Day of Solidarity with Palestine

Today is the International Day of Solidarity with Palestine - an occasion to talk about the future of the Palestinian people and the state of Israel. 

Palestine is a holy land where the main shrines of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can be found. Not only political, but religious passions have burned over Palestine for thousands of years. This land was bequeathed by God to Abraham who came from Chaldean Ur to Mesopotamia. Moses and Joshua won it back upon returning from Egyptian captivity, after which the Kingdom of Israel and Judah was formed there.

Later, Palestine was incorporated into the global empires - the Assyrian, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Ottoman. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, these territories came under British mandate. 

Today, all the more people understand that the materialist, economic, and evolutionary explanations of history are nothing more than a poor myth of Modernity. The factors of religion and ethnos are once again beginning to be taken seriously and are becoming an important key to understanding world events. Therefore, the Palestinian question should be seen through this lens. 

The population of Palestine is mixed. Hundreds of peoples have inhabited, passed through, and fused with each other on these lands. Jews left en masse after the failed uprising of the pseudo-Messiah Simon bar Kokhba in 135 A.D. This signified the fourth period of exile, the Galut. The Talmud forbid the Jews from returning to these lands until the arrival of the Messiah. This is one of the three main Talmudic commandments, which are: Israel is not to be returned to, the peoples among whom the Jewish Diaspora live are not to be harmed, and the construction of the Third Temple is not to be begun until the coming of the Messiah.

During the period of the spread of Islam, Palestine was conquered from the Byzantine Romans by the Arabs, followed by profound Arabization and Islamization. Before this, the majority of the population was Christian. In the epoch of the Crusades, Western crusaders won back Jerusalem from the Saracens for some time only to lose it again. Later, in the early 16th century, Palestine was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.

Starting with the late 19th century, under the influence of the nationalist and racist ideology of Zionism, a Jewish nationalism which copied European nationalism, European Jews began to arrive in Palestine en masse, thereby violating the Talmudic commandments.

The Zionists decided: if the Messiah is in no hurry to come, then we will take the initiative into our own hands and hasten his coming. Not all Jews agreed with this, so the anti-Zionist Jewish movement known as Neturei Karta arose which believed Zionism to be a diabolical heresy. 

In 1947, following the end of the Second World War, the State of Israel was founded under the influence of the Zionists. Insofar as the Jewish religion in its Zionist version represents a fairly strict, racist doctrine, the local Palestinian population - largely Arab and Muslim, although also including many Christians among Palestinian Arabs - was subjected to real genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. The Jews, having just been subjected to unprecedented persecution by the Nazis in the Third Reich, appeared to be trying to push their pain and wrath onto the Palestinians who were, by the way, not guilty of anything. Millions of Palestinians were deported from the lands they had lived on for centuries. 

This didn’t happen under the Arab conquests nor under the Crusaders. The Zionists did not recognize any resolution on the establishment of a Palestinian state nor the international status of Jerusalem. Constantly citing their suffering at the hands of the Nazis, the Jews used this as a pretext to refuse to pay attention to the protests of the Arabs and the calls of the UN and international community. After all, by violating the Talmudic commandments, the Zionist leaders essentially identified themselves with the Messiah. All that remained was to proceed to construct the Third Temple. To do so, the Arabs have to be expelled from the Temple Mount and the Islamic shrine, the al-Aqsa Mosque, has to be destroyed. The completion of the genocide of Palestinians is part of these Zionist plans. Then, in their opinion, the period of Jewish rule on a global scale will arrive - the Fifth Monarchy, under which the nations of the earth, the Gentiles, will recognize the supremacy of the Jews and submit to them. This is the creed by which the State of Israel lives. 

In this situation, the Day of Solidarity with the peoples of Palestine is celebrated by those who do not share this kind of mystical-political and racist eschatological ideology of Zionism.

For an Orthodox person, this is too clearly reminiscent of the Antichrist. We equally cannot be delighted by the Islamic conquest of Palestine. After all, this was our Orthodox land, a part of our Empire. 

Perhaps the most just of all would be to return Palestine to us Christians. We are not racists or fanatics and we do not claim exclusivity. We guarantee the rights of both Muslims and Jews on our holy land. Thus, let us meet in Orthodox Jerusalem.