The Land of Jerusalem That Every Country Has Coveted

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

                                Hadrian, Emperor of Rome 

Jerusalem is the heart and soul of the Jewish people. It's the capital of Israel in the center of the Judean mountains,  and has been the capital for over 3,000 years.   Jerusalem was created from a few buildings that was the capital city of Canaan.  David captured it in 1010 BCE and became the capital of a united Israel as told in II Sam.5:6-8: and in  I Chron. 11:4-6.  He found the tribe of Jebusites living there and dealt leniently with them.   They were incorporated into the city with his people.  This was 3,033 years ago.  The Jewish people keep his memory alive, and also that of their capital.  They had seen the city with its famous Temple destroyed by fire in 70 CE, and have been praying ever since for its return, finally having their prayers answered on in 1948.  

     Jenin during Israel's entrance to find 2 terrorists

The city of Jenin is only 90 miles from Jerusalem, a hotbed of Muslim Arab terror.  That's as far as Rockway Beach is from Portland, Oregon.  Their goal is to take Jerusalem as well.  Jenin, which was and still is a Palestinian town called Ginaea in Roman days, is the center of Arab nationalist fanaticism and has been so since the 1930s.  It was part of Jordan from 1948-1967.  It's population then in 1967 was 8,346  apart from the Arab refugees totaling 5,019 more.  39,005 was the population in 2007. 

 Israeli troops entered Jenin in the early morning hours of Monday to arrest two wanted suspects, as the situation was getting far worse, and  the IDF and Border Police said in a statement, leading to intense gun battles that included the first use of a helicopter gunship in the West Bank in decades.

“During the activity, a massive exchange of fire took place between the forces and armed gunmen in the area. Large numbers of explosive devices were hurled at the forces. The forces responded with live fire,” the statement said, adding that several suspects were hit.

Later on Tuesday, four Israelis were killed and four injured when two Palestinian terrorists opened fire on civilians at a gas station and an adjacent restaurant outside the central West Bank settlement of Eli. All reports from the outside are all blaming Israel as usual.  They have no idea what's been going on.  

Emperor Hadrian, Roman,   (117-138) tried to rid Jerusalem of its Jews, though at first he made a good impression on them by supporting Egyptian Jewry in disputes with Greeks.  Then he turned against circumcision which led to Judaism on the whole.  He visited Palestine in 130 and continued with hellenization of the people by turning Jerusalem into a Roman colony, called Aelia Capitolina.  Bar Kokhba rebelled and took back Jerusalem in 132-holding it till 135 when he was killed in battle.   

 Hadrian even received the title of Imperator.  Judea was then a consular province called Syria-Palaestina, and became a pagan city.  An equestrian statue of Hadrian was erected on the site of the Holy of Holies.  

Christianity, looked upon as an offshoot of the Jewish people, became the official religion over the Roman Empire by the 4th century.  Between 330 and 638 CE, Jerusalem was still important in the Byzantine Empire, for reasons about Jesus, not the Temple.  

Along came Omar bin al-Khattah who conquered Jerusalem in 638 CE.  who started the Arab era.  He had the Temple Mount cleaned up and built a wooden mosque called Mosque of Omar (Dome of the Rock) on the spot where Abraham had sacrificed Isaac, which he said was Ishmael, instead.  The Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in 705, the one important site to Arabs.  The Arabs had also built palaces now discovered.            

1099 and the Christians returned.  The Jews joined their Muslim neighbors in protecting the city.  They tried to defend the wall where most lived in the NE part of town, ;now known as the Muslim Quarter.  The Christians were powerful, massacred everyone-and someone wrote of them that the blood of the "infidels" was ankle deep; in this case  with infidels being the Jews and Muslims. 

                                     Saladin statue in Egypt 

By 1187, Saladin's army came and annihilated the Crusaders and their army on a hill above the Galilee, called Hittin.  Saladin was the prevailing hero.  He even called the Jews to return and live with them.  However, with him also entered the founder of the Husseini family, who settled in Jerusalem and whose descendants would be the enemies of Zionism, led first by Haj Amin  al-Husseini and later by Yasser Arafat, but at the time, no one knew what ancestors will think or do. It's all according to how they are raised and educated.    

Three years later in 1190, hundreds of Jews from England and France had settled in Jerusalem.  Here we have a FIRST:  European Jews were on the same side as the Muslim Arabs and they both were against Catholic Europe.  

Life evolves and by 1260, the Tartars invaded.  Jerusalem meant nothing to them, and they razed it.  "Tatar, also spelled Tartar, any member of several Turkic-speaking peoples that collectively numbered more than 5 million in the late 20th century and lived mainly in west-central Russia along the central course of the Volga River and its tributary, the Kama, and thence east to the Ural Mountains."

Rabbi Nachmanides, called the Ramban, arrived with the Mamelukes. 

The Egyptian Mamelukes brought Jerusalem peace in 7 years in1267  who came to the rescue and conquered the land.  They held the land for over 200 years.  Nachmanides came with them.  Moses ben Nachman, or Moses Ben Maimon, Maimonides, thus:   commonly known as Nachmanides, and also referred to by the acronym Ramban and by the contemporary nickname Bonastruc ça Porta, was a leading medieval Jewish scholar, Sephardic rabbi, philosopher, physician, kabbalist, and biblical commentator.  He's one of our most famous and important rabbis.  

Ramban born 1135 in Cordova, Spain leaving with his family to escape the Almohade persecutions where Muslims conquered S.Spain and caused forced conversions, finally reached Palestine in 1165-30 years later.  They ended up in Egypt. By 1170 he was the physician to the viceroy of Egypt.  He died in 1204 in his 70s, buried in Tiberias.  He represented the Jews in the debate held by King James of Aragon, Spain in the Barcelona Disputation in 1263.  A converted Jew, now Catholic,  was to prove the truth of Catholicism and the falsity of Judaism, but failed with being up against the Ramban because even before it was over, the king gave up and aborted.  The Ramban got out of town quickly and went on to Judea.  He arrived in Jerusalem to see it as a destroyed city, all in ruins.

The Ramban created a synagogue out of the ashes.  Time moved on and by 1517, the Ottoman Turks came and stayed for 400 more years.  Sultan Suleiman was in charge, and did much building.  Jews were safe but poor.  

1837 brought in a terrible earthquake in the Galilee, and Safed, the city I lived in for 4 years, was severely damaged.  Jews then moved over to Jerusalem.   and for the 1st time, were the majority population in Jerusalem since Hadrian. 

     Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, Jerusalem now a site to behold  The Shrine of the Book was built as a repository for the first seven scrolls discovered at Qumran in 1947. The unique white dome embodies the lids of the jars in which the first scrolls were found. 

Israel was created on May 14, 1948, brought in with raging battles going on.  It left the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem empty of Jews and severely damaged.  Then it sat for 19 years under the managing of Jordan, untouched.  Lozowick was there in July 1967.  He said it was looking at Warsaw after the Germans left.  Civilians entered to see The Wall (Wailing Wall) or (Western Wall) for the 1st time since 1948. 

Jews had been praying 3 times a day for this day to arrive.  That's a lot of prayers totaling 1,900 years or 640,000 days.  Jews all over the world where they had dispersed in 70 CE, that is, those who managed to remain alive, were depending on a Jerusalem to be returned.  They had to figure out how to live for 2,000 years without their own homeland, which they had enjoyed for over 1,080 years. They were mocked as "The Wandering Jew."  

Their creation of Israel was accepted by the League of Nations, then the United Nations, but not by the Middle Eastern Countries themselves.  They didn't want the land ruined by a Jewish presence.  They wanted it to be ALL Muslim land.  

We are taught in our Tanakh (Bible) that the land is to be populated by both  the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael;  Abraham's children, and hopefully, that is what the Abraham Accords will produce;  peace between the two, with Israel secure in their own land.  

Resource;

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

Right To Exist by Yaacov Lozowick, historian at Israel's Holocaust Museum.