Passover’s gift: The promised and undivided land.

By Victor Sharpe

Millions among the world’s population still do not know the meaning of the towering festival of freedom and liberty known as Passover; a festival recognizing an event that has blessed the world for some 3,300 years.

The festival begins at eventide on April 15th of this year and always on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan. Jews and Christians know from the Bible the story of the Exodus and of the salvation of the Jewish people from centuries of slavery under the Egyptian pharaohs: This was the creation and deliverance of an entire nation.

Such a seminal event in humanity’s history became the foundation for freedom and liberty – created many centuries before democracy was first enunciated by Greek philosophers who nevertheless lived within a polytheistic society.

Many people know in varying degrees the Passover story and the birth of the Jewish people and of their undying faith in the One and Only God and Savior, invisible and indivisible besides whom there is none other. Judaism has given the world monotheism in its purest and most undiluted nature. The Unity of God is what Jews have defended against all who attempted to suggest a plurality: even to enduring martyrdom.

The long-suffering Jews under Egyptian bondage were led to freedom by the Jewish prophet, Moses, who brought them to their own very special and promised Land of Israel. Moses spoke with God in Sinai and brought a wondrous divine blessing to the Jewish people and through them to all humanity; the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, and the basis of today’s laws of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization and jurisprudence. These ten brief commandments – a mere 120 Hebrew words – are written on the walls of synagogues and in some churches.

But, as in all Jewish practice, Moses was never deified. He was shown in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as a man: nothing else. Indeed, in order not to deify him or exalt him over others he is shown in the Holy Bible with human failings and his burial place remains unknown.

He sought the mountain top and beheld the Promised Land of Israel. Yet he was never to enter. In fact, in the Torah, Moses is described merely as “the humblest and meekest of all human beings.” For in Judaism, only God is divine and besides Him there is none other.

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is the first of the Jewish holidays and festivals coinciding with the coming of the Spring in the Jewish people’s ancestral, biblical and native land: the land given by God in an everlasting Covenant to the Jewish people; a land extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and beyond, including Gilead (the possession of the tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben) east of the river, in the present day Arab state of Jordan.

The Passover festival precedes two other harvest festivals based upon the agricultural cycles of ancient and modern Israel. Next comes Shavuot, (Pentecost), which records and commemorates the giving to Moses of the Ten Commandments followed by Succot, which is known as Tabernacles. Mankind was, and is, blessed through the Passover for it is a veritable gift to those who accept its divine message and perform the ritual meal, the Seder, recording the Exodus story.

But there is an evil in men’s hearts, and it is a profound evil, for those who hate and envy this Jewish gift to humanity and its message of freedom, liberty and foundational democracy. They have chosen since time immemorial to rise up to destroy all that it stands for and persecute those – the Jews – who received it from God and who have shared it with all mankind.

Let me recount what Mary Antin wrote in 1911 about the horrors inflicted upon the Jews in Russia as they celebrated the festival of liberty in the Exodus story during the festive Seder meal. Ms. Antin wrote of what routinely took place at Passover and of how Russian neighbors reminded the Jews that for them it was still another Egypt:

“… in Russian cities and even more in country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered, the peasants would hear lies about the Jews, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill their Jewish neighbors.

“They attacked them with knives, clubs, scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom.

“Jews who escaped the pogroms came with wounds on them and horrible, horrible, stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mother’s eyes. Only to hear these things made one sob and sob and choke with pain.

“People who saw such things never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived and sometimes their hair turned white in a day and others went insane.”

In the Passover story, which is enshrined in the Haggadah, the book retelling the events of the Exodus and of the order of the Seder meal, there is a profound and millennial old passage: “Not one man alone has risen up against us to destroy us, but in every generation there have risen up against us those who sought to destroy us; but the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.” And so it was and so it still is.

A family, living in the Israeli village of Itamar, situated in Biblical and ancestral Jewish Samaria, was slaughtered just a few short years ago by Arab Muslims whose tracks led back to a nearby Arab settlement. The members of the Fogel family were sleeping in their home on the Sabbath when an Arab murderer calling himself a Palestinian, urged on and encouraged by the hate spewing Palestinian Authority, knifed to death the father, mother, and three children, including a little baby girl only three months old.

The PA lauded the Arab murderer as a hero and paid the Arab’s family a lifelong pension. The malign Palestinian Authority still pays blood money to terrorists’ families even as its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, encourages them to murder more Israeli civilians. Abbas pays with funds routinely received from the UN and the EU. Tragically, that money originates even from U.S. taxpayers sent by the Biden Administration to prop up UNWRA.

Mary Antin had spoken about unspeakable horrors inflicted on Jewish families in Russia; atrocities which had been repeated time after time throughout Europe for almost 2,000 years and within the Islamic word for the last 1,400 years. Those relentless persecutions, pogroms and the shattering genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, in which a third of the world’s Jewish population was exterminated, were done when the Jews were still living in the long night of statelessness after Rome had destroyed Jewish Judea in 135 CE.

Yet today, since the modern miracle in 1948 of Israel’s rebirth and reconstitution as a sovereign, independent nation, restored again to its ancestral and biblical homeland, successive Israeli governments since that of David Ben-Gurion plead for peace despite the overwhelming and empirical evidence of an implacable refusal to ever accept Israel as a Jewish state by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

Peace is offered again and again to those Arabs, and again and again is rejected by them. Yet still Israeli leaders make unheard of and suicidal offers of “land for peace.” This may seem to many observers as an aberration, an illogical and deeply naïve act in the face of so much evidence of antipathy and hatred exhibited towards the Jewish state by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

What nation would accept such Arab and Muslim barbarity and withstand so many Palestinian crimes against its civilian Jewish population – and still hope for peace? What nation would continue, despite the rain of thousands of missiles launched from Hamas occupied Gaza upon Israeli women and children, to hold out the hand of peace to a people who display such barbarity and human rights abuses? What nation, after seeing the horror in the Fogel home, and so many more since, would still harbor hopes of a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel? What people would still entertain the insanity of dividing up their tiny land under the fatal rubric of a two-state-solution?

Well, only a people and a faith who have embraced the Passover message for millennia and of the biblical passage in Deuteronomy 19;18, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” would remain convinced of the benefits to all, even to an Arab people who have poisoned and morally crippled themselves for some 100 years with the most abhorrent anti-Jewish hatred.

But to give away one inch of the land is a profound rejection of the Covenant made between His people and Almighty God. It is also a strategy of national suicide.

As Passover approaches, again there are insistent reports that Hamas, the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that occupies the Gaza Strip and Fatah which is equally hate filled ceaselessly call for the extermination of the Jewish state, plan new atrocities against the embattled people of Israel during and after the Passover. Remember the words: “In every generation.”

An Arab terrorist who once planted a bomb in Jerusalem became a passionate supporter of the Jewish state. Walid Shoebat once stated to a Jewish audience in America the following:

“Americans need to start looking at what really happens in Israel. They don’t see what happens in their media. They don’t see what happens to the religious places in Judea or what the world calls the ‘West Bank.’ They have never seen what has happened to Joseph’s tomb. They have never seen every single holy place, Jewish and Christian, in Judea desecrated by the Palestinian Muslims.

“Americans need to see the reality on the ground and what happened to a Jewish couple who got lost in the streets of Ramallah in the Palestinian Authority. If they did, they would see the demonic frenzy of the Palestinian Arab population of Ramallah and of how they tore out the human hearts, lungs and kidneys of the hapless Israeli victims.”

And within the last several weeks, Jewish men and women have been stabbed and shot by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians in the Israeli cities of Beer Sheva, Hadera and Tel Aviv even as Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken arrived to press the Jewish state to accept the suicidal creation of a Palestinian State torn from the God given Covenanted Jewish ancestral and Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, land known incorrectly as the ‘West Bank.’

The media in America and around the world must show the reality of how the Jews suffer and of how they cannot go from their homes to worship in complete safety in their synagogues, holy places, or at the holiest Jewish site: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Walid Shoebat also stated that the worst possible mistake Israel ever made was inviting Arafat and his terrorist cronies to end their exile in Tunisia and set up their new headquarters in Judea and Samaria – Israel’s biblical heartland. This decision by the left-wing Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin led to Arafat and his terrorist gang gaining international acceptance, the so-called Oslo Peace Accords, which in time became the Oslo War in which thousands of Israeli civilians were murdered and maimed by Palestinian terrorists and suicide bombers.

Walid Shoebat concluded that he sees the Jewish people are afraid of the Arab Goliath. But he, Shoebat, born a Muslim and now a Christian, knows full well the death sentence imposed upon him under Islamic Sharia law.

Neither should Israel be afraid, for in truth it is the David, the tiny Jewish state of only some 7,000,000 Jews within a tiny land no larger than New Jersey, confronting the Muslim Goliath; the combined Arab and Muslim world of one and a half billion straddling an enormous land mass dwarfing America plus most of Europe.

And Israel should no longer seek to placate the morally compromised United Nations and the European Union which remorselessly call for a “two-state- solution and would reduce the Jewish state at its most populous region to a width of only nine miles: yes, only nine miles wide: A sure and certain recipe for self-destruction within the Middle East; arguably the most evil neighborhood on planet Earth.

We approach the Passover festival, which brings light and blessings to all humanity, but which also brings the maniacal threats of genocide against the Jewish people by those who would unleash unutterable terror and who, like the evil Iranian mullahs, spew hideous ravings and shameless libels against the ever-suffering Jewish state.

And it would not go amiss to remind the increasingly Godless European Union and morally compromised United Nations of Passover’s gift to the Jewish people: The promised and undivided land. Not the infamous “Two-State-Solution.”

Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer with many published articles in leading national and international conservative websites and magazines. Born and educated in England, he has been a broadcaster and has authored several books including a collection of short stories under the title The Blue Hour. His acclaimed four-volume set of in-depth studies on the threats from resurgent Islam to Israel and the West is titled, Politicide: The Attempted Murder of the Jewish State.