Palestine is Southern Syria, 1915

"Palestine is Southern Syria"

Ze'ev Jabotinsky
June 30, 1915

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What Did the Temple Mount Floor Look Like?

From this clip illustrating Frankie Snyder's work:

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Jabotinsky using "Palestinian"

When Jabotinsky used "Palestinian" (referring to Jews of the Palestine Mandate), as reported in Denver Jewish News, Sept. 3, 1925

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From the Series: Extra-Biblical Testimonies to Biblical Events

Many doubt the Bible is a genuine reliable record of history.

For example, do we have testimony to an exile of Jews from Judea as a result of an Assyrian conquest in 585 BCE?

Well ---

There are the Āl-Yāhūdu tablets. "Āl-Yāhūdu" is Akkadian and means "Town of Judah" or "Village of the Judeans."  There was a settlement in Babylonia where deported Judeans and their descendants lived after the exile that followed the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE.

The tablets found numer about 200 cuneiform, including fragments. They were written in Akkadian on clay tablets. Most date from approximately 572–477 BCE, spanning the late Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods. They were salvaged from the antiquities market and were later studied by scholars.

These are ordinary administrative and legal documents, including land leases, tax records, loans, labor obligations, property transactions and court-related documents.

They show that the Judeans, aka Jews, retained their identity, bore clearly Yahwistic names, such as Ahikam, Gedaliah, Shelemiah, Yashuv-Tzadok and...Netaniah. They contain references to the God of Israel (Yahu/Yah) and prove the exiles did not just disappear into Babylonian society but retained their national ethnic identity.

As Ariel Kopilovitz has observed:

“It will be a long time” (Jer 29:28). These words, allegedly sent to the Judean exiles in Babylonia, were meant to suppress expectations that existed among them, and possibly also among some of those remaining in Judah, that the exile would end soon (Jer 28:1–4). Jeremiah declares that the opposite is true: the exiles must prepare for a long stay in Babylonia and therefore should build houses, plant gardens and do as much as they could to improve their living conditions until their long-awaited restoration.

As Lauire Pearce has written:

The term ‘Judean’ refers to people with origins in the southern kingdom of Judah, which, along with the northern Israelite kingdom, occupied a strategic position between the imperial powers of Mesopotamia (Assyria, and later, Babylonia) and Egypt. Assyrian king Sennacherib (704-681 BCE) vanquished the northern kingdom, and deported the vast majority of Israel’s population throughout locales in Mesopotamia and North Syria. Although he also deported a significant portion of the Judean population, as illustrated in wall reliefs depicting the siege of Lachish and recorded in 2 Kgs 18:14-16, Sennacherib maintained Judah as a political identity, albeit as a vastly reduced vassal state. The scattered redistribution of deportee populations across the landscape complicates the identification and study of Israelites and Judeans in Assyrian sources, as the few distinctively Israelite or Judean names stand in geographic and social isolation from others of the same background; it is thus difficult to trace their history and/or social and economic location. The documentary situation is different with the population of Judah, deported to Babylonia in several waves: in 597 BCE, following Nebuchadnezzar’s capture of Jerusalem, which resulted in the deportation of the 18-year-old king Jehoiachin and his family (2Kgs 24:12-16); in 587 BCE, after destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; and in 582 BCE. Unlike their Assyrian predecessors, Babylonian kings (primarily Nebuchadnezzar) resettled their deportees as largely intact groups and resettled them in single locales, in many cases, in new settlements named for their places of origin. Some deported Judeans were settled in a town called Yahudu (“Judah”). 

The tablets cover more than a century, showing families across multiple generations. This helps explain why many Jews remained in Babylonia even after Cyrus the Great allowed exiles to return to Judah in 538 BCE.

The Āl-Yāhūdu documents provide direct contemporary evidence of the lives of ordinary Judeans in exile.

The tablets 

help confirm that large numbers of Judeans were indeed deported to Babylonia, that they formed recognizable communities and maintained distinct identities while adapting to Babylonian rule.

The Babylonian exile was not simply a literary or theological concept but a documented historical reality reflected in everyday records.

The standard scholarly publication is the book Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer by Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch, which first brought many of these texts to broader academic attention. Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer.

One scholar wrote:

"The documents published in the present volume are of immense importance for the study of Judeans in Babylonia... The new evidence from Āl-Yāhūdu and its surroundings corroborate...that exile did not equal enslavement, but Judeans had rights, responsibilities, and even opportunities to prosper. From now on, the study of Judean communities in Babylonia is to be primarily based on cuneiform sources, not only on the sporadic pieces of information found in the Hebrew Bible."

And most importantly, from this community that retained and preserved and cherished its identity, Jews returned to the Land of Israel.

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The Cassandra Project

After reading Richard Landes' Substack post on cognitive war, I commented that I found this summary:

Cassandra appears to be the only one who takes notice; she warns the Trojans that they must burn the wooden horse. Unfortunately, the Trojans disregard her warnings.  She’s described as having “one heart was steadfast, and one soul clear-eyed.” (Smyrna, 556)  She has a very powerful gift of prophecy and sees evil forces falling upon the city of Troy. She is compared to a lion, running about and screaming of the city of Troy’s impending fall.  Here, she embodies pure terror and doom.  “Her neck writhed, like a sapling in the wind shaken, as moaned and shrieked that noble maid” (Smyrna, 565) It appears that no one takes her omens seriously and she tries to convince everyone to burn the wooden horse, but unfortunately no one believes her.  She tries to take matters into her own hands and burn the horse herself but is unable to do so.  She exhibits determination and will by attempting to respond to her prophecy and prevent their downfall; however, her failure to destroy the horse demonstrates her powerlessness as a woman. 

I suggest the effort be termed The Cassandra Project.

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Jabotinsky and Petliura - in Jabotinsky's Words

"Petliura and the pogroms", a letter from Vladimir Zhabotinsky to the newspaper "Latest News" first published in Russian on October 11, 1927 in Paris

and then in Yiddish in the Warsaw Haint daily on October 16, 1927

and then in Hebrew, in Haaretz on October 21, 1927

In English:

Part of the Ukrainian press, discussing the Schwartzbard case, completely misinterpreted my position on the issue of Petliura’s responsibility for the pogroms of 1917-1920.

There were two reasons for this:

1) In the summer of 1926, I published an article in the New York newspaper Morgen-Journal, in which I said that, although I had never seen Petliura, I did not, however, consider him a convinced pogromist; and that in general I saw pogroms as the result not so much of the subjective “anti-Semitism of people” as of the objective “anti-Semitism of things”.

2) In the autumn of 1921, I signed an agreement with Maksym Slavinsky, the Prague representative of Petliura's then-exile government, establishing a special Jewish gendarmerie within Petliura's army (the remnants of which were then encamped in Galicia) specifically to prevent pogroms. (This agreement was never implemented, as Petliura's army was soon liquidated.)

From all this, a section of the Ukrainian press has concluded that I consider Petliura not responsible for the pogroms. I believe it would be useful to explain to this section of the Ukrainian press that they are profoundly mistaken.

The question is not whether Petliura was a supporter of pogroms at heart. I have expressed my hypothesis and consider it plausible. But even if my hypothesis is correct, I insist most emphatically that it has no bearing on the question of Petliura's responsibility for the pogroms. Petliura was the head of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian army for two years or more; pogroms continued for almost the entire time; the head of the government and army failed to suppress them, did not punish the perpetrators, and did not resign. Therefore, he bears responsibility for every drop of Jewish blood spilled. This is so clear that no excuses will suffice.

Petliura's apologists won't be helped by arguing that, from the perspective of the philosophy of history, pogroms are a consequence not so much of "the anti-Semitism of individuals" as of "the anti-Semitism of things." Every sociology textbook claims that theft, banditry, and the like are explained not so much by the evil will of individuals as by the pressure of social conditions. But no one has ever concluded from this that an individual thief or bandit is "innocent" and not guilty and not subject to punishment. 

The pogromists who slaughtered Jews during Petliura's reign were also guilty and subject to severe punishment. Petliura didn't punish them, even though he was the head of the government and the army. The philosophy of history has nothing to do with this: such a head of government, such a head of the army, is guilty of an unheard-of and unforgivable crime against the Jewish people, the Ukrainian people, and all of humanity.

That Petliura, if he had seriously wanted to, could have taken measures to truly suppress the pogroms is best proven by my agreement with his authorized representative, Mr. Slavinsky. This agreement stipulated the establishment of a Jewish gendarmerie. In other words, the legalization of Jewish self-defense and the right to maintain order by force of arms. This means there is a remedy against pogroms. But this very remedy was already available in 1917-1920. Jewish self-defense organizations existed in Ukraine even then. Therefore, they could have been legalized, armed, and all Jewish youth could have been called upon to participate. But Petliura did not take advantage of this remedy. On the contrary, the Jewish self-defense, under the pretext of eradicating Bolshevism, was exterminated by his own soldiers.

Whatever Petliura's inner self, responsibility for the pogroms falls on him; to deny it is to misunderstand the nature of the head of government and the army.

If a portion of Ukrainian society concludes from this explanation that I have become an enemy of the Ukrainian national movement, it will be as absurd as the suggestion that I considered Petliura "innocent."

I remain a friend of the Ukrainian movement. I will continue to strive to allay the righteous indignation pent up in the Jewish soul, even if it means invoking the philosophy of history or constructing hypotheses about the psychology of figures I don't personally know. Moreover, I will continue to seek an agreement with the Ukrainian movement—as I did, incidentally, in the agreement with M.A. Slavinsky—despite this movement's grave sin against the Jews. But I consider it unacceptable to deny this sin or to treat it as a trifle. And if there are people or groups in the Ukrainian movement who think that pogroms are a forgivable trifle, that one can tolerate the systematic slaughter of Jews and still remain heroes and pure—then I am not a friend to such people and groups, but an enemy, and I warn Ukrainian society that such people or groups are not its friends, but its enemies.

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Academic Distortion: Was Jabotinsky a Leader Prior to 1923?

How do academics distort?

Example:

From a book review by Professor Josdeph Heller published in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, April 1993, pp. 355-369 -

Anyone who checks Google, Wikipedia or the Jabotinsky Institute will readily find that he was a leader on the world Zionist stage well before 1910.

He was one of the initiators of Jewish self-defence in 1905 in Russia. Was a delegate to the 1903 Zionist Congress and subsequently became one of Russia's leading Zionists polemicists. He was sent to Turkey to lead the Zionist press there in 1909. By 1913, he was on the Committee to establsih the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Almost single-handedly he establsihed the Jewish Legion in 1917. He was a member of the Zionist Commission in 1919. In 1920 he led the Hagana in Jerusalem. In 1921 he was appointed to the World Zionist Executive. He was a member of the Keren Hayesod delegation to America spending some eight months there.

He was a leader.

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