Fire at the Center The Protracted Conflict

Medieval geography, adapted from the system devised by the mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy in the second century a.d, conceived of the earth as a globe on the surface of which a hemisphere of land lay opposite a hemisphere of water. Jerusalem was located at the center of the land mass. (In the version-Dante used for The Divine Comedy, the conical Mount of Purgatory rises from the ocean at the point diametrically opposite Jerusalem.)

If we take this notion not as literal statement of geographic fact but as a symbolic expression of strategic and geopolitical realities, we will find it rather more than a quaint fantasy of our prescientific ancestors. Palestine, for which Jerusalem serves as synecdoche, is, if not the foremost, unquestionably one of the world’s three or four primary strategic nodes. There it is on the map, at the crossroad, the bridge, between Asia and Africa, on both the land and the sea flank of the route between Europe and the south of Asia and Africa, guarding the portage (or channel) between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, opening on the eastern shore of the inland sea on and around which so many critical episodes.of history have, swirled, the site of supremely holy places of the three great monotheistic religions.

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James Burnham

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Medieval geography, adapted from the system devised by the mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy in the second century a.d, conceived of the earth as a globe on the surface of which a hemisphere of land lay opposite a hemisphere of water. Jerusalem was located at the center of the land mass. (In the version-Dante used for The Divine Comedy, the conical Mount of Purgatory rises from the ocean at the point diametrically opposite Jerusalem.)

If we take this notion not as literal statement of geographic fact but as a symbolic expression of strategic and geopolitical realities, we will find it rather more than a quaint fantasy of our prescientific ancestors. Palestine, for which Jerusalem serves as synecdoche, is, if not the foremost, unquestionably one of the world’s three or four primary strategic nodes. There it is on the map, at the crossroad, the bridge, between Asia and Africa, on both the land and the sea flank of the route between Europe and the south of Asia and Africa, guarding the portage (or channel) between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, opening on the eastern shore of the inland sea on and around which so many critical episodes.of history have, swirled, the site of supremely holy places of the three great monotheistic religions.