The Mamilla Cemetery is an ancient Muslim burial ground and holy site believed to date back to the 7th century, when companions of the Prophet Muhammad were reputedly buried there. Numerous saints of the Sufi faith and thousands of other officials, scholar, notables and Jerusalemite families have been buried in the cemetery over the last 1000 years. The Muslim Supreme Council declared the cemetery a historical site in 1927, and the British Mandate authorities pronounced it an antiquities site in 1944. It was an active burial ground until 1948.”

“After the new State of Israel seized the western part of Jerusalem in 1948, the cemetery fell under Israeli control, and like other Islamic endowment properties, or waqf, Mamilla Cemetery was taken over by the Custodian for Absentee Property. Since then, Muslim authorities have not been allowed to maintain the cemetery.” At that time, in 1948, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry itself acknowledged Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars.” It added: “Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.”

But that is not what happened.

In the early 1980s, Muslims became aware that the cemetery was being encroached on and human remains were being disinterred, and protested to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1984 Israel responded to that protest by stating flatly that “no project exists for the de-consecration of the site and that on the contrary the site and its tombs are to be safeguarded.” In fact even as Israel said this, however, it was engaged in parceling off pieces of the cemetery for various kinds of private developments, even as they assured UNESCO that they were protecting it.

Sadly, Palestinians had no legal instrument by which they could stop this. Although Mamilla cemetery in on a list of “Special Antiquities Sites,” it is not protected as a religious site. All of the cemeteries in Israel that are protected as religious sites are Jewish. (The Israeli government designates 137 holy sites that receive such protection, but all are Jewish, a fact that the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report of 2009 protested against.) Furthermore successive governments have sought to obliterate reminders of Palestinian culture in Jerusalem; successive governments parceled out sections of Mamilla for buildings, then for the construction of the parking lot mentioned above—and in 1992, the site was transferred to the Jerusalem municipality. At one point the government built a park over a part of the cemetery, which they named Independence Park, a reference to the founding of Israel in 1948 (and a clear attempt to provoke and humiliate Palestinians).

This is completely unlike the treatment meted out to Jewish cemeteries. On the Mount of the Olives, for example, the Jewish cemetery has been lavishly refurbished and even expanded, and finally transformed into a “heritage site.” On the other hand, Israel’s Muslim cemeteries have been allowed to fade into disuse, and are even destroyed when the government thinks it can get away with it. The 900-year-old Hittin mosque built by Saladin in the Galilee region has been deliberately fenced off and allowed to go to ruin. According to Bethlehem-based journalist Jonathan Cook, some mosques are used by rural Jewish communities as animal sheds. “And yet more,” he writes, “have been converted into discos, bars or nightclubs, including the Dahir al-Umar mosque—now the Dona Rosa restaurant—in the former Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd.”

Meron Benvenisti, a former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who wrote Sacred Landscape: Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, has been vocal in pointing out that Muslim groups, contrary to what the Simon Wiesenthal camp is saying, pleaded over the years to be allowed to officially refurbish and keep up their sacred sites and cemeteries, but were never allowed to do so. Many important Islamic sites, he has written, have been “turned into dumps, parking lots, roads and construction sites.”

The Israeli government has recently added Ibrahimi and Bilal Bin Abi Rabah Mosques to the Jewish heritage list, which means they are not protected as religious sites. This means that the Israeli government could easily sell off, close or develop the sites, just as it has the Mamilla site, which is also on the heritage list but not protected as a religious site.

On a tour of East Jerusalem in late summer 2010, activist and author Phillip Weiss wrote on his website Mondoweiss:

Maybe the most pitiable sight I saw yesterday, inside the West Bank but close to the north Jerusalem colonies of Ramot and Ramat Shlomo, [was] the hilltop tomb of the prophet Samuel, which is worshiped by Jews and Muslims. The tomb is both a mosque with a minaret and a Jewish place of worship. Well when we visited, busloads of Jewish schoolchildren were arriving and Israeli soldiers were in the tomb davening and Hasidic boys were descending, too.

But next door it was a different story:

The door is chained, pigeons fly into the outer rooms, the Palestinian who runs a store there told us that the authorities had shut down the minaret. There are no Palestinian worshipers.

Weiss points out that this is an Israeli National Park in the West Bank, which is supposedly Palestinian land and supposedly—if there were actually ever to be a two-state solution—the future site of a Palestinian state. But being under the authority of the Israeli army, the Jewish site is protected as a religious site, whereas the Muslim worship facility next to the tomb of the prophet Samuel has been closed down. It is hard not to conclude that the closing and degradation of Muslim religious sites is a deliberate and coordinated policy of the Israeli government to humiliate Palestinian Muslims, an extension of the slow ethnic cleansing currently underway in the occupied territories. The message seems to be, “If you don’t like what we’re doing to Muslim holy sites, why don’t you leave?”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center similarly claims that Mamilla deserves no protection as a religious site, citing the fact that in 1964 the government set up a Muslim trust and that the head of that council “deconsecrated” Mamilla—and supposedly declared it no longer sacred ground, thus opening it up to partial development. But the person in question was apparently a government plant brought in to give political cover to those anxious to make money by developing the cemetery. (The bogus 1964 proclamation was aggressively overturned—or ruled “void”—by the Shari’a Court of Appeals in Israel, which found the sanctity of cemeteries to be “eternal” in Islam.) Certainly one person—especially one who in 1964 had been given no authority by Muslims to represent them—cannot speak for the many families whose ancestors are buried in Mamilla. Although some tombstones appeared to have been replaced in recent years, individual attempts at upkeep haven’t been as successful as organized efforts by a Muslim trust would be.

In Death in Jerusalem, Noga Tarnopolsky writes of her friend Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher and university president, who located the tomb of two illustrious ancestors in the Mamilla cemetery: “Nusseibeh then contacted a friend working at the Ministry for Religious Affairs and requested permission to place a plaque on the crypt. ‘I thought it was important to commemorate this, and to tell people that in the case of a family like mine, we are not claiming roots here in the abstract or national sense, but in the familial sense, which is a much closer thing,’ he said.”

“Nusseibeh secured permission and affixed a stone plaque explaining that the tomb belonged to Islam’s Kabrkabiyyan period and contained the remains of one Prince Iddaghji and a certain Judge Nusseibeh. The next day it was removed by municipal workers, who claimed sole jurisdiction over the entire park.” This was despite the permission he had supposedly gotten from the Ministry for Religious Affairs. This could stand as a paradigm interaction of Israel and its Palestinian citizens. One can jump through all the hoops, do all the paperwork required, but if you are Palestinian you can be ignored and shut down at any moment, simply because you do not have the right religion. And your attorney will be able to do nothing for you, because in Israel the legal system is completely skewed against Palestinians.

Thus the location for SWC’s “Museum of Tolerance” had already been contested ground for some time before 2004, and in the opinion of most Palestinians a prime example of Israel’s swaggering and increasingly aggressive religious intolerance. Even the design for the new structure—by the internationally-known architect Frank Gehry—seems to have pleased nobody. (Gehry claims that it represents a bowl of fruit, a strange idea that got little traction in Jerusalem.)[i] Meron Benvenisti complained about its “geometric forms that can’t be any more dissonant to the environment in which it is planned to put this alien object.” Noga Tarnopolsky characterized its design as “the image of a supernatural edifice resembling nothing so much as a crab in the process of hatching a sapphire spider with huge, glassy eyes. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is striking and odd.” The management of the Vad Yashem Holocaust memorial were unhappy about the competition in Holocaust tourism (there’s a great comic novel in there somewhere), and the people of Jerusalem, perhaps wary of busloads of ecstatic tourists from southern California, were generally mystified by Heir’s grandiose ideas.

The “Museum of Tolerance” was built on a parking lot that was supposed to be adjacent to Mamilla cemetery. In reality it was built over part of it. This fact became painfully clear to the Wiesenthal Center as workmen began to encounter human remains. (Laying electrical cables and sewer lines probably resulted in digging deeper than had been required for building the parking lot.) At first the presence of human remains was kept secret by the SWC, but it couldn’t have surprised many people in Jerusalem, since they knew that the government had been parceling off the cemetery for some time. What the government had chosen to ignore was how resentful of this Palestinians had become over the years, especially those families with ancestors buried in Mamilla.

Reports vary, but the Wiesenthal Center workers apparently encountered remains of about two hundred people; and a decision was supposedly made to take the remains to another Muslim cemetery and re-inter them there. (What really happened can’t be confirmed because the Wiesenthal Center won’t reveal where they were taken.) The centuries-old remains have been the main sticking point for Hier and the SWC, the seriousness of which can be inferred from their insistence that they “respectfully” re-interred the bones. (If that is true, why won’t they allow journalists to take photos of their final resting place?) If the Wiesenthal Center is simply building something on a parking lot, why were they engaged in digging up human remains? And if the claims of local Muslim families were all lies, why was the Wiesenthal Center, by its own admission, re-interring those same human remains in another Muslim cemetery?

In fact, Hier and the Wiesenthal Center had known for a very long time that they were building their “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance.” on top of an historic Muslim cemetery. During the building of the original parking lot back in the 1960, hundreds of graves were disinterred, which caused anguished protests by Muslims; the same thing happened in 1984, when they appealed to UNESCO. Furthermore, as early as 1993 the municipal authorities offered the SWC the parking lot for the building of the project. Both Teddy Kollek and Ehud Olmert had encouraged the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build the current or similar projects at precisely this site, and they above all were in a position to know that the parking lot had been built over part of Mamilla Cemetery. Therefore Kollek, Ehud Olmert and Rabbi Hier knew exactly what lay under the parking lot. In fact, the case can be made that Hier wanted to build on a Muslim cemetery, especially given his apocalyptic ideas about the inevitability of religious war between Muslims and Jews. What could be better for fund-raising than a nice little religious war, with the frenetic Hier leading his faithful troops into the fray?

In 2005, Gideon Suleimani, a Palestinian archeologist, personally warned representatives of the SWC that the area was an antiquities site; at Seleimani’s request, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) dug test trenches, and it was revealed that hundreds of graves—as many as four layers of graves—were located under the parking lot. One has the sense that Suleimani thought that he could get the Wiesenthal Center to back off if only he could appeal to their common humanity. If so, he didn’t know the group he was dealing with—the SWC continued, in spite of being so advised; and when reports surfaced of their digging up remains and carrying them away surreptitiously in boxes, several Palestinian families in the area decided to act.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) then moved to investigate further. Suleimani, who was the Chief Excavator on the project, found that there were “at least 2000 graves,” on at least four levels, with exhumed remains dating back to the 12th century, and the lowest level dating back to the 11th century. But, as Suleimann later testified in an Affidavit, people from the Simon Wiesenthal Center began to put pressure on the IAA, as did interested politicians who were invested in getting the construction done. For their part the IAA, according to Suleimani, tried to get him to stop his excavating and to alter his report. Suleimani also said that “representatives of the SWC started coming by on a daily basis, pressing for the excavation to progress quickly, to prevent the Muslims from stopping the project,” not to mention entrepreneurs whose connection to the site was unclear, but who were now threatening to sue the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

In 2006 a lawsuit was filed that resulted in a court order that temporarily stopped construction. But the pressures were growing on the government. The Israeli Antiquities Authority decided, while defending against the lawsuit, to suppress the evidence their Chief Excavator Gideon Suleimani had uncovered. The High Court of Israel never found out that there were around 2,000 graves under the parking lot, going down four levels, the lowest level of graves dating back to the 11th century. They did not find out about it because the IAA suppressed the evidence that Seluimani collected, and that the IAA had asked him to collect. In an equally cynical move, the IAA apparently lied (according to affidavits by Suleimani) about his finding that only about ten percent of the excavations had been done, instead claiming that ninety percent was done.

What caused these criminal misrepresentations to the High Court, the first of which was suppression of evidence, and the second of which was perjury? For one thing, the Simon Wiesenthal Center had arranged to pay the workers doing the excavation, perhaps a violation of the law, but one that gave the SWC greater leverage over facts on the ground. Secondly, there is some evidence that the “Museum of Tolerance” was part of a larger deal which may not have been strictly legitimate (since it may have involved patronage from politicians). Thirdly, why did the IAA falsify the report they had initiated, and what did they receive in return from the Simon Wiesenthal Center? This critical piece of information can’t be determined until the principals to the controversy can be examined under oath. But given the value of the land involved it is hard to believe that they acted alone, or that they decided to suppress evidence on their own volition.

The High Court allowed construction to continue in October, 2008. Efforts were made to appeal this, since the Israel Antiquities Authority had repressed the only evidence that really counts in this case, which was testimony (and evidence) of the Chief Excavator assigned by the IAA itself, Gideon Suleimani. Despite the suppression of everything he had to say and all the evidence he had obtained, the court refused to open the case again, and insisted that construction must proceed. Exhumation of human remains resumed, and there was nothing that could be done about it. This constituted the exhaustion of appeals within the Israeli system of justice, and made the later appeal to the United Nations inevitable.

Contrary to what the IAA had told the High Court, ninety percent of the area intended for the Wiesenthal Center project still had to be dug up. The Israeli Antiquities Authority claimed that the disinterring of human remains occurring after October, 2008, involved manual removal after documentation so that the remains could be re-interred, but both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the IAA have engaged in extreme secrecy, and it is impossible to say exactly what they did with the remains. (Needless to say, they refused to consult with appropriate Muslim authorities.) It was reported by the Palestinian News Network that during one week in 2009, some 300 Muslim graves were opened up, and the remains dumped into a mass grave. It is impossible to confirm this, but one can imagine how such reports affect the Palestinians that read them. The apparent collusion of the IAA and the Simon Wiesenthal group, and the extreme secrecy with which they operated—not to mention Rabbi Hier’s violent rhetorical attacks on any who oppose their projects as terrorists, anti-Semites, and “Islamists”—have for the time being removed hope for resolution using any of the instruments of Israeli civil society.

Therefore on 10 February 2010, in New York, Jerusalem, Geneva and Los Angeles, a petition was filed with several United Nations agencies to stop desecration of Mamilla Cemetary by Israeli authorities and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. (Press conferences were held in Geneva, Jersalem and Los Angeles.) The UN agencies to whom this was appealed were the UN Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Religion and Belief and on Contemporary Forms of Racism; the Independent Expert on Culture; the High Commissioner for Human Rights; and the Director General of UNESCO, the agency that was involved in investigations of previous desecrations of Mamilla Cemetary in 1984. The Petition was filed on behalf of some 60 Palestinians from 15 Jerusalem families whose ancestors, going back to the 12th century, are buried in the cemetery. The filing was done by the Center for Constitutional Rights located in New York, which has made information about the campaign to save Mamilla available at www.mamillacampaign.org.

The press release accompanying the filing said as follows:

“This will be the first known time Palestinian individuals have taken collective action against Israel to bring such an issue before a UN forum and comes after all remedies in Israel were exhausted. The families, NGOs, and attorneys argue the desecration of the cemetery violates international conventions protecting cultural heritage, the manifestation of religious beliefs, and the right to family.” Maria LaHood, a Senior Attorney as CCR, added: “Left with no recourse in Israel, families of people buried in Mamilla cemetery have come together to petition the United Nations to safeguard their international human rights to be free from discrimination, to manifest religious beliefs, and to have their cultural heritage protected. We call on the international community to denounce this shameful desecration of a historic Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights was found in 1966 by lawyers involved in the civil rights movement in the US, and is “committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.” In the international arena, the CCR sees itself as “dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Predictably, the Simon Wiesenthal Center sees the Petition filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights as a scheme to overthrown the authority of the Jewish state, in the same way that the Goldstone Report is seen by them as an unfair use of international law to attack and destroy Israel.

In 2009, in the New York Sun and the Jewish press, the Simon Wiesenthal Center presented “evidence” (in the form of a story from the Palestine Post of 1945) that the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem was planning a business center on the site of the Mamilla Cemetary in 1945. The Palestine Post (precursor to the Jerusalem Post) was violently Labor-Zionist in its politics, and in 1945 was not the best source for anything going on within the Palestinian community, nor the best advocate for its interests. Furthermore, the nominal head of the Muslim Council at that time was the notorious Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, who although out of the country in 1945 was still the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; and who, besides being one of the worst anti-Semites of the 20th century, was also an enthusiastic propagandist for Hitler and the Nazis. Furthermore, the entire Muslim Council in Jerusalem at that time was rife with cronyism, corruption, and the infighting of various Jerusalem families.

Although it is somewhat dangerous to generalize, it could be said that Al-Husayni and Jerusalem’s Muslim Council in 1945 represented a snapshot of exactly what a great many secular Arab nationalists (not to mention the later Islamic Revival throughout Muslim-majority countries) aimed to get rid of—not merely cronyism, greed and class oppression but also, in the case of Al-Husaybi, European-style fascism and anti-Semitism. The fact that neither Arab nationalism nor the Islamic Revival was entirely successful in doing so does not change the fact that Al-Husayni and the Muslim Council of 1945 engaged in behavior that the best Arab thinkers were irrevocably opposed to. It was for precisely this reason that the Palestinian Liberation Organization was careful to sideline al-Husayni and to downplay his influence in the years before his death in 1974.

In any case, neither al-Husayni nor the Muslim Council of 1945 are authoritative guides to the important cultural and political decisions that face Israel/Palestine in 2010, if for no other reason than that both Palestinian and Jewish communities today are entirely different than they were in 1945, as are their leaders. Sadly but not unsurprisingly, that is difficult for Rabbi Hier and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to accept. For them, there are only “the Palestinians,” much as Christians once referred to that mysterious entity known as “the Jews,” who were supposedly the enemy of Christendom; in the same way, Hier sees all Palestinians as enemies of Israeli Jews.

But Hier’s rhetoric is the self-delusion of the bully, who projects his own bad conscience onto his weaker victim. In reality, there is no they in those organizations and individuals who seek to defend Mamilla Cemetary, but Muslims, Christians and Jews of many different temperaments and affiliations who share an interest in preserving one of the most important and compelling religious sites of the Middle East. But Mamilla Cemetery is also a dispute in which a dominant group of people have the power to hurt and humiliate another and weaker group of people, whose religious sites furthermore receive no protection from the government. And the most dangerous thing in the world is unlimited executive power over aggrieved but powerless people, with the impunity to hurt them and get away with it.

* * *

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an extreme rightwing Jewish organization, tinged by neo-fascism and with many of the characteristics of a hate organization. It is based almost completely on a vulgarized, pervasive form of religious nationalism. Its vision for Israel is consistent with the neo-fascist Jabotinsky tendency within Zionism that was modeled on Italian fascism, and it also promotes the Likudnik doctrine that Judaism itself has no practical or demographic existence separate from Israel. The SWC supports the neo-con belief in permanent war in the Middle East, and it engages in the vigorous dissemination of religious bigotry against Muslims in the US. It portrays anti-Semitism as worse than it is, partly for fund-raising purposes and partly to establish an imagined victim status. It similarly uses the Holocaust both to discourage criticism of Israel and to justify Israel’s own violence, aggressively insisting that every criticism of Israel is really aimed at destroying the Jewish people. Above all, the SWC is a dangerous cultural force that seeks religious war as the standard for religious authenticity.

What kind of people make up the “400,000 member-families” the SWC claims as supporters in southern California and the US? If the SWC does indeed have that many families that contribute annually, that makes it very much a mass organization, which means that it must be taken seriously. One has the sense that Hier’s followers are primarily lower (and middle) middle-class people, perhaps small businesspersons and conservative professionals who reject Judaism’s traditional concern for social justice, whose level of cultural literacy is not particularly high, and who are attracted to the us-against-them aggression of religious nationalism. The frenetic and frequently duplicitous advocacy emanating from the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a pronounced middlebrow flavor—that is, it is pretentious, self-congratulatory and sometimes unintentionally funny. (Last year an e-mailed Passover invitation to SWC members billed Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper as “featured Scholars-in-Residence at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and Spa.”) Above all, the “member-families” of the Simon Wiesenthal Center are incessantly indoctrinated with the idea that Israel—and the Center itself—never make mistakes and are never at fault, because criticisms of them are invariably the work of anti-Semites.

The Wiesenthal Center’s exaggerations and fabrications regarding anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli attitudes are well-known. The SWC claimed that the 2002 World Social Forum in Mumbai was ‘hi-jacked by anti-Israel and anti-American forces.’ This was completely untrue, as Jewish peace activist Cecilie Surasky, who was in attendance, later testified. (The SWC also claimed in the Jerusalem Post to be ‘the only Jewish NGO’ at Mumbai, whereas in reality there were several, including Jewish Voice for Peace, with which Surasky is affiliated.) The Wiesenthal Center also engaged off a strenuous campaign to portray Hugo Chavez as an anti-Semite, which they attempted to do by strategically doctoring a quote by Chavez. This interventionist attitude shouldn’t surprise us—the Wiesenthal Center once presented Jeanne Kilpatrick, a US diplomatic defender of the murderous Pinochet regime in Chile, with its Humanitarian of the Year Award. (They also honored such noted humanitarians as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Murdoch.)

The Wiesenthal Center also has the unenviable distinction of involvement in one of the worst journalistic blunders of modern times. In the late spring of 2006, Douglas Kelly, editor of the National Post, a Canadian newspaper, became aware of an item in a column by Iranian exile Amir Taheri, indicating that the Iranian Parliament might require Jews to wear yellow stars. A Post editor contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, thinking it was a legitimate human rights agency. Both Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the SWC excitedly insisted to anybody that would listen, both verbally and in an email to the Post, that the tale was “absolutely true.” The Post went ahead with the story on Page One, but Taheri was a neo-con plant, and the story was a fabrication.

Within days, Post editor Kelly was obliged to make a long and detailed apology to his readers. He referred directly to the Post’s contact with both Cooper and Hier at the Wiesenthal Center, mentioning pointedly that they had both, on separate occasions, confirmed the story. The implication of having been consciously betrayed by the Wiesenthal Center was quite clear. For Hier and Cooper, however, it was a big victory—they’d been able to place a great piece of propaganda on Page One of a large daily newspaper, while managing to make the connection between Nazis and Iranians, a staple theme of the SWC.

The Wiesenthal Center is silent on the rise of fascism in Israel in 2010, probably because the Center’s own tactics are borrowed from classical fascism, such as their tireless dissemination of religious bigotry. Their more overt activity in this area involves their promotion and showing of the violently anti-Muslim film The Third Jihad, which was a project of the Clarion Fund, a shadowy rightwing Zionist operation that produced Obsession: Radical Islam’s War with the West. According to recent investigative reporting by Pam Martens appearing in Counterpunch, the Clarion Fund’s main financial supporters—Donor Capital Fund and Donors Trust—are managed by people who have a long association with Charles G. Koch, billionaire donor to the Tea Party.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center also cooperated with Aish HaTorah, a extremist rightwing Jewish group that Atlantic Magazine’s pro-Israel pundit Jeffrey Goldberg has referred to as “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today,”[ii] a group that has strong ties to the racist settlers in Israel’s occupied territories. Before the election of 2008, the Clarion Fund functioned as a loosely-constituted front group in America for Aish HaTorah, whose operatives had produced a film in 2003 alleging Palestinian incitement against Israel and Jews. Then, in the heady post-9/11 atmosphere, the Clarion Fund went ahead to produce Obsession, and then The Third Jihad, both wildly inflammatory propaganda films that were supposedly about a minority of “radical” Muslims, but which made fantastic allegations about mainstream Muslims organizations in the US such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), alleging them to be part of a hostile international plot to infiltrate and take over America.

In the spring of 2009, the Clarion Fund released The Third Jihad, with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles enthusiastically opting to sponsor its West Coast premiere on May 17th, 2009, thereby making it a major event in their spring calendar. The Wiesenthal premiere was co-sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, an unsavory far-right group that was unabashedly Islamophobic and pro-torture (books by John Yoo and Marc Thiessen were on sale at their website). The Washington D.C. opening of The Third Jihad, which occurred at the same time as the SWC event in Los Angeles, was co-sponsored by the International Free Press Society, another unsavory rightwing group, this one authentically neo-fascist. Two months before the Washington Premiere, the IFPS had been involved in publicizing and promoting Geert Wilders, the well-known Dutch neo-fascist with links to several far-right parties in Europe.

The climax of The Third Jihad was a supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation discovery of a subversive document—a “Grand Jihad Manifesto”—outlining a Muslim plot to take over America. Why the FBI wasn’t out making arrests, if the plot violated any laws, was left unanswered. The document was depicted as being so sensitive it couldn’t be released to the general public, perhaps because it would demoralize the nation. (Or perhaps, on the other hand, it really doesn’t exist.) “The 15-page document outlines goals and strategies for the infiltration and domination of America from within,” The Third Jihad insists. “Among the strategies discussed is the establishment of ‘moderate’ groups, mosques and Islamic centers across North America in an effort to strategically position Islam so that it might weaken western culture and promote the implementation of Sharia Law.” (The resemblance of the alleged secret “Grand Jihad Manifesto” to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was not lost on Jewish progressives.)

The Wiesenthal Center’s cooperation with Aish HaTorah, the group behind the Clarion Fund, is problematical for other reasons. Experts on cults suggest that Aish HaTorah has either become a cult or developed profoundly cult-like behavior. Some information about these concerns—including the first-person account of a Jewish mother whose son was indoctrinated—appears on the website of the Ross A. Rick Institute, which monitors cult behavior. Ross writes that cult-like Orthodox Jewish groups like “Aish HaTorah and Ohr Somayach have generated serious and repeated complaints from Jewish families, including Orthodox Jewish families….Aish/Ohr has repeatedly been accused of ‘brainwashing’ American Jewish tourists in Israel. These are typically young people that started out on vacation and were instead sucked into Aish/Ohr. These recruits then often gave up school, work, previously set goals and relationships to study at times for years with Aish/Ohr and stayed in Israel.”

Ross continues: “Recruiting was often done at the Western Wall and began with a simple invitation to a dinner or ‘Shabbat.’ Families should be aware of all this before sending their kids to Israel for any programs or vacations….Some of the most hateful and nasty emails I have ever received from any group mentioned on the Ross Institute database have been from Aish and Ohr participants, which have denounced other Jews (e.g. Reform and Conservative) and have expressed often extreme, bigoted and even violent sentiments.” Like many cults, Aish HaTorah uses various excerpts from holy books to rationalize coercive or violent behavior by leaders.

At present Aish HaTorah is also little more than an extension of the worldwide Israeli propaganda effort. People associated with Aish Hatorah devised the Hasbara Fellowships, which invite (or lure) young people to Israel, indoctrinate them, and send them back to fight “the enemies of Israel.” Honest Reporting, which claims to be the world’s largest pro-Israel media organization, is also a product of Aish HaTorah—its claimed 150,000 members worldwide that report on journalism they believe to be “anti-Israel.” Aish HaTorah is also known to partner with a national US Jewish fraternity to run a three-week tour of Israel trip for their undergraduate members, who then receive “education” from the group. Aish HaTorah runs a plethora of groups and seminars that purport to teach “core values” of Judaism, but which actually teach a fanatical, apocalyptic version of rightwing religious Zionism. For its leaders, the final goal of life is the death or defeat of Palestinians and Arabs. In some interviews, Aish HaTorah participants have made statements that suggest that they believe that it is God’s will that the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem be destroyed—an eventuality that would, of course, spark a major religious conflagration.

It is this background of incessant Islamophobia and extremely aggressive religious nationalism that must be kept in mind when considering the Wiesenthal Center’s motivation for building the “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance.” Rabbi Hier and the SWC knew very well about the bodies buried under the parking lot at Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. They had reportedly contemplated buying the site since at least 1993; they have been repeatedly warned that the site was built over a historic Muslim cemetery; and they have repeatedly refused suggestions of both Muslims and Jews to build somewhere else. Leaders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center cannot say that they did not know the potential for conflict in their choice. At its core the conflict over Mamilla Cemetery is, besides its potential for sparking religious conflict, one more attempt by rightwing Zionists to redefine Judaism as a religion that can somehow redeem the Holocaust by hurting and humiliating Palestinians.

Words like “Tolerance” and “Dignity” from the liberal and social-democratic past of European Jewry are gleefully flaunted by the SWC, but are used in the same way that Stalinists used words such as “democratic“ or “liberation,” to disguise the real nature of Stalinism. There is nothing “ironic” about the use of such words, as many liberal and religious-liberty groups believe, because this use of language it is a ploy, a part of SWC strategy; it serves the main function of deliberate Orwellian language, which is to communicate contempt for logic and to distract with its absurdity. Finally, it is an expression of raw illegitimate power, saying in effect to the Palestinians: “We control everything, even language. If we say that black is white, we will force you to accept it, because we have the power to humiliate and kill you.” Finally, like most extremist rightwing movements, people in the leadership of the Wiesenthal Center will lie and misrepresent things anytime they think they can get away with it.

The Mamilla Cemetery site was chosen for a reason. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s real objective in building the “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance” in Jerusalem is almost surely to ignite religious conflict, and ultimately religious war in the region. It is this pathological aggression that makes the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and its fundamentalist allies like Aish HaTorah, so dangerous. The fight over Mamilla Cemetery is a dispute in which Rabbi Hier, the very incarnation of the charismatic but morally corrupt religious fanatic, seeks to invent a new Judaism that, like medieval Christianity, defines itself by its ability to wound and torment the underdog. As American neo-conservatives made clear in their famous letter to Netanyahu in 1996, the American empire they seek depends on a state of permanent war in the Middle East. By all appearances, the Simon Wiesenthal Center aspires to be a pivotal part of this approaching religious war.

Lawrence Swaim is executive director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation.

Notes.

[i] Gehry latter pulled out of the project. In November, 2010, Jewish Voice for Peace announced that Gehry had joined a group of theatre professionals and people in the arts that were boycotting the Ariel performance center in the West Bank.

[ii] Ben Harris, “Rabbi Noah Wienberg, Founder of Aish HaTorah, Dies,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6 Feb. 2009.

(This article is based on a column written for InFocus News, the national Muslim newspaper.)

Definition of Zionism

Simple definition for easy-understanding:

Zionism is an aspiration of the Jews in the post-European Renaissance environment to avail the opportunity to have a Nation State.


Jewish Definition

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/zionism.html
Zionism, the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, advocated, from its inception, tangible as well as spiritual aims. Jews of all persuasions, left and right, religious and secular, joined to form the Zionist movement and worked together toward these goals. Disagreements led to rifts, but ultimately, the common goal of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland was attained. The term “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum.


Nathan Birnbaum (Pseudonym: Mathias Acher) (1864-1937)

Nathan Birnbaum was born in Vienna, and lived there from.1864-1908, and again from 1914-21. He lived in Berlin from 1912-1914, and again from 1921-1933. After the rise of Nazism, he left Germany for Scheveningen, Netherlands, where he edited Der Ruf ("The Call"), a platform for his ideas. He died there in 1937.

In 1882, together with two other students in the University of Vienna, he founded “Kadimah,” the first organization of Jewish nationalist students in the West.

In 1884, he published his first pamphlet, Die Assimilationsucht (“The Assimilation Disease/Mania”).

In 1890, Birnbaum coined the terms “Zionist” and “Zionism,” and, in 1892, “Political Zionism.”

In 1893, he published a brochure entitled Die Nationale Wiedergeburt des Juedischen Volkes in seinem Lande als Mittel zur Loesung der Judenfrage (“The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in its Homeland as a Means of Solving the Jewish Question”), in which he expounded ideas similar to those that Herzl was to promote subsequently.
in the First Zionist Congress (1897) and was elected Secretary General of the Zionist Organization.

he and Herzl developed ideological differences. Birnbaum had begun to question the political aims of Zionism and to attach increasing importance to the national-cultural content of Judaism.

Birnbaum eventually left the Zionist movement and later became a leading spokesman for Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora.

In the years preceding World War I he gradually abandoned his materialistic and secular outlook, eventually embracing full traditional Judaism. .. His most famous book of this period was Gottesvolk (“God’s People”) first published in German and Yiddish in 1917 (translated into English in a shortened form by J. Elias in 1947 titled "Confession").

Dissatisfied with the spiritual complacency of the religious masses, he initiated a movement, the Order of the Olim (“[Spiritual] Ascenders”), to consist of small groups of people dedicated by their way of living to raising spiritual awareness within the larger Jewish society, thus leading toward a Jewish spiritual renaissance. (See Divrei Ha-Olim: “The words of the Olim,” 1918, in Hebrew, Yiddish and German).

Disturbed by the urbanized focus of Jewish life, he promoted the establishment of agricultural communities and other groups living a style of Jewish life more in conformity with nature. Settlement in Eretz Israel was to be for the prime purpose of fulfilling the spiritual role of the Jewish people. (See Im Dienste der Verheissung: “In the Service of the Promise,” 1927).


Judah Leib (Leon) Pinsker (1821-1891)

Born in Russian Poland in 1821. ..in 1882 he anonymously published a rallying cry to Russian Jews ¬ his German language pamphlet Autoemancipation, in which he urged the Jewish people to strive for independence, national consciousness and a return to independent territorialism.

Pinsker died in Russia in 1891 and his remains were brought to Eretz-Israel in 1934 and reburied in Nicanor's Cave next to Mount Scopus. The yishuv of Nahalat Yehudah near Rishon Le¬zion is named after him, as well as streets in several towns in Israel.

Quotations from
“Auto-Emancipation” by Leon Pinsker (1882)

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html
“the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation. Hence the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed. This does not mean, of course, that we must think of waiting for the age of universal harmony. No previous civilization has been able to achieve it, nor can we see even in the remote distance, that day of the Messiah, when national barriers will no longer exist and all mankind will live in brotherhood and concord. Until then, the nations must narrow their aspirations to achieve a tolerable modus vivendi. The world has yet long to wait for eternal peace. Meanwhile nations live side by side in a state of relative peace, secured by treaties and international law, but based chiefly on the fundamental equality between them.”

“Friend and foe alike have tried to explain or to justify this hatred of the Jews by bringing all sorts of charges against them. They are said to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited the peasant, and so on. These and a thousand and one other charges against an entire people have been proved groundless. They showed their own weakness in that they had to be trumped up wholesale in order to quiet the evil conscience of the Jew-baiters, to justify the condemnation of an entire nation, to demonstrate the necessity of burning the Jew, or rather the Jewish ghost, at the stake. He who tries to prove too much proves nothing at all. Though the Jews may justly be charged with many shortcomings, those shortcomings are, at all events, not such great vices, not such capital crimes, as to justify the condemnation of the entire people. In individual cases, indeed, these accusations are contradicted by the fact that the Jews get along fairly well with their Gentile neighbors.”

“The Jewish people has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands; no center of focus or gravity, no government of its own, no official representation. They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home. The nations have never to deal with a Jewish nation but always with mere Jews. The Jews are not a nation because they lack a certain distinctive national character, inherent in all other nations, which is formed by common residence in a single state.”



Wikipedia

Zionism (Hebrew: ציונות‎, Tsiyonut) is a nationalist[1] Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, calls for the self-determination of the Jewish people and a sovereign, Jewish national homeland.

Zionism did not have a uniform ideology, but a plethora of ideologies:

General Zionism,
National-Religious Zionism,
Labor Zionism,
Revisionist Zionism, etc.

Zionism is based on historical ties and religious traditions linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.[4]

Almost two millennia after the Jewish diaspora, the modern Zionist movement, beginning in the late 19th century, was mainly founded by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to antisemitism and the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.[5]

Zionism is included in diaspora politics as a broader phenomenon of modern nation liberation movements.[6]

The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat.[7] The movement sought to encourage Jewish migration to the Ottoman Palestine and was eventually successful in establishing Israel on 14 May 1948
(5 Iyyar 5708 in the Hebrew calendar), as the homeland for the Jewish people.