Waiting For WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY- May 1948

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

    Jerusalem was burned down along with the 2nd Temple in the year of 70 CE. Judaea, now part of modern day Israel, had been a forced under pressure Roman ally since the second century BC and became a Roman province in 6 AD. It was in 70 that the Romans had burned down Jerusalem and the Temple, then rebuilt it into a Roman city.  The Temple had become a Roman military center during the siege.   People were killed, captured, and some were able to flee. Some remained in hiding from the Roman soldiers.  

                                                 

A Roman Temple was built over the site of the 2nd Temple of Solomon.  A mosque has since stood there, the Mosque of Omar. Emperor Hadrian (117-138) founded the Roman colony  and renamed Jerusalem AELIA CAPITOLINA .  Arabs call Jerusalem El-Kuds.  Under Hadrian, who had received the title, Imperator, Judea became a consular province called Syria-Palaestina.  

Judah had been under Roman Occupation under Rome's administration. King Herod I, known as THE GREAT, (73 BCE-4 BCE, was the son of Antipater, the Idumean or Edom, as it was also called,  and his mother was a Nabatean, Cypros.   Antipater had been the ruler of Judea from 63 to 43 BCE and was the son of the ruler of Idumea .  Antipater had grown rich from trade with Arabia, which didn't hurt his family's standing with Rome.  It had given him power.  Following the deposition of Herod Archelaus in 6 CE, Judea came under direct Roman rule.  

Pontius Pilate, Latin in full Marcus Pontius Pilatus, a procurator, (died after 36 ce), was the Roman prefect (governor) of Judaea (26–36 CE) under the emperor Tiberius (14-37 CE) who presided at the trial of Jesus and gave the order for his crucifixion.  All of Palestine was harshly administered under his rule.  He was one of 14 governors of Judea under the Roman emperors.  

Then along came Titus, Rome's Emperor in the years of 79 to 81 CE, son of Vespasian.  He took over command of the Roman army in Judea from his father in 70, when he destroyed Jerusalem after the 5 month siege. Ever since then Jews tried to regain Jerusalem.               

      The Jews were able to continue with the governing body of the Great Sanhedrin. from 80 to 429 CE.  

Attempts were made to be able to govern themselves earlier before the Roman takeover.  

 The last King of Israel had been Hoshea (730-721 BCE).  The last King of Judah was Zedekiah (597-586, the last from the House of David.   BCE). Nebuchadnezzar,  King of Babylon had conquered all the lands from the Euphrates to the Egyptian frontier, including Judah.  It was he who had put Zedekiah on the throne!  After the fall of Babylon to the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE,   exiled Judeans were permitted to return to Judah. According to the biblical book of Ezra, construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem began around 537 BCE.  The Persians used governors after Cyrus to govern the province of Judah.  

The Maccabees founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 168 BCE – 37 BCE, reasserting the Jewish religion and expanding the boundaries of the Land of Israel by conquest. In the post-Maccabean period the high priest was looked upon as exercising in all things, political, legal, and sacerdotal, the supreme authority.                                             

"Aluf" Bar Kokhba, AKA General Simeon Bar or Ben Kosiba was a Judean revolutionary leader, the nephew of Rabbi Eleazar of Modiin and of Davidic descent, possibly even a Cohen, became the General who gathered up an army of excommunicated Judean men like himself and regained Jerusalem in 132 CE.  He died in battle after 3 years of holding out against the best army of the world at that time, angering them for doing so a great deal.  How could such as rag-tag army succeed?  That came to be the last attempt of Jews regaining their homeland until the 1940s.  It turned out to be the only OPEN WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY.                                     

Between 135 and 1914, there were a lot of takeovers of land.    "The Eastern Roman Empire, today commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, ruling from the Balkans to the Euphrates, became increasingly defined by and dogmatic about Christianity, gradually creating religious rifts between the doctrines dictated by the establishment in Constantinople and believers in many parts of the Middle East. From the 3rd century up to the course of the 7th century AD, the entire Middle East was dominated by the Byzantines and the Sasanian Empire. 

From the 7th century, a new power was rising in the Middle East, that of Islam. The dominance of the Arabs came to a sudden end in the mid-11th century with the arrival of the Seljuq dynasty. In the early 13th century, a new wave of invaders, the armies of the Mongol Empire, mainly Turkic, swept through the region. By the early 15th century, a new power had arisen in western Anatolia, the Ottoman emirs, linguistically Turkic and religiously Islamic, who in 1453 captured the Christian Byzantine capital of Constantinople and made themselves sultans.   

The Ottomans held their empire for 400 years, losing it in WWI.  

                                                                     

That's when waves of Jews, 5 of them in all, called Aliyah-Aliyote returned to Palestine.  Meyer Levin's novel, THE SETTLERS, tells all about it in a fantastic 832 paged book.  Jews, who had been denied the right to own land, taught themselves how to grow crops before they arrived in Palestine and were a success.                                  

Britain was awarded the 30 year mandate to manage Palestine after WWI.  The Ottoman Empire, by being on the wrong side of the war, lost their empire. Germany lost holdings.  The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded.  It was the worst war people have ever known about.   Some 75 million people died in World War II, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians, many of whom died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation.  The Holocaust of the 2nd WW slaughtered 6 million Jews.  

Jews had scattered all over the world in the attempt to find refuge.  There remained in Palestine, for that was what it was now called, a scattering of the remnant of Jews who had been living in other areas outside of Jerusalem, though.  They were always under the yoke of another emperor or country who never lived there, just collected taxes from the people who lived there.  In the course of events of invaders, the common practice was removing one population and replacing it with another, so that there were strangers living at different times in Israel's ancient land.  That's how Arabs came to be there.                                                                                  

Israel had been a large piece of real-estate including Syria during days of King Solomon.  The people of Syria called themselves Palestinians..  Jews were also called Palestinians.  The Arabs had come out West in conquering and converting people to Islam.  It is even possible that some Arabs were already settled in Palestine in the time of the 2nd Temple which was destroyed in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar.  

There has not been a country of "Palestine" with rulers.  The closest to that concept was the Ottoman Empire of Turkey.  Palestine was the name that the Romans had given the land, naming it after the Jews most successful enemy, the Philistines, in retaliation of Bar Kokhba's daring to retake Jerusalem from 132-135. It had never been a country of Arabs, though Arabs had entered and lived there.   

Ever since 70 CE, Jews have been waiting for the regrouping of the Jewish people.  The return to the land was prophesized in the bible and is in the act of happening right now.  Israel was created again in 1948.  Jews from all over the world have been returning.  

                                                                

Husseini with the Nazis in Germany plotting against the Jews of Palestine

An Arab, Haj Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974), the Sherif of Jerusalem, the Grand Mufti, attacked Jews in the 1920s, trying to end Jewish population of the land.  

                                                                

On the other hand, Emir Feisal, another Arab, was all for their creating their state again and expected it would benefit his own people in the process, bringing a light of education to their darkness of ignorance. Feisal became King of Syria and King of Iraq.  Arabs were offered their own state of Palestine but refused it, opting out for the whole section of land called Palestine, instead.  That was in the 20s.     The window of opportunity had finally arrived.  The League of Nations decided that Jews would get their country back in Palestine.  Abdullah received Trans-Jordan from Britain, land that was tagged as part of the Jewish National Homeland, but there was about 8,000 sq miles left for the Jewish Homeland, reduced by 77% from that giveaway.  

Logic and truth did not prevail with the Arab family.  More were aroused by Husseini, and there we are, still defending our country from the Palestinians.  Even Feisal felt the pressure and didn't want to lose his position. 

That's 1,878 years of waiting for our beloved Israel, wading through a lot of anti-Semitism.  Our waiting ended 73 years ago.  Almost 2,000 years of painful waiting and patiently holding onto a religion of faith they had vowed to keep, even though nations and religions tried to break our hold on this precious gift that had been accepted.                              

We see that the Palestinian Arabs are still attacking-this time by arson, burning precious fields of wheat that would feed the whole population of Israel.  They follow the old adage of cutting off their noses to spite their faces.  So much good would be theirs if they gave it in return.  They're missing out on so much.  Their window of opportunity is only to destroy Israel.  The window is sealed shut for such a goal.  Israel remains prepared.  

Resource;

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_captivity#:~:text=After%20the%20fall%20of%20Babylon,Jerusalem%20began%20around%20537%20BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_leaders_in_the_Land_of_Israel

https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/josephus.html#:~:text=Judaea%2C%20now%20part%20of%20modern,Roman%20province%20in%206%20AD.