Blogpost # M.12             SANCTUARY

[N.B. The context of this writing is not set in the Israeli-Hamas conflict nor is it, fundamentally intended as an observation of current events. Its salient message is the metaphysical existence and survival of a People, historically and eternally threatened with destruction.]

It may be useful to, initially, recite a brief and contextually significant, review of recorded history:

At the time Britain obtained control of the territory, then known as, “Palestine,” from the Ottoman Empire and chose to issue the historically impactful  Balfour Declaration (1917), declaring its support for “Zionism” and the legal establishment of a (National) home for the Jewish People, the territory had a majority Arab, Muslim population with Jewish and Christian minorities.

The British Declaration’s promise of a Jewish State, in their Biblical homeland, motivated hundreds of thousands of Jews, fleeing from Nazi prosecution and the horrific events of the “Holocaust,” to migrate to Palestine. Clashes between Palestine Arabs and Jews grew in tandem with the increase in Jewish migration. In 1947, Britain declared its exit from the territory, and as a consequence, the United Nations agreed to partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian Arab States. Many Palestinian Arabs rejected the U.N. plan. Thereafter, a Civil War ensued following Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, after which Five Arab Nations promptly attacked Israel.

It is contextually relevant to this capsulized recitation of history, that before the founding of the State of Israel, Jews, everywhere had been eternally defenseless against the cruel and baseless persecution and mass murder that impacted that people’s history for upwards of two thousand years. In every venue to which Jews were thereby obliged to flee, they established viable communities and thrived for periods of time, only, to be subsequently persecuted, expelled, attacked, and murdered. The Crusades, in the year 1096 killed thousands of Jews, likewise, did the religious-based Spanish Inquisition, the many riots in the Arabic Territories, regular Russian pogroms, and, pointedly, Nazi extermination camps (six million murders). History pitilessly and inarguably taught the Jewish people that their sole available route to avoiding extermination was, when and if possible, the existential sanctuary of an established, Jewish State, (Zionism); a Nation that had the defensive capability to fight back to ward off those (many) who desired their destruction.

It may, permissibly, be said that the 18^th Century watchwords relevant to the historic revolutionary establishment of the American Nation, were “Liberty” and “Independence.” The single operative (ancient) watchword of the Jewish People has, eternally, and fundamentally, been survival. The salient moral virtue of the State of Israel, regardless of temporal considerations of transitory, events, is its morally and historically appropriate, humanistic existence and pragmatic function as an ethnic and cultural Sanctuary.

-p.