August
8, 2002, 9:00 a.m. Joseph’s
Inheritance
The Israelis,
restrained.
By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
n
an apparent reaction to last week's series of terrorist attacks on Israelis,
including the bombing of the Frank Sinatra cafe at Jerusalem's Hebrew
University, Israeli defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer issued a ”green
light” to the IDF to take further action to uproot the terrorist
infrastructure in the Palestinian Authority. The week's offensive included
the Israeli takeover of the city of Shechem (Nablus), in Samaria.
IDF troops quickly
took control of the city and began conducting house-to-house searches,
endangering themselves as they did in Jenin, rather than bombing suspected
terrorist bases and factories from the air. Thus far, the searches have
netted a series of arrests, four bomb factories, weapons, and ammunition.
In many cases, the explosives were being assembled and stored in the homes
of local civilian residents, as has been the PLO practice.
For those familiar
with the Bible, Shechem should ring a bell. It is the city where Joseph,
son of Jacob (named Israel by God), was buried (Joshua 24:32) and where
his tomb stands to this day. It is also the city where Levi and Simon,
two other sons of Jacob, took vengeance for the rape of their sister Dina
by a local chieftain, killing all the men of the city (Genesis 34). Despite
its biblical identification with the city of Shechem, the modern city
in the area is regularly referred to as Nablus in the general media. In
that regard, Shechem is a symbol, a test case, of the subtle attempt,
through the use of language, to disconnect Israel, the land, from the
history of Israel, the nation.
That attempt to disassociate
Jews from Judea began with the Roman conquerors of the second Jewish commonwealth.
They changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, Judea became Palestina,
and, in 72 A.D., the Roman Emperor Vespasian established a new city on
the site of Shechem, calling it Flavia Neapolis, and later Julia Neapolis.
The Muslim hordes who swept north from Arabia in 636 called the city Nablus,
as the Arabic language has no ”p” sound and they could not pronounce
the Roman name correctly. That is also why, to this day, the Arabs refer
to the entire country as Filasteen, rather than the Roman Palestina. The
crusaders, when they conquered the region from the Muslims, renamed Shechem,
Naples. In short, there is no Arabic name for the city of Shechem, nor
for the land of Israel — just mispronounced Latin ones. Jews, incidentally,
had lived in Shechem periodically throughout the ages, totally abandoning
the town only after countrywide anti-Jewish pogroms in 1929.
Jews returned to
Shechem only in 1967, during the Six Day War, allowing the children of
Israel once again to pray and study in the shadow of the Tomb of Joseph.
Even after the ill-conceived Olso Accords gave regional sovereignty over
Shechem to the PLO, Israel retained a presence at the patriarch's tomb.
That is, until October 2000, the start of the current terrorist war against
the Jews. After a pitched battle that focused on the Tomb of Joseph, IDF
soldiers withdrew, carrying with them the body of another Joseph —
Druse Border Police corporal Joseph (Yusef) Madhat.
An awareness of the
history of the area only highlights the temerity, arrogance, and hatred
that must have inspired local Arabs to desecrate the Tomb of Joseph after
the October battle. Subsequently, the PLO repaired the site, but converted
it into a Muslim shrine to a deceased sheik, also, coincidentally, named
Joseph. The Israeli government white paper, documenting the systematic
PLO violations of agreements with the Jewish state, says that ”P.A.
forces failed to uphold their Interim Agreement obligations — and
in the case of Joseph's Tomb, a promise just given to Israeli commanders
in the Nablus area — to protect holy Jewish sites… Following
Israel's decision to evacuate Joseph's Tomb — so as to avoid further
bloodshed — it was looted, torched, and in parts dismantled. Local
Palestinian commanders openly stated that no Israeli would set foot there
again; and indeed, one man who apparently wanted to visit the site was
brutally murdered, and a group of hikers (including women and children)
'suspected' of coming too near to the tomb, were shot at, wounded and
one was killed.” During Operation Defensive Shield, following the
Passover Massacre in Netanya this past March, Israeli troops retook the
tomb compound, but have not re-established access to the holy site.
Of course, the Muslim
Arab view denying Jewish roots in the land is not limited to Shechem.
”All Palestine is Islamic land…” said Sheik Taysir Bayoud
al-Tamimi, chief justice of the Muslim Trust in Jerusalem and an Arafat
appointee. ”The Jews usurped it,” he continued, ”There
can be no compromise on Islamic land.” Al-Tamimi also made it clear
that Jews have no right to pray at the graves of the patriarchs. Hamas
leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in an interview with the Italian newspaper
Corriere Della Sera explained, ”Israel was born in violence and it
will die in violence. The Jews have no right to the land of Palestine.”
With all of the above
in mind, one can only wonder what took the current Israeli government
so long to decide to return to Shechem and to the Tomb of Joseph.
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n
an apparent reaction to last week's series of terrorist attacks on Israelis,
including the bombing of the Frank Sinatra cafe at Jerusalem's Hebrew
University, Israeli defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer issued a ”green
light” to the IDF to take further action to uproot the terrorist
infrastructure in the Palestinian Authority. The week's offensive included
the Israeli takeover of the city of Shechem (Nablus), in Samaria.
