Hanukah 5785

 Hello everyone, this year Erev Hanukah is also the same day as Christmas, the 25th. So, I'm just taking a moment to reflect on Palestine, Christianity, Zionism, and the current genocide.

I think it's important to remember that despite the cliche, we were strangers in a strange land too. In fact, we still are. Even ignoring the first kingdom, which is hardly attested in archaeology, there was obviously some collective organization of tribes that came together before the second kingdom. And if you study torah, you notice that there are many traditions that have been spun together, without regard for contradictions. From this it becomes clear that Jews have always lived "in diaspora". In fact by the second kingdom Judea wasn't even the center of Jewish life. It was just one of many. Babylon could probably be seen as it's actual place. But we were already scattered by then anyway, and it was through a network of writings and trade routes that Judaism continued. We shared traditions, and we can trace the core of them to a set of Semitic language writings, Caananite customs, and the adaptation of these to wherever we've been. 

In Hanukah, Judea was occupied by the Seleucid empire and Hellenistic influence. It lasted from 167 BCE to 134 BCE, and began with the Seleucids controlling Judea, and ending with the Maccabees gaining independence. It likely started because a disagreement by the Jewish priesthood spilled out and Antiochus mistook it for a rebellion. (tzvay yidn dray mainungen...). Antiochus began an occupation in earnest at this point, and the Maccabees, the ruling Hasmonean dynasty. The Maccabees waged a guerilla war, and then an outright revolt. In many analyses, it's actually seen as a Jewish civil war, between the traditionalist Jews of the countryside and the Hellenized Jews in Jerusalem, and Antiochus intervened because he thought it was a rebellion of all of us.

Regardless of the original causes though, it was an asymmetric war. The Jews were primarily farmers, merchants, and scholars, while the Seleucids were an empire with their own military and supply networks. Waging war directly against them would have been folly.

So we didn't. We did what all occupied people do, and strike at the occupier until they can't justify the expense of the occupation anymore. Only then, the idea of "leveling a city" to rubble was just literary exaggeration to drive home the point that one ruling dynasty had been replaced by another. Nobody actually ever considered "salting the earth" so to speak. Militants and leaders would be dispersed or executed, they'd take their households with them, and settle far from their homeland. And we'd have a new place in diaspora. Eventually the Maccabees wore out the Seleucids enough to just leave us alone again. They didn't lose, they just stopped occupying the temple. We were still under their general empiric rule, but we had Judea under our control. 

Consider now that in Palestine, a place we didn't really control for nearly 2000 years, that's been through many empires, independent states and peoples, one group of diasporic Jews thought "Well, we can convince the current empire to 'give' us Palestine and then control it for them'". So, now, we return, backed by the current empire, with their weapons, their tactics, their logistics, and begin murdering everybody in sight. We took the literary metaphors for regime change and turned them into actual destruction of Palestine. So, who are the Maccabees now? And who are the Seleucids? In an asymmetric war, the occupied people fight very differently, and we're seeing that now. Only now, the total destruction and rebuilding is just part of the standard process since we've perfected building infrastructure back up. What would take thousands of years of growth and building we now can do in weeks or months.

And so the people of Palestine who've been under occupation by the current empire since the fall of the Ottoman Empire are fighting an actual biblical battle against an occupier that has manifested biblical powers against them.

What would we do? Would we roll over and take it like the ahistoric Mauschel narrative of Zionism? Or would we resist, like we did in Warsaw? Think about it.