The Irony of Centuries of Changes Between Iran and Israel's History

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

       Babylonians marching away the Jews from Jerusalem

Our historical connection all started with the Babylonian Empire.  In the summer of 586 BCE, the Babylonians burned down Solomon's 1st Temple in Jerusalem, effectively ending worship and sacrifice for decades.  They executed the chief priest, who was a Cohen, Seraiah as well as his 2nd in command and several other priestly "keepers of the threshold, " documented in 2 Kings 25:18.  A number of surviving priests wound up in Babylon during the Jews' 50 year exile. They were all descendants of the older brother of Moses, Aaron,  who had designated them as being priests with the responsibilities thereof for their people in observing Judaism.  This was documented in The Book of Ezra.  A 3rd reference from  ancient papyri and from the writings of the 1st century as a Jewish Historian and Roman apologist and even a general considered as a traitor to the Jews, Flavius Josephus,  we know that Jewish temples existed in Babylon during the exile.  This obviously tells us how synagogues started, local places for communal worship that became a hallmark of Diasporan Judaism in the Common Era of CE. 

                                               

In 539 BCE, the Babylonian Empire fell to the Persians, whom we call Iran, today.  This was fortunate for the Jews who had been brought there as captives.  This ended the reign of the Babylonians, setting the scene in motion for the restoration of the Jewish presence in Judah and the construction of the 2nd Temple.

                                                

The very next year of 538 BCE, Cyrus, the Persian King, showed to be a man of leniency, and he established a policy of reconciliation and repatriation of deportees----and their various deities----to  return to their homelands.  As referenced in the Book of Ezra (I:1-4) which is also summarized in Joseph Blenkinsopp's book, Sage, Priest, Prophet,  Cyrus's proclamation led to the return of some 50,000 Babylonian Jews, who wasted no time in constructing an altar, offering sacrifices, and celebrating the harvest festival of Sukkot in Jerusalem once again.  It is believed that Cyrus was the son of King Ahasueros and his Queen Esther as found in the Book of Esther.  Another theory was that he was the grandson, not the son.  

"Cyrus is the grandson of King Ahasuerus ((Astyages) and Queen Esther.  Cambyses, Cyrus' father dies when he is 12 years old.  His grandparents (King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther) summon him and his mother (Mandane) to come live with them at the palace.  Cyrus is taught by Esther and the King about the laws of God and the prophecies written 150 years before by God through the prophets about him (Cyrus).  When the time comes Cyrus king of Persia issues the edict for the Jews to return to Israel:   "Isa 44:28  That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid."  "

If the Persians hadn't taken Babylon, and then allowed the return of the Jews to their homeland, Jewish cultural continuity would have been lost.  Persian action  saved Judaism. 

Such an event reminds one that the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, killing 6 million Jews, paved the way for the re-creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948.  Wouldn't Hitler be shocked that his maniacal animosity for Jews revived Israel and the Jewish people after 2,000 of waiting and praying 3 times a day?  

Babylonia was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia. A small Amorite-ruled state emerged in 1894 BCE, which contained the minor administrative town of Babylon.  The town of Babylon was located along the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq, about 50 miles south of Baghdad. It was founded around 2300 B.C. by the ancient Akkadian-speaking people of southern Mesopotamia. Babylon, one of the most famous cities from any ancient civilization, was the capital of Babylonia in southern Mesopotamia. Today, that’s about 60 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq.

                                                   

 Laws Known as the Code of Hammurabi helped Babylon surpass other cities in the region.  Hammurabi's Laws were sort of a precursor of the Ten Commandments.                

Strangely, Iran and Iraq fought each other again in a terrible war from September 22, 1980 till August 20, 1988.  Open warfare began on September 22, 1980, when Iraqi armed forces invaded western Iran along the countries' joint border.                             

Iraqi forces firing rocket launchers on the outskirts of Khorramshahr, Iran, October 1980.

© Zuheir Saade—AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

Iraq, however, claimed that the war had begun earlier that month, on September 4, when Iran shelled several border posts.  The roots of the war lay in a number of territorial and political disputes between Iraq and Iran. Iraq wanted to seize control of the rich oil-producing Iranian border region of Khūzestān, a territory inhabited largely by ethnic Arabs over which Iraq sought to extend some form of suzerainty. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein wanted to reassert his country’s sovereignty over both banks of the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab, a river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that was historically the border between the two countries.

In total, around 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died over the course of the war, in addition to an estimated 100,000 civilians. The end of the war resulted in neither reparations nor border changes.  Boys were used as fighters in the end as they were running out of men.  

It was on Sunday, September 28, 1980 that my husband and I arrived in Haifa at the Abba Khousy Absorption Center  after landing in Israel a few days earlier.  We had been so busy with making aliyah, which was a lifetime change, that we had no idea of a war that had started.  This made our over 5 year stay, for we left in late November, 1985, a fairly safe hiatus of war in Israel.  As two teachers, we were settling in for 10 month period of studying in order to pass the Israeli test to teach in Israel, which we both passed.

  "By June 14, 1981 I was still in the Haifa Ulpan studying.  We had celebrated Shavuot by taking a trip to  a school on the Mediterranean Sea with our teacher and we saw a program of singing and dancing on stage and an agricultural parade of wagons  carrying fruits, vegetables, and flowers.  That was followed up with visiting with our teacher's sister and eating cheesecake.  When we arrived at her apartment, a neighbor told us about Israel bombing the Iraq atomic plant.  What a big surprise to us!  We had no idea about it. Again, Israel is in the news.  Well, France shouldn't have supplied Iraq with such deadly things.  Sarah, our teacher, wound up giving us a whole dinner while we discussed it".                                              

 Operation Opera (Hebrew: מבצע אופרה‎), also known as Operation Babylon, was a surprise airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force on 7 June 1981, which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometres (11 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq. The destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor has been cited as an example of a preventive strike in contemporary scholarship on international law. The efficacy of the attack is debated by historians, who acknowledge that it brought Iraq back from the brink of nuclear capability but drove its weapons program underground and cemented Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's future ambitions for acquiring nuclear weapons.

Reference:

Jacob's Legacy by David B. Goldstein, David Benjamin Goldstein is an American human geneticist. Goldstein is founding Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, Professor of Genetics and Development and directs the genomics core of Epi4K and administrative cores of Epi4K with Dan Lowenstein and Sam Berkovic.

Letters From Israel by Nadene Goldfoot

https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Iraq-War

https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-history/babylon-babylonia-tower-babel-hanging-gardens-hammurabi/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera#:~:text=Operation%20Opera%20(Hebrew%3A%20%D7%9E%D7%91%D7%A6%D7%A2%20%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%94,)%20southeast%20of%20Baghdad%2C%20Iraq.

http://www.cognm.org/cognm/Publications/Esther_-_The_Rest_of_the_Story.htm

 

Why Jews Say "NEVER AGAIN"

Nadene Goldfoot                                        

Jupiter, king of Roman Gods

Zeus, king of Greek Gods

        
About 4 thousand years ago, Abraham and his entourage of family members and  descendants got into trouble for not believing in the religion of the Greeks and Romans.  Instead of accepting the Greek Zeus and his whole family who were living above Mt. Olympus out in space and believing in his contemporary, the Roman god, Jupiter, these people had become monotheistic and only would believe in one unseen G-d.  So from then on, people were suspicious of them.  How odd they must be to not believe as others did.
                                                                     

Queen Esther (Hadassah) in about 300 BCE told her husband, the king of Persia, that she was Jewish and of Haman's plot to kill all Jews. 

They were a stiff-necked people, indeed.  They refused to follow others' religious beliefs.  About 2300 years ago in Persia, there was an advisor to the king named Haman who had been offended by a Jew.  He wouldn't bow to him, or some such elementary thing.  The advisor, swelled up with pride and deep in his self worth for being so important to the king who could not make a move without him, decided ALL JEWS IN THE WORLD MUST BE KILLED.  They were a subjected people and would not bow.  Well, the ending to this story is that the king's queen was a hidden Jew and the king really loved her, so he killed off Haman and his sons and had them hung in the public square.  The Jews had a close call they never forgot.
                                                                           

Concentration Camp-Aushwitz, Jews were slaughtered here

All of about 75 years ago in 1943, the Nazi's final solution to all problems, especially the economic ones, were to kill all the Jews of the world.  This time they almost succeeded.  The USA and England knew about Jews being gassed in German death camps in Poland and that Hitler was busy with formulated plan to kill all Jews from the Atlantic Ocean to the Volga River, and probably would then start on the USA.
                                                                                 

Aushwitz-Death-Concentration Camp WWII

Did anyone come to the rescue of these constant monotheistic odd people?  No.  USA, Britain and France wouldn't let them in their countries.  They couldn't bring anything of value as the Germans had taken all their property, yet the Jews were told to leave Germany and its occupied territories.  A few relented if they had enough money to leave with and were guaranteed jobs by other prominent Jews of that country.
                                                                             

SS Washington

Werner Oster was on the last ship out of Germany in May 4-12,  1939.  The next ship to leave a week later and others following were turned away after docking in Western ports and were sent back to a Europe now ruled by Nazis who killed Jews.  Werner had a sponsor and a job guarantee in USA, making him no liability for the USA.  He was 23 years old.
                                                                         

Jewish children rounded up for deportation to death camps like Aushwitz

In the meantime, the natives of eastern Europe helped the Nazis round up Jews in hiding so they could also go into the ovens.  There were very few people Jews could trust to hide them or help out.
                                                                         

Emma Lazarus b: 1849 New York
Poet

As for the United States, the story is very disappointing.  Our own country, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the land where the Statue of Liberty's creed was written by a Jewish woman, Emma Lazarus,  saying:

Statue of Liberty, New York

“Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

And it meant  to the needy Jews who couldn't come to see it, a chance to live.  Our government was full of anti-Semitic officials high up in the State Department and other agencies in the Roosevelt administration.  They went out of their way TO HIDE DATA ABOUT THE PLIGHT OF JEWISH REFUGEES.    They went around protocol in order to refuse entry into the United States who were escaping from the Holocaust.  Only a few Jews got into the USA.

                                                                                     

Jews behind barbed wire in Cyprus, prevented from entering Palestine

The British were almost as bad and also did their very best to stop Jewish refugees from escaping to Palestine, which was already decided by the League of Nations  after WWI to be the Jewish Homeland within 30 years-only waiting out the British Mandate period of time.   Here was land designated for the Jews and they couldn't get in.  They also were turned away to go back to Europe to be killed.  

                                                                            

Dachau- Death-Concentration Camp, WWII

We come to the fatal 1943.  American authorities knew what was going on.  They learned a lot from those who had escaped.  They had photographs from reconnaissance.  They learned things from German spies passing detailed information to Swiss  spies. Besides their own informants, there were international Jewish advocates who asked that the Allies would bomb the places like Auschwitz.  

                                                                      

Auschwitz was killing over 10,000 Jews a day.  Pleas to bomb these death camps were ignored and the pleaders were told lies.  

                                                                          

For 70 years, Israelis have learned the lessons about the psychology and economic stability of their friends.  Through the Holocaust they have learned much about the ways of mankind.  Jews are really on their own and can never let such things happen to them again.  Mankind is not to be trusted.  They can "never again assume that national leaders" who have deadly weapons at their disposal do not really mean all the horrible things they shout and scream about killing Jews,  especially the land that produced a Haman.  Friends have turned out to be much less.  

                                                                                  

Any deal any country makes that gives Iran a nuclear bomb is unacceptable to Israel.  Israel has never stood for an unfriendly country that means harm to Israel to have nuclear weapons.

Osirak nuclear plant site

                                                                            

Osirak nuclear site

Iraq found this out.  Saddam Hussein got a nuclear reactor from France and it was up by 1981.  Israel then took it out.  

                                                                           

Syria built the al-Kibar nuclear plant that was launched by the North Koreans.  this uranium enrichment plant was destroyed in 2007 by Israel.

                                                                              

One should remember all the boos and yells at Israel for doing these two acts of self protection.  ISIS now controls the land these plants stood on.  

Arak in Iran;  Heavy Water manufacturing

                                                                               

Bushnehr nuclear site in Iran

Parchin Military Nuclear Facility in Iran

Let's face it.  Israeli leaders trust their own Mossad much more than the Western intelligence they are fed.  They're rarely told the truth about matters of their own safety.  So Israel relies on their own people.  

The same thing has happened with the Iran nuclear plan. The big 5+1 was invited but Israel was left out in the dark and they are the #1 people that most matter in this deal.  

                                                                           

Never again will Israel allow Jewish lives to be snuffed out.  

That's why this Iran plan must be stopped somehow.  How about the fact that Obama has said that American planes will attack Israeli planes if they try to attack the Iranian plants?   According to promises, this plan was on the table for the USA to do.  Iran had plenty of warning.   Do you really think that in 12 years Iran will be a friendly nation and not bomb the USA as well?  

                                                                           

Revolutionary Guard unit of Iran

Already the Iranian Revolutionary guards were the ones that ordered the attack on Israel yesterday from Syria with 4 bombs.  It was carried out by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and hit the Golan.  They're in practice for the big one, no doubt.  

Resource:  The Jewish Press, August 14, 2015:  Israeli Preemptive Action, Western Reaction, by Victor Davis Hanson. 

http://www.israelandstuff.com/israel-iran-deal-was-thumbs-up-on-attacking-israel

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/191966#.Vdd0jyVViko Obama's threat to Israel 

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.660714

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/04/17/obamas-iran-nuclear-deal-is-an-unforgivable-betrayal-of-israel

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/israeli-officials-u.s.-leaving-us-in-the-dark-on-iran-talks/article/2567839

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