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Image by Jim Black from Pixabay – Photo: 2026<\/p>\n
By Jonathan Power*<\/p>\n
LUND, Sweden | 26 January 2026 (IDN) \u2014 Perhaps the biggest single misthink in Western history is best understood by standing in the town square of Bethlehem, allowing one\u2019s gaze to pass over the rooftop of the Church that covers the stable where Jesus was supposedly born, and letting one\u2019s eye drift into the blue sky beyond\u2014and thinking: how on earth could it be that the Christians, whose belief in the divine centres around Jesus\u2019 crucifixion carried out by Roman soldiers but done at the behest of the Jewish populace, could turn round nearly two millennia later and say to the Jews, in effect: we buy the argument that you are God\u2019s chosen people and this land is your land and we are going to turn it over to you as your \u201cnational home\u201d, even though the Arabs or their forefathers have been living here since the Romans kicked the Jews out of Babylon after demolishing the Temple in AD 70.<\/p>\n
![\"jonathan-power.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/jonathan-power.jpg\")
Jonathan Power<\/p>\n
This is what British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour did in his famous Declaration, strongly backed by Prime Minister Lloyd George, a religious man who saw the Jewish cause as one that must be supported by Christian charity.<\/p>\n
The British had taken Palestine following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 at best was an emotional cause, at worst a political adventure. The next generation of British politicians and colonial administrators, faced with a bloody Arab revolt that they had to mercilessly repress, felt that the British had made an awful mistake.<\/p>\n
Provocation on the Temple Mount<\/p>\n
A more recent misthink: how could it be that the Jews of today could elect as prime minister in the year 2001 Ariel Sharon, when they had been voting for a peace candidate barely two years before? Sharon\u2019s most successful campaign trick was to walk with a muscular entourage across the courtyard of Jerusalem\u2019s Dome of the Rock, the sacred Islamic territory from where Mohammed ascended to heaven for a night, and claim this as Jewish territory forever because down below are the remains of the Temple that the Romans destroyed.<\/p>\n
In helping provoke the second Intifada (uprising) and thus undermining the democratically elected government of Palestine to the great advantage of the militant Hamas, he showed both his irresponsibility and his total contempt for 1,400 years of continuous Muslim presence. How would Christians have felt if he had strutted across the piazza in front of St Peter\u2019s and made a speech that slighted Christian claims to that piece of earth? How would the Jews have felt if the Palestinians had suspended political banners from the Dome at the top of the hill down over the sacred Wailing Wall below?<\/p>\n
Is there no sense of consistency or basic justice in the Israeli body politic? What is the point of subscribing to a religion of values if one can be so easily led by the nose by an unscrupulous politician out for power and vainglory, careless of human life that gets in his way? And aren\u2019t the Jews, as a very small religious group, the ones who have the most to lose if religious tolerance is undermined?<\/p>\n
Christians are meant to turn the other cheek. The Jews have long been satisfied with an eye for an eye. But both religions have stressed the need for justice and for consideration of how those one is dealing with might feel. \u201cDo unto others what you want them to do to you\u201d is part of both Old and New Testament teaching. Neither Balfour nor Sharon\u2014nor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today\u2014appears to have possessed a profound notion of the core values of their religion.<\/p>\n
History, Myth, and Moral Evasion<\/p>\n
The Jewish notion that they can have this land and no one else can is so wildly anachronistic by any Western standards or historical experience that it is amazing that in 1917 it got the time of day. If every ethnic group in the world asserted so vigorously ancient yearnings to exclusive possession, the world would become totally chaotic in a short time, and nowhere quicker than in North America itself, where the Spanish, French, Russians and British once made part of it their territory. China, united by the Mongol invasion, would today be subject to Mongolian rule.<\/p>\n
Also overlooked is that Palestine was described in the 12th century BC as an area of land between modern-day Tel Aviv and Gaza. This was around the time Moses led the Jews out of Egypt to find the \u201cPromised Land\u201d. Moses led the Jewish troops up towards modern-day Israel, fighting a number of tribes on the way. When it came to the most vigorous of their opponents, the Midianites, Moses said\u2014according to the Bible\u2019s Book of Numbers in the Old Testament (in the Jewish Torah)\u2014that all the Midianites must be killed, including women and children, apart from young virgins who must be married off to Jewish soldiers.<\/p>\n
This passage in the Old Testament is rarely cited by Jews, Christians, or Muslims. It is rarely mentioned in today\u2019s books on Jewish history, nor in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.<\/p>\n
Why should Israel get a free pass today? If the Jews want to believe that Temple Mount (on which the Dome of the Rock is built) is \u201cthe focal point of creation\u201d, and that in the centre of the hill lies the \u201cfoundation stone\u201d of the world, and that here \u201cAdam came into being\u201d, they may be allowed to believe it. But that the arbiters of the United Nations, including the U.S., Russia and Europe, could go along with this myth at the expense of traditional Palestinian centuries-old occupancy rights is almost impossible to digest.<\/p>\n
And the worst of it is that even liberal voices in the Western political world calling today for Israel to compromise seem to accept that even if the Palestinians recovered all of the pre-1967 territories on the West Bank, they would still only have barely 20% of the land that the United Nations divided into Jewish and Arab states in 1948 when the British withdrew.<\/p>\n
I have long been a supporter of the Jews, as those who read my latest book on war crimes will see (Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals). The Holocaust was the most horrific act in human history. But I can\u2019t support Judaism when its believers bury their heads in the sand.<\/p>\n
The Jews must start to grapple honestly with their past. They have no moral or Biblical right to do what they have done to the Palestinians over the last century, and their war with Gaza was an excessive abomination. [IDN-InDepthNews]<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2025 Jonathan Power<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Image by Jim Black from Pixabay – Photo: 2026 By Jonathan Power* LUND, Sweden | 26 January 2026…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154],"class_list":{"0":"post-97104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-bethlehem","9":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","10":"tag-bethlehem-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}