BY ISRAEL SHAMIR – The Jewish chosen-ness led to genocide time and again. Outside of Jerusalem’s Jaffa gate (Bab al-Halil), there was once a small neighbourhood called Mamilla, destroyed by real-estate developers just a few years ago.
During the development works, the workers came upon a burial cave holding hundreds of sculls and bones. It was adorned by a cross and the legend: ‘God alone knows their names’.
The dead were laid to their eternal rest in AD 614, the most dreadful year in the history of Palestine until the Twentieth Century. The Scottish scholar Adam Smith (1723-1790), wrote in his Historical Geography of Palestine: “until now, the terrible devastation of 614 is visible in the land, it could not be healed”.
Jews massacred between 60,000 and 90,000 Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem alone, almost 1.5 million in today’s values (the total earth’s population was according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica about 300 million, twenty times smaller than today). A few days later, the Persian military understood the magnitude of the massacre and stopped the Jews. CONTINUE READING
