Gathered against Jerusalem: Peer with your eyes and see… then & now
by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006
In studying discussions and recommendations on Israel’s plight we often are astonished at the range and abundance of prescient analyses and warnings about the path set by the dominant factions of the reborn state, — and by the enmity of its neighbors and ‘friend.’
The following is no exception. It is excerpts, with some comments from today, from chapter 7 of my book, Gathered against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace (Writers Club Press, 2000). The text is description, analysis, warning and way out, with frequent reference to Torah, oral and written. Heroes from our days, and there are many, were quoted. We have seen them since; they need and deserve fellowship of every kind.
The enmity of western civilization and Islam, Esau and Ishmael only has increased since the original essays were penned. The good news and the bad news is that western civilization is committing suicide; the branch that attacked its [Jewish] root is withering and dying. But as it dies it comes full circle, having little energy left but to intensify attacks on Jews, Judaism and Israel, a fledgling in its attachment to Judaism. The good need to hold tight and do what’s right, — hold onto the heartland and holy hill that are the foundation of Judaism’s wedding of sanctification of human life. Jews must seek out to achieve all ways in which we can be “a single nation in the land upon the hills of Israel.â€?
Now that Israel’s ruling elites are fronted by a political party whose very name is a lie, the epigraph to the original version of this essay is increasingly timely.And He said, ‘what do you see, Amos?’ I replied, ‘a basket of summer fruits [kayitz].’ Hashem then said to me, ‘the end [haKaitz] has come for my people, Israel. I will no longer continue to forebear them…â€?
While we know that there will not be a complete exile and destruction, the magnitude of the losses and suffering will depend on rectification of the lies and servitude beneath which the people of Israel are constrained to bend. The genocidal abuse of and contempt for the Jewish people by the powers great and small, east and west during the past century show abundantly and chillingly that Israel must save itself.
Here is an example of the degree of servitude that continues to this day….
“Three days before Hanukkah 5760, an American woman was arrested atop the Temple Mount by police of the Muslim Waqf, allowed by Israel’s government to set conditions upon Judaism’s holiest site. They interrogated her, accused her of conspiring to destroy the Dome of the Rock, and handed her to Israeli police who booked her… for the crime of closing her eyes and informed her that this is considered ‘an act of prayer’ forbidden to Jews on the Mount. Such are the costs of the political, judicial and religious leaders having preferred the ‘wailing wall’ to God’s holy hill.
“On 20 Kislev, the Arabs opened a gateway, 12 meters wide from within the south side of the Mount. The government had known for three months, noted a Likud MK that excavation was going on with cranes and bulldozers hollowing out the inside of the hill. Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute commented to Arutz-7 that “the Arabs not only deny our history with words, they are erasing the physical evidence that there was a [Jewish] Temple there.
“The ‘Peace Bloc’ [Gush Shalom, which should be called a ‘war party’ for its encouragement of the Islamic jihad against Judaism] demanded that the government declare ‘the Temple Mount is a Moslem area and that Israel has no intention of intervening there.’ Public Security Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami said that if Israel used force, ‘it would cause the whole city to burn.’
“Another official response, from Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein was perhaps most significant. ‘We have lost control of the Temple Mount,’� he commented with the inaccurate and perhaps disingenuous dismay which is one of the tactics by which the elites seek to dishearten the Jewish people.
But he was and is right that “the remnants of the history of the Jewish people are being trampled.� This process has continued since the days of Barak though with less emphasis on loss of holy sites and more on loss of Jewish lives. As one political and legalistic betrayal has followed another, Israel has moved from the intoxicating and befuddling semantics of Barak’s “simultaneity and momentum� (“it’s on to the end of the end game� he chirped on Charley Rose’s show in NYC in spring 2000) to Sharon’s “disengagement� and Olmert’s “convergence.� All are code words for the gentile and Hellenist project of blotting out the name and memory of Israel, a project essential to their goal of blotting out name, memory, and national boundaries (with the traditions and loyalties that reflect) all over the world.
The “final status talks� which the Clinton Administration pushed ever more feverishly as it approached its stall gave place to the Saudi – Bush administration Road Map and its “security fence,� a nostrum first touted by establishment ‘conservatives’ like George Will and Charles Krauthammer (fall 2001). All, all are names for what the British did to the Jewish National Home during the Mandate: roll it back to indefensible borders. It is a labyrinth at the rotten heart of which waits an insatiable pagan Minotaur.
“The world is waiting for the Jewish people to heed the words of Haggai. No amount of Jewish diffidence will erase this responsibility or placate the Arabs who know in their hearts that they indeed are trespassing on the Mount� and in the land generally. “Jews must close their eyes in prayer and then open them ‘to see retribution on the wicked.’ No longer arrested, they will be bless and praised, “a crown of splendor in the hand of Hashem and a royal headdress in the palm of your God� (Isaiah 62:3).
The religious, the “dati� will shed true knowledge and insight and bring merits of the true crown to Israel when they restore this connection of the heart broken by the brokers of political favors and geopolitical blackmail. The West will not save Israel: it will not even save itself. Only renewed Judaism, linking prayers and deeds will save it.
Dr. Eugene E. Narrett
Excerpts are from Gathered against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace pages 40-5.
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