In the year 66 AD, a great Jewish revolt began against the Romans in Israel. Instigated by Roman idolatry and forced taxation, the fighting began in Caesarea and spread northward into the Galilee. The revolt would last for seven years, only ending with the fall of Masada in 73. It was responsible for some of the greatest tragedies and destruction in the history of Judaism, most notably, the siege of Jerusalem and subsequent destruction of the Second Temple.

As Jewish rebels in the Galilee faced defeat in the early years of the revolt, its leaders, determined to hold off the Romans, fled to Jerusalem. It was there that many of the rebels, known as the Zealots, would make their last stand in an attempt to protect the Temple.

The seizure of power in Jerusalem by the Galilean rebel leaders was not the only change in leadership that took place prior to the Roman conquest of the Holy City. In 69, following an ongoing power struggle taking place at the time in Rome, Roman commander in Israel Vespasian hastily departed the Holy Land to claim the throne of his empire, leaving his son Titus responsible for capturing the Holy City.

While his father had patiently laid siege on the outskirts of the walled city for nearly two years, Titus was eager to prove himself and determined to take Jerusalem. Several attempts to negotiate with the Jewish rebel leaders – through the Jewish Roman slave and historian Josephus Flavius – were carried out in vain. The Zealot rebel leaders, determined to defend the Temple and the holy city, refused to make any concessions.

This hardline position, however, also played a significant role in the fall of Jerusalem and ultimate destruction of the Temple. The Zealot position of not negotiating with the Romans created a significant and bloody rift among Jerusalem’s Jews. Many of the city’s residents, particularly the wealthier classes, perhaps sensing impending destruction, wanted to negotiate some sort of surrender. The Galilean rebel leaders, however, would have none of it. A bloody civil war broke out inside the city’s walls at the same time as its outer walls were being pounded by Roman battering rams.

In a perhaps suicidal effort to motivate fellow Jews to fight against the lengthy siege instead of surrendering to it, the Zealots at one point began burning dry food stores, adding hunger to the already long list of problems faced by the ancient Jerusalemites. Some historians have suggested that more Jews died from the infighting than were killed by the Roman conquest itself.

The city of Jerusalem and its residents were not the only victims of the Roman siege and destruction. The environment and landscape were also ravaged. In order to build the stockade towers and battering rams necessary for breaching the city’s walls, Titus ordered that every tree within ten miles of Jerusalem be cut down. Josephus Flavius wrote after the battle:

And truly, the very view itself was a melancholy thing; for those places which were adorned with trees and pleasant gardens, were now become desolate country every way, and its trees were all cut down. Nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judaea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change.

But the wooden tools of war, despite their ultimate success, also had their weaknesses – wood burns. Historical and archaeological records suggest that the city’s defenders managed to hold off the Roman advances several times by tunneling under the city’s walls in order to set fire to the stockade towers, as well as more traditional attacks throwing firebombs over the walls. The tunneling, however, it has been suggested, backfired in the end. Although certainly aided by constant Roman pounding, the tunnels may have contributed to the walls’ collapse by undermining their otherwise solid foundation.

Titus and his Roman garrisons finally broke through Jerusalem’s walls in the early summer of 70 AD; the city was ravaged and destroyed. Although there is an historical debate as to whether Titus himself gave the order, the Roman soldiers quickly set fire to the Jewish Temple, an event that is commemorated on Tisha b’Av. Josephus Flavius described the destruction afterward, saying that Roman soldiers who had grown to hate the Jewish rebels set fire to an apartment adjacent to the Temple against Titus’ orders, the flames quickly spreading to the Temple. Other accounts suggest that Titus revised this version of history to improve his image.

While most of the Jews in the city were killed or enslaved when Jerusalem fell, some of the rebels managed to escape through tunnels and reestablished themselves at the mountaintop fortress of Masada, joining other Jews who had already moved there. In 73 AD, Masada fell, bringing the Jewish revolt to an end.

Jerusalem is a mosaic of different peoples, faiths, and nationalities. Nevertheless, despite this diversity, under the sovereignty of Israel, Jerusalem is a city that works. But has it always been this way?
The following video, produced by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in honor of Jerusalem Day, attempts to answer this question by presenting Jerusalem’s 4000-year history in five minutes:

Analyst and former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger says Obama’s pro-Muslim advisors keep him unbridgeably away from understanding Netanyahu.

Amidst all the commentary and verbiage regarding the recent speeches by Obama and Netanyahu, American-Israeli expert Yoram Ettinger says the cultural and political gap between the two is unbridgeable – largely because of Obama’s pro-Muslim advisors and tilt.

The gap won’t be spanned, Ettinger writes, ”as long as the President assumes that the ethnic, religious, tribal and ideological violent power struggles on the Arab street constitute ‘a story of self-determination’ and ‘the vanguard of democracy.’”

Similarly, “Netanyahu cannot bridge the gap between himself and Obama as long as the President’s world view is heavily influenced/shaped by his senior advisors: Valery Jarrett, who is the favorite of Muslim organizations in the U.S., Ambassador Susan Rice, who considers Israel part of the exploiting Western world and the Palestinians part of the exploited Third World, and Samantha Power, who is one of Israel’s harshest critics in the U.S.  In addition, Obama considers Prof. Rashid Khalidi, who was a key PLO spokesman in the U.S., a luminary on the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Another issue preventing Obama from understanding Israel is his underlying assumption that the Israel-PLO issue is the “root cause of Middle East turbulence, the core cause of anti-U.S. Islamic terrorism, and the crown jewel of Arab policy-making.”

Assumption of Security in Insecure Borders
And possibly most significant of all, according to Ettinger, Obama “assumes that Israel can be secure – in the most violent and volatile region of the world – within the 1967 borders. Such borders would rob the Jewish State of its Cradle of History and would reduce its waistline to 9-15 miles (over-towered by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria) – the distance between JFK and LaGuardia airports…”

“How can the gap be bridged,” Ettinger asks, “when Obama considers the 1967 lines – and not hate-education in Abu Mazen’s schools, media and mosques – the crux of the conflict?”

Ettinger has long said, and continues to say, that Israel must respond to illogical American demands with firmness and facts on the ground – as it has done, with positive results, several times in recent decades. Ben-Gurion defied the State Department; Eshkol built in and reunited Jerusalem over Johnson’s objections; Golda built four new Jerusalem neighborhoods when Nixon proposed the Rogers Plan; and Shamir rebuffed Presidential pressure in several areas.

On the other hand, Ettinger says, Netanyahu should focus Israel’s relations with the U.S. on issues such as enhanced strategic cooperation, the mounting threats to U.S. interests, the absence of any reliable/capable Arab ally, the intensified Iranian threat, the increased Russian and Chinese profile in the Middle East, the development of energy alternatives, water technologies, homeland security, and more.

    An animated video prepared by senior IDF generals for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) graphically describes Israel’s territorial needs for self-survival.

In light of a widening range of threats to Israel’s security, the generals outlined the basic principles of a defense policy, rooted in a consensus spanning past and present Israeli governments and focusing on Israel’s maintaining defensible borders.

The crisis over the Hamas flotilla to Gaza illustrates how some of Israel’s critical alliances in the Middle East are changing, according to the JCPA, especially its relationship with Turkey, and the importance of designing a defense policy that takes into account the uncertainties that Israel faces with many of its neighbors.

Jimmy and Brannon House discuss the 44th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem.

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Obama calls for Israel to return to 1967 borders

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The problems with the Glenn Beck Rally Part 2

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The problems with the Glenn Beck Rally Part 1

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Throughout the Syrian uprising of the last two months, the dominant media narrative has followed the now-familiar arc of a freedom-seeking populace mustering the courage to finally confront an autocratic, anti-democratic regime responsible for decades of repression. Little mentioned is another element of the unrest, one readily apparent to most veteran Syria watchers: faith.

President Bashar Assad is an Alawite, a minority sect often described, in the convenient shorthand on which journalists rely, as an “offshoot of Shi’a Islam.” The Alawites’ creed, however, is so far removed from any mainstream Islamic orthodoxy that most Muslims worldwide – Sunni and Shi’ite alike – are apt to describe them either as heretics or as wholly outside the Islamic faith community, or ummah.

The term Alawite derives from Ali, the martyred son-in-law of Muhammad venerated by Shi’ite Muslims as the first Imam, or successor to the prophet. In much of the Islamic world, however, Alawites are known pejoratively as Nusairis, after Muhammad ibn Nusair, the ninth-century religious renegade who seems to have been their spiritual forebear.

For 1,000 years, the Alawites were the most despised and suppressed of Syria’s faith communities – an isolated, rural people practicing a secret, syncretic religion rumored to incorporate Christian, Shi’a and pre-Islamic rites. In 1963 Syria’s Alawite-led Ba’ath Party seized power, an event so religiously and politically implausible that half a century later, mainstream Arabs and Muslims still struggle to comprehend it.

“An Alawi ruling Syria is like an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia,” the historian Daniel Pipes wrote in his book Greater Syria, “an unprecedented development shocking to the majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries.”

LIKE THE Druse, another heterodox sect with distant Islamic roots, the Alawites adhere to an esoteric creed known only to a small group of shaykhs, or religious authorities.

In the late 19th century, however, an Alawite convert to Christianity published a book revealing a deeply syncretic creed that in every era adopted elements of the region’s dominant faith – Byzantine Eastern Orthodoxy, Sunni and later Shi’a Islam, Crusader Catholicism – while maintaining its own suspicious insularity.

Ali is no doubt central to the community’s dogma, so much so that mainstream Shi’ites deride Alawites as ghulat – “those who exceed” all bounds in their deification of the imam. But the Alawites’ resemblance to the Shi’ites constitutes the least of their heresies to Syria’s majority Sunnis.

Far worse is their doctrinal affinity with Christianity, and with pre-Islamic pagan rites like the Persian New Year, Nowruz.

Alawites “believe in reincarnation, regard the Pillars of Islam as purely symbolic, do not fast during Ramadan or make pilgrimage to Mecca, have no mosques or indeed any public worship, celebrate Christmas, Easter and Epiphany, and traditionally wear crosses like Christians,” according to University of Haifa linguist John Myhill.

The idea of God’s reincarnation in human form is central to Alawite belief, Myhill said, explaining that Alawites believe in “seven cycles,” or reincarnations of God in both revealed and hidden forms.

For example, Adam (God’s revealed form) returned to Earth in the hidden guise of Abel, Moses returned as Joshua Ben-Nun, Jesus as Peter and Muhammad as Ali. Like Christians, Alawites also worship a “holy trinity” – in their case, Ali, Muhammad and Salman the Persian, a companion of Muhammad who helped lay siege to Medina during the Islamic Conquest.

IN THE Ottoman era, Alawites were persecuted as infidels, forced to pay heavy taxes and mostly worked as indentured servants or tenant farmers for Sunni landowners.

The advent of French rule after World War I ushered in a golden age for the oncedowntrodden sect, which was granted short-lived autonomy as the “Alawite State” on Syria’s coast in the 1920s and ’30s. Colonial authorities hoping to stem Sunni nationalism propped up the Alawites and other Syrian minorities, giving them preferential treatment in the army and laying the groundwork for today’s Alawite-dominated military.

Hafez Assad – a former air force pilot and the father and predecessor of the current president – came to power in 1971, eight years after the coup by his own Ba’ath Party. The movement was putatively socialist and Arab nationalist, but dominated by young Alawites eager to end Syria’s centuries-long domination by an urban, Sunni elite. One of Assad’s first acts was to replace the constitutional requirement that Syria’s president be Muslim, with a law stipulating that the president’s religion is Islam – essentially certifying his own Muslim faith.

In the four decades since, the new Alawite elite have considerably weakened the Sunnis’ once-inviolable commercial dominance, and turned Syria’s military and intelligence services into its own private domain. The one significant challenge to Assad the father’s rule – a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the central city of Hama – was brutally quashed, with security forces killing an estimated 20,000-30,000 people.

THE FACILE description of the Alawite faith as a branch of Shi’a Islam is encouraged by the Assad regime’s close ties with the Shi’a theocracy in Iran, and with Tehran’s Shi’ite proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

In Shi’ism, Resistance and Revolution, Middle East scholar Martin Kramer wrote that the Syria-Iran partnership is purely a marriage of convenience.

“Common hatreds and ambitions inspired this expedient alliance between two incongruous political orders. The Iraqi regime was hateful to both Iran and Syria.

In Lebanon, Iran realized that it could not extend support to its clients there without Syrian cooperation,” Kramer wrote. “A sense of shared fate, not shared faith, bound these two regimes together.”

Indeed, the Islamic Republic has never recognized the Alawites as Muslims, much less of the Shi’ite variety. Instead, it was Musa al-Sadr, a Lebanese Shi’ite leader eager to expand his circle of influence, who in 1994 issued a fatwa certifying the Alawites as a branch of “Twelver” Shi’ism, the dominant Shi’ite branch and the one widely practiced in Iran. (“Twelver” refers to the 12th, or “hidden” imam, who disappeared 1,100 years ago and whose return is believed to augur the messianic age.) “When these Twelver clerics – [ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini’s closest students and disciples – visited Damascus, they spoke only the language of politics,” Kramer wrote. “They did not utter any opinion on the beliefs, doctrines, or rituals of the Alawis, about which they knew no more than any other outsider. Instead, they spoke of political solidarity, appealing to all Muslims to set aside their religious differences, to unite to meet the threats of imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism.”

ACCORDING TO Myhill, Syrian officials’ decades-long anti-Israel rhetoric is mere bluster to compensate for their perceived heretical creed: “In order to legitimize their rule among the Sunni majority, they must publicly project an image of championing Arabism by unrelentingly rejecting Israel and flirting with Israel’s avowed enemies.”

In practice, he noted, the Assads have little interest in a renewed confrontation with Israel. Other than the 1973 Yom Kippur War (a bid, he said to “keep up appearances” among Arab neighbors) and this week’s breach of the Golan border fence (an apparent attempt to distract the world’s attention from the bloody Syrian uprising), the Assads have generally kept their side of the border quiet.

“The Alawites’ religious beliefs suggest that they are pro-Jewish and anti-Sunni,” Myhill wrote this month for the Begin- Sadat Center. “From Israel’s perspective, it is far better for the Alawites to maintain power in Syria than for a Sunni regime to take control there… If a Sunni regime were to rule Syria, any wide-scale Israeli-Palestinian clash, such as Operation Cast Lead, would likely trigger an emotional response, pulling Syria into an international war with Israel, regardless of the consequences.”

Myhill wrote that Syria would not accept an official peace treaty with Israel under any circumstances, because such an agreement would spell the end of the regime’s legitimacy in the eyes of its own Sunnis, and those of the Arab and Islamic worlds.

“While an open alliance between Israel and the Alawite regime is impossible, it is possible for the leaders of the two countries to develop tacit understandings, whereby they would essentially coordinate actions to support their countries’ common goal of combating Sunni hegemony and radicalism,” he wrote.

If Myhill is right – and should Assad survive the current unrest – then Syria, long a byword for anti-Israel bluster, could become one of the Jewish state’s most reliable partners, and all because of its leaders’ esoteric, eccentric and insular creed.

In 2004, US President George Bush, in exchange for then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, wrote a letter saying in any future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians it would be “unrealistic” to expect a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines (the 1967 lines), and that a just and fair solution to the Palestinian refugee issue would be their absorption in a future Palestinian state, rather than Israel.

What prompted Prime Minister Netanyahu to issue a surprisingly harsh response to President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday night was the sense that Obama had essentially thrown that letter out the window.

There were three elements in the Obama speech — a speech which was not without some “sweeteners” for Israel — that particularly irritated and surprised Netanyahu.

The first had to do with the President using, for the first time, the 1967 lines as a baseline for an agreement, saying in his speech that “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

Using the 1967 lines as a baseline, and saying that land will have to be swapped from inside Israel, has never before been US policy.

In 2009, in a carefully worded statement, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said the following: “We believe that through good faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.”

What Obama did in his speech was make the Palestinian goals of a “viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps,” the American goal as well.

Although the 1967 lines may have been the implied baseline in the Bush letter, there was no hint there of a need for Israel to compensate the Palestinians fully for all territory taken in the Six Day War. In fact, Bush wrote that Israel must have “secure and recognized borders” emerging from negotiations based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. UNSC Resolution 242 famously calls for an Israeli withdrawal from territories taken during the war, but not all the territories.

In Netanyahu’s mind Obama is charting new and dangerous territory, something that cannot be ignored or whitewashed. Or, as he said as his plane was just about to land in Washington Friday morning a few hours before his planned meeting with the President, “some things cannot be swept under the rug.”

The second issue that perturbed Netanyahu was the refugee issue.

While Bush in his letter said clearly that the Palestinian refugees should return to a Palestinian state, Obama made no mention of that position and instead actually said that the refugee issue would have to be negotiated down the line. In the Israeli view, Obama simply ignored the American policy articulated by Bush on the refugees.

With Palestinian “refugees” storming the border fence in the north demanding the “right of return,” the concern inside the PMO is that Obama’s failure to take a firm stand on the issue only reinforces the Palestinian belief that there is actually something to talk about on this issue. “This is a basic misunderstanding of the reality,” one PMO source said.

And the third issue that rankled Netanyahu had to do with Hamas. While Obama said the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation raised “profound and legitimate questions for Israel,” for Netanyahu this was simply not a strong enough statement. The PMO saw Obama as “wishy-washy” on Hamas, and at the very least wanted to hear Obama reiterate the Quartet’s three conditions for engagement with Hamas as part of a PA unity government: forswearing terrorism, recognizing Israel and accepting previous agreements.

That Obama made no mention of these conditions, and that he did not clearly and unequivocally reject Hamas’ participation in a PA government, sent — at least in Netanyahu’s mind — exactly the wrong message.

Jimmy is back to discuss new developments in the Beck Israel rally coming this August. Worldview Weekend has found a sound clip of Glenn Beck saying, “We are entering a – we are entering a dark, dark period of man. Um, I was, um, I was in the Vatican, and I was surprised that the individual I was speaking to knew who I was. And they said: ‘Of course we know who you are. What you’re doing is wildly important. We’re entering a period of great darkness, and if good people don’t stand up, we could enter a period unlike we have seen in a very long time.’ It was odd to stand in the Vatican and hear those words. Of all places that would understand the Dark Ages.” Does the Vatican see Beck as being “wildly important” because Beck, like the Vatican, is pushing ecumenicalism? What role will the Church of Rome play in the coming one-world religion spoken of in the Bible? Has the Church of Rome offered to oversee an agreement between Jews and Muslims as to the building of the Temple in Jerusalem? Jimmy DeYoung explains from the Bible why will the antichrist will not be a Muslim and Brannon explains why Muslims would never worship a man that sets himself up to be worshipped as god as the Bible says the antichrist will do. While Brannon and Jimmy are not calling anyone the antichrist, who on the world scene today is embracing the issues, philosophies and religious views that the antichrist will certainly embrace? How is this person being accepted by the false church today? Does the acceptance of this man today give us an understanding of how easily the antichrist will be accepted by the religions of the world?

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