EASTERN COCKPIT

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 135, 5 December 1938, Page 8

EASTERN COCKPIT

STRIFE IN PALESTINE

TALE OF FORTY CENTURIES

CONQUEST & REVOLT

Belgium has been called the "Cockpit of Europe," but even this country has not known the same number cf invaders as Palestine, writes John A. Smith in the "Adelaide Chronicle." For four thousand ' years Palestine, now again subjected to guerrilla warfare, has been fought over. Mongols, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Turks, Germans, and British are a few of the invaders. When the Ancient Britons were painting themselves with woad, and Caesar was crossing from Gaul to "see and conquer," there was fighting in Palestine. Before that, while the ancestors of those Briton's were making primitive drawings on cave walls, before Rome existed, there were pitched battles on Palestinian soil, with serried ranks of archers and stone-slingers. Few of the intervening centuries have passed without strife, and they are still fighting in Palestine. The Holy Land has a record of unholy warfare which is hardly rivalled by that of any other territory under the sun. Today it is Jew versus Arab. It has been Jew versus Arab once before. On the other hand, once in Palestine's history Jew fought with Arab against the Christian. Almost every ancient nation, almost every modern one except the Americans, a handful of Europeans, and the Japanese, has fought in Palestine. On and off for four thousand years the battle has been waged with, at different times, Mongols, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Hittites, Israelites, Turks, Germans, and British as its protagonists. CAT AMONG THE DOGS. "Palestine's Soitow" is its situation. Placed at the eastern end of the Mediterranean with Egypt to the west and the Red Sea to the south, it is today a crucial factor in empire policy. In the past it has been the cat among half a dozen dogs, placed by Nature between great Powers, coveted by them all, and periodically overrun by them all. Its fate has been always in the balance; it has never belonged to one nation and perhaps never will. Palestine lies at the tail end of the States stretching down from Asia Minor, at the gateway of Arabia and Egypt. Egypt was the first of the ancient civilisations to turn an eye to this sea-coast wedge of land. Seventeen hundred years before Christ, Egypt swept over Palestine in a series of drives that carried its troops as far as the Euphrates. In 1887 a number of cuneiform tablets were discovered at Tel-el-Amarna, in Egypt. They were over 3000 years old, actually political correspondence between Western Asia and Egypt over a period during the reigns of Amenophis 111 and IV. To Amenophis the Elder and his son at Thebes a petty king in Palestine described on these tablets how his rule, and therefore Egypt's, was threatened by mercenaries and \ bandits from Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the Levant. He described how the enemy was approaching and hedging him round; he prayed for help, protesting his loyalty, complained that the disloyalty of other minor kings was assisting the enemy, and offered ingenious excuses for his own suspicious behaviour. So it seems that to rule in Palestine in 1400 B.C. was no bed of roses. EGYPT'S MAIN ENEMIES. The Hittites were Egypt's main enemies. They came from the north and, avaricious for fertile Syria, fought the great Power, Egypt, on Palestine soil. After several campaigns Barneses II made a treaty with them, only to have to turn his attention to the Assyrians. They came down "like a wolf on the fold," and Palestine was the fold. The king whose scribes wrote the tablets to Thebes mentioned the Habiru, people from the coast who were causing him much trouble. It is believed that the Habiru were the advance guard of the Israelites, the Hebrews. They came, at any rate, about 1000 8.C., and, with -Egypt in decline, they held Palestine in a fairly stable control. This was the period of the Old Testament "Judges," to be followed by the Kings, Saul, David, and Solomon. The Hebrews found it almost impossible to hold the land under a single kingship, and it was divided into Judah and Israel. When the Assyrians under Ahab (himself an Israelite) came marauding again, Israel and the Hittites combined against him and were successful so long as they were united. During the long procession of the centuries Palestine passed under the rule of Babylon, to be part of the greatest empire the world had then known. When Cyrus the Great buckled on his armour and caused the poet to sing "Babylon is fallen, is fallen," Palestine became Persian. The Greeks conquered the Persians; Palestine passed under the rule of Darius and Alexander. RISE OF JUDAS MACCABEUS. No kind of death or subjection is Stranger to the people of the Holy Land. Alexander passed through Palestine on his way to Egypt, capturing Tyre after a siege of seven months, and took some Jews by force to people his new city of Alexandria. Alexander died at 32; Ptolemy succeeded him. He made a huge Crown land of Egypt; Palestine he reserved to fill his coffers. He farmed out the taxes, took cedar from Lebanon to build his palaces, bled the country dry. Ptolemy was succeeded by his five-year-old son, of whom it is written in Ecclesiastes, "Woe to thee, O Land, when the King is a child and thy princes eat in the morning!" The Seleucids* a tribe from the north, defeated the boy's generals and, in the customary way, took Palestine as their prize. The Seleucids went further than any other conquerors and forbade the Jewish religion. They raised an altar to Deus on the great altar in the Temple and prohibited all observance of the Jewish law. Judas, a Hebrew, the third son of a priest, known as Maccabeus, "the Hammer," gathered his fellows in revolt and, for three years, waged such guerrilla warfare as the Arabs are waging today. He fought his way through to Jerusalem and. exactly three years after the desecration, cleansed the Temple. Then Rome arose and again Palestine was the rope which she and her rivals tugged between them. Rome divided up the country among the three sons of Herod. When they died Palestine was set under a series of procurators, indifferent rulers. The fifth one of this series was Pontius Pilate, by all accounts not too harsh a master. Yet the responsibility for the dispersal of the Jews was Rome's. In A.D. 66 Vespasian and Titus, with legions and auxiliary troops numbering altogether 60,000 men, capturing Palestine after rebellion, destroyed the Temple because Jerusalem was most stubborn in resistance, set up a temple Ito Jupiter and one to Venus on Mount Golgotha and forbade any Jew, on pain of death, to appear within sight of the I city. | The Roman Empire fell and its lands ; were partitioned. Palestine enjoyed 200 years of peace. During that time pilgrimages developed. But peace

came to a sudden end in 611 A.D. when the Persians invaded the country from Syria and, aided by the Jews, held it for seventeen years. Then came one of those decisive moments which are seldom seen in their true light at the time. The nomadic Arab tribes united to take the country, and were successful. They, the Arabs, were the first of the Islamic conquerors who were to hold Palestine for the next twelve hundred years, only, as Turks, to be dislodged in the Great War. But even under the most uninterrupted sway of the Moslem Palestine did not know peace. She suffered nine Crusades—or rather, eight, for one was of 50,000 children, the larger (and' the. happier) part of whom appear to have been drowned in the Mediterranean. The bluest of Europe's blue blood was spilled on Palestine in | these crusades, with no permanent results. The Turks, whom all Europe failed to dislodge, were followed by hordes of Mongolians from Central j Asia, and by Tamarlane the Terrible, I with his fierce horsemen. Then the Turks returned, under Selim the Grim, j and stayed put untij 1918. TAKEN BY THE BRITISH. , Jewish colonisation, aided by foreign philanthropy and the revenue from the pilgrim and tourist, traffics had made war-worn Palestine fairly prosperous by the early years of the present century and, but for the fact that Turkish rule was not easy, the genius of Palestine might well have sat back and breathed a sigh of relief. But in 1914 came the Great War. For over two years the Holy Land was the base of a large Turkish force which made two great attacks on Suez and attempted an invasion of Egypt in 1915. The British counter-offensive began in the winter of 1916, and its first stage was marked by the fall of Jerusalem. The British advance meant that large forces must be kept on the spot, even whan, the Dardanelles urgently needed men, an» it had to wait upon the building of a railway and water pipe line across the desert. But the campaign was rewarded. In September, 1918, the combined German and Turkish forces were finally overthrown; the Turkish hold on the Holy Land was broken at last. Yet it was the Jews who held the baby. Thousands of them died literally from want because war conditions dried up the stream of Zionist foreign contributions and they were not, necessarily, self-supporting. Many of those who had established themselves in the land that, for generations, they had considered traditionally their own, found their fortunes destroyed overnight by war. The Arabs, of course, will swear that they got the worst of the deal—that they were promised the land for aiding us against the Turks and now find the British word valueless. But conscientious distinction between competing rights has never featured in the history of Palestine. Force it has been which has ruled the country, and it is still force which rules Palestine.