Eratz Israel

We are fans of Cecil de Mille who walked us through the Ten Commandments to see Moses looking like Charlton Heston and Egyptian emperors like Yul Brynner, young John Derek was Joshua, the sole guy who gets to cross into Canaan among originals from Egypt. We meet the name Yoshua again in the Greek Iesu called Jesus in Rome.

Otto Preminger’s Exodus made us cheer for the birth of Zionist Israel in the movie adaptation of Leon Uris’ novel. John Derek this time plays Taha, a Muslim muktar, hanged by extremist for assisting his blue-eyed Jewish friend, Paul Newman. The movie had a Hollywood ending, a hope for a Palestine of peace!

I grew up hearing again and again the replay of the Philippine vote in the United Nations that finally got Israel into the international body over the hump in vote count. In Filipino, the word for “traitor” when I was growing up was “Hudyo” (Jew), but carried by the human sentiment of backing up David in Goliath’s backyard, I cheered the side of the “People of the Book,” albeit condemned for its traitorous treatment of Jesus our hero in a 2,000-year-old story!

Now, in the Truman papers, we learn that the sense of justice for the little guy was not the only rationale at play. We now know that he supported the entry of Israel into the United Nations so that we would have a friend to protect our oil interest in the Muslim Middle East. Rothschild was not a name to trifle with.

Oil discovered in the Middle East was the property of the countries on them, but the technology and financing of drilling it off the ground, getting it to refineries to be distributed worldwide, and having the network of shipping lines to distribute the product had Texan fingerprints all over it. There were also the ancillary industries from its byproducts like plastic that needed development worldwide. American-dominated fossil fuel industry was neither going to run out of work nor profit.

For those of us steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we know that Eratz Israel is an odd minority in the Muslim Middle East, experienced by Palestinian Arabs to be a schoolyard sissy turned relentless bully. After the Fall of Jerusalem during the Roman Empire, Israel disappeared into diaspora; the Crusades briefly had Jerusalem until the Prophet’s hold of the Middle East became more permanent to the end of the Ottoman Empire when Europe took command of settlers and nomads.

Palestine’s boundaries when the British took over were taken straight out of the Books of Numbers and Jeremiah of the Bible, from the tip abut Lebanon, with a protrusion north in between Syria and the Golan Heights slightly north of Tyre’s longitude, to the dagger tip desert that empties into the Gulf of Aqaba; west is the Mediterranean and the River Jordan holds the east.

The Palestine in 1946 had pockets of Jewish settlements, though Jewish experience in Nazi’s Holocaust accelerated membership to the Zionist movement that relieved the “traitor’s” reputation in Europe, gained a wider sympathy from the guilt re the European genocide, and allowed the massive migration of Semitic Jews to Palestine. British partition of 1947 met the upper lip sense of equity but did not serve anyone’s interest. It was artificial. The surrounding Arabs did not recognize the partition that relegated Palestinians to half of the land area with half identified to be Jewish territory. (See accompanying map in four stages from 1946 to 2000.)

Clearly, Israel’s restraint in “occupying” territories is nonexistent. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood got organized in the Middle East, temporarily ruled Egypt until the U.S.-trained and supported military decided that Sharia law was not going to be the nation’s rule of law.

One of the Muslim Brotherhood’s offspring is Hamas in Gaza, an acronym of Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamat al-Islāmiyyah, meaning “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Religious Hamas countered the influence of secular socialist Fatah of Arafat’s PLO, so Israel “supported” Hamas until they defeated Fatah in the Gaza area. Fatah kept its grip on the West Bank. Now, Hamas’ Gaza sends missiles toward Israel while Israel pounds Gaza in attempts to destroy tunnels where militants hide.

Before the conflagration, Egypt and Israel imposed an embargo on Gaza because of Hamas; to expect Tel Aviv and Cairo to lift the quarantine is like expecting Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia to be rid of the Ebola virus quickly, thank you. To expect Gaza to demilitarize is like asking Americans to be rid of their handguns. Both are virtual impossibilities. Israel is winning the PR war, though. It claims that each time a ceasefire is raised, the Israelites “cease” and the Palestinians “fire.” However, the movie Exodus notwithstanding, Israel is no nation of peace!

It’s a messy war in Gaza where “revenge” is the motivational currency in use. At the end of the 72-hour humanitarian truce, the shooting war is on again. Current attrition score: Palestinians, 2,000-plus; Israel, 80. Eratz Israel represents U.S. in the Middle East, clearly intending to leave the whole of Palestine in the afore-printed map all white.