Al Quds.  Jerusalem.  Yerushalayim.  It is all of these, and it is bleeding.

President Trump performing at the western wall, Jerusalem

This week the US regime announced it would move its Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  In so doing it becomes the first country in the world to buy the Zionist claim that Jerusalem is the ‘real’ capital of Israel, and to break the long-held international and UN consensus that Jerusalem cannot be the capital of Israel because it is illegally occupied.

No matter.  In return for enough cash and votes in the US, the people who run that imperial country simply gave away Jerusalem to the Israeli regime.

Of course it was never theirs to give.  Neither was Palestine when the former imperial power, Britain, gave it away 100 years ago to the Zionist movement.

In a 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild, a British Zionist leader, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”  And so it was done, at the stroke of an imperial pen.

This week’s equivalent assault by the US can only produce more of the same ‘benefits’ the British favour has been dispensing since 1917.  More lies, more ignorance, more hypocrisy, more hatred, more repression, more suffering, more violence, more death.

From western regimes, historically biased and/or fearful of the Israel lobby, the best we can expect are a few meek murmurings of ‘cause for concern,’ but no meaningful opposition.  As usual that will have to come from the rest of us.

As I see it, the most effective way to stand with the besieged Palestinians is through the international grassroots campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction the illegal occupier, Israel.  In short, BDS.

Here I offer impressions gleaned from my own travels in Palestine-Israel.  These generated a book, Our Way to Fight, about courageous Palestinians and Israelis fighting for a just peace in the battered land that many call holy.  From those same travels also emerged Deus Vult/God wills it, a short, pungent history of Jerusalem before, during and since the Crusades.

That article follows below.  A few fragments:

…Archeological findings suggest human habitation here for at least fifty centuries.  Some linguists believe the name Jerusalem, or Yerushalayim in contemporary Hebrew, was derived from the Jebusite (a tribe of Canaan) Ur-Shalem, which translates loosely as ‘City of Peace.’  The Arabic name for the city, Al-Quds, means “the holy.”  The faithful of three religions consider it holy, with the result that peace here has tended to be rather elusive.  By one historian’s count, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, captured and recaptured 44 times….

…..The European invasion known as The First Crusade occurred in the last decade of the 11^th century.  It was sparked by Pope Urban II in 1095 with a series of ferocious sermons across Catholic Europe, in which he denounced Muslims – or Saracens, as they were called at the time, a term that evoked both contempt and fear – as pagans, rapists, defilers of Christian holy places, and all in all “a race absolutely alien to God.”  At the launch of this vicious campaign for an invasion of Jerusalem, it is reported that a great roar went up from the assembled crowd: Deus vult!  God wills it!

An estimated army of 40 – 60,000 volunteers started out on the long march from Europe to Palestine.  Along the way, many Jews were massacred by the Christian zealots.  Probably now the victims would be called collateral damage.  Also enroute, many foot-soldiers died from hunger, disease or in battle, and many defected.  Some 12 – 15,000 survivors reached Jerusalem in early June, in the roasting heat of deep summer, to besiege the thick-walled, well-defended city.  At about midday on July 15, 1099, the Crusaders managed to break through a section of the northern wall east of Herod’s Gate, a short walk from the present-day Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

According to Crusader eye-witness reports, within two days nearly all the Muslims in the city were killed.  The Jews, who had lived at peace with their Muslim neighbours, sought refuge in their synagogue; the Crusaders burned them alive.  Fulcher, a chaplain and chronicler from Chartres, wrote thus of the Christian invaders’ motives: “They desired that this place, so long contaminated by the superstition of pagan inhabitants, should be cleansed from their contagion.”  Several reports describe a triumphal procession of nobles and clergy to the Holy Sepulchre, through streets that ran with blood – some said as deep as the ankle, some the knee.  Deus vult!  the Crusaders chanted along the way. God wills it.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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