Next Year In Jerusalem: לשנה הבאה בירושלים

Question: Is giving in to the enemies of Israel the concession that Jerusalem shall not be again the capital of Israel a concession made to whom are, effectively, Nazis? I discuss, without weasel words:

L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim (Hebrew: לשנה הבאה בירושלים‎‎, lit. “Next year in Jerusalem“) is a phrase Jews living in the Diaspora utter each year at the end of Passover and Yom Kippur. After the destruction of the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem, by the Romans in 73 CE, the hope of seeing it rebuilt became a central component of Jewish religious and secular consciousness.

Many are upset by this attitude of the Jews, in the last 1950 years, or so. They called it “Zionism”. And many identify Zionism with racism. How, why, do the Jews want to go home, generation after generation? How dare they?

Isn’t good enough, say the Jewish skeptics, that Jews are tolerated back on the so-called Holy Land? Why do they want everything back, like the owned the place in the past? Why do they want their capital back? Don’t they have it already?

Before last year presidential election, opponents of Trump claimed he was a Jew hater. They were, they are that dumb, and, or disingenuous. Even Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and New York Time pillar claimed that, two days before the election. The fact that of Trump’s several closest family members several were Jews didn’t mean anything to them. Such a level of idiocy means that arguing intelligently is as easily done with the Commons as with common cockroaches.

We had to build our mosques on top of your temple, to show you who is the boss, and so that you could never return. Beautiful Gold Al Aqsa Mosque Crushes Foundations Of Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. God is a terrorist, or is not.

Now Trump has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the cockroaches are roaring to high heavens. Jerusalem was the capital of Israel for more than a millennium. Say from 1200 BCE (king David) until 136 CE.  Rome had two terrible wars with Israel, one in 66-73 CE, starting under Nero, and the other in 132-136 CE. In 73 CE, the victorious Romans demolished the great temple. In 136 CE the Romans ordered the dispersion of the Jews out of Israel,  and took to calling Israel “Palestina”. (from “Philistia, land of the Philistines”, something justified by old Assyrian inscription). In 360 CE, Roman emperor Julian ordered the Jewish temple rebuilt, but the work was interrupted by a quake and Julian’s death. During the Sassanian occupation of the area, in the Seventh Century, the Jews were again given autonomy. But then the Christians regained control, and the Jews lost the autonomy, and the Muslims followed suit, even forcing Jews to wear marks on their clothing. Jews regained autonomy, shortly after demolishing the British government’s headquarters in the King David hotel in Jerusalem.

The international consensus at the united nations was that Jerusalem was an international city. Right, a treaty was signed to this effect between Richard the Lion Hearted (representing Philippe Auguste of France, his suzerain) and Saladin. (Treaty of Jaffa, 1192 CE!)

The reason being that Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In the case of the Muslims, it’s because Mohammed flew there on top of a winged horse after his death (don’t make fun of the Prophet, or Allah may make you drink melted lead, one of his prefered punishment, says the Qur’an). Another reason is that the tiny territories given by the UN at the creation of Israel, don’t have much of the city.

However, Jerusalem is not just the religious capital of the superstition known as Judaism. As I said, it was the capital of the STATE of Israel for 1,300 years. Not as long as the 1,600+ years of Paris as capital, but close. And about as long as Memphis was capital of Egypt. Memphis was capital of Egypt three times between 2950 BCE and 664 CE.

The question is this: what is the justification for the existence of Israel? Conventional wisdom says it’s just a place for the Jews to be, otherwise they end up in ovens, and related situations. This is a silly reason: Jews shouldn’t end in ovens, because if they do, everybody will (as the top Nazis recognized, sotto voce, among themselves: the treatment they gave to the Jews, extermination, was going to be extended to others).

No, the real reason for Israel is Israel: bringing back the state by that name, made greatly, but not exclusively, of Jews. That state had Jerusalem as capital.

But what of the reasoning that this compromises peace?  Jacques Attali‏, one of France’s deepest thinkers, and close to president Macron, wrote on his twitter account (we follow each other): @jattali: “The United States’ unilateral recognition of a reunified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and of no other state, is against the long-term interests of Israel and the Middle East peace process.”

I recognize that the “of no other state” part is uselessly aggravating. However Trump said:  “We are not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved,” That does not seem to exclude that East Jerusalem couldn’t be the capital of a Palestinian state (having a double capital was close to a situation found in Berlin for decades).

So my grain of wisdom? The Hamas charter wants all Jews killed. Hamas rules Gaza. I have quoted this saying of Prophet Muhammad in Hadith (41; 6985)  many times.

According to the Hamas charter, Jewish people “have only negative traits and are presented as planning to take over the world.”[39] The charter claims that the Jews deserve God’s/Allah’s enmity and wrath because they received the Scriptures but violated its sacred texts, disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew their own prophets.”[40] (This mentality is straight from the Qur’an, which insults the jews, page after page, even asserting all pigs, monkeys and dogs we see are, truly, Jews…) ).

Here is a piece of the Hamas Charter, halfway through Article Seven:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

Article Eight:

Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.]

An essay in the Huffington post disingenuously claims the preceding Hadith does not really say what it says. Yet it’s repeated in at least 2 other places; moreover the Qur’an is extremely insulting to the Jews (although it quotes the Bible favorably to justify a “rain of stones” on homosexuals). The constantly repeated idea in the Qur’an is that Jews disobeyed “god”. Their “god”: the prophet of Islam knew better than the Jews what the Jewish “god” wanted, and he wanted them punished for it. 

In other words, the Palestinians are in denial. The Qur’ an and its murderous threats is their main problem, not the jews. The Jews have the right to come back where they were from. Recognizing this is recognizing the reason for Israel. Anything short of that tries to refute history… and justice.

here are many times more Muslims in Egypt than there are Jews in the world. The Middle Earth has space for the Jews to return.  It will enrich the place force tolerance, hence intelligence.

Meanwhile, negotiating with the most determined enemies of Israel is like negotiating with the Nazis, and literally so. One couldn’t negotiate with the Nazis, for a number of reasons. One does not negotiate with rattlesnakes. This is what the French Republic thought. France declared war to the Nazis, as soon as Great Britain changed its mind and agreed to help France militarily, if France got into a war with the Nazis.  The result is that the Nazis were forced into war 6 years early, and lost said war.

The case of Hamas is typical: read the text above. It’s straight out of Nazi central casting, the sort of declarations even the top Nazis (say Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler) didn’t dare to utter. Respecting this, and giving Hamas the concession that Jerusalem shouldn’t be again the capital of Israel is making to Nazis the concession that Jerusalem shouldn’t be again the capital of Israel. How wise is that/ How moral is that? How prudent is that? How cowardly is that?

If we want truth and reconciliation, we need truth first. The truth is that Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel. It was the case for more than 1300 years, roughly as long as the superstitious ideology known as Islam. I am not a Jew, I am more than that, I am a historian. Or, at least someone cognizant with the basics of common history. It’s where the facts are.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Israel, Jerusalem, Next Year in Jerusalem