Jan. 30, 1968 / Oct. 7, 2023

Despite claims to the contrary, prior to the end of the Babylonian captivity circa 539-7 BCS, Judea was a henotheistic* society, not significantly different from its neighbors and rivals in the region.

Split off from ancient Israel following a civil war -- a rival Hebrew culture subsumed into Syria two centuries earlier -- Judea eventually fell prey to the Babylonian empire in 598 BCS.

Long story short, the educated ruling elite were either killed or enslaved, leaving only illiterate peasants behind in the ruins of Jerusalem and other Judean cities.

In 539 BCE it was the Babylonians turn in the barrel as the Persian empire crushed them.  By that time many -- perhaps most -- of the captured elite Judeans either assimilated into Babylonian culture, intermarrying and converting to their captors’ gods.

However, a hardcore remnant clung to their separate identity as Jews.  Whether they started as nationalists who became monotheists or monotheists who became nationalists is moot; by 537 BCE the ancient Jews hardwired two primary creeds into their culture: 

1. There is only one God

2. He gave Judea and Jerusalem to us alone

We’ll skip over a lot of historical detail for the next half millennia.  Like clockwork Judea fell to then rebelled against several foreign conquerors.  While these conquerors exerted great direct and indirect influence on Jewish culture, they did not enslave and remove them as the Babylonians did.   

Many Jews -- primarily merchants but also scholars and religious officials -- emigrated to other lands and established communities there.  While some assimilated, most retained their cultural identity.

Come the first century CE, however, things reached a boiling point in Judea again.  They rebelled against the Roman empire and the Romans responded by wiping Judea as a nation off the face of the earth, killing or scattering almost all the Jews in the region.

Non-rebellious Jews living outside Judea were regarded with suspicion but mostly spared.  The Romans erased the name of Judea from the maps and renamed the territory Palestine, a Latin derivative of Philistine, the ancient Hebrews / Israelite / Judeans long hated and despised ancestral enemies.

For nearly two thousand years, this remained the status quo.

While most cultures suffering defeat and captivity would collapse and either die out or be assimilated, the Jews retained their hardcore cultural identity.  Returning to Judea became baked into their cultural DNA:  ”Next year in Jerusalem” became the byword at every Passover.

While never as evangelistic as their offshoot religion, the Christians, the Jewish faith did find many gentile converts and adherents in the first and second centuries CE.

The Christians, however, gained a significant recruiting edge by offering Judaism-lite:
The same basic moral ethos minus the wienie whacking and dietary restrictions required to be fully admitted into the Jewish faith.

Again, we’ll skip over reams of historical detail to focus on these three facts:

1. Jews and Christians were rivals for converts and influence in the first and second centuries CE

2. Christians eventually became the official religion of the Roman and later Byzantine empires

3. Christians persecuted rival religious beliefs more vigorously than they’d been persecuted two centuries earlier,

By medieval times the Jews were relentlessly persecuted and victimized in Europe and either barely tolerated (if lucky) in the Islamic world or eradicated (if not).

Through all this, every Passover around the world included “Next year in Jerusalem.”

In Europe all this came to an ugly head in the 19th and 20th centuries CE.  “Antisemitism” was coined as a polite replacement for the older and more accurate “Jew hatred.”  By 1939 CE the Holocaust revved into high gear and by the time WWII ended in 1945 CE, at least six million Jews had been slaughtered by Jew haters.

While a few individuals and families found their way back to Palestine in the centuries before, Zionism -- i.e., a desire for a literal large scale Jewish resettlement of their historical homeland -- really got started in the 19thcentury CE.

By the start of WWII it proved a serious enough movement that it drew the attention of both the British empire (who controlled Palestine at that point) and local Islamic leaders (some of whom disliked Jews because of friction Mohammad had with some Jewish communities, others because they allied with the anti-British Nazis abd hey, the enemy of my enemy’s enemy is my enemy, right?).

Add to this mix some decidedly antisemitic British military and political leaders undermining efforts at a peaceful solution and you get an idea of what happened at ground level in Palestine in 1948.

Europe -- horrified at the inevitable outcome pf two thousand years of Jew hatred -- felt eager to give the Jews (particularly surviving European Jews) a homeland…

…outside of Europe.

A couple of places were suggested (with in consultation with native populations already living there) but ultimately the United Nations opted to divide Palestine into roughly four pieces and give two to the Jews and two non-adjacent pieces to the Palestinians already living there.

Any moron can see this was a recipe for disaster.

The Jewish refugees – many of them battle hardened bastards who just survived the Holocaust – wanted all the land their three thousand-plus year old culture promised them.

Many of the local Palestinians pointed out:

1. They occupied the land longer than the ancient Jews did and

2. since the Holocaust was a European problem maybe the Europeans should solve it in Europe.

In any case, the U.S. recognized Israel but not Palestine as a sovereign nation.  Irate Palestinians and Arab allies tried to overrun Israel, more than a few vowing genocide.  The former Jewish refugees now known as Israelis proved they mean it when they say “Never agaib” and a long series of bloody wars and uprisings and terrorist attacks began.

Which brings us to Oct. 7, 2023 and Jan. 30, 1968.

Let the record show that Hamas are a bunch of bloodthirsty genocidal hate mongers determined to wipe out Israel and are willing to do so in a manner than guarantees massive retaliation against the very Palestinians they claim to be trying to liberate.

Let the record also show that the current Israeli government is perfectly willing to kick and punch that tar baby, either unable or unwilling to acknowledge doing so plays right into their enemy’s hands.

Hamas committed atrocities aimed against civilians, deliberately targeting women, children, and families within Israeli territory who posed to direct threat to them.

Israel responded with attacks that inflicted ten to twenty to thirty times as many casualties on Palestinians who had nothing to do with Hamas’ attack.

Hamas, while absolutely not justified in their attacks on civilians, were responding to relentless provocation by militant Israeli nationalists; in particular, in the week before the Oct. 7 attack (which had been planned and put in motion long before this occurred), a group of Israeli militants stormed the Al-Asqa mosque in Jerusalem to disrupt a regularly scheduled worship service.**

On Jan. 30, 1968 the U.S. had been in active ground combat in Vietnam for three years, an escalation from previous “advisors” dating back to the 1950s.

Every day the U.S. was told we were winning, that the Viet Cong quivered on the verge of collapse, and their capitulation was just around the corner.

On Jan. 30, 1968 the Tet Offensive started.  It proved to be a massive tactical defeat for the Viet Cong…

…and strategically it won the war for them.

Make no bones about it, the Viet Cong were just as blood thirsty and as ruthless as Hamas, perfectly willing to provoke the U.S. into massive retaliation against Vietnamese civilians because they knew in the end the Vietnamese would side with the other Vietnamese fighting a foreign power.

Take all the time you
need to let that sink in. 

Hamas has won this for the Palestinian people:  There will be an independent Palestinian state.

And they won’t be under Israel’s thumb.

If Israel follows its current policies, they simply delay the inevitable and give the rest of the world even less reason to support the existence of a Jewish state.

Cut your loses now
while there’s time.

If the U.S. recognized this in 1968, we would have spared tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

“But Hamas and other Arab terrorists have vowed to destroy Israel.”

Yes, they have…

…and, no, they won’t.

Hamas and the rest of Palestine (and the rest of the Middle East, for that matter) needs to wrap theire brains around this face:  Israel has nuclear weapons.

The day Israel thinks there’s even a ghost of a chance they will be overrun is the day several  Middle Eastern population centers disappear in a flash of white hot light.

Think Mecca and Medina aren’t on that list?  Really?  You think after what was done to them over the last 2,500+ years that the Jews are bluffing when they say “Never again”?

Here’s the answer; none of you are going to like it:

Everybody gives up something.

Israel grabs their militant settlers by the ears (or other more delivate portions of their anatomy) abd drags them off Palestinian land.

That territory you grabbed in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War?  You’re going to need to give a lot of it back.

You don’t get Biblical Judea back, you get a new Jewish nation with new boundaries.

The Palestinians need to knock off all this “from the river to the sea” crap.

Ain’t gonna happen.

And be prepared to cede a lot of Palestinian territory to Israel so they can have on contiguous country.

You’ll get a bunch of territory Israel now controls, but that’s it.  Nothing more.

New borders need to be set and both sides need to stay within their own territory.  Draw a narrow DMZ from the Mediterranean through Jerusalem and let the U.N. administer it as a multi-national zone.

Nobody gets what they want.

But if they’re wise, everybody gets something their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren can live with.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Henotheistic means a culture with one supreme primary god – in this case Yahweh a.k.a. Jehovah – but several lesser gods, demi-gods, and heavenly beings.  While the primary god is dominant, it is not strictly a monotheistic culture.

**  How important is Al-Asqa mosque to Arab Muslims?  Imagine a bunch of atheists storming Notre Dame to disrupt mass.