Israel, Hamas, and Gaza

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem by jdblack via pixabay.com

Aside from everything else going on in the Gaza strip since October 7, there is one thing the Israelis seem to have neglected: the infrastructure needed to supply millions of suddenly homeless Palestinians, a hostile and impoverished people.

There is no police presence in the areas the IDF has denuded of habitable dwellings; there is no count of the remaining population, there is no coordinated effort to supply the necessities of life to these people such as water, food, and shelter.

As a result, after six, then seven months of war, the Palestinian people of Gaza are suffering another catastrophe, this one worst than the first.

Whether they deserve what happened is hard to comprehend. After all, more than half of them are women with children. Surely, children under twelve cannot be held criminally responsible for what Hamas has done.

What has happened, I have to keep reminding you, is a tit-for-tat increase in violence that has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years. The perpetual war has been waxing and waning, but it clearly was ongoing in the second century AD (the Common Era), when the nascent Christians began to directly blame the Jews for the death of Jesus Christ.

I’m going to try not to get into first-century Jerusalem politics right now although it’s a fascinating subject. Suffice it to say that Jesus Christ, a legendary figure from the time the Romans occupied Jerusalem in about 30 of the Common Era. Many prophets were crucified during that period of time in Jerusalem. A single direct reference to Jesus is found in the History of Jerusalem penned by an eye-witness, Josephus Flavius. He also mentions several other martyrs to the cause of freeing Jerusalem from the Romans.

Nonetheless, a conspiracy theory grew up in the early second century that Jesus had been betrayed by his own people, the Jews (specifically the SanHedrin, a council of powerful locals) to be crucified. The Jews delivered him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who said what he said, offered the crowd Barabbas or Jesus (so it was the crowd’s fault, yes?) and then delivered Jesus to the Army to be murdered.

This conspiracy theory, that the Jewish “deep state” (the SanHedrin) had condemned Jesus for his anti-establishment teachings, has been orthodoxy in Europe since before the Middle Ages. The theory was only definitively shot down by a Pope in 1970. Many people still prescribe to it, including such far-right Republicans as Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

So, the revolt of Jerusalem occurred, and the Romans wiped the Temple off the face of the Earth in around 70 CE. A second, more desperate Jewish revolt occurred in the early second century, which was even more ruthlessly quashed. Nonetheless, Jewish people are reported to have lived in the Jerusalem area despite these thorough Roman military campaigns.

When the Muslims invaded shortly after their inception, they took over the site of the ruined temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by the Romans. They built a new complex of mosque and related buildings, including the Dome of the Rock shown in the photograph above. The Dome is said to contain the rock from which Mohammed ascended to Heaven in his final Night Journey. More importantly, it occupies the space previously held by the Jewish Temple and thus emphasizes the idea that Judaism is conquered.

Despite all this, the remaining Jewish population of the world benefited from the Diaspora. Since everyone spoke the same language, they naturally preferred trading with their own, and formed huge networks.

The campaign to return to the historic land of Israel is not a new thing.