RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/perfidious-albion/

As the Ottoman Empire was in its death throes, the British government began to look ahead. On November 2, 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour issued a momentous statement in a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish community:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

This was a significant boost for the Zionist project, as it was the first time that a major power had expressed support for it, and Jewish immigration into Palestine increased.

The British, however, were playing both sides. At the same time that they committed themselves to the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, they were also encouraging the most vociferous opponents of the Zionist project, the Arabs. Indeed, no less an authority than Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the celebrated “Lawrence of Arabia,” admitted that the very concept of Arab nationalism was a British invention.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21227/israel-amos-philistines

Israel’s enemies in Gaza today, like the Philistines of old, constitute a mortal threat to the nation, although that threat diminishes as Israel again succeeds in overcoming its enemies.

One hopes, with the astounding team of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President-elect Donald J. Trump, who successfully initiated the Abraham Accords, that jihads, pogroms and similar events will no longer take place, and that Israel will soon herald in a new dispensation of peace and redemption, as promised to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and live once again as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

The Hebrew prophet Amos lived some 2,700 years ago, during the reign of King Jeroboam II of Israel. At the time, the Israelites’ main enemies were the Philistines of Gaza, reputed to be the most menacing tribe in the region and dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Amos predicted dire punishment for the Philistines, who had taken “captive whole communities and sold them to Edom.” The Philistines had attacked the Israelites, enslaved and sold them to another of their enemies, the tribe of Edom. According to Amos, divine retribution was at hand. Certain passages of Amos’s prophecy cite the punishment of Israel’s Gazan enemies:

“Because she took captive whole communities
and sold them to Edom,
I will send fire on the walls of Gaza
that will consume her fortresses.
I will destroy the king of Ashdod
and the one who holds the scepter in Ashkelon.
I will turn my hand against Ekron,
till the last of the Philistines are dead.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-my-journey-between-jerusalems?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To make proper sense of the bloody events of the past 12 months in the Middle East, I had to go to Vilnius. 

That may strike you as bizarre, as Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and roughly 1,600 miles from Tel Aviv. But Vilnius was once “the Jerusalem of the North”—that’s what Napoleon called it when he passed through in 1812.

It is a pretty city today, with all kinds of charming eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, many of them creatively renovated since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Vilnius is a city of ghosts. That so much of its baroque architecture survived the brutalities of first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation is remarkable. The Jewish inhabitants were not so fortunate.

To understand Israel today, you must first understand what befell the Jews of Europe. It is the story of what can happen to a people without a nation state. It is the story of a people without an army of their own. And it is a story of what could happen again if the enemies of the Jewish people are given a chance, once more, to fulfill their fantasies.

What today is Vilnius was once Vilna, a part of the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist empire, and then, between 1918 and 1939, Wilno in the Republic of Poland. The condition of much of the Jewish population was impoverished and insecure. A British member of Parliament who toured the Pale of Settlement in 1903 was appalled by Vilna’s “pestilent” cellars. 

Yet the city was also the most important Jewish cultural hub in Eastern Europe—a center of Jewish learning and culture from the 1560s until the 1930s. The greatest Talmudic scholar of the eighteenth century, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, was known as the Vilna Gaon. The man who pioneered the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, studied in Vilna. That cultural vitality did not abate after the city’s incorporation into the Polish republic. YIVO, the center for Jewish studies that is now based in New York, was originally founded in Wilno in 1925.

In 1939, when Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the city was handed over to Lithuania. This seemed providential. For Jews fleeing Nazi and Soviet rule, Vilnius looked like a sanctuary. Indeed, many of the city’s Jews celebrated the end of Polish rule. 

But the celebration was premature. In June 1940, along with neighboring Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union. A year later, the regime changed once again—this time fatally. 

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the fate of the Jews of Vilnius was sealed. Between 190,000 and 196,000—more than 90 percent—of Lithuanian Jews were murdered: a higher share than in any other country the Nazis occupied. Their destruction was swift: Most Lithuanian Jews perished before the end of 1941.