The dead were laid to their
eternal rest in AD 614, the most dreadful year
in the history of Palestine until the Twentieth
Century. The Scottish scholar Adam Smith, wrote
in his Historical Geography of Palestine:
“until now, the terrible devastation of 614 is
visible in the land, it could not be healed”.
By 614 Palestine was a part
of the Roman successor state, the Byzantine
Empire. It was a prosperous, predominantly
Christian land of well-developed agriculture, of
harnessed water systems and carefully laid
terraces. Pilgrims came in flocks to the Holy
places. The Constantine-built edifices of the
Ascension on the Mount of Olives and of the Holy
Sepulchre were among the man-made wonders of the
world. The Judean wilderness was enlivened by
eighty monasteries, where precious manuscripts
were collected and prayers offered. The Fathers
of the church, St Jerome of Bethlehem and Origen
and Eusebius of Caesarea, were still a living
memory. One of the best Palestinian writers, on
a par with the Minor Prophets, blessed John
Moschos, just completed his
Spiritual Meadow.
There was also a small,
wealthy Jewish community living in their midst,
mainly in Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of
Galilee. Their scholars had just completed their
version of the Talmud, the codification of their
faith, Rabbinic Judaism; but for instruction
they deferred to the prevailing Jewish community
in Persian Babylonia.
II
In 614 local Palestinian Jews
allied with their Babylonian co-religionists and
assisted the Persians in their conquest of the
Holy Land. 26,000 Jews participated in the
onslaught. In the aftermath of the Persian
victory, the Jews perpetrated a massive
holocaust of the Gentiles of Palestine. They
burned the churches and the monasteries, killed
monks and priests, burned books. The beautiful
basilica of Fishes and Loaves in Tabgha, the
Ascension on the Mount of Olives, St Stephen
opposite Damascus Gate and the Hagia Sion on Mt
Zion are just at the top of the list of perished
edifices. Indeed, very few churches survived the
onslaught. The Great Laura of St Sabas, tucked
away in the bottomless Ravine of Fire (Wadi an-Nar)
was saved by its remote location and steep
crags. The Church of the Nativity miraculously
survived: when Jews commanded its destruction,
the Persians balked. They perceived the Magi
mosaic above the lintel as the portrait of
Persian kings.
This devastation was not the
worst crime. When Jerusalem surrendered to the
Persians, thousands of local Christians became
prisoners of war and were herded to the Mamilla
Pool area. The Israeli archaeologist Ronny Reich
writes:
They were probably sold to
the highest bidder. According to some sources,
the Christian captives at Mamilla Pond were
bought by Jews and were then slain on the spot.
The Oxford Professor Henry
Hart Milman's History of the Jews
describes it in stronger terms:
It had come at length, the
long-expected hour of triumph and vengeance; and
the Jews did not neglect the opportunity. They
washed away the profanation of the holy city in
Christian blood. The Persians are said to have
sold the miserable captives for money. The
vengeance of the Jews was stronger than their
avarice; not only did they not scruple to
sacrifice their treasures in the purchase of
these devoted bondsmen, they put to death all
they had purchased at a lavish price. It was a
rumour of the time that 90,000 perished.
An eyewitness to the
massacre, Strategius of St Sabas, was more
vivid:
Thereupon the vile Jews…
rejoiced exceedingly, because they detested the
Christians, and they conceived an evil plan. As
of old they bought the Lord from the Jews with
silver, so they purchased Christians out of the
reservoir… How many souls were slain in the
reservoir of Mamilla! How many perished of
hunger and thirst! How many priests and monks
were massacred by the sword! How many maidens,
refusing their abominable outrages, were given
over to death by the enemy! How many parents
perished on top of their children! How many of
the people were brought up by the Jews and
butchered, and became confessors of Christ! Who
can count the multitude of the corpses of those
who were massacred in Jerusalem!’
Strategius estimated the
victims of the holocaust at 66,000.
In plain prose, the Jews
ransomed the Christians from the hands of the
Persian soldiers for good money to slaughter
them at Mamilla Pool, ‘and it ran with blood’.
Jews massacred between 60,000 and 90,000
Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem alone,
almost 1.5 million in today’s values (the total
earth’s population was according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica about 300 million,
twenty times smaller than today). A few days
later, the Persian military understood the
magnitude of the massacre and stopped the Jews.
III
To his credit, the Israeli
archaeologist Ronny Reich does not try to shift
the blame for the massacres onto the Persians,
as it is usually done nowadays. He admits that
‘the Persian Empire was not based on religious
principles and was indeed inclined to religious
tolerance’. This good man is clearly unsuitable
to write for the Washington Post. That
paper’s correspondent in Israel would have had
no trouble describing the massacre as
‘retaliatory strike by the Jews who suffered
under Christian rule’.
The holocaust of the
Christian Palestinians in year 614 is well
documented and you will find it described in
older books. It has been censored out of modern
guides and history books. Elliott Horowitz
described, in his brilliant expose of the Jewish
apologia[ii]
how almost all Jewish historians suppressed the
facts and re-wrote history. The cover-up
continues even now. Recent Israeli publications
attach the blame to the Persians, as they push
the responsibility for Sabra and Shatila
massacre onto the Lebanese Maronites. Horowitz
writes:
Raul Hilberg, in The
Destruction of the European Jews, asserted
that “preventive attack, armed resistance, and
revenge are almost completely absent in two
thousand years of Jewish ghetto history”. Avi
Yona, a leading Israeli historian, Leon Polyakov,
author of History of Anti-Semitism (published at
the expense of Marc Rich, the thief - ISH) and
many others glossed over the holocaust of 614,
kept silent or denied it completely. Benzion
Dinur, a former director of the Holocaust Museum
Yad va-Shem, told his readers euphemistically,
in language that might have offended him if used
with regard to Jews, that "recalcitrant
Christians were firmly held in check’.
As a rule, Jewish historical
and ideological writing is notoriously
unreliable and apologetic, Horowitz shows.
Granted, ‘not all Jews’, vide Horowitz,
Finkelstein and other wonderful men, but they
would be the first to agree with the truth of
the above. The feeling of self-righteousness and
perpetual victim-hood reinforced by a
tendentious, distorted historical narrative is a
source of mental disease, an obsession common to
many modern Jews. This obsession intoxicates
Jews and gives them unusual strength in
promoting their own distorted narrative. In a
way, this massive distortion of reality turns
Jews into victorious berserks of ideological
struggle. Still, while being a successful
strategy, it is a mental disease, a danger to
the souls of Jews and to the lives of others.
The Jews are not unique.
Germans were intoxicated by the injustice of
Versailles, and Adolf Hitler voiced it. Eric
Margolis of the Toronto Sun[iii]
wrote about Armenians inflamed by the story of
their holocaust. They massacred thousands of
their peaceful Azeri neighbours in the 1990s,
and uprooted 800,000 native non-Armenians. ‘It’s
time to recognize all the world’s horrors’,
Margolis concludes. It is time to recognise the
danger of inflammatory and one-sided narrative,
I would add. The same system of tendentious
reality-distorting narrative was deployed by the
activists of militant feminism, communism,
psychoanalysis, neo-conservatism,
neo-liberalism, Zionism and a plethora of
smaller movements as the means to enrage and
intoxicate supporters for the ideological
struggle.
As a result, we live in a
psychotic, sick world. Our only system of
communication, the media, is the enforcer of the
malady and leads us to our perdition. It is
necessary to promote balanced, alternative
discourse in order to return to the common
sense. Since the Jews have become so prominent
in the modern world, the lopsided Jewish
discourse has to be deconstructed and the crown
of martyrdom carefully removed.
The tragic events of 614
should be returned into historical narrative,
for it will help the Jews to heal their paranoid
delusion. Without this knowledge one cannot
understand the provisions of the treaty between
the Jerusalemites and Caliph Omar ibn Khattab,
concluded in year 638. In the Sulh al Quds, as
this treaty of capitulation is called, Patriarch
Sofronius demanded, and the powerful Arab ruler
concurred to protect the people of Jerusalem
from the ferocity of the Jews.
The genocide of the AD 614
was the most horrible, but not the only,
genocide wreaked by Jews in those troubled
years. Though the biblical story of the Canaan
conquest by Joshua is just a story, it
influenced Jewish souls. The Sixth Century was a
century of strong Jewish influence, and it had
more than its fair share of genocide.
Just a few years before 614,
in 610, the Jews of Antioch massacred
Christians. The Jewish historian Graetz wrote:
[The Jews] fell upon their
Christian neighbours and retaliated for the
injuries which they had suffered; they killed
all that fell into their hands, and threw their
bodies into the fire, as the Christians had done
to them a century before. The Patriarch
Anastasius, an object of special hate, was
shamefully abused by them, and his body dragged
through the streets before he was put to death.
For Graetz, as for IDF
spokesmen, Jews always kill ‘in retaliation’.
This dogma was not invented by CNN and Sharon:
it is deeply rooted in the Jewish psyche as the
ultimate defence. This historian (like other
Jewish historians) did not care to mention that
The Jews of Antioch
disembowelled the great Patriarch Anastasius,
forced him to eat his own intestines; they
hurled his genitals into his face.[iv]
IV
After the Arab conquest, a
majority of Palestinian Jews accepted the
message of the Messenger, as did the majority of
Palestinian Christians, albeit for somewhat
different reasons. For local Christians, Islam
was a sort of Nestorian Christianity without
icons, without Constantinople’s interference and
without Greeks. (The Greek domination of the
Palestinian church remains a problem for the
local Christians to this very day.)
For ordinary local Jews,
Islam was the return to the faith of Abraham and
Moses. They had not been able to follow the
intricacies of the new Babylonian faith anyway.
The majority of them became Muslims and blended
into the Palestinian population.
V
Modern Jews do not have to
feel guilty for the misdeeds of Jews long gone.
No son is responsible for the sins of his
father. Israel could have turned this mass grave
with its Byzantine chapel and mosaics into a
small and poignant memorial reminding its
citizens of a horrible page in the history of
the land and of the dangers of genocidal
supremacy. Instead, the Israeli authorities
preferred to demolish the tomb and create an
underground parking-lot in its place. That did
not cause a murmur.
The guardians of the Jewish
conscience, Amos Oz and others, have objected to
the destruction of ancient remains. No, not of
the tomb at Mamilla. They ran a petition against
the keepers of the Haram a-Sharif mosque complex
for digging a ten-inch trench to lay a new pipe.
It did not matter to them that in an op-ed in
Haaretz, the leading Israeli archaeologist
denied any relevance of the mosque-works to
science. They still described it as ‘a barbaric
act of Muslims aimed at the obliteration of the
Jewish heritage of Jerusalem’. Among the
signatories I found, to my amazement and sorrow,
the name of Ronny Reich. One thought he might
tell them who obliterated the vestiges of the
Jewish heritage at Mamilla Pool.
Censored history creates a
distorted picture of reality. Recognition of the
past is a necessary step on the way to sanity.
The Germans and the Japanese have recognized the
crimes of their fathers, have came to grips with
their moral failings and have emerged as
humbler, less boastful folks, akin to the rest
of human race. We Jews have so far failed to
exorcise the haughty spirit of the Chosen-ness,
and find ourselves in a dire predicament.
That is why the idea of
supremacy is still with us, still calling for
genocide. In 1982, Amos Oz[v]
met an Israeli who shared with the writer his
dream of becoming a Jewish Hitler to the
Palestinians. Persistent rumours identify the
potential Hitler as Ariel Sharon. Whether it is
true or not, slowly this dream is becoming a
reality.
The Haaretz published
an ad on its front page[vi],
a fatwa, signed by a group of Rabbis. The
Rabbis proclaimed the theological identification
of Ishmael (the Arabs) with the Amalek. ‘Amalek’
is mentioned in the Bible as the name of a tribe
that caused trouble for the Children of Israel.
In this story the God of Israel commands His
people to exterminate the Amalek tribe
completely, including its livestock. King Saul
botched the job: he exterminated them all right,
but failed to kill nubile, unwed maidens. This
‘failure’ cost him his crown. The obligation to
exterminate the people of Amalek is still
counted among the tenets of the Jewish faith.
At the end of WWII, some
Jews, including the late Prime Minister Menachem
Begin, identified the Germans with Amalek, and a
Jewish religious socialist and a fighter against
Nazis, Abba Kovner, hatched a plot in 1945 to
poison the water-supply system of German cities
and to kill ‘six million Germans’. He obtained
poison from a brother of the future President of
Israel, Efraim Katzir. Katzir supposedly thought
Kovner intended to poison ‘only’ a few thousands
German POWs. The plan mercifully flopped when
Kovner was stopped by British officials in a
European port. This story was published last
year in Israel in a biography of Kovner written
by Prof Dina Porat, head of the Anti-Semitism
Research Centre at Tel Aviv University[vii].
In plain English, the Rabbis’
fatwa means: our religious duty is to
kill all Arabs, including women and babies and
their livestock to the last cat. The liberal
Haaretz, whose editor and owner are
sufficiently versed to understand the fatwa,
did not hesitate to place the ad. Some
Palestinian activists recently criticized me for
associating with the Russian weekly Zavtra
and for quoting the American weekly Spotlight.
I wonder why they have not condemned me for
writing in Haaretz? Zavtra and
Spotlight have never published a call to
genocide, after all.
It would be unfair to single
out Haaretz. Another prominent Jewish
newspaper, The Washington Post, published
an equally passionate call to genocide by
Charles Krauthammer[viii].
This adept of King Saul cannot rely upon his
audience’s knowledge of the Bible, so he refers
to General Powell’s slaughter of routed Iraqi
troops at the end of the Gulf war. He quotes
Colin Powell saying of the Iraqi army: "First
we're going to cut it off, then we're going to
kill it”. For Krauthammer with his carefully
chosen quotes, multitudes of slain Arabs do not
qualify for the human pronoun ‘them’. They are
an ‘it’. In the last stage of the war in the
Gulf, immense numbers of retreating and disarmed
Iraqis were slaughtered in cold blood by the US
Air Force, their bodies buried by bulldozers in
the desert sand in huge and nameless mass
graves. The number of victims of this hecatomb
is estimated from one hundred thousand to half a
million. God alone knows their names.
Krauthammer wants to repeat
this feat in Palestine. ‘It’ is already cut off,
divided by the Israeli army into seventy pieces.
Now it is ready for the great kill. ‘Kill it!’
he calls with great passion. He must be worried
that the Persians will again stop the bloodbath
before the Mamilla Pool fills up. His worries
are our hopes.
[ii]
"The Vengeance of the
Jews Was Stronger Than Their Avarice":
Modern Historians and the Persian
Conquest of Jerusalem in 614 (published
in Jewish Social Studies Volume 4,
Number 2, Indiana University)
[v]
Here and there in the
Land of Israel, Amos Oz
[vii]
Haaretz,
28 April 2001
[viii]
Washington Post,
20 Apr 2001