My Religious Me: Part V
The truth about the history
of Israel and Palestine must be told. Christians, especially Catholic priests,
must not hide vital information about this subject. I would understand that most
of the fly-by-night churches may have zero information on this. Catholics,
however, have information at their disposal but they do not want to share it
with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the people of Palestine are being
butchered daily by apartheid Israel under the pretext that the land of the Palestinians
is a land that was promised to them by their God. Nonsense!
Today I share an enlightening
article, first published in Umsebenzi Online,
written by Future Msebele regarding this question.
The question of Palestine in historical
perspective: What does the Bible say?
By Future Msebele
We have seen on our television screens image after image of Israeli
planes and heavy artillery bombarding the narrow coastal strip dominated by the
city of Gaza. Hamas, the dominant party in control of Gaza has retaliated by
relatively harmless rocket attacks against Israel.
Why is Israel attacking Gaza? Who are the Israelis? Who are the
Palestinians?
In Zimbabwe there is a strong body of opinion which says “This land
belongs to the Jews because the Bible says so.” This is indeed a very
short-sighted and misinformed statement. When the Christian religion began, it
adopted wholesale the Jewish scriptures which we know as the Old Testament.
Read the relevant historical portions properly and you will find that there
were many different peoples there long before the invasion by the Hebrew tribes
who were to adopt and introduce what we now call the religion of Judaism.
18: In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto
thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river,
the river Euphrates;
Genesis 15 vs. 18-21 (KJV)
Two things are obvious here: firstly that there
were other people already living there; secondly, as all would know too well
through the European versions of African history - history is mostly written by
the winners. It is the Israelites, and not all the other people mentioned who
are saying that the land was promised to them!
Further on, in the First Book of Samuel Chapter 15,
we read that God ordered King Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites!
Again, Jews regard Jerusalem as their historic
capital. But they did not build it:
4: And David and all Israelwent to Jerusalem, which
is Jebus; where the Jebusites were, the inhabitants of
the land.
5: And the inhabitants of Jebussaid to David, Thou
shalt not come hither.
Nevertheless David took the castle of Zion, which
is the city of David.
1 Chronicles 11 vs. 4&5 (KJV)
What we read, then, in the Old Testament is about a
group of warlike nomadic tribes with their herds of cattle, sheep and goats,
conquering peaceful city dwellers and establishing themselves as rulers.
As we study the history of the Jews through the
Bible and other sources we find that the people of Palestine/Israel, lying
between the two great early civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia (Iraq) were
of extremely mixed origin including in their gene-pool both fair-haired
Hittites and black Ethiopians. Likewise, when it comes to religion we find that
worship of the Golden Calf and of Baal went side by side with the worship of
the one God - with different forms of religion being dominant at different
times. People who did not originally belong to the Hebrew tribes began to
practise the Jewish religion and people that were of Hebrew origin turned to
other religions.
By the time of Jesus, there were more Jews outside
Palestine than in Palestine, many of them proselytes, that is converts.
Following unsuccessful Jewish revolts against the
Romans in 70CE - when the temple was destroyed and the Bar Kokhba revolt of
132CE, the Jewish leadership left Palestine, leaving behind the peasants who
slowly converted - first to Christianity, then later to Islam. Many people do
not know that about 15% of Palestinians are Christian - descendants of the
earliest Christians. Most of the rest are Muslims.
The Palestinians of today, then, are the
descendants of the many different peoples that inhabited the land in ancient
times - including Jews - since which they have also acquired ancestry from the
Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula, West European Crusaders and Turks - all of whom
conquered that territory at various times. Israeli Jewish historian Tsvi
Misinai states categorically in a piece written in 2009 that “90% of
Palestinians are descended from Jews.”
At the same time, many people of non-Palestinian
origin converted to Judaism. In the Acts of the Apostles:
Now when the congregation was broken
up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who,
speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God.
Acts 13 v 43 (KJV)
There are a number of other references to
proselytes in the New Testament.
More than that, we know of many cases of whole
communities which converted to Judaism in Yemen, Ethiopia and most
spectacularly in the Khazar Kingdom which covered an area now in Russia and
eastern Ukraine. In the 8th century CE, an entire Turkic-speaking kingdom, the
Khazar Kingdom converted to Judaism, and, although estimates vary, it is
definite that a considerable part of European Jewry have Khazar ancestry.
How then did Jewish
settlers from all over the world come to claim Palestine as theirs?
During the 19th century in Europe, nation states
began to be formed. Italy became one nation in 1851, Germany in 1871. Others,
Poles, Czechs and Hungarians were seeking to form nation states. Some Jews
began to ask themselves where they belonged.
In 1895, an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl wrote a
book called The Jewish State. Two years later the First World
Zionist Congress took place in Switzerland. Herzl approached the Turkish
government for a Jewish settlement in Palestine (at that time part of the
Ottoman or Turkish Empire) although permission to establish a Jewish state was
refused (despite an offer to assist the Turks pay off substantial debts), small
groups of Jews began to settle in Palestine. However, Palestine was not the
only place thought suitable for a Jewish National Home, part of British East
Africa (now Kenya) was also seriously considered!
In Russia in 1910, as the Tsarist Empire grew to a
close, and only 7 years before the Russian Revolution. Pogroms - attacks on
Jewish settlements by right-wing thugs (the Black Hundreds) took place. Some
emigrated to America, a few to Palestine. This group formed a solid core of
Jews in Palestine.
As fascism grew in Europe during the 1930s, more
and more Jews, fleeing persecution, went to Palestine. Following the end of the
Second World War, many Jews who escaped Hitler’s attempt to destroy them, fled
to Palestine (by then under British control). They began to fight the indigenous
people for their land. The newly formed United Nations agreed to partition
Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state. In 1948, the State of Israel
was formed. They had already seized considerably more land than had been
granted to them by the UN. The West Bank became part of the Kingdom of Jordan
and Gaza was administered by Egypt.
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was
formed and was given immediate recognition by many countries as the sole
representative body of the Palestinian people. It obtained UN observer status
in 1974. But in 1967, war had broken out between Israel and its Arab neighbours
and the Israelis seized both the West Bank and Gaza.
Nevertheless, in 1987, the Intifada, the uprising
against Israeli occupation, started. By 1993, the Israelis, led by Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinians led by PLO President Yasser Arafat
signed an agreement to recognize both the State of Israel and the State of
Palestine.
In 1995, Rabin was shot dead by an assassin who
represented the extreme right of the Zionist movement. Soon after that, Israel
was ruled by a succession of extreme right-wing governments which refused to
recognize Palestinian rights and continued to steal Palestinian land and build
Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Yasser Arafat was humiliated in front of
his own people and in 2004 was poisoned by a radioactive chemical. The
Palestinians have been reduced from being the owners of the whole area of what
is now Israel and Palestine to being confined to the tiny area of Gaza and a
few even smaller enclaves in the West Bank.
The Zionist Jews who came to Palestine to flee
persecution have now themselves become the persecutors - or as one commentator
put it:
“The Palestinians are the last victims of
Hitler.”
Future Msebele is President of Zimbabwe
African People’s Union Youth Front (ZAPU Youth Front)
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