"Isreal"

Fifteen million, give or take. That is the total global population of Jews.

According to the World Population Clock, currently 8.3 billion human beings inhabit this third rock from an unremarkable star. This makes the Jewish percentage of humanity 0.18%. Not even a full percentage of mankind is Jewish. Not even half of a percent.

And yet. And yet this tiny fraction, this small, vulnerable population excites the hatred of so many of their fellow humans out of all proportion to their numbers or their power.

Jewish space lasers. Banksters. Cultural pollution. The crimes ascribed to Jews are legion. They are the world's puppet-masters, the true power behind everything. 

There are currently fifty-three majority Muslim nations. And yet the one Jewish state is seen as a threat to the world's over 2 billion Muslims. Muslims, we are assured, will always be under threat and can never be free as long as this "Zionist entity" exists. It must be eradicated so that not only can Muslims live in peace and in full command of the practice of their religion, but indeed so that the world can be free of strife.

Jews in the Holy Land are seen as colonists. Interlopers. A foreign element in an indigenous Arab land. No better than the Europeans who conquered the Americas. Nay, worse. They are gross oppressors, carrying out their evil plans for world domination from Tel Aviv and Mount Herzl. Their claims to the land are laughable, obscene. They never had a Temple. They never had any presence in the land before the Balfour Declaration. They are rootless cosmopolitans seeking to establish a state on a land to which they have no claim. Jesus, after all, was a Palestinian.

Of course, reality is reality, and history is history, whether you agree with it or not, whether it accords with your prejudices or not.

No. There was most likely no Exodus, no conquest of Canaan, no tumbling of Jericho's walls. Because there didn't need to be. All current scholarship posits that the people who became known for their devotion to YHWH arose out of the Canaanite hill tribes late in the second millennium BCE. They were, in fact, the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan. "Palestine", as it came to be known by Greeks and Romans, is named after the Philistines, who were, also in fact, outsiders, part of the Sea Peoples which helped bring an end to the Bronze Age civilizations which had dominated the Levant and Fertile Crescent for thousands of years. "Palestine" is named after rank outsiders who came in their ships to destroy the civilizations which had existed long before them.

Therefore, "Palestinian" Arabs are named after actual colonizers. Which is apt. Since Arabs, too, are colonizers. Arabs are not indigenous to the Levant. Or to Iraq. Or to Egypt. They are the colonizers and conquerors which erupted out of the Arabian Peninsula after the death of Muhammad, Islam's founder. They have as much claim on those lands as did the Crusaders, as did the British and French after the First World War. And that claim is one of conquest. It is not one of indigeneity. Yes, before the Arab expansion, the area had been Semitic for thousands of year. Semitic. Not Arab. And Jews were part of those Semites who were the actual indigenous peoples of the Levant and Iraq. Jews are, in fact, the only surviving Semitic people who predate the Arab conquest. The rest were subsumed into Arabic language and culture. As conquered peoples often are.

And that's just it, isn't it? Jews are, as the Torah says, a stiff-necked people. Jewish Scripture is one long story of their wrestling with a God whom they repeatedly disobeyed. And Jewish history is one long story of a people who would not give up who they were to any conqueror, always rising up and struggling to be their own nation in their own land. The Assyrians couldn't destroy them. Neither could the Babylonians. Greeks and Romans have come and gone, and Jews still exist. As they were scattered to all corners of the earth, they maintained themselves, their culture, their religion, eliciting hatred and scorn from the nations in which they lived, cast out, ostracized. 

Palestinians aren't indigenous to the Levant. They are colonizers. Jews are descendants of those who were indigenous. As much as Muslims would like to elide that fact, the history is clear. So is the archeology. Jewish habitation of Israel is incontrovertible. And despite what President Mahmoud Abbas avers, the Jewish Temple was on the Temple Mount, now occupied by Muslim holy sites. (About that. As a conqueror, Israel had every right to raze the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Temple. But it didn't. Because Jewish theology, after the Romans destroyed Herod's Temple, moved beyond the Temple cult, and no longer needed it.)

What Jews exemplify is a people who will hold onto its traditions and beliefs, when the entire world wants to crush it. And that's why we are seeing a resurgence in Jew hate. 

As we mourn the fifteen Jews murdered in Australia—which has seen massive demonstrations against the "genocide" in Gaza—remember that they have survived the worst that the Gentiles could throw at them, and have not only survived, but thrived. And that is their ultimate crime. That they didn't simply lay down and die, or surrendered their heritage and melded into the countries in which they lived.

Now, to the title of this piece.

For some reason, anti-Zionists like to misspell Israel as "Isreal". It is childish and moronic, seeking to turn the idea of the nation into a joke. But it reveals a hidden truth. For, in fact, Israel "is real". And it is not going anywhere.

Am Yisrael chai. And I stand with them.