#Suppression Of Activism In Favor Of Palestine

[msclaritea]

The U.S. Government and MSM, Caught Lying Again! Israel wants control of Tikitok to suppress Activism

#Israel IS TRYING TO BUY #TIKTOK

#Israel IS TRYING TO BUY #TIKTOK

#Israel IS TRYING TO BUY #TIKTOK

#Israel IS TRYING TO BUY #TIKTOK

[notebeans-galaxy]

twitter users have no reading comprehension skills ffs. someone called holland a zionist for referring to what's happening in Palestine as a conflict and for no other reason, because they believe calling it a conflict is a statement of neutrality or a "both sides" argument.

First off, the word conflict does not imply neutrality or siding with Israel. It doesn't imply anything other than that there's a disagreement between two sides, which there obviously is because Palestinians want to live as they always have and Israel wants to kill them and take over their land.

Second, and more broadly than just yall calling people zionists for saying children shouldn't have to die: yall need to learn the difference between a state and its citizens. Palestine does not exist as a unified state at the moment, and is run by two different organizations as well as Israel via occupation in the West Bank; the two Palestinian organizations that do any sort of governing are Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Generally, people who are pro-palestine understand that not all Palestinians are part of either of these organizations, but some of yall think any criticism of Hamas at all is pro-Israel and like. Idk how to tell you this but even many Palestinians don't like Hamas. Getting them out of power simply is not a priority while there's an ongoing genocide; that doesn't mean they should be immune to criticism.

When it comes to Israel, on the other hand, a lot of y'all don't seem to get that not all Israelis are zionists!!!! Shocker!!! Having an Israeli citizenship doesn't automatically make someone a Zionist. There are active anti-zionist organizations in Israel that advocate for the BDS movement, who have been opposing their government's occupation of Palestine for decades, who have been violently suppressed by said government for opposing the occupation of Palestine. There are several organizations of former IDF soliders (keep in mind Israel has mandatory conscription for all citizens regardless of gender) who were born there and raised Zionists, who became antizionist after witnessing the violence of the Israeli military against Palestinians firsthand; Israel's trying to crack down on anti-zionists even more now that they've aggressively stepped up the bombardment of Palestine, and, is rightfully being called fascist for it. There's Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Arabs/Palestinians make up 20% of Israel's population, over 1.8 million people. So those of you who think killing Israeli civilians is fine, actually? You're also in favor of killing Palestinians who didn't leave during the Nakba.

So technically, this conflict is actually more complicated than just Israel vs Palestine but not by much: It's Israel the state plus its supporters (Zionists), vs the two governments of Palestine, Palestinians, Arabs in general, a lot of Israelis, anti-zionists, anyone even remotely pro-palestine, and anyone who speaks out against Israel pretty much at all. It's Zionists vs everyone else. It is not Palestinians vs Israelis (and those two categories have overlap).

[thebombasticbooky]

I personally don’t blame anyone if they feel they must vote for Biden but I have zero patience for lionization of the man and painting not voting for him as ignorant or malicious because he did this stuff for us. If we’re going to do the bad faith game I could say it reeks of ‘got mine, fuck yours’, and demands Palestinians ignore the ongoing genocide, black people ignore the crime bill and his prosecutor VP, victims ignore the allegations, or they’re heartless morons who don’t care about trans people. Can’t we say the same thing? ‘If you’re arguing for voting for Biden, do me a favor and stop pretending like you care about Palestine, about black people, about victims.’ Where would that get us?

Why do we acknowledge voting especially on a federal level is at best damage control where it is not being actively suppressed and made not to matter not by the cynical mean leftists but by the very system through laws in the south and the electoral college, but find it a necessary hill to die on, to ostracize over, to divide? It’s always ‘voting is just the first step, voting is not the end all be all, don’t just vote’ and then you’re ready to burn bridges with those doing more because they don’t vote, or even just don’t talk highly enough of it. What is this achieving.

I’ll say it again, please just grit your teeth and vote for Biden…

[today-in-wwi]

Sarrail Sacked

Adolphe Guillaumat, Sarrail’s replacement, pictured after the war.

December 10 1917, Paris--By the end of 1917, Sarrail had accumulated some powerful enemies.  The Italians and Serbs thought he overstepped his bounds in Albania; the Greeks felt his heavy-handed treatment had suppressed recruitment efforts for the Greek army; and the British were annoyed that he had refused to relieve or reinforce the British sectors of the front after the British diverted troops away for the campaign in Palestine.  Furthermore, Clemenceau, the new French PM, was already at odds with the Socialists, and removing the socialist Sarrail would do little to further diminish his favorability with them.  Nevertheless, he tried to distance himself from Sarrail’s removal, ordering Pétain to do recall him to France.  Pétain, however, did not want to take the blame either, and correctly pointed out that his own remit stopped at the Adriatic.  As a result, Clemenceau had to issue the order himself.  On December 10, he sent a telegram to Sarrail, telling him: “I have the honor to inform you that, acting in the general interest, the Government has decided to order your return to France.”

The sacking was announced the next day in the French press, but Clemenceau made sure it was overshadowed by more stunning news, accusing former PM Caillaux (Madame Caillaux’s husband), a noted advocate of a separate peace with Germany, of treasonous activities and demanding a revocation of his parliamentary immunity.  The resulting scandal rocked the country for months and most soon forgot about Sarrail, except via his connection to Caillaux.  Several weeks later, a memorandum by Caillaux came to light in which he proposed that he and Sarrail would seize power, with Sarrail playing the role of Bonaparte after his return from Egypt.  While it seems unlikely that Sarrail had any knowledge of what Caillaux had in mind for him, Sarrail wisely decided to stay out of public view.

Clemenceau wanted to replace Sarrail with Franchet d’Espérey.  Although tempted, Franchet d’Espérey eventually declined, seeing the move as something of a demotion from commanding an Army Group in France.  Chosen instead was Adolphe Guillaumat, who was commanding the 2nd Army around Verdun.  An apolitical and generally respected general, his selection caused little uproar.

Today in 1916: Lloyd George Builds His Cabinet Today in 1915: Siege of Kut Begins in Earnest Today in 1914: Von der Goltz Dispatched to Turkey

Sources include: Alan Palmer, The Gardeners of Salonika

[evilelitest2]

100 Days of Trump Day 58: Foyle’s War

Welcome back to 100 days of Trump where we try to explain WTF happens in 2016 through 100 days, and today’s adventure is going to be much more of educational and be more a lesson to the left fighting against the right than the right itself.  Lets talk about Foyle’s War.

Foyle’s War is a British TV show about the home front of southern England in WWII and is about war as a concept, and how dangerously toxic war thinking is.  The show is very left wing and definitively anti Nazi in like...every way, but it is also very critical of the type of tactics employed by the allies in WWII, in particular those that violate the principles that they are supposedly fighting for.  The show delights in showing the various complications that emerge in war and tend to get papered over by future historians when talking about how glorious the whole thing was.  Some episodes themes include

The fate of the German refugees living in England at the time. 

The Treatment of Conscientious objectors and the role of pacifism in WWII

 The treatment and abandonment of those solider who lost limbs during the war 

The many pro Nazi political groups active during the War and what place freedom of expression/speech has in a democracy at War 

The role of women in the massively expanded workforce and how sexual assault, sexism, and slut shaming were all present at the time 

Early American opportunities who provide resources to the UK but 

The Communist Party in relation to the War, both as an early ally of the nazis and then as one of the strongest critics and opposes of the nazis that the goverment doesn’t like 

The role of the Irish in the War

The wide spread Anti Antisemitism among the British at the time

The treatment of Black American soldiers by the Brits and by the American white soldiers.  

The massive wide spread corruption among both the military and the men making money off the war. 

The resentment of post war British after losing everything

The treatment of Jews fleeing the Holocaust by the British

The problems about working with Stalin and the complications that come about when you ally with a mass murdering dictator who is also doing the most work fighting against the Nazis.

The morality of bombing German civilians, in particular the firebombing at Dresden 

The Treatment of Homosexuals during the War 

The morality of theft and draft dodging in war

and much much more

The show at no point says the war isn’t worth it, and concludes that the Nazis must be destroyed, but it rejects the notion that to do that one must turn a blind eye to the problems of ones own side.  

Alright that is all very good, but Eli, how does this relate to Trump?  

   Well, WWII in our culture is often seen as “The good war” where everything was simple ,there was a big evil bad guy, and the there were not moral complexities, the whole Repubican Trump vision of the world is very much based on rejection the notion of complexity in favor of virtuous simplicity, and Foyle’s War is a very good example of why that isn’t true, all wars, even the most justified, produces complicated problems.  Throughout the show people keep justifying all their decisions, however vile, as “Its war” or “You don’t want the Nazis to win” in order to suppress descent and it usually works, because people at war can rationalize almost anything.  And we are a country at war.  This is why decade long wars are always ad for democracy, because they by their very nature weaken democratic institutions, wartime psychology makes authoritarianism much more tempting and it makes accepting complexity much more difficult.  And this applies equally to the left btw, the moment we start falling into a war time “us vs. them” mentality, you immediately see all of the sacred cows of the left get slaughtered on the alter of war (French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Spanish Civil War, Chinese Revolution, Haitian Revolution).  War makes things simple, but that doesn’t mean that they are simple, and being able to admit fault in your own side makes your argument stronger, not weaker, because it allows clarity of vision.  Hell look at Israel/Palestine and you can see how a constant war mentality makes pretty much anything justified 

You can find the whole show on Netflix.  I would really recommend the episode on the British Fascists “The White Feather’ and how the Fascists use the fact that the allies won’t admit to fault as a recruiting ground to make themselves seem more reasonable, and if you listen to Trump supporters today, they will often find a few legitimate criticism of the current American system mixed in with all the incoherent rage and racist conspiracy theories.  Owning up to that makes their argument weaker, because we don’t look like we are hypocritical.  This was a major problem with Hillary Clinton, because the left was forced into a position where to fight a worse evil they had to defend a lesser one, which make them look like plutocratic hacks and a fucking billionaire was able to spin himself as a populist (isn’t that a laugh).  Fighting evil doesn’t justify evil, and it often only makes that evil stronger, remember the Reign of Terror just made Napoleon Possible.  

[thevividgreenmoss]

There is no doubt this moment calls for a powerful mobilization against the Trump administration and the ruling-class, white-supremacist interests it represents. But establishment Democrats' strategy of hitching their “resistance” campaign to Russiagate is misguided and dangerous. By demanding Trump prove he’s tough on Russia, the same Democrats who warn that Trump is dangerous and unhinged are asking him to oversee an even more bellicose foreign policy. The net effect has been to push the U.S. government to take a more confrontational stance toward Russia and other geopolitical foes and—ultimately—expand its military empire.

Whatever one thinks about the aims and scope of Russian interference, the evidence is undeniable: Democrats’ overwhelming focus on Russia has led directly to a significant—and measurable—military buildup. The $716 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2019 is massive, marking an $81 billion increase over 2017 (adjusted for inflation). The bill explicitly targets Russia and China. From the outset, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle cited the threat of Russian interference to argue in favor of the NDAA. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, gushed, “This bill continues the absolutely critical work of pushing back against President Putin.” Smith, who earlier that month called for an impeachment investigation of Trump, appeared eager and willing to hand the president a giant check for war.

...This confrontational positioning has ramifications far beyond Russia. In July 2017, for example, the House and Senate overwhelmingly voted in favor of bipartisan legislation that bundled sanctions against Russia with sanctions against Iran and North Korea—even at the risk of upending the nuclear deal with Iran. To justify this move, Democrats cited Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sen. Dianne Feinstein told The Intercept, “I just looked at the sanctions, and it’s very hard, in view of what we know just happened in this last election, not to move ahead with [sanctions].”

Meanwhile, other election scandals, from voter suppression to the fact the electoral college overrode the popular vote, garner far less scrutiny and outrage. As for collusion with foreign governments, leaders of the “resistance” aren’t exactly lining up to examine evidence that Trump’s transition team colluded with the Israeli government to defend illegal settlements in Palestine.

The nonstop specter of Russian “active measures” has all but ended any discussion of post-Snowden reforms to curtail dragnet government surveillance. The threat of our permanent national security state was, for decades, something the Left cared about. Now the FBI and CIA, we’re told by some ostensibly left media, are our allies.

There may well be something to the Russian influence story and the Trump administration should, of course, be held to standards of utmost transparency on this and every other matter. But Democrats and their loyal pundits are pegging their anti-Trump strategy to Russiagate, and not to the multitude of other scandals, precisely because Russia is a historic geopolitical foe—a convenient bad guy that can be invoked to demand the heightened national security state many centrist Democrats were already calling for. Some of these resistance heroes, like Sens. Chuck Schumer and Feinstein, brought us the war in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the war on Yemen and the intervention in Libya.

(x)

[socwinter]

“It happened to me the last evening in September, in Heidelberg, but it has also happened quite frequently in other cities in Europe and America and even here, in Spain, while talking with foreign journalists. Very often, at different times, with a monotony that only the differences in language and immediate purpose break, I have been forced to explain patiently, with as much clarity as possible, for educational purposes, that my country is a democracy, undoubtedly flawed, but not much more nor more seriously flawed than those of equivalent countries. I have gone to great lengths to present datelines, mention laws and changes, set useful comparisons. In New York I have had to remind people full of democratic ideals and condescension of the fact that my country, unlike theirs, does not accept the death penalty, nor sending minors to prison to serve life sentences, nor torturing prisoners in clandestine prisons.

Outside Spain, sometimes, one is forced to teach history lessons and even geography lessons. Up until not so long ago, a Spanish citizen had to explain, in spite of being aware that the odds were that he wouldn’t be listened to, that the Basque Country is not even remotely like Kurdistan, nor Palestine, nor the Nicaragua jungle where Sandinists used to resist against the dictator Somoza. We had to explain that the Basque Country is among the most advanced territories in Europe, with one of the highest standards of living, and that it has a degree of self-government and fiscal sovereignty considerably higher than any state or federal region in the world. The answer used to be, at best, a polite but skeptical smile.

A big part of the educated opinion, both in Europe and America, and even more among the academic and journalistic elites, would rather hold a bleak view of Spain, maintain a lazy attachment to the worst stereotypes, especially the one about the legacy of the dictatorship, as well as a bullfight-like propensity to civil war and bloodshed. The cliché is so captivating that is unapologetically held by people that are convinced of really loving our country. They want us to be bullfighters, heroic guerrillas, inquisitors, victims. They love us so much that they hate it when we question the willful blindness upon which they build their love. They love the idea of a rebel, Fascism-fighting Spain so much that they are not ready to accept that Fascism ended many years ago. They love what they see as our quaint backwardness so much that they feel insulted if we explain to then hoy much we have changed in the last 40 years: that we don’t attend Mass, that women have an active presence in every social sphere, that same-sex marriage was accepted with an astonishing speed and ease, that we have integrated, without outbursts of xenophobia and in just a few years, several million immigrants.

The other night, in Heidelberg, on the eve of the notorious 1st of October, in the middle of a pleasant dinner with several professors and translators, I had to explain once again, and my vehemence helped me overcome my despondency. A German female professor told me that someone from Catalonia had just assured her that Spain was still “Francoland”. I asked her, as nicely as I could, how would she feel if someone said to her that Germany was still Hitlerland. She felt immediately insulted. With as much calm as I managed and in an educational tone, I clarified what no citizen from another democratic country in Europe is ever forced to clarify: that Spain is a democracy, as worthy and as flawed as Germany, for instance, and as far away from totalitarianism; even more so, if we read the latest election results obtained by the far right. If, as her Catalan informer said, we are still in Francoland, how is it possible for Catalonia to have its own educational system, a Parliament, a police force, a public television and a public radio, an international institute for the dissemination of Catalan language and culture? Acknowledging the singularity of Catalonia was such a priority for the new Spanish democracy, I told her, that the Generalitat was re-established even before voting the Constitution. What an odd Francoist country, one that suppress Catalan language and culture so much that it chooses a Catalan-spoken film to represent Spain at the Oscars.

Anybody that has lived or is living outside our country knows about the precariousness of our international presence, the financial strangulation and the political meddling that have so often thwarted the relevance of the Cervantes Institute, the lack of an ambitious, long-term foreign policy and of a national framework agreement that doesn’t change with every change of government. The Spanish democracy hasn’t been able to dispel age-old stereotypes. Basque terrorists and their propagandists took good advantage of them for many years, precisely the years when we were at our most vulnerable, when the most murderous gunmen were still being granted asylum in France.

Therefore, the Catalan secessionists have not needed a big effort, nor a big sophisticated campaign in the media, to turn in their favor, in the international opinion, the so-called “narrative”. They had succeeded even without the dedicated co-operation of the Ministry of the Interior, that sent forces from the National Police and the Civil Guard to appear as extras in the bitter spectacle of our discredit. Few things make a foreign correspondent in Spain happier than the opportunity to corroborate our exoticism and our brutality. Even the renowned Jon Lee Anderson, who lives or has lived among us, is deliberately lying, with no qualms, aware that he is lying and aware of the effect his lies will have, when he writes in The New Yorker that the Civil Guard are a “paramilitary” force.

As a Spanish citizen, with all my fervent Europeanism and my love of travel, I feel hopelessly doomed to melancholy, for a number of reasons. One of them is the disrepute the democratic system in my country is in due to ineptitude, corruption and political disloyalty. Add to that, the fact that the European and cosmopolitan world in which people like me look at ourselves and which we have so painstakingly worked to resemble, always prefers to look down upon us: however carefully we try to explain ourselves, however assiduously we learn languages, so that they can better understand our useless explanations.”

Also in Spanish (x)

[universalessays-blog]

Armed Conflict and Social Work Research Paper has been published on http://research.universalessays.com/sociology-research-paper/social-work-research-paper/armed-conflict-and-social-work-research-paper/

New Post has been published on http://research.universalessays.com/sociology-research-paper/social-work-research-paper/armed-conflict-and-social-work-research-paper/

Armed Conflict and Social Work Research Paper

This sample Armed Conflict and Social Work Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Like other free research paper examples it is not a custom research paper. If you need help with writing your assignment, please use research paper writing services and buy a research paper on any topic.

Abstract

An underresearched area, this research paper is aimed at understanding the complexity of the impact of armed conflict on individuals and communities in the context of social work. For this purpose, key definitions, the scale of those affected by the phenomenon, and its impact are considered. Issues related to researching armed conflict are highlighted. The relevance of social work support during different facets of armed conflict follows, including the dilemmas that this type of intervention raises for social workers. Throughout the text, the international character of armed conflict is emphasized, and examples are given from different parts of the world.

Outline

Introduction

Contextualized Background Information

Experiencing Armed Conflict

Long-Term Impact

Positive Outcomes of Armed Conflict

Researching Armed Conflict

The Relevance of Social Work to the Humanitarian Activities Undertaken in Armed Conflict Contexts

The Impact of Armed Conflict on Social Workers

Training and Educational Initiatives

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Making sense of the significance and implications of armed conflict for social work requires clarity about what constitutes armed conflict. Armed conflict is a political conflict in which arms are used to attack the other side, defined as ‘the enemy,’ and to defend one’s own side. Although this is the definition of war, the concept of war is usually kept for an armed conflict between two or more countries, while the term ‘civil war’ is used to describe a war within one nation or country.

Armed conflict is not a useful term for describing hostilities between two groups in which arms are not applied, but which are nevertheless powerful, and may be either the outcome of an armed conflict, or lead to one in the future. Most conflicts between ethnic minorities and majorities, coexisting religions, and travelers and nontravelers do not result in armed conflict most of the time, but may plant the seed for such a conflict in the future. The war in the then Yugoslavia in the 1990s provides a good example of a political conflict that simmered for 50 years before it erupted into outright war. This research paper considers the relevance of social work support during different facets of armed conflict, including the dilemmas that intervening poses for social workers. It emphasizes the international character of armed conflict, giving examples from different parts of the world.

Contextualized Background Information

There are 15.3 million refugees of war from 21 countries, according to the United Nations (UN) Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2012). Refugees are people who have left their own country due to a violent conflict and 10.5 million of them are looked after by the UNHCR, while 4.8 million of these are looked after by the UN Refugees Welfare Agency in the Middle East refugee camps based in Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) where they have been since 1949.

Twenty-seven million people are recognized as internally displaced people (IDP). They live mainly in their country of origin, but away from where they lived when the conflict began, which they left due to the impact of an ongoing internal war (civil war) or occupation by another country. This brings the total number of refugees and IDP to 42 million, likely to be an underestimate, because many of those leaving in a hurry in the chaotic situation of an armed conflict, are often not counted and do not declare themselves as either IDP or refugees.

Asylum seekers are people who declare themselves as refugees, live outside their country, and whose status has not been confirmed as refugees by the authorities in the country in which they reside. The total number of asylum seekers is not known, as not every country releases this information, and also because some of them enter a country illegally, or without the knowledge of the authorities. Recent information from the UNHCR (2012) states that in 2012, there were 108 912 asylum seekers in industrialized countries, a rise of 25% from the 2009 to 2010 figures.

Their treatment in the host countries and country of origin should follow the Geneva Convention (established in 1951). It should also follow the UN Convention and Protocol (1967) on the status of refugees, endorsed by the UN, although not signed by all countries (see Ramon and Magljlic, 2012). In reality, this is not always the case, especially for IDP or asylum seekers, where each country decides how they should be treated.

Experiencing Armed Conflict

Some of the most negative outcomes of armed conflict appear daily on television screens. Losses of many types characterize the impact of armed conflict, such as loss of life, limbs, family members and friends, animals, property, or items of sentimental value. The loss of the sense of security and of future prospects for many of the survivors of an armed conflict may take a very long time to heal, and in many instances remain unhealed and potentially lead to further conflict in future.

Economic devastation is often a direct outcome of an armed conflict, in which the means of production have been destroyed, leading to supply shortages of food, water, and means of construction. The lack of food and shelter leads to an increased rate of illness and death among the more vulnerable population groups, such as children, women, and old people (Watchlist, 2003 (Web site); ECHO, 2013 (Web site); Doucet and Denov, 2012; Krill, 2000).

The destruction of medical facilities and the disappearance of health personnel lead to a high rate of disability and increased mortality among those wounded. The long-term physical, psychological, and social impact on those affected has been documented (e.g., Doucet and Denov, 2012). These include the long-term impact on women, Beah’s (2007) personal account of being forced to be a child soldier, and Nuttman-Shwartz et al.’s (2011) account of the long-term impact of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Long-Term Impact

Most of the current ongoing armed conflicts, across all continents, have their roots in the past history of the communities engaged in them. For instance, the current Syrian conflict has its roots in the history of the relationships between the Alawite minority groups and the Sunni majority; the aftermath of the war in Iraq is marked by the renewed conflict between the Sunni and the Shia communities, which has also been at the background of the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.

It is the interpretation of the past, and what is remembered of it by those who witnessed the conflict and subsequent generations who reinterpret the past in the light of the present, that counts and makes the differences between looking for another round of armed conflict or its prevention. Memories are always constructed, although often individual memories are suppressed in favor of memories perceived by those in power as suitable for collective consumption (Halbwachs, 1992).

Social work practitioners need to be aware of these issues in their work with individuals and communities, to enable individuals to resolve their memories that conflict with the collective injunction. For example, in Bosnia, Moslem women experiencing rape in the 1990s were not allowed to mention this experience due to the wish to repress the assumed guilt of their menfolk in being unable to prevent the rape (Zavirsek, 2008: p. 162).

Considerable efforts have gone into collectively remembering some conflicts, such as the Second World War, the Holocaust of Jews and Gypsies in Europe, and beyond these groups at that time, or in subsequent events of a similar nature. Moreover, some other conflicts, no less horrendous or far reaching, are not equally collectively commemorated, e.g., the Armenian genocide and the Biafra war.

The wish to remember, and for such events to be etched into the collective memory, is understandable in the light of the magnitude of what has happened (Zavirsek, 2008). Furthermore, where the underlying reasons for the conflict have not been resolved, and where people continue to lead an uprooted life, it is likely that the conflict will resurface, as is the case in the Middle East, where a third generation of those who left Palestine in 1948 live in refugee camps, do not have full citizen rights in the countries where the camps are located, live on UNWRA financial support, have poor future prospects, and are highly unlikely to return to the land of Palestine–Israel, a country they have never been to, but which has acquired a mythical significance for them, as it did for Jews for over 2000 years.

At the individual level, there is a range beginning with people who wish not to forget any element of the conflict, ending in those who wish to forget all of it, with people who have nightmares connected to it to those for whom it does not matter in the middle. PTSD is a recognized psychiatric diagnosis, attributed to people suffering from reliving selected situations of the conflict and finding it difficult to continue with their ordinary life (Nuttman-Shwartz et al., 2011). Enabling to share significant memories both collectively and individually is an important part of community social work/development work in rebuilding a community impacted by armed conflict, helping to cement community cohesiveness. Yet, carrying out this work without rekindling the wish for revenge and reliving traumatic events presents a challenge to social workers.

Positive Outcomes of Armed Conflict

Side by side with the high level of mindless brutality that war unleashes, a kinder human approach during armed conflicts and their aftermath can be observed. Positive outcomes include in-group and outer-group solidarity; instances of human generosity; readiness to risk one’s own life for the sake of the lives of others; tireless work toward conflict resolution and peace building; health and social reforms that would not have taken place without being stimulated by the wish that something positive will come out of such negative events; and creative art (see L’Art en Guerre, 2013).

Specific examples include Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham (who was a social worker) revising their psychoanalytically oriented work with children following the lessons learned from their involvement in the experience of mass evacuation of British children during the Second World War (Freud and Burlingham, 1943). This has led to more caution in considering moving children from home when a parent becomes ill and unable to look after them, to much greater focus on the family as a unit during family consultation services (Felsman, 2001). The recognition that many of the behaviors displayed by the evacuated children were normal reactions to abnormal situations helped to reduce the detection of pathology, and diagnosis of these children as suffering from forms of mental illness.

When Sarajevo’s psychiatric hospital was bombed out of existence during the Bosnian war, the option of not to rebuild it was accepted, enabling the more radical change of the mental health system there to proceed and move it from being a heavily institutionalized and segregating system to one with a number of community services (Kucukalic et al., 2005).

The value of an individual acting courageously to raise awareness and encourage international organizations to take the necessary steps has been exemplified by Malala Yousafzia recently. Aged 14 years, she was shot in the SWAT Valley of Pakistan in October 2012 by the Taliban because she protested against their policy of excluding girls from schooling in Pakistan. The shooting was not only condemned internationally, but also resulted in expressed mass solidarity with her in Pakistan and elsewhere (Amnesty International Newsletter, November 2012: pp. 10–17). She has survived the shooting, but had to pay the price of emigrating from her country to the United Kingdom. Malala has continued her activities for girls’ education, and has received during 2013 the International Peace Prize for Youth.

Researching Armed Conflict

Research into armed conflict is needed to achieve better conceptual understandings, give meaning to people’s experiences of it, and develop strategies for preventing the next round of armed conflict and the harm to the population from the ensuing outcomes. Yet, carrying out methodologically sound research is not an easy task. There is potential physical risk to researchers and those participating in the research during an acute conflict stage. Risk is also heightened because such research touches on highly sensitive and emotionally charged issues.

Researchers of human behavior are likely to use qualitative methods that encompass their own values and biases (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). This may introduce a lack of ‘objectivity’ that becomes multiplied in armed conflicts, when sympathy with one side provides the credentials that enable the researcher who is asking for permission to carry out research to do so. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the themes requiring research is difficult to encompass through simple methodology and methods, while researching in harsh conditions calls for simplicity.

Although impartiality is unattainable, commitment to uphold universal ethical rules and reflect on one’s own biases go some way to ensure that this research is carried out ethically (Kelly, 2004). Two types of research can be identified: research aimed at better understanding the context and stakeholders’ positions and evaluation of policies and interventions, including social work interventions.

Despite these difficulties, examples of sound research in relation to values and methodology exist, some of which are outlined below. Miljenovic and Zganec (2012) researched the views of local residents in a region of Croatia that showed signs of community disintegration after the 1990s war there. They developed a framework of the factors of community life that mattered to the residents, and interviewed key people representing these elements. Deteriorating economic development topped the list, followed by dysfunctional social relations between the ethnic groups that were leading a separate coexistence, difficulties in the way public institutions were functioning, and crisis of local government. Meanwhile, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were active, but internal NGOs were operating in an uncoordinated fashion that lacked continuity. On the basis of this research, the authors proposed how community building could proceed.

A survey of 10 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America, undertaken recently by the World Health Organization (Fisher et al., 2011), highlights the difficulties that adolescents face in war situations. In total, 4868 adolescents from armed conflict areas participated in these studies, and although they come from different contexts, the similarities in the findings are striking. The findings include high exposure to traumatic events, high to severe levels of PTSD symptoms, varied therapeutic responses, and the impact of the context on the severity of difficulties experienced and adequacy of responses. For example, those who became child soldiers had not only experienced traumatic events, but also scored much higher than the clinical cutoff point on depression and PTSD scales. Much needed evaluation of policy implementation is provided in a recent study of UNCHR community empowerment projects in Sierra Leone (Skran, 2012).

Only a small number of studies looked at the impact of armed conflict on social workers (e.g., Campbell and McCrystal, 2005; Ramon et al., 2006; Baum and Ramon, 2010), although this group is highly likely to be impacted by armed conflicts. Al Mikhamresh et al. (2012), researching social work activities with Iraqi refugees in Jordan, highlight the need for politically competent social work practice, in the sense of having to understand well the ‘political map’ in the situation and use this understanding to benefit clients. Guru (2012) refers to the dilemma of the researcher attempting to work with families of young Moslem men accused of engaging in terrorist activities. This research sympathizes with the families and wishes to understand better their context, but is not sure how ethical it is to research such families at the crisis stage in which their lives are embedded, while the researchers simultaneously experience difficulties in getting ethical permission to carry out this research on the grounds of potential risk to them.

The Relevance of Social Work to the Humanitarian Activities Undertaken in Armed Conflict Contexts

Local social workers in an armed conflict context are usually part of the workforce providing different types of support, working alongside doctors and administrators, and local and international organizations. At the time of an acute conflict, they will provide any help they can – food, shelter, accompanying people to medical services, taking children left without parents to a safer place, and sharing in their grief.

Support at the postacute stage may differ. At times, this focuses on economic support, including rebuilding local enterprises, emotional support in the form of formal and informal counseling, bereavement work, referring survivors to disability services, reconnecting people, supporting people to go back to their original geographic or ancestral location, and enabling memory work to take place (Zavirsek, 2008). The social work response needs to be tailored to the variations in the reactions to the traumas experienced during an armed conflict in a given population. Focus on community and group work is often more effective than individual work in increasing solidarity and mutual support. Good practice examples range from Northern Ireland to South Africa (O’Brien, 2003) to the development of advocacy practice centers in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine (Moshe-Gorodofsky, 2012), and memory work with three generations in Chile (Zavirsek, 2008). Doucet and Denov (2012) describe the work of social workers in Sierra Leone with women returnees from the civil war. In this, the clients were engaged in agricultural work alongside their social workers, in a situation in which these women were excommunicated by their own community and the social workers too had to find additional source of subsistence to their meager salary (Doucet and Denov, 2012).

Lindsay (2008) describes the work carried out by Palestinian school social workers who work with school children, their parents, and teachers when children are arrested, or who have to spend hours at checkpoints just to get to their workplace. Israeli social workers outlined what it meant to provide group mediation and emotional support to settlers evacuated from the Gaza strip, despite their vocal objection to this move (Nuttman-Shwartz, 2008).

Being local is an advantage in terms of knowing what is available and how to behave, an essential element of offering emotional and social support. Yet, being local can be a disadvantage when a civil war is raging, as it will be assumed that the social worker would side with the position taken by her or his national/tribal group, and hence defined as either part of ‘us’ or of ‘the enemy,’ and treated as such. Wairire (2008) describes such a situation in Kenya, where social workers try to mediate between tribes engaged in war on territory and cattle, and may risk their lives as a result. Working for international humanitarian agencies often entails carrying out social work activities, such as rapid assessment, responding to the need for immediate relief to a traumatic war event, and distributing food, medicine, and shelter. At the postconflict stage, the complexity to be confronted is even more demanding, including displaced people with little to do, buy, or sell, and worried about the people left behind, sick, or disabled.

Maglijlic-Holicek and Rasidagic (2008) have looked at the role of international NGOs in Bosnia-Herzogovina during the armed conflict there in the 1990s and its aftermath. Being a major tool in the application of the Dayton Peace Agreement, alongside the UN Peace Corps, they brought a new language, one of Western policy terms, and favored people who spoke English regardless of their other qualities or lack of them, over local people with the qualities and experience required for welfare work. The usual pitfalls in understanding local conditions, power games, and the diversified needs of the local population, played an additional role in making these overseas workers ineffective in their activities.

The Impact of Armed Conflict on Social Workers

Social workers participate in armed conflicts as both citizens and professionals. Like any other citizen, they too, experience increased physical and psychological vulnerability during the conflict. Yet, being citizens makes them more sensitive to the plight of specific groups, and alert to dangers that their loved ones may be facing while they are working as professionals. They may be committed to one of the two sides in the conflict.

As professionals, their mandate is similar to that of doctors – namely, to support their clients, and those people who become their clients during the armed conflict, regardless of the political affiliation of the latter. Working during a conflict may be difficult, in terms of physical danger, in being exposed to more acute losses and suffering than is normally the case (e.g., being the bearer of bad news to families), lacking necessary resources, or having to provide services to people whose views they object to. They may at times feel that they have to provide an example to others who are more vulnerable than they are (e.g., Palestinian school counselors, as described by Lindsay, 2008) or rise to the challenges that the conflict has provided and with that an opportunity to acquire a higher level of skills while highlighting to the general public the centrality of the social work contribution (Ramon, 2004; Baum and Ramon, 2010). For some social workers, the solutions adopted included deflecting the political nature of their work (e.g., mental health social workers in Belfast, as described by Campbell and McCrystal (2005)).

This context inevitably contains ethical dilemmas, which social workers may or may not be aware of. Cemlyn (2008) and Cemlyn and Nye (2012), looking at working with asylum seekers and travelers in England, indicate a range of such dilemmas resulting from the misfit of English legislation and policy and social work values. A minority of social workers are also engaged politically in campaigning for the values they believe in. Doing so from a platform of social work values is challenging, as highlighted in Moshe-Gorodofsky and Yudelevich’s (2012) recent Israeli example.

Training and Educational Initiatives

Training and education offer the possibility of preparing service providers to offer targeted service for vulnerable groups caught in armed conflict. The trainers must be responsive to local conditions and sensitivities. For example, Moshe-Gorodofsky (2012) reports on a program aimed at preparing community advocates in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine as volunteers who respond to citizens experiencing the negative outcomes of armed conflict. The program enables the advocates to meet with their counterparts from the three countries in a neutral location, a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet the enemy as human beings who share values and ways of working with each other. Butler (2005) has led a fieldwork placement on a social work degree in Plymouth, in which students worked as social work trainees with refugees. Using a community development and welfare rights approach, this enabled students to have a much better understanding of the issues faced by refugees, develop empathy and demonstrate it, and try to resolve individual issues within the limitations imposed in the UK system on what refugees can and cannot do. This placement enabled students to test their adherence to the values taught on the degree course, and acquire the necessary knowledge and skills for this type of work.

Lindsay (2008) developed a training program for school counselors in the PA in Ramallah with local educators. This project enabled a 2-year training program for people from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds to acquire knowledge and skills of providing a social work service to children and their teachers in an area where daily confrontation took place with Israeli soldiers and settlers. As the children were also engaged in protest activities against the occupation, and the workers were experiencing frequent difficulties in getting to the workplace through the roadblocks manned by the Israeli army, the newly qualified workers had to grapple with the issues that working under these complex conditions raised.

Examples of encountering obstacles related to the armed conflict and attempting to overcome them include a period of not being paid salaries due to the temporary withdrawal of EU funding because of an escalation of the political conflict in 2007. This affected directly the participants in the training who were in many cases the sole bread winners of their families. They considered taking strike action, but decided against it because of the importance of the training to them (Lindsay, 2008: pp. 233–234). Many of the participants were often stopped at border crossing by the Israeli army and it took them a long time to get to work, but put up with this obstacle as an example to the children they were working with to strive toward a normal, nonviolent life as much as possible (Lindsay, 2008).

These examples raise the question of what input is needed within the basic qualification for social workers and in postqualifying programs on armed conflicts. This question is particularly pertinent given the universal lack of attention to this issue in most well-established social work programs, despite attempts to encourage engaging with it (Duffy et al., 2013). The main reason usually given for this blatant lack is the already burdened curriculum, which is a polite way of saying that this issue is perceived as being of lesser importance than those already in the curriculum, and constitutes a denial of the significance of armed and political conflicts to an ever increasing number of countries across the globe.

The few existing initiatives are located in countries that are in a postacute armed conflict stage or have become more acutely aware of the impact of a long simmering conflict. An example of an initiative developed in the peace-building phase is provided by the school of social work at Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland (Duffy, 2006; Campbell and Duffy, 2008). Service users who have experienced the impact of this conflict (locally known as ‘The Troubles’) were invited to address social work students in their introduction to the social work course. The invitation was to a local voluntary sector organization that works with families affected by ‘The Troubles.’ A well worked-out protocol was developed relating to the aims of this initiative, how to approach the students over the several seminars that were focused on this issue, what to tell or not tell about oneself, preparing the students who come increasingly from the two sides of the conflict, and how to evaluate the outcomes. This has been a successful initiative to judge by students’ and presenters’ comments (Duffy, 2006). However, social workers who have been affected in this conflict both as citizens and as professionals have not been invited to address the students thus far.

Conclusion

This research paper has highlighted the complexity of the issues entailed in social workers’ understanding of and responses to the needs of populations experiencing armed conflict and included the impact of such conflicts on social workers themselves. The text covered research evidence, and the need for further research was also identified.

The insufficient attention paid to the impact of armed conflict in social work, and in social work education, and good practice examples were identified. Given that armed conflicts are part of the reality of the twenty-first century, it is hoped that the social work profession, its researchers, and educators will move from paying lip service to this crucial issue to give it the centrality it deserves. Likewise, there is a place for multidisciplinary work between social workers and other relevant disciplines to occur soon. In the context of armed conflict, social work knowledge takes key concepts concerning trauma, displacement, rebuilding communities, and research methods from psychology and sociology in particular. Practitioners work closely with varied health practitioners and educators and planners.

Epidemiologists, economists, and system managers also play an important role in different stages of an armed conflict. In meeting other disciplines on this issue, the role of social workers is both to inform and be informed, to decide which of the contributions of the other disciplines is of particular relevance to social work, as well as whether and how it fits social work values. An interesting example is provided by Dan Bar-On in his seminal article on the silence of psychologists as a discipline when faced with armed conflict (Bar-On, 2001). He argues that in this case, the allegiance to science, perceived as objective and beyond biases, prevents psychologists from taking a moral stand as well as a knowledge-building one. This research paper helps to understand similar positions taken by social workers, social work researchers, and social work educators, and understand how such a reaction does not fit the values that social work stands for, because these include social workers’ defense of human rights. Compared to other social sciences disciplines, social workers’ activities in armed conflict situations, and the research led by social work researchers on this issue, are far less known outside the discipline, calling for more effort to be put into wider dissemination of existing understandings of the issues entailed and evidence accumulated within social work.

Bibliography:

Al Mikhamresh, S., Saneus, S., Neocleous, G., 2012. The need for political competence social work practice: lessons learned from a collaborative project on Iraqi refugees – the case of Jordan. British Journal of Social Work 42 (2), 1074–1092.

Amnesty International Newsletter, November 2012, pp.10–17.

Bar-On, D., 2001. The silence of psychologists or why there is no “post-Zionist” psychology? Political Psychology 22 (2), 331–345.

Baum, N., Ramon, S., 2010. Professional growth in turbulent times. Journal of Social Work 13, 163��182.

Beah, I., 2007. A Long Way Gone. Harper Perennial, London.

Butler, A., 2005. A strengths approach to building futures: UK students and refugees together. Community Development Journal 40 (2), 147–157.

Campbell, J., Duffy, J., 2008. Social work, political violence and citizenship in Northern Ireland. In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 57–76.

Campbell, J., McCrystal, P., 2005. Mental health social work and the troubles in Northern Ireland: a study of practitioner experiences. Journal of Social Work 5 (2), 173–190.

Cemlyn, S.J., 2008. Social work education responses to political conflict issue in the UK. In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 189–213.

Cemlyn, S.J., Nye, M., 2012. Asylum seekers young people: social work value conflicts in negotiating age assessment in the UK. International Social Work, Special Issue on Armed Conflict 55 (5), 675–688.

Doucet, D., Denov, M., 2012. The power of sweet words: local forms of intervention with war-affected women in rural Sierra Leone. International Social Work, Special Issue on Armed Conflict 55 (5), 612–628.

Duffy, J., 2006. Participating and Learning: Citizen Involvement in Social Work Education in the Northern Ireland Context. Social Care Institute for Excellence/ Social Work Northern Ireland Social Care Council, London.

Duffy, J., Ramon, S., Guru, S., Cemlyn, S., Lindsay, J., Shwartz-Nutman, O. Opportunities and challenges in developing a social work curriculum on political conflict. European Journal of Social Work 16, forthcoming.

Felsman, K., 2001. Young children in complex emergencies. Reading for Child and Youth Care Workers. Issue 34 online.

Fisher, J.R.W., Cabral de Mello, M., Izutsu, T., Vijayakumar, L., Belfer, M., Omigbodun, O., 2011. Adolescent mental health in resources-constrained settings: a review of the evidence in the nature, prevalence and determinants of common mental health problems and their management in primary health care. International Journal of Psychiatry 57 (SI), 57–78.

Freud, A., Burlingham, D., 1943. War and Children. Medical War Books, New York.

Guru, S., 2012. Reflections on research: families affected by counter-terrorism in the UK. International Social Work, Special Issue on Armed Conflict 55 (5), 689–703.

Halbwachs, M., 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago University Press, Chicago.

Kelly, M., 2004. Qualitative evaluation research. In: Seale, C., Gobo, G., Gubrium, J., Silverman, D. (Eds.), Qualitative Research Practice. Sage Publications, London, pp. 463–477.

Krill, F., 2000. The Elderly in Situations of Armed Conflict. International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva.

Kucukalic, A., Dzubar-Kulemovic, A., Ceric, I., Jacobsson, L., Bravo-Mehmedbasic, A., Preibe, S., 2005. Regional collaboration in reconstruction of mental health services in Bosnia. Psychiatric Services 56 (11), 1445–1447.

Lincoln, Y.S., Guba, E.G., 1985. Naturalistic Inquiry. Sage Publications, London.

Lindsay, J., 2008. Dilemmas, opportunities, obstacles and achievements in training Palestinian social care workers and social workers. In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 217–244.

Maglijlic-Holicek, R.A., Rasidagic, E.K., 2008. The role of NGOs in societies facing war: experiences from Bosnia and Herzogovina. In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 123–146.

Miljenovic, A., Zganec, N., 2012. Disintegration and possibilities for rebuilding of war-affected communities: the Vojnic municipality case. International Social Work, Special Issue on Armed Conflict 55 (5), 645–661.

Moshe-Gorodofsky, M., 2012. Community-based human rights advocacy practice and peace education. International Social Work, Special Issue on Armed Conflict 55 (5), 740–753.

Moshe-Gorodofsky, M., Yudelevich, D., 2012. Organising across-identity group division in the context of acute political conflict – operation cast lead. British Journal of Social Work 42, 1060–1073.

Musee d’Art modern de la Ville de Paris-Musee, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2013. L’Art en Guerre: France 1930–1947: From Picasso to Dubuffet. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao visited 21st August 2013.

Nuttman-Shwartz, O., 2008. Working with “others” in a context of political conflict: is it possible to support clients whose views you disagree with? In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 36–56.

Nuttman-Shwartz, O., Dekel, R., Tuval-Mashiach, T., 2011. Post-traumatic stress and growth following forced relocation. British Journal of Social Work 41 (3), 486–501.

O’Brien, C.R., 2003. Community Development and Post Conflict Resolution: An Examination of the Potential for Complementary Strategies in Post-Settlement Contexts, with Special References to Northern Ireland and South Africa. Ph.D. thesis. University of Bradford, Bradford.

Ramon, S., 2004. The Impact of the 2nd Intifada on Israeli Arab and Jewish social workers. European Journal of Social Work 7 (3), 285–303.

Ramon, S. (Ed.), 2008. Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham.

Ramon, S., Magljlic, R.A., 2012. Social work, political conflict and displacement. In: Lyons, K., et al. (Eds.), The Sage International Handbook of Social Work. Sage Publications, London, pp. 311–325.

Ramon, S., Zavirsek, D. (Eds.), 2012. Armed conflict. International Social Work 55, 2 (special issue).

Ramon, S., Campbell, J., Lindsay, J., McCrystal, P., Baidun, N., 2006. The impact of political conflict on social work: experiences in Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine. British Journal of Social Work 36 (3), 435–450.

Skran, C.M., 2012. Research on UNCHR Community Empowerment Projects in Sierra Leone. UNCHR Policy development evaluation services. UNCHR, Geneva.

Wairire, G., 2008. The challenge of social work in the Kenyan context of political conflict. In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 101–122.

Zavirsek, S., 2008. Social work as memory work in times of political conflict. In: Ramon, S. (Ed.), Social Work in the Context of Political Conflict. Venture Press and IASSW, Birmingham, pp. 147–168.

See also:

Sociology Research Paper Topics

Sociology Research Paper

Social Work Research Paper

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Palestinian-American historian, journalist and author, Dr. Ramzy Baroud, speaks on his upcoming book, just-released digital media project – Palestine in Motion – and why Palestinian history has to be urgently retold. ***** When it comes to Palestine, we often see a dichotomy between mainstream media platforms – which are essentially molded out of a Zionist narrative – and a counter-narrative, produced by a young generation of highly educated Palestinians which try to reach new audiences, tear down the limits imposed by the dominant rhetoric and take center stage. This generation of intellectuals tries to define its role in the aftermath of the Oslo fiasco, now that it has become clear that the US-sponsored ‘Peace Process’ as the sole criterion of conflict resolution is dead and gone. The Internet has created favorable conditions to spread this counter-narrative on a journalistic level, but there is still much work to be done, especially on a deeper level. Palestinian intellectuals cannot confine themselves to reporting mere facts, because the Israeli narrative is based on a cruel but very elementary concept: rewriting history in order to completely erase Palestinians. Is it possible to act on two fronts? Can we combine the journalistic experience and the historian’s analysis? What should be done in order to neutralize the Israeli propaganda and its attempts to cancel the Palestinian point of view and even the very existence of a Palestinian people? We asked these questions to Dr. Ramzy Baroud, writer, the author of three books and a contributor to many more. As a journalist and a columnist, he has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Palestine Studies from the European Centre for Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter and his approach – at times, is that of a historian. Romana Rubeo:  There has always been a clear distinction between historians and journalists; the former tend to consider the big picture, while journalists tend to report from what we could call an “annalistic approach”.  How do you combine these two perspectives? Ramzy Baroud:  In the case of Palestine, as in other national struggles that are rooted in the past, history is at the heart of the story. Many people tend to have short-term memory when the rights of the Palestinians are in question. This feeds quite well into the Zionist narrative, which has aimed to displace Palestinian history altogether, and replace it with something entirely different, albeit a construct; a falsified history. The latter is not my own conclusion, but a fact, reported, although timidly, in Israeli media (almost never in US mainstream media). Although files relating to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 are still hidden in Israeli archives (they should have been de-classified a long time ago), one document, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has escaped the keen eye of the Israeli censor: file number GL-18/17028. This file shows the process of how Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, resorted to Zionist historians in the early 1950s to forge an alternative story as to how Palestinian refugees were expelled. He chose the most convincing one, and that became ‘history’. In other words, he rewrote history. This rewriting of history is ongoing and has tainted the present as well. The Israeli narrative has aimed to create a pseudo reality from the very beginning. This alternative reality continues to define every aspect of the so-called ‘conflict’ in Palestine.  Thanks to the willingness of western mainstream media, Israel has managed to paint itself as a victim, not an aggressor, and a besieged nation, not a colonial military occupier. How can journalists, then, unearth the seemingly complex truth, without understanding history – not the version conveniently fashioned by Israel, but the history of pain, suffering and the ongoing struggle of the Palestinians? To report on Palestine and Israel, without fully fathoming the historical roots of the conflict, is to merely be content with providing a superficial account of what ‘both sides’ are saying, which often favors the Israeli side and demonizes the Palestinians. The fact is that it is such shallow reporting that makes the arguably most reported story in the world, the least understood. RR: You said: “History is at the heart of the story”. Indeed, this approach is very clear in your previous books. For example, in My father was a freedom fighter, the history of Palestine is not seen through the lens of “powerful men” who shaped events from above, but through the lens of true people, who influenced the course of history from below, through their principles, their aspirations, their struggle to survive. Is the new book a further step in this direction? RB:  Yes. My new book is a continuation of my journey in both journalism and academia. Entitled: The Last Earth: A People’s Story of Palestine, my forthcoming book is an attempt to reanimate a collective Palestinian narrative, through narrating the stories of ordinary Palestinians, who lead extraordinary lives. Through reading and intersecting their narratives, one becomes familiar with a new and important aspect of Palestinian history. In my approach to history, I attempt to demolish the academically defunct, but still applied ‘Great Man Theory’, and other historical methodologies that do not place the people at the heart of the discourse. RR: When it comes to Palestine and the Middle East, this historical approach seems totally new. Noam Chomsky referred to your upcoming book “the finest tradition of people’s history”.  Do you think this new approach can contribute to the necessary change of narrative about Palestine and the Middle East? And also to give new important sources to future historians? RB: Sadly, orientalist history still defines the way that history is written in the Middle East and about the Middle East. I reject that, not only as a matter of principle, but also because it is both impractical and false. For example, the Palestinian people, although oppressed, occupied and marginalized have been active participants in shaping their own destiny. They have resisted Zionist colonialism for a century, organized and struggled, using every available platform and against numerous odds. Generation after generation, they have paid a heavy price. But they have behaved in what seems like a predictable pattern in which resistance remains the most constant characteristic in their collective identity. Without Palestinian resistance, there would be no ‘conflict’ of which to speak. Israel would have perfectly subjugated Palestinians, and the story would have ended a long time ago. It has not. Its continuity can hardly be attributed to the lack of Israeli will to suppress Palestinians or to the savvy and strength of the Palestinian leadership: the former has been remorsefully oppressive, and the latter, notoriously quisling. Thus, the only factor remaining is the people. This is why I believe Palestinian history has to be entirely reoriented to document their story. Hence, I have dedicated most of my work to tell their story. RR: Historian Eric Walberg calls you “one of the best emissaries of Palestinians, a people without a voice.” Do you think this definition can describe the role of Palestinian intellectuals? And do you think these works can be a contribution to give a voice to Palestinians? RB: Arundhati Roy is quoted as saying, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” I believe that Palestinians already have a voice, and an articulate one. But that voice has been deliberately muted through a massive campaign of misinformation, distortion and misrepresentation by Israel, and many in western media – some willingly, and others unwittingly. I think the distinction is absolutely essential, because understanding it fully defines our roles as historians and intellectuals. I have chosen ‘people’s history’ and ‘history from below’ as the platforms to communicate Palestinian history, because the collective voice is already there; it just needs to be freed from the numerous attempts to bury it. When Israel and its allies say ‘Palestinians are not a people’, they essentially say Palestinians have no identity, no legitimate demands, thus deserve no voice. Our answer should not be to purport to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people, but to actually listen to them; truly listen to them and empower their voices so that they articulate their own aspirations and rightful demands, and express their own identity. RR: We described you as a writer, a journalist, and a historian. Do you think you can render this approach to all your fields of expertise? RB:  In essence, yes, although it is not easy. I am a trained journalist, both academically and in the field. I have launched several successful media ventures in Europe, Asia and the Middle East and operated my own media outlet for nearly 17 years. I have also trained many journalists and have contributed to many newspapers around the world. But history for me is more of a passion. In fact, I do not think that a true intellectual can operate outside the realm of history. To acquire knowledge of yourself, of your society and to impart it to others requires that you have a deep, solid understanding of history. This is especially so for Palestine. Every facet of today’s ‘conflict’, every term in the dominant discourse, Zionist or Palestinian, every reference made in the news to the ‘conflict’ are all rooted in history, and can only be truly understood if we take on the intricate task of deconstructing the past. That is what I have tried to do throughout the years. If I am to discuss the boycott movement (BDS) in Palestine, I must speak of the 1936 strike and the first mass movement of civil disobedience. If I am to understand today’s resistance, I have to place it into a most captivating history of generational resistance. And every step of the way, I insist on being guided by the legacy of the people. I have learned so much more talking to ‘ordinary people’ conveying their personal history than I have learned from disengaged ‘historians’ constantly cross-referencing one another. The most fascinating part of my work is when I try to find the common ground between people’s personal histories in order for me to locate the grand narrative of a people. It is an exciting, but also a never-ending process. RR: So, what should we be expecting from you in the near future in terms of books and journalism projects? RB: Aside from my new book, The Last Earth: A People’s Story of Palestine, I have just launched, together with a team of journalists at Al Jazeera English, a unique media project called ‘Palestine in Motion’. ‘Palestine in Motion’ is an attempt at retelling the Palestinian story through individual stories, connected and intersected to create one comprehensive narrative. The project has involved nearly 30 people, comprising storytellers, researchers and developers. There are more projects still in the pipeline. http://clubof.info/

[embervoices]

Trump and Biden's opinions on Israel and Palestine align

Do they, though?

Trump's criticisms of how Israel is handling Palestine are grounded in them being bad at PR and "taking too long" to establish firm control of the region. He actively encourages them to "get it over with". His support for Israel is grounded in personal power and economic interest. He's soured on Israel, not for the treatment of Palestine, but for their support of Biden's presidency being disloyal to him personally.

Biden's support for Israel is grounded in US economic interests, and the hope for safety of Jewish people throughout the world (I think this part is at least out of date, if not entirely misguided now, but it's a sentiment he has consistently expressed for decades).

Biden's criticism of how Israel is handling Palestine are grounded in humanitarian concerns, same as ours. Biden has consistently advocated for a two-state solution and tried to negotiate for ceasefire, while endeavoring to maintain US influence over Israel, which is a neat trick given that he has repeatedly told leaders of Israel that he disagrees with them, to their faces, on record.

Granted, it's not enough, on this issue. We don't want a measured, strategic Pro-Israel position, we want a passionate pro-Palestine position.

But even if you are a single-issue voter in favor of Palestine, Trump's position on Palestine and people who support Palestine is clearly actively worse than Biden's.

Biden is a career political administrator. It's boring, and it's a dirty job, but he definitely knows how to do it, and what the limits of his power are in practice, as well as what they're supposed to be in theory.

Trump is a narcissistic, self-serving bully who openly plans to be a fascist dictator, and considers hypocrisy and violent suppression of dissent a flex.

Even with regards to Palestine, NO, they DO NOT align.

From a country where voting is not a choice, but a duty, it's interesting seeing American discourse every four years on whether or not voting matters. This year there's an added layer, because Joe Biden has been supporting Israel's genocide against Palestine. Now there's a pervading sentiment - both in and out of the US - that voting for Joe Biden supports Palestinian genocide, and it's an American's moral duty to withhold their vote in support of Palestine.

I guess the question I ask is: how is withholding your vote effective activism?

If you don't vote, and Trump wins, he says he will deport pro-Palestine demonstrators. He says he supports Israel's right to defend itself. If you vote independent, and Trump wins the same thing happens.

If Biden wins, he will continue his support of Israel.

So: Is voting really the battleground for the Palestinian genocide, when either outcome leads down the same road?

And what other battles are being fought in this presidential race?

Gun laws - Biden passed "the most significant gun safety legislation in more than two decades", the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It includes enhanced background checks for gun purchasers, and prohibits individuals convicted of domestic violence towards a romantic partner from purchasing a gun (wherein the past a 'boyfriend loophole' had existed, wherein the law only applied if an individual was convicted of domestic violence against a spouse or cohabitant). Trump has promised to overturn Biden's new laws.

Healthcare - Uninsured Americans are at an all-time low under Biden's administration, with only 7.6% of Americans being uninsured in the second quarter of 2023. The number of people who signed up to Obamacare in 2024 is at 21.3 million - and Trump plans to repeal it.

Climate change - Biden's Inflation Reduction Act invests 300 billion dollars towards clean energy. Electricity generation from renewable energy sources — including wind, solar and hydropower — surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time in 2022, making it the second-biggest source behind natural gas generation. At a recent dinner with oil executives and lobbyists, the Republican promised to eliminate Mr Biden's new climate rules and environmental regulations if they donated $1bn to his campaign.

Much has been said about Trump's second term beyond the above three points. @batboyblog posted a very clear and concise graphic on Trump's plans for his second term.

The BBC has also posted about Trump's plans for his second term, which I'll screenshot:

Trump is now a felon, but I was really shocked to learn about how little impact this has on his ability to run as president. His supporters are likely to stay by his side, because they believe in these policies.

Biden does not have the same luxury. I don't think he should have the same luxury. Still, I feel like it's important to point out that Trump and Biden's opinions on Israel and Palestine align, but there are a plethora of other issues they do not align on. As a voter, as an activist, when given two political parties, why would you choose based on the similarities as opposed to the differences?

Ways to help Gaza.

Vetted gofundmes.

Other links to help Palestine.

[free-mormons-blog]

Jerusalem: In Early Christianty -- Mormonism and Early Christianity -- HUGH NIBLEY 1987

Jerusalem: In Early Christianty

Christian concern with Jerusalem involves the ancient concept of the city as a shrine of preeminent holiness, marking the physical and spiritual center of the cosmos, the spot at which history began and at which it shall reach its apocalyptic consummation.1 The idea of an umbilicus mundi, a scale-model as it were of the universe itself,2 at which a nation or tribe would gather periodically to renew its corporate life by the observance of the now familiar year-rites, was familiar to many ancient peoples,3 and the nations converted to Christianity had no difficulty accepting the supreme eschatological significance of Jerusalem and its Temple.4 The city’s unique status, however, raised certain questions which have never ceased to puzzle and divide Christian theologians, namely, (1) Just how literally are Jerusalem’s claims and promises to be taken? (2) How can the glory of Jerusalem be disassociated from the Jews and their persistent claims to be its legitimate heirs? (3) How can the prized continuity (back to Adam) of the city’s long history be maintained if Christianity is a completely new, spiritualized beginning? (4) How can Jerusalem be the Holy City par excellence without also being the headquarters of the church? (5) How can the city’s prestige be exploited in the interests of a particular church or nation?

These issues have all come to the fore in each of the main periods of Christian preoccupation with Jerusalem, namely, (1) the “Golden Age” of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, (2) the Imperial Age from Constantine to Justinian, (3) the Carolingian revival, (4) the Crusades, (5) the period of intrigues and grand designs, (6) the time of patronage by the Great Powers, and (7) the rise of Israel.

The question of literalism was paramount in the second and third centuries; the early Christians had been Jews of the apocalyptic-chiliastic persuasion with lively visions of a literal New Jerusalem, while an educated and growing minority (as also among the Jews) favored a more spiritual interpretation of the biblical promises and accused the old-school Christians of superstition and “Judaizing.”5 The banning of Jews from the city by Hadrian gave an advantage to the Gentile party,6 and the “Doctors of the Church” made the Hellenized or “spiritualized” image of Jerusalem the official one.7 Still, the millennialist teachings survived beneath the surface, occasionally bursting out in sectarian enthusiasm or becoming general in times of crisis, 8 while the doctors themselves repeatedly succumbed to the enticements of a real and earthly Holy City.9 Hence, the ambiguities of literalism versus allegory might have been minimized were it not that the continued presence and preachings of the Jews forced the Christians in self-defense to appeal to the doctrines of a purely spiritual Jerusalem.10

From Origen’s time to the present, churchmen of all sects have been one in insisting that the New Jerusalem is for Christians only, since the Jewish city can never rise again.11 In the absence of scriptural support for this claim various stock arguments are used, namely, Josephus’ description of the destruction of A.D. 70, with its atmosphere of gloom and finality;12 the argument of silence—the Bible says nothing about a restitution of the city after Vespasian;13 the ominously lengthening period of time since the expulsion of the Jews;14 various tortured allegorical and numerological demonstrations; 15 the appeal to history with the ringing rhetorical challenge: “Where is your city now?”16 A favorite argument (akin to a Jewish teaching about the Diaspora) was that Jerusalem had to be destroyed so that Jews and Christians alike might be scattered throughout the world as witnesses to the fulfillment of prophecy in the new religion.17 Against these were arguments which never ceased to annoy: Why did the city and temple continue to flourish for forty-two years after the final pronunciation of doom, and why during that time did the Christians show every mark of reverence and respect for both?18 Why did Jesus weep for the destruction if it was in every sense necessary and desirable?19 Why do the doctors insist that the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans was a great crime, and yet hail it as a blessed event, saluting its perpetrators as the builders of the New Jerusalem even though they were the chief persecutors of the Christians?20 If expulsion from Jerusalem is proof of divine rejection of the Jews, does the principle not also hold good for their Christian successors?21 How can the antichrist sit in the temple unless the city and temple are built again by the Jews?22 The standard argument, that only a total and final dissolution would be fit punishment for the supreme crime of deicide,23 was frustrated by the time schedule, which suggested to many that the city was destroyed to avenge the death not of Jesus but of James the Just.24

But if Jerusalem was to be permanently obliterated, how could the Christians inherit it? In a spiritual sense, of course. The church was the New Jerusalem in which all prophecy was fulfilled, the Millennium attained, and all things became new.25 But this raised a serious question of continuity: Has God chosen another people? Can one preserve the meaning of the eschatological drama while changing all the characters?26 Can a people (the Christians) be gathered that was never scattered?27 And what of the Heavenly Jerusalem? The approved school solution with its inevitable rhetorical antithesis was to depict the Heavenly and the Earthly Jerusalems as opposites in all things, the one spiritual, the other carnal;28 yet none of the fathers is able to rid himself of “corporeal” complications in the picture, and the two Jerusalems remain hopelessly confused, 29 for in the end the two are actually to meet and fuse into one.30 Palestine was the scene of busy theological controversy and these and related mysteries when the “Golden Age” of Christian Jerusalem came to an end with the persecutions of A.D. 250.31

After the storm had passed, Constantine the Great at Rome, Nicaea, Constantinople, and elsewhere celebrated his victories over the temporal and spiritual enemies of mankind with brilliant festivals and imposing monuments.32 But his greatest victory trophy was “the New Jerusalem,” a sacral complex of buildings presenting the old “hierocentric” concepts in the Imperial pagan form, with the Holy Sepulchre as the center and chief shrine of the world. 33 Jerusalem was treated as the legitimate spoils of Christian-Roman victory over the Jews, whose entire heritage accordingly-including the temple—passed intact into the hands of the Christians.34 Henceforth, there remained no objections to giving Jerusalem its full meed of honor.35 Continuity back to Adam was established with suspicious ease by the rapid and miraculous discovery of every relic and artifact mentioned in the Bible;36 and a flood of pilgrims came to rehearse, Bible in hand (the earliest pilgrims, Silvia [383 A.D.] and the Bordeaux Pilgrim [333 A.D.], are markedly partial to Old Testament remains), the events of each holy place and undertake weary walks and vigils in a cult strangely preoccupied with caves37 and rites of the dead.38 The Patriarch Macarius, who may have contrived the convenient discoveries of holy objects with an eye to restoring Jerusalem to its former preeminence,39 promoted a building boom which reached a peak of great activity in the sixth and seventh centuries.40 Financed at first by imperial bounty, the building program was later supported by wealthy individuals, and especially by a line of illustrious matrons whose concern for the Holy City goes back to Queen Helen of Adiabene, 41 and whose number includes Helen, the mother of Constantine; his mother-in-law, Eutropia; Eudocia, the wife of Theodosius II; Verina, the wife of Leo II; Sophia, the mother of St. Sabas; Paula, Flavia, Domitilla, and Melania, rich Roman ladies and friends of St. Jerome.42 By the end of the fourth century, Jerusalem had more than 300 religious foundations, sustained by generous infusions of outside capital, until the economic decline of the fifth century forced the government to take the initiative, culminating in Justinian’s ambitious but fruitless building program.43 The period was one of specious brilliance in which, A. J. Hubert notes, everything had to be splendens, rutilans, nitens, micans, radians, corsucans—i.e., brilliantly surfaced—while the actual remains of the buildings show slipshod and superficial workmanship. 44

Spared the barbarian depredations suffered by most of the world in the fifth and sixth centuries, Jerusalem was an island of security and easy money, where the population of all ranks was free to indulge in those factional feuds which were the blight of the Late Empire. Points of doctrine furnished stimulation and pretext for violent contests involving confused and shifting combinations, ambitious churchmen and their congregations, hordes of desert monks, government and military officials and their forces, local and national, the ever-meddling great ladies, members of the Imperial family and their followings, and the riotous and ubiquitous factions of the games.45 The Jews of Alexandria became associated with one of these factions of the Emperor Phocas, who ordered his general Bonossus to suppress the corresponding faction in Jerusalem by converting all Jews by force.46 While pitched battles raged in the streets, a Persian army appeared at the gates, sent by Chosroes, the pro-Christian monarch, seeking vengeance on the treacherous Phocas for the murder of his friend Mauritius. 47 The Jews regarded this as a timely deliverance by a nation that had succored them before and sided with the Persians—an act not of treachery (as Christian writers would have it) but of war, since Phocas had already called for their extermination as a people.48 The Christian world was stunned when Chosroes took the cross from Jerusalem in A.D. 614, and elated when the victorious Heraclius brought it back in 628. Under the vehement urging of the monk Modestus, whom he had made patriarch and who aspired to rebuild Jerusalem as a new Macarius, Heraclius, against his better judgment, took savage reprisals on the Jews. 49 But within ten years the city fell to Omar, who allowed the pilgrimages to continue while making Jerusalem a great Moslem shrine by the revival of the temple complex, which the Christians also, after long and studied neglect, now claimed as their own.50

Though Christians, originally as Jews and, later, on church business, had always made pilgrimages to Jerusalem,51 the great surge of popular interest beginning in the fourth century alarmed some churchmen, who denounced the pilgrimage as a waste of time and means, dangerous to life and morals, and a disruptive influence in the church.52 Along with monasticism, with which it was closely associated, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an attempt to get back to the first order of the church, to retrieve the lost world of visions, martyrs, prophets, and miracles;53 and this implied dissatisfaction with the present order.54 The writings of the fathers furnish abundant evidence for the basic motivation of the pilgrims, which was the desire to reassure oneself of the truth of Christianity by seeing and touching the very things the Bible told of55 and experiencing contact with the other world by some overt demonstration (healing was the most popular) of supernatural power. 56 Only at Jerusalem could one receive this historical and miraculous reassurance in its fullness; only there did one have a right to expect a miracle.57 The earliest holy place visited “was not, as might have been supposed,” the Holy Sepulchre, but the footprint of the Lord on the Mount of Olives, the spot where he was last seen of men as he passed to heaven, and would first be seen on his return.58 Contact was the basic idea, contact with the biblical past and contact with heaven itself, of which Jerusalem was believed to be a physical fragment.59 Tangible pieces of the Holy City, carried to distant parts of the world, gave rise to other holy centers, which in turn sent out their tangible relics like sparks from a central fire: Sparsa sunt ligna et accensus est mundus, says St. Augustine.60 The Christian world was soon covered by a net of holy shrines, built in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the temple, and often designated by the names of Jerusalem, the temple, or the sepulchre.61 Each became a pilgrim center in its own right, and there was a graded system of holiness measured on a scale of distance in time from the Lord and in place from Jerusalem,62 which remained “as far above all the other cities in the world in renown and holiness as the sun is above the stars.”63

After being fought over for two centuries by Moslem dynasties, Jerusalem in 800 was placed under the protection of Charlemagne, who was doing Hārūn al-Rashīd the service of annoying his Umayyad enemies in Spain.64 Though Rome had come under his protection five years earlier in the same way—by the presentation of holy keys and a banner by the bishop—it was the prestige of ruling Jerusalem that warranted the changing of Charlemagne’s title from king to emperor.65 Like Constantine, Charlemagne stimulated a revival of large-scale pilgrimages to Jerusalem,66 and a tradition of royal generosity, endowing a church, school, monastery, and library67—the Jerusalem hospitals for pilgrims were a tradition going back to pre-Christian times.68 From Darius to Augustus and the emperors of the West, great rulers had courted the favor of heaven by pious donatives to the Holy City,69 and this tradition of royal bounty was continued through the Middle Ages, when kings imposed Jerusalem taxes on their subjects and monks from Jerusalem made regular fund-gathering trips to Europe.70 During the years of the “quasi-Protectorate of the Western Emperors” over Jerusalem and the revived Byzantine control (made possible by Moslem disunity),71 Northern and Slavic Europe came to bathe in the Jordan, pray at the Holy Sepulchre, and endow pious foundations. 72 Stimulated by the end-of-the-world excitement of the year 1000, this stream “multiplied tenfold” in the 11th century,73 culminating in great mass pilgrimages of thousands led by eminent lords and churchmen.74 When the Seljuks, having defeated the Byzantine army in 1071 and occupied Jerusalem in 1075, became oppressive in their fees and controls of the holy places, Christian leadership felt obliged to “take up again the part of Charlemagne,” and the armed pilgrimage led by Robert le Frison, 1085—90, was hailed throughout Europe and viewed by the Pope and the Byzantine Emperor alike as advance reconnaissance for a crusade.75

The Crusades were the expression of a popular religious revival in which Jerusalem, restored to its full apocalyptic status (the Crusading literature has a strongly Old Testament flavor),76 offered a welcome door of escape to all classes from economic and social conditions which in Europe had become intolerable.77 The Crusades have also been described as the complete feudalization of Christianity78 by an ancient chivalric tradition with Christ as a liege lord whose injuries must be avenged and whose stronghold must be liberated. 79 We see it in the language of the Crusading literature,80 the significant exchange of embassies, and the close resemblance of Asiatic to European arms and accoutrements, suggesting an older common “epic milieu,”81 and the nature of the Crusades as a Völkerwanderung.82 Since the fourth century the western church had accepted, along with the Roman victory-cult,83 the concept of world polarity, dividing the human race into the Blessed (Jerusalem, Church, ager pacatus) and the Damned (Babylon, Unbelievers, ager hosticus), 84 reflected in the jihād concept of the Moslem countercrusade.85 Such a concept assumed papal leadership of all crusades, giving rise to baffling questions of imperial, papal, and royal prerogative.86 These came to a head in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, whose Assizes, though the most perfect expression of a model feudal society, remained but an ideal,87 “a lawyers’ paradise,” where royalty, exploiting the city’s propinquity to heaven, dramatized its own claims to divine authority, with pageantry of unsurpassed splendor.88 This motif was developed by the military religious orders of the Hospitalers (founded by the Amalfi merchants in 1048 and open only to the nobility), and the Templars, each claiming a monopoly of the unique traditional power and glory of Jerusalem and the temple, and hence displaying an independence of action which in the end was its undoing.89

The Crusades challenged the infidel to a formal trial-of-arms at Jerusalem, to prove which side was chosen of God.90 The great scandal of the Crusades is accordingly not the cynical self-interest, betrayal, and compromise with the enemy that blights them from the beginning,91 but simply their clear-cut and humiliating failure,92 which dealt a mortal blow to medieval ideas of feudal and ecclesiastical dominion.93 With the loss of all the East, “Operation Jerusalem” adopted a new strategy of indirection, approaching its goal variously and deviously by wars against European heretics,94 by preaching missions, through which the Franciscans held a permanent Roman bridgehead in Jerusalem,95 and by local crusades against Jews and Moslems as steps in grand designs of global strategy: the grandiose plans of Charles VIII, Alfonso of Castile, João II, Albuquerque, and Don Sebastian all had as their ultimate objective the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre,96 as indeed did all of Columbus’ projects.97A marked cabalistic influence has been detected in these plans, and indeed the ever-living hopes of the Jews, fired by new prophecies and new messiahs, were not without effect in Catholic and Protestant circles, 98 as appears in the career of the Humanist Guillaume Postel, who, acclaimed at the court of France for his philological researches in Jerusalem, urged the transfer of the Papacy to that city, and finally declared himself to be the Shekhinah.99

The great reformers, while mildly condemning pilgrimages,100 placed strong emphasis on the purely spiritual nature of the New Jerusalem and the utter impossibility of the Jews’ ever returning to build an earthly city.101 This was necessary to counteract the tendency to apocalyptic excitement and renewed deference to the Jews attendant upon the Reformation’s intensive preoccupation with the Bible,102 as various groups of enthusiasts took to building their own local New Jerusalems103 or preparing to migrate to Palestine for the task;104 such groups flourished down through the 19th century.105 Protestant pilgrims to Jerusalem from the 16th to the 20th centuries have consistently condemned the “mummery” of the older pilgrimages while indulging in their own brand of ecstatic dramatizations.106 While the Catholic practice has been to identify archaeological remains as the very objects mentioned in the Bible, the Protestants have been no less zealous in detecting proof for the scriptures in every type of object observed in the Holy Land.107 Chateaubriand’s much publicized visit to Jerusalem in 1806 combined religious, literary, and intellectual interest and established a romantic appeal of the Holy Land that lasted through the century.108 When Jerusalem was thrown open to the West in the 1830s by Mohammed Ali, European and American missionaries hastened to the spot with ambitious projects of converting the Jews with an eye to the fulfillment of prophecy in the ultimate restoration of the Holy City.109 Even the ill-starred Anglo-Lutheran Bishopric of 1841 had that in view,110 and Newman’s denunciation of the plan as a base concession to the Jews and Protestants111 indicated the stand of the Roman Church, which in 1847 appointed a resident patriarch for Jerusalem.112 In the mounting rivalry of missions and foundations that followed, France used her offices as protector of Roman Catholics and Holy Places in the East (under the Capitulations of Francis I, 1535, renewed in 1740) to advance her interests in the Orient, e.g., in the Damascus ritual-murder affair of 1840;113 and when Louis Napoleon was obliged by his Catholic constituents to reactivate French claims to holy places which France had long neglected and the Russians long cherished, “the foolish affair of the Holy Places” (as he called it) led to the Crimean War and its portentous chain of consequences.114

In the second half of the nineteenth century the major powers of churches were stimulated by mutual rivalry to seek commanding positions in Jerusalem through the founding of eleemosynary institutions over which they retained control.115 Beyond the hard facts of geography and economics, the religious significance of the city continued to exert steady pressure on the policies of all the great powers, as when the German kaiser gratified his Catholic subjects with the gift of the “Dormition,”116proclaimed Protestant unity by the dedication of the great Jerusalem and the patronage (thwarted by his advisers)117 of Palestinian Zionism.118 The taking of Jerusalem by Allenby in 1917 was hailed throughout the Christian world as the fulfillment of prophecy,119 and deplored by the Moslems as a typical Crusade against their holy city.120 World War II was followed by increasing interest in Jerusalem as a center of oecumenical Christianity,121 though old religious and national rivalries, of long standing and great variety, continued to flourish.122 The twentieth-century pilgrimages acquired a touristic air in keeping with the times, interest in Jerusalem having a more sophisticated and intellectual tone.123 Even the old and vexing problem of the priority of Jerusalem, “mother of Churches,” over other Christian bishoprics is now approached in a spirit of mutual concession and with respect for the autonomy of the various bishoprics of Jerusalem.124 This liberal attitude may be a response to what is regarded in some Christian circles as the Jewish challenge to the basic Christian thesis that only Christians can possess a New Jerusalem.125 While the great powers for over a century cautiously sought to exploit the energies of Zionism and its sympathizers,126 it is now openly conceded that the Jews might indeed rebuild their city—though only as potential Christians. 127 Though some Christians are even willing to waive that proviso,128 the fundamental thesis is so firmly rooted that the progress of Israel is commonly viewed not as a refutation of it but as a baffling and disturbing paradox. 129 The Roman position, reflecting a 2000-year battle of prestige between Rome and Jerusalem,130 is especially resistant to change.131

With the Israel military victories of 1948, 1956, and 1967, the Christian world was confronted by a new image of a heroic Israel. The picture was agreeable or disturbing to Christians depending on which of two main postions one chose to take, and the years of tension following the Six-Day War of June 1967 were marked by an increasing tendency among Christians everywhere to choose sides. On the one hand, the tradition of the Church Fathers and Reformers, emphasized anew by Arnold Toynbee, looked upon a Jewish Jerusalem as a hopeless anachronism, and deplored any inclination to identify ancient with modern Israel. This attitude rested on the theory, developed by generations of theologians, that only Christians could be rightful heirs to the true Covenant and the Holy City. Roman Catholics continued to hold the position, propounded by Pope Pius X to Herzl in 1904, that the return of the Jews to Jerusalem was a demonstration of messianic expectations which that church considered discredited and outmoded. Those suspicious of the progress of Israel naturally chose to minimize the moral and world-historical significance of Jerusalem, and to treat the problems of modern Israel as purely political. On the other hand were Bible-oriented Christians of all denominations in whom the successes of the Israelis inspired to a greater or lesser extent renewed hope and interest in the literal fulfillment of biblical prophecy. To such persons in varying degrees the Jewish military achievements appeared as steps toward the fulfillment of the eschatological promise to Abraham (Genesis 15:18) As interest in Jerusalem shifted from the antiquarian appeal of the 1950s to heightened eschatological allure, something of the old Christian vision of Jerusalem seemed to stir the Christian conscience.

If Jerusalem did not exist, the Christians would have to invent it—indeed they have invented it, choking with emotion at the sight of sixteenth-century walls and tracing the Lord’s footsteps through late medieval streets.132 It has always been an indispensable authentication for their faith and an abiding reminder of prophetic promises.

*   This article first appeared under “Jerusalem: In Christianity” in the Encyclopedia Judaica, 16 vols. (Jerusalem: Macmillan, 1972) 9:1568—75. The footnotes are published here for the first time.

1.   H. W. Hertzberg, “Der heilige Fels und das Alte Testament,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 12 (1932): 32, 39—42.

2.   Sibylle Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” Welt als Geschichte 22 (1962): 19.

3.   For a recent coordination with emphasis on Hebrew rites, see Samuel H. Hooke, ed., Myth, Ritual, and Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958).

4.   Jerusalem is to all Christians what Athens is to the Greeks and Rome to the Latins, Jerome, Epistolae (Letters) 46, in PL 22:489. The rites of the old shrines are now transferred to the Christian center, Theodoret, Graecarum Affectionum Curatio 11, in PG 83:1095.

5.   The issue is clearly stated by Jerome, Commentarius in Isaiam Prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) XIV, 51, 7—13, in PL 24:487—88; XV, 54, 1—3, in PL 24:516; XVIII, 65, preface, in PL 24:627; Jerome, Commentarius in Jeremiam Prophetam (Commentary on Jeremiah) IV, 19, in PL 24:802, n.b; VI, 22, in PL 24:886, and in the note in Origen, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) IV, 22, in PG 11:1058, n. 74.

6.   “Dissertatio de Vita Sancti Cyrilli” (“Disquisition on the Life of Saint Cyril”) I, 6, 34, in PG 33:61.

7.   It is only the ignorant rabble who “promise us a rebuilding of Jerusalem,” Theodoret, In Divini Ezechielis Prophetiam (On the Divine Prophecies of Ezekiel) 1045, in PG 81:1248; so Origen, Against Celsus IV, 80, in PG 11:1105—8; Origen, Peri Archon (On First Things) II, 4, 3, in PG 11:201—3; Jerome, Commentary on IsaiahXV, 54, 1—3, in PL 24:516; XVIII, 65, preface, in PL 24:627—29.

8.   Friedrich Baethgen, Der Engelpapst (Halle: Niemeyer, 1933), 76—77; Ray C. Petry, in Church History, 10 vols. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962—64), 9:55.

9.   Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphone (Dialogue with Trypho) 80, in PG 6:665; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos (Expositions on the Psalms) 30, 8—10, in PL36:253; Augustine, Contra Litteras Petiliani Donatistae (Against the Writings of Petilianus the Donatist) IV, 25—28, in PL 43:409—10; Jerome, Letters 46, in PL22:485, 489; Cassiodorus, Expositio in Psalterium (Commentary on the Psalms) 86, 7—end, in PL 70:474, 621; Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Isaiam Prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 292, in PG 70:468.

10.   When Christians are accused of Judaizing, the specific charge is “Chiliasm,” which “is found wherever the Gospel is not yet Hellenized, and must be regarded as a main element of Christian preaching,” Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, 7 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958), 1:167, n. 1.

11.   Arguments and references in Origen, Against Celsus IV, 22—23, in PG 11:1055—60. Protestant writers are just as emphatic, note 100 below.

12.   Flavius Josephus, Jewish War VI, 403—22.

13.   Origen, Against Celsus IV, 22, in PG 11:1057; George Cedrenus, Historiarum Compendium (Compendium of History) 1, 408—10, in PG 121:448—49; Theodoret, Interpretatio in Psalmos (Interpretation of Psalms) 73, 1—3, in PG 80:1453—56.

14.   With each successive writer, this argument becomes more effective, e.g., Origen, Against Celsus IV, 22, in PG 11:1081; Hilary, Tractatus super Psalmos (Treatise on the Psalms) 58, 12, in PL 9:381; 124, 2—3, in PL 9:680; 126, 1—2, in PL 9:693; “Index Analyticus in Cyrillum,” in PG 33:1711; Cosmas, Topographia Christiana (Christian Topography) 111, in PG 88:168; Fulbert, Tractatus contra Judaeos (Treatise against the Jews) 2, in PL 141:312; 3, in PL 141:317—18; Andronicus Comnenus, Dialogus contra Judaeos (Dialogue against the Jews) 41, in PG 133:869; Ernest Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Christology of the Old Testament, 4 vols., tr. James Martin (Edinburgh: Clark, 1858), 3:291—92.

15.   Cedrenus, Compendium of History 1, 285—87, 423—24, in PG 121:321, 461—64; Michaeus Glycas, Annales (Annals) 238, in PG 158:449; Sulpicius Severus, Chronicon (Chronicle) 2, 33, in PL 20:147—48.

16.   Using almost identical words, Ambrose, Historiae de Excidio Hierosolymitanae Urbis (History of the Destruction of Jerusalem) 19—20, in PL 15:2323; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 73, 1—4, in PL 36:929, but especially 931—32; Andronicus Comnenus, Dialogue against the Jews 54, in PG 133:893; Anonymus Saeculus, Tractatus adversus Judaeum (Tract against a Jew) 39, in PL 213:777; Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, eds, Luther’s Works, 30 vols. (Philadelphia: Concordia, 1957), 2:361; or D. Martin Luthers Werke, 92 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883—1941; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966—83), 42:520.

17.   Irenaeus, Contra Haereses (Against Heresies) IV, 3, 1, in PG 7:980; Justin, Apologia pro Christianis (Apology) 49, 5, in PL 6:336; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 30, 8—10, in PL 36:253; Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Isaiah 37, in PG 70:72. TB, Pesaḥim 87b—88a.

18.   Jerome bridges the gap by transferring the angelic announcement of A.D. 70 —transeamus ex his sedibus—to the time of the crucifixion, Epistola Paulae et Eutochii ad Marcellam (Letter of Paula and Eutochius to Marcella), discussed by Robert Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1929), 1:130. Cf. Walafridus Strabus, De Subversione Jerusalem (On the Destruction of Jerusalem), in PL 114:967; Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” 13.

19.   Gregorius Magnus (Gregory the Great), Homiliae in Evangelia (Homilies on the Gospel) II, 39, in PL 76:1294—95; Strabus, On the Destruction of Jerusalem, in PL 114:971, 965; Origen, Homiliae in Jeremiam (Homlies on Jeremiah) 13, 1—3, in PG 13:400—01; Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Isaiah 407, in PG 70:648.

20.   Hadrian is both the benefactor of the human race and the Abomination of Desolation: Eusebius, HE IV, 5—6, in PG 20:308—16; cf. Domitian, cited in ibid. III, 19, in PG 20:252; Hadrian’s Aelia was the New Jerusalem! Cedrenus, Compendium of History 1, 437—38, in PG 121:477. Titus’ attack on Jerusalem was directed especially against the Christians, Sulpicius Severus, Chronicon 2, 50, in PL 20:157—58; Vespasian feared the Christians as he did the Jews, René Basset, ed., “Le synaxaire arabe jacobite,” in PO 16:310.

21.   The Christians find themselves in exactly the same position as the Jews and are given the identical comfort, Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones (Divine Institutes) V, 23, in PL 6:627—28; Origen, In Lucam Homiliae (Homily on Luke) 38, in PG 13:1897; Jerome, Commentarius in Ezechielem (Commentary on Ezekiel) 36, in PL25:340; Cassiodorus, Commentary on the Psalms 59, 7—9, in PL 70:422; Haymond of Halberstadt, Enarratio in Malachiam Prophetam (Exposition on Malachi) 14, in PL 117:276. The principle had been laid down that whoever holds the Holy Places is the true church, since God would never allow them to fall into the hands of unbelievers. Athanasius, Quaestiones ad Antiochum Ducem (Questions to Duke Antiochus) 43—45, in PG 28:625. Below, note 91. The fathers are pleased to be able to identify their people with the Jews through their parallel sufferings.

22.   Irenaeus, Against Heresies V, 25, 1—2, in PG 7:1189; Hippolytus, Exegetica 21—22, in PG 10:656, 921, 928; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses (Catechetical Lectures) 15, in PG 33:889; Clement of Alexandria, Stromatum I, 21, 57—62, in PG 8:856; Hilary, Commentarius in Matthaeum (Commentary on Matthew) 25, 1—7, in PL 9:1053—55; Theophylactus, Enarratio in Evangelium Marci (Exposition on the Gospel of Mark), in PG 123:630.

23.   Origen, Against Celsus IV, 32, in PG 11:1077; Hippolytus, Demonstratio de Christo et Antichristo (On Christ and the Antichrist) 2, 7, in PG 10:792; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 62, 18—19, in PL 36:759; 64, 1—2, in PL 36:773; Jerome, Letters, in PL 22:485—86; Chrysostom, Contra Judaeos et Gentiles, quod Christus Sit Deus (Against the Jews and the Gentiles that Christ is God) 6, 2—3, in PG 48:907; Chrysostom, Commentarius in Sanctum Matthaeum Evangelistam (Commentary on Matthew) 76, in PG 58:695, etc.

24.   Discussed by Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas 1:147. Many fathers give other reasons. The time scale is the decisive factor, Christians and Jews each arranging it to suit themselves. The Trophies of Damascus IV, 2, 1—3 and 8, in PO 15:262—66.

25.   The view is stated by Charles Malik: “The promises made to ancient Israel were all fulfilled in Jesus Christ,” so that any subsequent development “has nothing to do either with eschatology or Christian theology. . . . Any further political expectation for the Jews would mean that there is still something which has not been already completed and finally fulfilled in Jesus Christ,” cited by David Polish, The Eternal Dissent (The Hague: Mouton, 1960), 204, Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, Jerome, Cyril of Jerusalem, Chrysostom, etc., all say the same.

26.   “Here the Christian confronts a solemn, awful question,” P. Parker, Inherit the Promise (Connecticut: Seabury, 1957), 62. Renovatio has a special meaning in this case, for God really founds another city entirely, Augustine, Civitate Dei (The City of God) 18, 48, in PL 41:574—76; Eusebius, De Vita Constantini (On the Life of Constantine) 32, 16—18, in PG 24:321; Anonymous, Vita Sancti Pachomii (Life of Saint Pachomius) I, 30, in PL 73:250; Hilary, Treatise on the Psalms 67, 30—32, in PL 9:465; Nicolas Faber, In Fragmenta Sancti Hilarrii (On the Fragments of Saint Hilary) 30—31, in PL 10:908, etc.

27.   Many fathers treat the paradox: Jerusalem is “the sterile mother,” Gregory the Great, In Primum Librum Regum (Commentary on the First Book of Kings) II, 15, in PL 79:84, “black but comely,” Gregory the Great, Super Cantica Canticorum Expositio (Commentary on the Song of Songs) 1, 21, in PL 79:487; 6, 3, in PL 79:526. Hippolytus, De Consummatione Mundi (On the Consummation of the World) 3, in PG 10:908; Jerome, Commentarius in Zachariam (Commentary on Zechariah) I, 1, in PL 25:1426; Prosper, Expositio Psalmorum (Commentary on the Psalms) 131, 5—10, in PL 51:379; Hilary, Treatise on the Psalms 124, 2—4, in PL 9:680—81; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 83, 3, in PG 6:672—73; Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies) I, 2, 3—4, in PG 41:392—96, etc.

28.   Clement of Alexandria, Stromata IV, 26, in PG 8:1381, even compares the Christian Jerusalem with the ideal cities of mythology and philosophy.

29.   Augustine, De Catechizandnis Rudibus (On the Catechising of the Uninstructed) 21, 37, in PL 40:336—37; he denies the title of Christian to those who would altogether reject a physical city, Contra Donatistas (Against the Donatists) IV, 10—11, in PL 43:409—10, and Jerome reluctantly warns against separating the two cities—the earthly Jerusalem is also holy, Letters 46, 7—10, in PL 22:488—89.

30.   H. Rusche, “Himmlisches Jerusalem,” in Michael Buchberger, ed., Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 9 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1960), 5:367; W. Schmauch, “Jerusalem: Theologie,” in Heinz Brunotte and Otto Weber, Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon, 4 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), 2:260. Wolberus, Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum (Commentary on the Song of Solomon) 208, in PL 195:1209, even suggests a third Jerusalem acting as a physical link between them.

31.   Michel Join-Lambert, Jerusalem (New York: Putnam, 1958), 106. During the period the great teachers “felt that their knowledge would not be complete, nor could they achieve the highest merit [virtutem]” unless they visited Jerusalem, Jerome, Letters 46, 206, in PL 22:489.

32.   Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine III, 12—15; III, 33, in PG 24:600—601; Hugh W. Nibley, “The Loyalty Problem: Our Western Heritage,” Western Political Quarterly 6 (1953): 641—46.

33.   W. Telfer, “Constantine’s Holy Land Plan,” Texte und Untersuchungen 63 (1957): 696—700. Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine III, 12—15; III, 33, in PG 20:600. Jerome says Palestine again became the religious capital of the world, Letters 46, 8—10, in PL 22:489; “Disquisition on the Life of Saint Cyril,” I, 6, 34, in PG 33:61. Constantine could only express these ideas “in the pagan idiom,” Andrew Alföldi, The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome, tr. Harold Mattingly (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), 112.

34.   Eutychius, Annales (Annals) 464—68, in PG 111:1012, compares Constantine’s conquest of the Jewish capital with Hadrian’s. Cf. Georgios Harmatolos, Chronicon (Chronicle) IV, 181, in PG 110:612, and Augustine’s victory chant, Expositions on the Psalms 63, in PL 36:759. The church stands forever on the foundation of the destroyed temple, Leo, Sermo (Discourse) 3, 1—2, in PL 54:145, literally occupying “non urbem sed locum,” Jerome, Commentarius in Jeremiam Prophetam (Commentary on Jeremiah) IV, 29, 5—10, in PL24:802. “Jerusalem was converted to the Christian faith in the time of Constantine,” Radulfi de Diceto, “Opera Historica,” in William Stubbs, ed., The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1876), 2:76.

35.   Suddenly “Aelia remembered that it had once been at Jerusalem . . . the basilicas of Constantine and of Helena . . . were reviving and exalting its venerable traditions,” Louis Duchesne, Early History of the Christian Church, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1931), 2:486.

36.   Jacob de Haas, History of Palestine (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 80—81; Georgios Hermatolos, Chronicle 410—11, in PG 110:620—21; Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1841), 2:80.

37.   Silvia visited two caves of Moses and Elijah, Job’s cave, the caves where Christ taught, was resurrected, born, ascended to heaven and (in spite of the scriptures) held the Last Supper, John W. Crowfoot, Early Churches in Palestine (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 31. The footprint of Christ in a grotto under the Temple Rock “where the dead met to worship God,” Join-Lambert, Jerusalem, 170, was matched by the Holy of Holies, in a cave under the same rock, C. Raymond Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1901), 2:150.

38.   Constantine’s prime monument, the Anastasis, was “a round building on the plan of the imperial mausoleum . . . the grotto-tomb stood in the middle,” Crowfoot, Early Churches in Palestine, 20. There “you cannot imagine what a wailing and howling was carried on by all the people . . . day and night,” to commemorate not the death, but the resurrection of Christ! (This is the author’s translation from the original text.) Compare with John H. Bernard, tr. & ed., The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1891), 68, p. 65 (cf. p. 126); 57, p. 48 (cf. p. 112). Jerome explains this with the quotation: “Where the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together,” cited in E. S. Duckett, Wandering Saints of the Early Middle Ages (New York: Norton, 1959), 296.

39.   Join-Lambert, Jerusalem, 108—11.

40.   Crowfoot, Early Churches in Palestine, 160; nine-tenths of Palestine’s churches were built then.

41.   For the economic history, Avi-Yonah, “The Economics of Byzantine Palestine,” Israel Exploration Journal 8 (1958): 38—51. Queen Helen, see Josephus, Antiquities XX, 2, 4; Eusebius, HE II, 12, in PG 20:165, was later claimed by the Christians, Flavius Lucius Dexter, Chronicon (Chronicle), in PL 31:201; Jacob Raisin, Gentile Reactions to Jewish Ideals (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 262.

42.   Join-Lambert, Jerusalem, 129, 134—40; Duchesne, Early History of the Christian Church 3:132—34, 140—43. The Lady Silvia found distinguished dames of her acquaintance inhabiting cells in Palestine, Bernard, The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places 40, p. 23—24 (cf. 90—91); 54—55, p. 42—45 (cf. 107—9).

43.   Avi-Yonah, “The Economics of Byzantine Palestine,” 41, 47—51. “A countless host of priests and monks” came hither, “partly because of the sanctity of the two places, partly because of the fame of Jerome, and partly to enjoy the charity of rich and noble matrons,” Marius Mercatius, Fides Rufini Aquileiensis (The Faith of Rufinus of Aquileia) preface, in PL 48:239. Anonymous, De Locis Sanctis (On the Holy Places) 11, in PG 133:985, puts the number of religious establishments in Jerusalem at 365.

44.   Crowfoot, Early Churches in Palestine, 7—8; Sozomen, HE II, 26, in PG 67:26; Avi-Yonah, “The Economics of Byzantine Palestine,” 41—42, 49.

45.   The grand scale rioting began at the dedication of Constantine’s church, Cambridge Medieval History, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 1:128, and culminated in the massacre at the Holy Sepulchre in 451 A.A. For a description, Marius Mercatius, The Faith of Rufinus of Aquileia 12, in PL 48:240; “Disquisition on the Life of Saint Cyril,” I, in PG 33:63—64.

46.   Cambridge Medieval History 2:285, 290; De Haas, History of Palestine, 116.

47.   William of Tyre, Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum (History of Overseas Territories) I, 2, in PL 201:214—15.

48.   Lawrence Edward Browne, Eclipse of Christianity in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 25; de Haas, History of Palestine, 117. Adrian Fortescue, “Jerusalem,” in Charles G. Herberman, ed., The Catholic Encyclopedia, 16 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1910), 8:359—60, charges treason.

49.   Georgios Harmatolos, Chronicle 4, 22, in PG 110:833, treats the breaking of this oath to the Jews as a crime, formally recognized as such by the Coptic Church. Cf. de Haas, History of Palestine, 120.

50.   Omar, “after a lapse of six centuries,” revived the essential Jewish tradition of Jerusalem, Join-Lambert, Jerusalem, 169. On Sophronius and the Christian claims, Charles Diehl and Georges Margais, Le monde orientale de 395 à 1081, in Louis Lévéque, ed., Histoire du moyen age, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Presses Universitaire de France, 1936), 1:154—55.

51.   Jerome, Letters 46, 8—10, in PL 22:489; Eusebius, HE VI, 2, in PG 20:541—44; Sulpicius Severus, Chronicle 2, 31, in PL 20:147; Basset, “Le Synaxaire arabe jacobite,” in PO 16:303—5.

52.   F. Dölger, in Relazioni 3:92. Among those discouraging pilgrimages are Origen, Athanasius, Hilary, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, Cedrenus, Sulpicius Severus, Bede, Theodoret, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Vendome, Gilles of Paris, the Russian Daniel, Rupert, and Thomas a Kempis. Note 54 below.

53.   Dölger, in Relazioni 3:88—93. They were looking for “une sorte de paradis perdu,” R. Roussel, Les pélerinages (Paris: Payot, 1954), 13. Pilgrimage and monastic life “met l’homme en communication directe avec Dieu,” Diehl, Le monde orientale 3:101. They would kiss the holy objects “like thirsty people,” Jerome, Letters 46 and 47, in PL 22:484—93.

54.   “In the whole of patristic literature there is not one homily or other exhortation . . . to undertake pilgrimages,” B. Koetting, Peregrinatio Religiosa (Münster: Regensberg, 1950), 42. It was a popular vote of no-confidence in the church, Adolf von Harnack, Das Mönchtum (Giessen: Kicker, 1895). “If you really believed, you would not have to visit these places to reassure yourselves,” says Gregorius Nyssenus (Gregory of Nyssa), Epistolae (Letters) 2, in PG 46:1013.

55.   Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” 14—15; Roussel, Les pélerinages, 48—50. The will to locate and materialize everything is paramount: “This is the tomb of Moses, in spite of the fact that the Scriptures say that no man knows his tomb,” Bernard, The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places, 42, p. 27 (cf. 94). Ricoldus put a live baby into the Holy Crib so he and other pilgrims could worship it, Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” 16.

56.   It was believed that Jerusalem was actually a bit of heaven, Harnack, History of Dogma 6:8; Bernardi, Itinerarium in Loca Sancta (Journey to the Holy Places) 10—16, in PL 121:572—73; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History) III, 16—17, in PL 95:258. At Jerusalem the most important “letters from heaven” descended, Mathew Paris, Chronica Majora, 7 vols. (London: Longman, 1872), 2:462—64; Maximilian Bittner, Der vom Himmel gefallene Brief Christi in seinen morgenländischen Versionen und Rezensionen, in Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 51 (1906): 71.

57.   Bernardi, Itinerarium in Local Sancta (Journey to the Holy Places) 10—16, in PL 121:572—73; Georgios Harmatolos, Chronicle 139—40, in PG 110:664; Cassiodorus, Commentary on the Psalms 67, 35—38, in PL 70:474; Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” 17.

58.   Stewart Perowne, “The Site of the Holy Sepulchre,” Listener 68 (1962): 351—53; F. M. Abel, “Jérusalem,” in DACL, 7:2311. It was the spot of the “ultima Domini vestigia,” Bede, Ecclesiastical History III, 16—17, in PL 95:257.

59.   A very moving description in Bede, Ecclesiastical History III, 17—18, in PL 95:258. The great central shrine was roofless in order to maintain contact with heaven, Bernardi, Journey to the Holy Places 10—12, in PL 121:572.

60.   Augustine, Sermones (Sermons) 117, 6—7, in PL 38:660. Cf. Gregory of Tours, Miraculorum de Liber Gloria Martyrum I, 5, in PL 71:709.

61.   M. Daniel-Rops, L’église de la cathedrale et de la croisade, 542. The four columns of the Holy of Holies were claimed by Mecca, Paris, Chronica Majora 6:349, Venice; John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 2:438; and Rome, ibid., 246, where they stood on the very soil of Jerusalem, sent to Rome by St. Helen herself, ibid., 272—73, n. 1. Cf. John the Deacon, Liber de Ecclesia Lateranensi (On the Lateran Church) 1—4, in PL 194:1547—48. In the eighth century Syncellus identifies Constantinople with Jerusalem in the most literal sense, Paul Alexander, “The Strength of Empire and Capital as Seen through Byzantine Eyes,” Speculum 37 (1962): 346—47; the chief church of Spain was called simply “Jerusalem,” Petrus Braida, Dissertatio in Sanctum Nicetam (Disquisition on Saint Nicetas) 5, in PL 52:952. The Jerusalem in Rome, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum 1, 202; 3, 172, like the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster, Phillip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols. (London: Harper, 1905), 1:748—49, were mystically identified with Jerusalem. The Temple in London was a reproduction of Solomon’s Temple, “built round in imitation of this,” Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimes 8:193; Walter Besant, Mediaeval London, 2 vols. (London: Black, 1906), 2:276—77. The same idea was followed in London’s St. Sepulchre, J. C. Dickinson, Monastic Life in Medieval England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962), 82.

62.   Walsingham, “The Nazareth of England,” gave the pilgrim “the same spiritual privileges as would the journey to Palestine,” Roussel, Les Pélerinages, 94. On the rule of distance, Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” 16; Titus Tobler, Dr. Titus Toblers zwei Bücher Topographie von Jerusalem und seinen Umgebungen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1853—54), 1:540.

63.   Giselbert, Historia Hierosolymitana (History of Jerusalem) IV, 35—38, in PL 166:555. It is “quasi alterum coelum,” Peter of Blois, De Hierosolymitana Peregrinatione (On the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem), in PL 207:1070, “a star in some other heaven,” Cassiodorus, Commentary on the Psalms 86—87, in PL 70:622, an “alter paradisus delicarum,” says Urban in Robert Manachus, Historia Hierosolymitana (History of Jerusalem) I, 1, in PL 155:672.

64.   On the political issues, Aziz Atiya, Crusade, Commerce, and Culture (Mass.: Smith, 1969), 36; Crowfoot, Early Churches in Palestine, 162—63.

65.   Sangallensis Monachus, De Gestis Beati Carolil Magni II, 11, in PL 98:1396—98; Anonymous, Annales Veteres Francorum, in PL 98:1427—28. Paris, Chronica Majora 1:368; Louis Halphen, Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, tr. Giselle de Nie (New York: North-Holland, 1977), 93—94; Cambridge Medieval History2:620—21, 704—5.

66.   Roussel, Les pélerinages, 14; Join-Lambert, Jerusalem, 176.

67.   Benedict Stolz, “The Benedictines in the Holy Land,” Christian News from Israel 11 (1960): 12.

68.   A. Philipsborn, “Les premiers hôpitaux au moyen age (orient et occident),” Nouvelle Clio 6 (1955): 144—46. In the history of hospitals in general “le role de Jerusalem est capital,” ibid., 160.

69.   Paul Heinisch, History of the Old Testament (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1952), 418. Vespasian continued the temple tax for the pagan temple, and Theodosius diverted it into the imperial treasury, as did the German Emperors, Cambridge Medieval History 7:646—47.

70.   In 883 and 887 King Alfred sent the monks back to Jerusalem loaded with gifts, Simeon of Durham, Historia Regum, in Thomas Arnold, ed., Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1882), 2:62; and in 889 following the example of Charlemagne imposed a regular Jerusalem tax, collected by the clergy, Richard of Cirencester, Speculum Historiale de Gestis Regum Angliae (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863—69), 2:41. Circa A.D. 900 “monks used to come annually to Rouen to collect alms” for Jerusalem. Stolz, “The Benedictines in the Holy Land,” 12, citing Ralph Glaber. The Jerusalem (later Saladin) tax became the foundation of Papal and national taxing policy in the Middle Ages, Ibsen’s review of A. Gottlob, Die päpstlische Kreuzzugsstreuen des 13. Jahrhunderts (Heiligenstadt: Cordier, 1892), Historische Zeitschrift 72 (1894): 315. This too has an old Jewish background, Cicero, Pro Flacco 28 (66—69).

71.   Charles Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 3 vols. (London: Frowde, 1905), 2:120—23; René Grousset, Histoire des croisades et du Royaume Franc de Jerusalem, 3 vols. (Paris: Librarie Plan, 1934), 1:lviii.

72.   Beazley, Modern Geography 2:126, 148—49, 107; Charles Homer Haskins, Norman Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), 266—67; Richard of Cirencester (New York: Ungar, 1960), 2:178—79, 252, 283; Giraldus, Chronicon 3:397—98 (St. David of Wales); Kristnisaga 13:2; 17:5; Are, Islendinga-boc 10:14; Orvar-Odds Saga 33:8; 34:1.

73.   Beazley, Modern Geography 2:155—61, 165, 167, 125, 215, 405.

74.   Beazley, Modern Geography 2:125; Ralph Glaber, Chronicon 4, 6, in PL 142:680—82; Purchas, His Pilgrimes 8:18; on mass pilgrimages, Beazley, Modern Geography 2:129—30.

75.   Quote is from Beazley, Modern Geography 2:127. Gregory VII and the Emperor Michael VII were already thinking of a Crusade in 1073, G. Ostrogorsky, “The Byzantine Emperor and the Hierarchical World Order,” Slavonic and East European Review 35 (1956): 14. On Robert le Frison, L. Henri Pirenne, Bibliographie de l’histoire de Belgique (Bruxelles: Lamertin, 1931) 1:96—100.

76.   The Crusaders are God’s elect, true Israel, the Chosen People, Fulcher, Historia Hierosolymitana (History of Jerusalem) 39, 4, in PL 155:891; Godfrey was the new Moses, his advent announced (literally) on Sinai, Alberic, Historia Hierosolymitana (History of Jerusalem) VI, 33—35, in PL 166:554; his successor is designated in his epitaph as “Rex Baldwinus Judas alter Machabeus,” Purchas, His Pilgrimes 8:187; the first Crusaders are “the Princes of Judah bringing comfort to Jerusalem,” Guibert, Gesta Dei per Francos (Acts of God through the Franks) VIII, 4, in PL 156:806—8, defending her “in the midst of the Gentiles,” ibid., in PL 156:810. “You are now the Children of Israel,” cries Urban II, “fight better than the ancient Israelites for Your Jerusalem,” Oswald J. Reichel, The See of Rome in the Middle Ages(London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 320.

77.   “Through the Crusades . . . the primitive Christian institutions were restored; the sacred places . . . led it to the Christ of the Gospels,” Harnack, History of Dogma6:9. Rodulfus Glaber, Historia (History) 3, 4, in PL 142:651: “Rejecta vestustate, passim candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret.” Against the will of the leaders, the masses insisted on marching straight to Jerusalem, William of Tyre, History of Overseas Territories VII, 2, in PL 201:378—79. “Sehnsucht nach Freiheit” was the motive, Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1957), 1:258; and Urban’s speech lays strong emphasis on the escape motif, Fulcher, History of Jerusalem 1, 2, in PL 155:830—32.

78.   Adolf Waas, “Der heilige Krieg,” Welt als Geschichte 19 (1959): 215—16.

79.   Thus Geoffrey, though anxious to avoid bloodshed, was “bound to avenge the insult [injuriam] to his Lord,” Godefridus Rex, Concio ad Milites Christianos (Call to Christian Soldiers), in PL 155:391, and so, seeking “neither Tower, nor Gold, nor Spoile, but revenge . . . clave human bodies from the head to the raines,” Purchas, His Pilgrimes 7:449—50. Pope and Sultan exchange formal challenges and insults in the best epic and chivalric manner, John of Whethamstede, Registra Quorundam Abbatum Monasterius St. Albanus (London: Longman, 1872—73) 11:270—71.

80.   The Crusaders adopted the epic literary idiom, and dramatized themselves as the Knights of the Round Table, Grousset, Histoire des croisades 3:731. Later ages saw the Crusades in an epic setting, as Torqvato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata 1:1, 12, 21, 23; 4:7; 6, 9, etc.

81.   Franz Altheim, Gesicht vom Abend und Morgen (Frankfurt: Fischer Bücherei, 1955), 148—50. The close ties with central Asia are significant, Éduard Perrov, Le moyen age, in Maurice Crouzet, ed., Histoire genérale de civilisations, 7 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), 3:341; Grousset, Histoire des croisades 3:746.

82.   “Earlier crusades were armed migrations, not military invasions,” Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Macmillan, 1896, 1910), 124.

83.   C. Dawson, Dynamics of World History, 137; T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958), 59—61, 106. Jerome describes the fall of Rome both in terms of Jerusalem and of Troy, Grant Showerman, Eternal Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), 337—38.

84.   Laetitia Boehm, “‘Gesta Dei per Francos’ oder ‘Gesta Francorum?'” Saeculum 8 (1957): 44—45; Hugh W. Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,” Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 226—53, and “The Unsolved Loyalty Problem: Our Western Heritage,” Western Political Quarterly 6 (1953): 641—46. Christianity borrowed from paganism its mystique of victory, Oswald J. Reichel, The See of Rome in the Middle Ages (London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 344—45.

85.   Waas, “Der heilige Krieg,” 212—15, demonstrates at length that the Moslems took over the idea from the Christians, and not the other way around. Cf. Atiya, Crusade, Commerce, and Culture, 130—37.

86.   William of Tyre, History of Overseas Territories IX, 16, in PL 201:448; XI, 11—13, in PL 201:497—99; Alberic, History of Jerusalem VII, 63—67, in PL 166:602—3; W. Ohnsorge, “Byzanz und das Abendland im 9. u. 10. Jahrhundert. Eine Zusammenfassung,” Nouvelle Clio 5 (1954): 447—49; Boehm, “Gesta Dei,” 44—46; D. M. Nicol, “Byzantium and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 13 (1962): 18; Charles Brand, “The Byzantines and Saladin, 1185—1192; Opponents of the Third Crusade,” Speculum 37 (1962): 179. On the very day of Charlemagne’s coronation the monks of St. Sabas (who had brought him the keys and banner of Jerusalem) fought a pitched battle with the Benedictines of Bethlehem whose patron was Leo III, Stolz, “The Benedictines in the Holy Land,” 12—13.

87.   Cambridge Medieval History 5:303; Steven Runciman, “The Crown of Jerusalem,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 92 (1960): 15; Angelo S. Rappoport, History of Palestine (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), 282—85.

88.   Eugéne de Roziere, ed., Cartulaire du Saint Sépulcre 1, in PL 155:1106. Most royalty in time claimed the crown of Jerusalem, Runciman, “The Crown of Jerusalem,” 8—9. When the patriarch of Jerusalem, the two grand masters, the pope, and the emperor met at Verona to discuss Jerusalem, an envoy of Saladin (who “claimed Jerusalem as his by hereditary right from Sara”) Ishmael was present with a letter to “his most victorious brother,” the Pope, Horace Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages, 18 vols. (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925), 10:255—56.

89.   The claims of the Hospitalers, back to the Maccabees, are presented by an anonymous writer, De Primordiis et Inventione Sacrae Religionis Ierosolymorum, in PL 155:1097—1104; the claims of the Templars on Solomon’s Temple are apparent from St. Bernard’s PL 182:927—28; the rapacity and independence of the orders from John of Salisbury, Epistolae (Letters), 1, 140, in PL 199.

90.   So Baldric, Historia Hierosolymitana IV, in PL 166:1152. This is brought out in the exchange of letters between the pope and the Sultan in 1457, John of Whethamstede, Registra Quorundam Abbatum Monasterius St. Albanus 1:270.

91.   Grousset, Histoire des croisades 2:319, 608, 693, 745—48; 3:29, 359, 393, 650; cf. Philippe de Méziére’s verdict, cited in Atiya, Crusade, Commerce and Culture, 110—11; D. M. Bell, Le songe du vieil pélerin, 2 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 180—90: he calls for peace with the Moslem world.

92.   Waas, “Der heilige Kreig,” 217—18. Defeat made the Christians vulnerable to their own stock argument against the Jews, Raisin, Gentile Reactions, 505; Paris, Chronica Majora 4:345—46, says the catastrophe of 1244 was the literal fulfillment of Mark 13:2.

93.   G. Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York & London: Cooperative Publication Society, 1900), 393, 395; Grousset, Histoire des croisades 1:163—64; Boehm, “Gesta Dei,” 45, 47; Waas, “Der heilige Kreig,” 218, 224.

94.   Paetow, The Crusades, 209—20; F. Mourret, Précis d’histoire de l’église 2:9. The crusade against the Albigensians was viewed as a mystic crusade to Jerusalem, Pierre des Vaux-de Cernay, Histoire albigéoise (Paris: Vrin, 1951), 42.

95.   Though St. Francis is credited with the gentler new method of preaching instead of fighting, Waas, “Der heilige Krieg,” 221, the legend is that he challenged Saladin’s religious entourage to a formal ordeal by fire in the best feudal manner, Ernest Raymond, In the Steps of St. Francis (New York: Kinsey, 1939), 225—26. And certainly the Franciscans were tough and aggressive, as appears in many reports in Purchas, His Pilgrimes 8:181—82, 300, 302—3; 9:466, 478—80. Indeed they considered their order to be the New Jerusalem, M. R. James, Apocalypse in Art, 67.

96.   Charles VIII, Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (London: Bell, 1909), 27, 82; Alfonso and Joan I, Elaine Sanceau, The Perfect Prince, 107, 243, 412; Albuquerque and Sebastian, K. G. Jayne, Vasco da Gama, 101, 279. Such schemes are already apparent in the 4th crusade and the career of St. Louis, and still earlier in Nicephorus Phocas fantastic letter of 964 to the court of Baghdad. Grousset, Histoire des croisades 1:12.

97.   Salvador de Madariaga, Christopher Columbus (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 18, 106, 165, 359—61, 404; Samuel Elliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea(Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 5, 45—46, 97, 304, 668.

98.   Purchas, His Pilgrimes 9:497; Albert Nathaniel Williams, The Holy City (New York: Deull, Slon & Pierce, 1954), 353—59; Jayne, Vasco da Gama, 284. The Reformation itself was hailed “as the first indication of the advent of the Messianic age,” L. I. Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925) 1:628, the early catharist preoccupation with Jerusalem being of Cabbalistic origin, 1:175.

99.   J. Bowsma, Concordia Mundi, 16—17, 178. On Humanist interest in Jerusalem, Boehm, “Gesta Dei,” 51—53, 59.

100.   Though “d’acharnes adversaires des pélerinages,” they still imitated them in their old Hebrew aspect, Roussel, Les pélerinages, 107. Luther can conceive of “honest” pilgrimages of the old type, Works 31:199; Werke 1:598; and is impressed by the unique holiness of Jerusalem, Works 2:344, 378; Werke 42:507, 533. Calvin objects primarily to the physical impossibility of gathering the saints at Jerusalem, John Calvin, Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, tr. John Owen, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1950), 5:228.

101.   Luther, Works 2:99—100, 342, 360—61; 3:77; 13:34—35, 269, 339; 14:20, 326—27; 21:104; 23:120—21, 369; 32:162—64; 35:291—92, 303—5, 329—30; Werke 42:333, 506—7, 519—20; 42:603; 8:32, 33; 41:127—28, 221—22; 5:57—58; 32:386; 33:186, 598—99; 8:60—61; John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, tr. James Anderson, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1949), 2:226.

102.   As is apparent from Luther, Works 14:6, 9, 19; 24:169—71, 237, 262; 31:198; Werke 1:31, 225—26, 228—29, 238; 45:615—17, 678, 701; 1:597—98; Calvin, Minor Prophets 5:228.

103.   Luther, Works 2:361—62; Werke 42:520; C. Henry Smith, Smith’s Story of the Mennonites (Kansas: Mennonite Publication Office, 1950), 282; G. H. Williams, Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1957), 23, 29, 150, 255—60.

104.   John Evelyn, Diary 5:177—78; George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 2:90, 130—32, 170—72, 338, 383, 481.

105.   Such were Jung-Stilling’s movement, Ernst Benz, “Ost und West in der christlicher Geschichtsanschauung,” Welt als Geschichte 1 (1955): 503—13, and the followers of Christian Offmann and Johann Lange, the Jerusalem Friends or Templers, Smith, Smith’s Story of the Mennonites, 282. Sir Henry Finch’s book, for which James I imprisoned him, calling for the Jews to return to Jerusalem and take “complete temporal dominion over the whole world,” had considerable influence for over 300 years, Christopher Sykes, Two Studies in Virtue (New York: Knopf, 1953), 149—50.

106.   Though the Quakers insisted that “wee . . . cannot owne noe other neither outwarde Jerusalem,” Fox, The Journal of George Fox 2:131, yet they risked life and limb to reach the physical Jerusalem, 2:338, 383, 481; W. C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (London: Macmillan, 1912), 418—19. Purchas asserts that “to ascribe sanctitie to the place is Jewish,” His Pilgrimes 8:19, yet he was a pilgrim; and others who poured contempt on the holy places and rites were transported by the sight of the former, 10:444, 487; Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism, 424. So Robinson declared it un-Christian to heed “particular times and places,” Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2:72, yet was overwhelmed by the “coincidence of time, place and number” when twelve American missionaries met in a “large upper room” in Jerusalem, 1:335; and Schaff, who abhorred the superstitious “mummery” of the pilgrimage, immersed himself ten times in the Jordan and “almost imagined I was miraculously delivered from rheumatism,” David Schley Schaff, Life of Phillip Schaff (New York: Scribner, 1897), 311.

107.   Both attitudes are seen in William Thomson, The Land and the Book (New York: Harper, 1882), 625—26.

108.   F. Bassan, Chateaubriand et la terre saints (1959) 209, 247. All the French travelers to Jerusalem between 1800 and 1850 “represent un oriente de fantaise,” according to Bassan, who lists 67 of them, ibid., 35.

109.   Williams, The Holy City, 365. “In 1835 the Church Missions to the Jews” set up in Jerusalem, Ruth Rouse and Stephen Charles Neill, eds., Histoire of the Ecumenical Movement (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1954), 289. E. Krüger, “L’effort missionaire américain dans le proche orient,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 40 (1960): 278—84. Robinson, Palestine 1:327—28, 332—35; Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History 9:101—3; K. S. Latourette, Nineteenth Century Outside Europe, 398.

110.   This is consistently overlooked by historians, but clearly stated by Gladstone, Correspondence of Church and Religion of William Edwart Gladstone, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 1:243, and Bunsen.

111.   John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Longman, Green, 1908), 128—38, 201.

112.   Fortescue, “Jerusalem,” 368—70. F. Mourret, Précis d’histoire de l’église 3:269: these moves “counterbalance as much as possible the influence of the Russian schismatics and the German Protestants.”

113.   Paul Goodman, Moses Montefiore (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1925), 62, 64—67.

114.   T. A. B. Corley, Democratic Despot (London: Barris & Rockliff, 1961), 148—49. G. Marchal, Guerre de Crimée, 2—5, showing that the war was actually fought about the Holy Places.

115.   Eugénie’s idealist plan for uniting the crowned heads of Europe in a common undertaking to rebuild the Holy Sepulchre found no takers, Corley, Democratic Despot, 267. “The French government saw in the pilgrimages a force to be utilized in the penetration of the Orient,” and even the anti-clerical parties supported them accordingly, Mourret, Précis d’histoire de l’église 3:379. It was to meet the growing power of France and Russia (which established a Jerusalem Bishopric in 1858) that the Protestants of England and Germany were appealed to for support “in the name of national interest and prestige,” De Haas, History of Palestine, 414, 416; cf. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 311—13.

116.   Wilhelm II, My Memoirs (London: Cassell, 1922), 210.

117.   Ibid., 208.

118.   In his childhood a favorite toy was “a wooden model of Jerusalem called ‘Heavenly Jerusalem,’ with removable domes,” Wilhelm II, My Early Life (New York: Doran, 1926), 40. Herzl hailed him in 1898 as “an emperor of peace . . . making a great entry into this eternal city,” Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, tr. Harry Zohn, 5 vols. (New York: Yoseloff, 1960), 2:741, a white charger and his spiritual entourage dreamed of converting the Jews, 2:759; the arrogance of his staff thwarted his Zionist intentions, Israel Cohen, Theodor Herzl (New York: Yoseloff, 1959), 195—96, 199, 201.

119.   Rappoport, History of Palestine, 324—25.

120.   M. Crouzet, L’époque contemporaine, 7 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 7:605; T. Canaan, “Two Documents on the Surrender of Jerusalem,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 10 (1930): 29, 31; the Turks surrendered Jerusalem “for the sole purpose of protecting the holy places.”

121.   Francis John McConnell, By the Way: An Autobiography (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1952), 193—95. The Jerusalem meeting of 1928 “recall[ed] not inaptly the period of the great Oecumenical Councils,” J. Wand, in Edward Eyre, ed., European Civilization, 7 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934—39), 6:1561, and gave “the impetus for the creation of the international Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews,” Rouse & Neil, Histoire of the Ecumenical Movement, 369. Such gatherings as the YMCA International Prayer Week at Jerusalem in 1951, ibid., 633, the Grand Mufti’s tea in 1955, Charles Smyth, Cyril Forster Garbett(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1959), 489—90 and the World Conference of Pentecostal Organizations in 1960, Christian News from Israel 11 (1960):12—14, are expressive of the idea.

122.   The astonishing variety, set forth by John of Wurzburg, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae (Description of the Holy Land) 12—13, in PL 155:1088, still survives, Join-Lambert, Jerusalem, 137. “American Jesuits from Baghdad, Presbyterian missionaries grouped around the American University of Beirut, multiplied schools and attracted students by the assurance of employment in Yankee enterprise,” says a resentful French observer, Crouzet, L’époque contemporaine 7:619. Today the Benedictine Order “seeks recruits in all countries . . . particularly in the United States,” for the work in Jerusalem, Stolz, “The Benedictines in the Holy Land,” 21.

123.   In 1948 the Vatican appealed for “the growth of Jerusalem as a universal Christian religious, cultural and educational center,” James McDonald, My Mission in Israel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), 210—11. The mixture of cultural with religious interest is apparent in the pilgrimages of the Holy Year 1950, the Baptist pilgrimage of 2,500 members in 1955 and “the arrival of . . . ever increasing number[s] of interdenominational, . . . [and] studygroups,” Father Jean-Roger, “Christian Travel in Israel,” Christian News from Israel 10 (1960): 21—22. The scholarly emphasis is seen in the founding of the auxiliary residence of the Pontifical Biblical Institute at Jerusalem in 1925, and amusingly demonstrated by the impeccable good taste of Cyril Forster Garbett, Bishop of York, Smyth, Cyril Forster Garbett, 493—94, 497, 501. Waas, “Der heilige Krieg,” 211, 224, notes that World Wars I and II both began as Crusades but quickly dropped the allusion.

124.   Wilhelm de Vries, “Die Entstehung der Patriarchate des Ostens und ihr Verhältnis zur päpstlichen Vellgewalt,” Scholastik 37 (1962): 368—69.

125.   Polish, Eternal Dissent, 203—12. By the “dramatic entry of Israel . . . the Christian tradition in the Holy Land has been violently disrupted,” says Bishop E. M. E. Blyth, who takes comfort in the thought that Israel is “fulfilling Scripture in many ways, even unconsciously,” E. M. E. Blyth, “The Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” Modern Churchman, n.s. 5 (1961—62): 231. Marcel Simon, Versus Israel (Paris: De Boccard, 1948), 118—20, is genuinely alarmed; Eyre, European Civilization, 6:854, and Williams, The Holy City, 348, are nonplussed.

126.   In 1838 Shaftesbury got Palmerston to appoint a British viceconsul in Jerusalem charged with “protection of the Jews generally,” and in 1840 they sought cooperation with Russian Decabrist, Polish Liberationists, and French statesmen as part of a widespread liberation movement, Christopher Sykes, Two Studies in Virtue (New York: Knopf, 1953), 151. Metternich also joined, Goodman, Moses Montefiore, 65. The Anglo-Lutheran Bishopric of the following year was denounced by Newman as an implicit concession to the Jews in Palestine, which it was, Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 128, 130, 132, 135, 138, 201. When the Grand Duke Frederick of Baden, who “evinced a deep interest in Zionism,” arranged for Herzl’s audience with the Kaiser, Zionism became “a question with which European politics must reckon,” Max Margolis and Alexander Marx, History of the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1927), 708. Even the Russian government was sympathetic, Herzl, Diaries 1:373.

127.   Joseph Sittler, “The Abiding Concern of the Church for the Jewish People,” Ecumenical Review 7 (1955): 221—23; cf. Herzl, Diaries 4:1593—94, 1603.

128.   So William F. Albright, “Israel—Prophetic Vision and Historical Fulfillment,” in Moshe Davis, ed., Israel: Its Role in Civilization (New York: Harper, 1956), 37. Chateaubriand found the Jewish community in Jerusalem to be the one wholly admirable and miraculous phenomenon in the city, Bassan, Chateaubriand et la terre saints, 161; Journal, 177—78.

129.   Polish, Eternal Dissent, 203—12, quoting Charles Malik, 205, and the World Council of Churches, 1948: “The continued existence of a Jewish people which does not acknowledge Christ, is a divine mystery.” It is “a mystery and a wonderful phenomenon,” says Berdyaev, Meaning of History (London: Centenary, 1936), 50, refuting “the materialistic and positivistic criterion” of history, as it does Mr. Toynbee’s theory of history, to his annoyance, Poish, Eternal Dissent, 209. See note 125 above.

130.   The rivalry is expressed in many of the fathers, and in the determined attempts of the papacy to stop the pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Mähl, “Jerusalem in mittelalterlicher Sicht,” 151; James Wallace, Fundamentals of Christian Statesmanship (New York: Revell, 1939), 333—35; Cambridge Medieval History 1:174—75; Luc Compain, Étude sur Geoffroi de Vendôme (Paris: Bouillon, 1891), 67.

131.   “I [consider] only Rome an opponent [because] . . . only Roman Catholicism is as oecumenical as Judaism,” Herzl, Diaries 3:889, cf. 1:345, 353; 4:1603. On the Roman position, Joseph Samuel Bloch, My Reminiscences (Vienna: Löwit, 1923), 161—62; James G. McDonald, My Mission in Israel: 1948—51 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), 35, 205—7; Esco Foundation for Palestine, Palestine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947) 1:277. During the U.N. debate of 1949 religious considerations were foremost, Survey of International Affairs 5 (1939—46): 307; Williams, The Holy City, 403.

132.   How easy it is to create holy places is seen in the designation by the Husseini family late in the 19th century of “the traditional site of Moses’ tomb” in Jerusalem, “Miscellany: This Year in Jersualem,” Palestine Review 52 (1938): 875.

[joshuaasworld-blog]

A Legacy of British Colonialism

The effects of British colonialism are widespread and felt throughout all corners of the globe today. One of the most apparent effects of its legacy is the British mandate territory of Palestine - now modern day Israel. Throughout much of the early 20th century, Jews did exist within this territory but their numbers were sparse. Shortly after World War I, the British government seized the territory of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. Before the war had even ended, the government issued the Balfour Declaration which voiced support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Jewish migration between World War I and II would significantly increase. The British were nurturing settler colonialism by actively encouraging the migration of Jews to Palestine all the while ignoring the plight of the indigenous populations that already lived there. It can be argued that British support of Jewish migration before World War II was largely politically motivated in that they sought to quell Arab dissent in the region and suppress Palestinian nationalism. Jewish migration would help quell Arab dissent through a divide and conquer strategy. The British viewed the territory of Palestine as a valuable asset to their empire and were not willing to lose it. Over the course of years leading up to World War II, Zionist groups and Jewish agencies in Palestine grew stronger with the aid and support of the British government. By the time the British withdrew from Palestine and relinquished its control to the UN, it left in its wake a grossly imbalanced political vacuum, one in which the power dynamics heavily favored Jewish occupants. This imbalance in the power dynamics between Jewish and Arab occupants of Palestine would set the stage for a unilateral mandate for the creation of a Jewish nation-state that would never envelop Palestinian nationalistic aspirations and would perpetuate injustices for the next six decades.

Sources:

http://socialistnetwork.org/the-imperialist-roots-of-the-arab-israeli-conflict/

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-balfour-declaration

[notchainedtotrauma]

Okay, so how and when do we factor the fact that Donald Trump Jr. praised Tim Walz for his response to the George Floyd protests ? The same Donald Trump who is running today ?

When do we factor in, since we're talking about the protection of queer people, the fact, that there is a rise of anti-trans bills, and extremely dangerous concepts would be legislated if it wasn't for organizing and protecting, like "trans panic", ripping trans children away from accepting parents ?

When do we factor in libraries disappearing from towns because librarians were receiving death threats for holding in their stacks queer and Black books and books that honestly told the history of both, which also meant the history of the oppressor ?

When do we factor in Lady Ruby and her daughter, elections workers in Georgia, that became Trump and his weasel of a lawyer (and politician and all around grifter, including grifter of the heart) Rudy Giluiani's major targets in 2020, told to have falsified the results in favor of Biden ? And who where violently, even threatened with possible death by those people and K***'s manager ? And they had to sue and I still haven't heard that Biden or Kamala Harris took care of any of this before it could happen ?

When do we factor in the removal of several and very specific departments in universities across states, and not only in Florida, and not only in Republican states, way before the pro Palestine campus protests, a lot of them about Black Studies, Feminist Studies, LGBTQ Studies, the study of specific histories ?

When do we factor in not only the sudden end of, but the rising hatred towards DEI (Diversity. Equity. Inclusion) in all spaces ?

When do we factor in Black teachers running away from their states because it's no longer safe to teach here and maybe there needs to be a collective of people to rewrite and re-edit the Green Book ?

Listen. Trump is here, teeth bared, ready to strike. But please, don't come here and sell people a fairytale. At this point, YOU, YES, YOU are ENDOCTRINATED. Because if you had any sense, if you're worried about Trump, then you should be worried that Kamala Harris is putting a Republican in her cabinet. By doing so, she is signaling she's going to work actively with the Republicans, with also means, she'll let them have a couple of victories, respecftully. So where does that fit in your fucking cotton candy, glitter and haloed world ?

The other thing: can you please stop telling people to vote and start organizing about the active suppression of ballots in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Wisconsin, where people are thrown off voting rolls like donuts in hot oil. If you want people to vote, make sure they CAN vote.

Demsoc motherfuckers: "It will be easier to push Kamala to the left! We have to elect her!"

Kamala Harris: