Israel Shamir – The Unz Review Sept 9, 2025

A talk at the International Round Table for the Security of the Holy Sites of Palestine, Istanbul, Sept 11, 2025

Recently Israel bombed two old venerable churches of Gaza: the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrios and the Catholic Holy Family Church. Thus, we were reminded that the Holy Land is called the Holy Land because it is the cradle of Christianity; this is the land where Jesus Christ was born and lived and died on the Cross, and was Resurrected. Where the Church was formed, where the Empty Tomb of Christ is located. This land was fought for in numerous Crusades, the flower of European chivalry died on its fields and hills fighting Muslim warriors. After the Crusades, for the last thousand years, her churches, shrines and relics remained safe and accessible for Christian pilgrims. And they are not museum pieces: every day there are many thousands of Christian Palestinians who worship in the churches and venerate its relics. Things began to change with advent of the Jewish State.

Without going into deep theology, let us sum it up: historically the Jews are, and always were hostile to Christ and Christians. You can learn that from the New Testament, or from the Talmud, Jewish holy text, or from the news, where you can see Jews daily spit on Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem.

Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli newspaper Haaretz:[1] “Jews feel towards Jesus today what they felt in 4 CE or in the Middle Ages… It is not fear, it is hatred and contempt. For centuries, Jews concealed from Christians their hate for Jesus, and this tradition continues even now.”

“He [Jesus Christ] is revolting and repulsive,” intervened an important modern religious Jewish thinker. This “repulsion passed from the observant Jews to the general Israeli public,” Rozen replied.

On Christmas Eve, according to a feature in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol Ha-Ir^.,[2] Hassids customarily do not read holy books because this might save Jesus from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils in hell).[3] This custom had been dying out, but Hassids of Chabad, fervent nationalists, have brought it back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting while passing by a church and cursing the dead while passing by a Christian cemetery. Last year in Jerusalem a Jew decided to refresh the tradition. He spat at a Holy Cross being carried in procession in a city street. Police saved him from consequent trouble, but the court fined him $50, despite his claim that he had been fulfilling his religious duty.

A few years ago, the biggest Israeli tabloid, Yedioth Aharonoth, re-printed in its library the Jewish anti-Gospel, Toledoth Eshu, compiled in the Middle Ages. It is the third recent reprint, including one in a newspaper. If the Gospel is the book of love, Toledoth is the book of hate for Christ. The hero of the book is Judas. He captures Jesus by polluting his purity. According to Toledoth, the conception of Christ was in sin, the miracles of Jesus were witchcraft, his resurrection but a trick.

Writing on the Passion of Jesus, Joseph Dan, Professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, stated:

The modern Jewish apologists, hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame on the Romans. But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried to prove that Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him. The Jews hated and despised Christ and Christians.

Prof. Dan added that there is little place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus caused his execution. Even today, Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word ‘Yeshu’ (instead of ‘Yeshua’) meaning ‘perish his name’. In a similar pun, the Gospel is called ‘Avon Gilaion’, the booklet of Sin. These are the endearing feelings towards Christ of the friends of Christian Zionists.

If there was raison d’etre of the Jewish existence, it was to fight Christ and to eliminate Christianity. That is the very reason why Jews wanted Palestine – because it facilitates their war against Christ. It’s hard to say whether Christianity will survive the total Jewish takeover of Palestine. Jewish faith is not just another faith, like say Buddhism. It is a fighting doctrine, an anti-Christianity.

In 1920s and 1930s, to solve The Jewish Problem, the Jews were offered many places for living: The Argentine, Kenya (then it was called Uganda), Dominican Republic, Birobijan in the Soviet Far East, but they insisted on Palestine. It’s not strange: Palestine is the centre of the world, the most important place of all. Not in vain, people fought and died for it for centuries. The followers of Mackinder, geopolitics, considered the ancient holy places of the world being the strategic points. Amazing that England gave away this most cherished possession to the Jews. And the Jews immediately began their work of expelling the Divine Presence from our midst.

Wait, you will say, Jews also believe in God! Yes, but a different one. To Gentiles – that’s you and other non-Jews – there is no access to the Jewish god. You must live forever without God, or you may worship the Jews, as God’s intermediary. It just so happens that the elimination of God’s Presence on earth is Satan’s main desire, too. So he has become a powerful Jewish ally; he helps them to destroy everything beautiful and spiritual on Earth.

Israel is the Jewish state, but not the only one: there is a bigger Jewish state, the USA. It’s not only the mighty supporter of its smaller brother. The USA nowadays has up to 80 percent Jews in the administration of its government, but this began long time ago. Carl Marx and Werner Sombart wrote that the US could became a Jewish state even without Jews. (More precisely, Marx said that it was the Jewish state without Jews, and Sombart corrected him, saying the Jews were there from the beginning.) In the USA, this great heresy of Christian Zionism was formed, the parody of Christianity. Likewise, in the US blossomed homosexuality, a parody of the sacred union of Man and Woman, as it was viewed in ancient Egypt, and in Japanese mythology, and in the book of Genesis. The Devil is a great mocker!

Jews are much more comfortable with Islam: a Jew can join Muslims in prayers, as the great luminary Rambam once ruled, and historically Jews escaped to Muslim states from Europe when they were ordered to baptise or else. Amazingly, Jews do not hate Islam and Muslims with the same fervour they hate Christians.

How do Muslims feel about Christianity? Muslims venerate Christ. He is called ‘The Word of God’, ‘Logos”, ‘Messiah’, ‘Christ’, ‘the Prophet’ and is considered a Messenger of God, along with Abraham, Moses and Muhammad. Many chapters of the Koran tell the story of Christ, his virgin birth and his persecution by Jews. His saintly mother is admired, and the Immaculate Conception is one of the tenets of Islam. The name of Christ glorifies the golden edifice of Haram al-Sharif. According to the Moslem faith, it was there that the founder of Islam met Jesus, and they prayed together. The Hadith, the Moslem tradition, says in the name of the prophet: “We do not forbid you to believe in Christ; we order you to.” Muslims identify their prophet Muhammad with Paracletes the Helper (Jn 14:16) whose coming was predicted by Jesus. They venerate places associated with the life of Jesus: the place of Ascension, the Tomb of Lazarus and the Nativity are adjacent to a mosque and perfectly accessible by Christians.

Although Muslims (and many Protestants) do not consider that Jesus is God, they do proclaim Him to be the Messiah, the Anointed one, the Paradise Dweller. This religious idea, familiar to Nestorians and other early churches but rejected by mainstream Christianity, opened the gates for those Jews who could not part with the notion of Unitarianism. That is why many Palestinian Jews and Christians of the Seventh Century accepted Islam and became Palestinian Muslims. They remained in their villages; they did not depart for Poland or England; they did not learn Yiddish; they did not study the Talmud, but they continued to shepherd their flocks and plant almond trees. They remained faithful to their land and to the great idea of the fraternity of mankind.

Paradoxically, nowadays in the US with its spiritual debt to Jews, a new term was coined: Judeo-Christian values, traditions, faith. This is sheer nonsense, it is a catachresis like cold-hot. And indeed, it works by submitting Christians to the Jews in the US, while in Palestine, it leads to destruction of the remains of all Christian life. Let us consider Bethlehem; before 1967 it was predominantly a Christian city. When the Jews captured Bethlehem, they ran a census, just like King Herod, and everybody absent from his home was stricken out. Students abroad, family visitors, war refugees, whoever was not in the house was deleted from the roll. By this first step Jews got rid of a third of the Christian population.

But before that, you can consider the pretty Christian village of Birim in Upper Galilee. The village of Birim has been dead for fifty years now. It is beautiful even in death, like Ophelia floating down the stream in the pre-Raphaelite painting of Millais. It was not ruined by war. Its Christian inhabitants were expelled from their houses well after the 1948 war. They were told to leave for a week or two, for ‘security’ reasons. They had no option but to obey the Israeli soldiers and move out. Their village was dynamited, their church surrounded by barbed wire. The people went to the Israeli Supreme Court, they went to the government, commissions were appointed and petitions signed. Nothing helped. For fifty years since then, they have lived in the nearby villages, and on Sundays they return to worship in their church. Their lands were seized by their Jewish neighbours, but they still bring their dead to be buried in the church graveyard, under the sign of the cross.

Until the arrival of the Israeli army, this ruined village with its orphaned church was the home of the rural Christians of Birim who for centuries of Moslem rule lived in peace with their Moslem neighbours of Nebi Yosha and with the old Sephardi Jewish community of nearby Safed. This Guernica of Galilee undermines the “Clash of Civilizations” myth of a “Judeo-Christian” civilization opposing a “monstrous” Islam.

Coming back to Bethlehem, we happen to see the beautiful image of Our Lady. She appeared to a Mexican peasant, and her flower-covered image arrested the strife and united Native Americans and Spaniards into one nation. She gave her rosary to Saint Dominic and a letter to Portuguese kids in Fatima. The Prophet Muhammad saved and cherished her icon found in a Mecca shrine, writes Maxim Rodinson. She appeared to the wealthy Jewish banker Alphonse Ratisbonne, and he took orders and built the convent of the Sisters of Zion in En Karim. A Palestinian Muslim in a refugee camp of Lebanon preserved the image he took from his native Galilee, tells Elias Khoury in his novel Bab Al-Shams. Syrian astronauts asked for her protection in the shrine of Seidnaya before their flight on the Soviet space shuttle.

In medieval legends, the Jews were often perceived as enemies of the Virgin. The Talmud refers to her in most blasphemous and hostile way. A certain column-stump on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa marks the place of a legendary attack of Jews on her person, while in Antioch in 592, Jews were found despoiling her image. These are old tales. And now some newer facts. Twenty-two years before 6.10.23 (that is the event and date that Jews want to count from) in Bethlehem, a Jew shelled the Virgin. A Jewish soldier in the formidable tank Merkava-3, constructed according to US technology at US taxpayer’s expense, fired a shell from a distance of fifty yards at the statue of the Madonna atop the Holy Family church in the town of the Nativity. The Virgin lost an arm, and her pretty face was disfigured. She became one of a hundred Palestinian women shot by the Jews in that outburst of war. This seemingly unnecessary act of vandalism could not have been an accidental shot. No terrorist hid behind her gentle figure on the pinnacle of the hospital church. At fifty yards, you make no mistake. It could have been orders; it could have been a spontaneous expression of feelings by a Jewish fanatic. Our world rewinds full speed back into the Dark Ages, and as Israel rekindles traditional Jewish hostile rejection of Christianity, we cannot indulge in Judaeo-Christian fantasy.

I also must mention the beautiful old Byzantine church of St Barbara, a local girl and the village patron saint. It is one of these bitter-sweet semi-ruined churches that still attract worshippers, along with St Anne of Safurie and Emmaus of Latrun, and it stands on a hill a mile away from the village. It would be called St Barbara-without-the-walls if it were in England.

On the thirty-first of May 2002, the Israeli army dynamited St Barbara, the living relic of the Christian past of the Holy Land. I do not know whether the sappers said the benediction prescribed for such occasions by the Jewish religious codex, Shulkhan Aruch: “Blessed you are, Our Lord, who destroys the Assemblies of Proud.” This destruction followed the Bethlehem siege; when, for the proverbial forty days and forty nights, from the Catholic Good Friday to the Orthodox Easter Sunday, the Jews besieged the Church of Nativity.

To conclude, it is only by a miracle Christianity may survive Jewish rule in Palestine, or indeed wherever anti-Christians rule. Historically, the Palestinian Church has served as a bellwether for the health of the Church everywhere else. It is the touchstone of our faith. Without the earthly testimony of Christians living in and working on the same lands walked by Christ and His apostles, Christians quickly fall victim to science-fiction fancies like Christian Zionism. The Holy Land is a living history that naturally refutes anti-Christian narratives that rely upon the ignorance of historical facts. It is the last relic of Christendom. And if it dies, Christendom is doomed to the same rootless, wandering extinction that plagues the Jews.

The collapse does not stop in Gaza: in France, once the beloved daughter of the Church, ruled by ex-Rothschild clerk Macron, in La Baconnière, the Church of Saint Cornelius and Saint Cyprian was demolished: the 12th-century building with stained glass by Auguste Allo and a bell from 1584 was declared unsafe and demolished due to the lack of 7 million euros for restoration. But in order to conclude with good news, I’ll say: last Sunday, Moscow witnessed a huge Crucession of hundreds of thousands of worshippers, for the first time since 1918. It happened soon after the ardent local Jews moved away to Israel. Christianity still has the potential for Resurrection.

Edited by Paul Bennett

Notes

[1] 28.1.94.

[2] 14.12.93.

[3] Gittin, 56b-57a.

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