Israel’s place in history puts this conflict into sharp focus

Only by seeing the war in the light of Jewish evolution can it be understood.

A Jewish boy celebrates the holiday of Purim, which commemorates the saving of the Jewish people in ancient Persia. Picture: Getty

The serious war that Israel is waging against Iran and its proxies has a long history behind it. The insistent chorus of demands for a ceasefire are misconceived. This is not a quarrel that can be resolved by a concession here or there between reasonable people. It is an existential battle between an advanced, open society and fanatical enemies bent on its destruction.

Given uncertainties about how the war will play out, it helps to be able to put the current clash of arms into the context of that long history. First, because that long history – going back to the ancient world – is at the root of the current violent struggle. Second, because the actual history varies enormously from the versions of it ­embedded in Jewish, Christian and Muslim beliefs or traditions.

There was no Israel before the collapse of the Bronze Age world in the Levant at the beginning of the 12th century BCE. As Eric Cline and others have shown, that collapse was sudden and dramatic. Many cities and whole cultures fell, never to revive. Egypt fought off the Sea Peoples and settled some of them in Canaan, including a people they called the “Pelest”, whence the territorial name “Palestine”, but these were not Arabs. The Egyptian records also refer to another people there at that time whom they referred to as the “Habiru”, whence the name Hebrews.

There was no Hebrew sojourn in Egypt. Nor was there an Exodus. Nor was there a conquest of Canaan by the Hebrews under Joshua. The early books of the Bible are mythic tales compiled in Judah, during the rule of King Josiah, in the 7th century BCE. The actual Israel arose amid the ruins of the Bronze Age culture of Canaan, not in Jerusalem under Saul, David and Solomon. It arose in the northern valleys and the Galilee.

The smaller, more rustic Judah arose south of there, in the highlands of what is now called “the West Bank”. Israel came to prosper, with the retreat of Egyptian power from the Levant, where it had been entrenched under the Egyptian New Kingdom since the 16th century BCE. As it grew and prospered, it clashed with the kingdom of Aram-Damascus, in southern Syria, a rival state. But the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, in the 9th and 10th centuries BCE, changed things. This was the world’s first truly hegemonic empire, and it was relentlessly imperialistic.

Israel, centred on the city of ­Samaria, rebelled against Assyrian hegemony and was crushed by King Tiglath-Pileser III, in 732 BCE, then polished off completely by King Shalmaneser V, in 720 BCE. Famously, its people were deported and replaced by Mesopotamian settler colonists sent there by the Assyrian monarch. Its true history disappeared from accessible records, until the past 50 years. The Biblical story, of wicked and idolatrous kings, put together a century later, in Jerusalem, was highly theological and historically inaccurate.

Judah itself emerged from the shadow of Israel after the destruction of its wealthier sibling to the north. It had not been and did not become a great kingdom a la David and Solomon. But it did become a refuge for Israelis fleeing from the north, and the centre of a major religious movement. It was at this point, in the 7th century BCE, that Judaism as we understand it began to take shape. The crucial figure was King Josiah (639-609 BCE).

But well before he came to the throne in Jerusalem, the king of Judah, Hezekiah (727-698 BCE), though surrounded by Assyrian colonies and vassal states, also rebelled against the Assyrians, in 705 BCE. This was the time of the prophets Isaiah and Micah. The Assyrian king was Sennacherib.

Lord Byron, basing his account on the Biblical story, wrote a Romantic poem, The Destruction of Sennacherib, about the Assyrian King’s power being humbled by the Lord God before the walls of Jerusalem, beginning with the ­famous lines:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on blue Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

One imagines that poem being recited by the resonant voice of Richard Burton in his heyday.

But in truth, it was not the Assyrians who were stricken. It was King Hezekiah and his people. It was a mistake taking on Assyria. From that point, humbled Judah became a vassal of Assyria until the fall of the Assyrian Empire, a century later.

King Josiah’s fate is bound up with this. As Assyrian power declined, in the 7th century BCE, Egypt, which had reasserted its independence, took the side of a failing Assyria against the rising power of Babylonia. Pharaoh Necho II marched through Canaan to come to the aid of the Assyrians as their empire collapsed. En route, he asserted his authority over Judah and had King Josiah arrested and executed. Josiah didn’t fall in battle at Megiddo, as commonly believed. His end was ignominious. So was that of Necho II, who was crushed by the Babylonians at Carchemish, in 605 BCE.

Was Israel then set free? Did Judah flourish? No. Judah defied the newly ascendant Babylonians – against the advice of Jeremiah – and paid the price. King Nebuchadnezzar stormed Jerusalem and deported the Hebrew elite to Babylon. Remarkably – and not for the last time – Judaism, as formulated by King Josiah, did not dissolve, but became the thing which sustained the crushed and exiled people of Judah.

It was at this point, in the 6th century BCE, that Judah became “Yehud”, its people the “Yehudim”, the Jews and Jerusalem the focus of remembrance and hope, against all the odds. And when, in 539 BCE, the Persian Great King Cyrus overthrew Babylon and established the greatest empire since that of Assyria, he released the Yehudim from their Babylonian exile, and they returned to Jerusalem. When we talk of Israel today, these events and the myths recorded under King Josiah are the root of its ­national consciousness.

But there was far more to come. The Persian Empire was a golden age for the Yehudim. But it ended when Alexander conquered the Persians, in the 330s BCE. From that point, they had to deal with invasions by Alexander’s warring generals, Ptolemy and Seleucus; attempts to force them to abjure monotheism and “Hellenise”, under the Hellenic Antiochus Epiphanes, as recorded in the Books of Maccabees; then Roman conquest under Pompey and ­Caesar.

Various Yehudim attempted to steer a prudent course between these great powers. Zealots fought back fiercely – with very mixed results. The two big rebellions against the Romans would prove most fateful. First in 66-74 CE and again in 132-135 CE, under Simon bar Kochba, they rose to try to throw off Roman rule. Each time they were crushed remorselessly by overwhelming Roman power. Jerusalem was sacked and a great many of the Yehudim scattered across the known world, in what would become known as the ­Diaspora.

The drainage channel Jews used to escape their Roman conquerors. Picture: Getty

But over the centuries that followed there were always Jews in what Christians would dub “the Holy Land”. They endured five more centuries of Roman rule. Then the Muslims invaded the Levant, defeating the Romans and Persians, both exhausted after interminable war against one another. When the Muslims took over, the Yehudim were as oppressed as they had been under “Christian” Roman rule. They were subjected to pogroms by Muslims and Christians alike. They were massacred when the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem.

All this is the prehistory of the astonishing epic of the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 under a United Nations mandate. All of it, often through the lenses of religious beliefs or ethnic myths, inspired Yehudim pioneers to build a new Israel. But the very idea was rejected by the Muslim world from the start. There could be no Jewish state, they insisted, and sought to destroy it at once – only to be routed by the Jewish militia.

The siege of Israel orchestrated from Tehran is the fruit of this anti-Zionism. And make no mistake, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, because the Muslims insist, as Christians long did, that the ­Yehudim should repudiate their old religion and accept the new ­religion. When pseudo-radical mobs right now march in the streets of Western cities and chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free”, they are overwhelmingly ignorant of the history of the case. That must change.

When Orthodox Jews declare that the land of Israel was given to them by YHWH, they are in error. The issue here is not one of religious revelation or doctrine. It is one of history, culture and resilience. There is no reason, as Benjamin Netanyahu has striven to point out, addressing the Iranian people themselves, why Israel cannot be an accepted and constructive member of a comity of nations in the Middle East. It has long made this plea, this offer, this commitment.

But for the present, as so often in the past, it is confronted by enemies who seek its destruction. Just possibly, this war could turn the long tide. The Begin/Sadat treaty of 1979 was a start down that road. The Abraham Accords held further promise. The next necessary step is the downfall of the mullahs in Tehran and the liberation of the Palestinian Arabs from rule by fanatical terrorists and ruthless anti-Zionists.

Paul Monk is the author of a dozen books, including The West in a Nutshell (2009), Credo and Twelve Poems: A Cosmological Manifesto (2015) and The Secret Gospel According to Mark (2017).