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Restored: an Ancient Road to the Temple

Dec. 28 2016

At a ceremony in the part of Jerusalem known as the City of David, a group of prominent Israelis announced the official reopening of an ancient road leading to the Second Temple, discovered in recent archaeological excavations and then restored. Daniel Eisenbud writes:

As rain and sleet poured down, the Sephardi chief rabbi Shlomo Amar, the culture and sport minister Miri Regev, and the mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat stood together several meters under the Givati parking lot in Silwan to light a large silver menorah at the end of the ancient road. . . .

Listening intently as they sat on makeshift wooden benches a few meters away with several members of Knesset were the three Israeli paratroopers immortalized in the iconic 1967 photograph of the liberation of the Western Wall. . . .

The approximately 50-meter roadway, built near the Herodian Pool of Siloam, where pilgrims once immersed themselves [in preparation for visiting the Temple], begins south of the City of David and ends at the foot of the Western Wall’s Robinson’s Arch.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Archaeology, History & Ideas, Jerusalem, Second Temple

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic