The Levant is the eastern Mediterranean area now covered by Israel, Lebanon, part of Syria, and western Jordan. Levant is a French word. It is the present participle of the French word for to rise lever, and its use in geography refers to the direction that the sun comes up.” The term Levant was first used in English in 1497, referring to “the East,” or “Mediterranean lands east of Italy.
The term Levant is often used in reference to the ancient lands in the Old Testament of the Bible (Bronze Age): the kingdoms of Israel, Ammon, Moab, Judah, Edom, and Aram; and the Phoenician and Philistine states. Important cities include Jerusalem, Jericho, Petra, Beersheba, Rabbath-Ammon, Ashkelon, Tyre, and Damascus.
Throughout the Bronze and Iron ages, the Levant was home to many ancient Semitic-speaking peoples and kingdoms, and is considered by many to be the home of Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic. There are 22 Arab-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa: Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen versus only one Hebrew-speaking nation – Israel.
Today, Levant is the term typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the history of the region. Scholars have adopted the term Levant to identify the region due to its being a “wider, yet relevant, cultural corpus” that does not have the “political overtones” of Israel-Palestine associated with the Middle East.
Of all the regions in the world, none may have as complicated a history as the Middle East. The area of three religious faiths has been conquered, contested, and ruled by several empires across the millennia.
From some time in the eleventh century BCE until the end of the sixth century BCE, the Jews lived in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The two kingdoms split apart, probably around 930 BCE.
The two kingdoms of Hebrews: in the north – Israel, and in the south – Judah. The Israelites formed their capital in the city of Samaria, and the Judaeans kept their capital in Jerusalem. These kingdoms remained separate states for over two hundred years.
During the Iron Age, two related Israelite kingdoms, Israel and Judah, controlled much of Palestine, while the Philistines occupied its southern coast.
The Kingdom of Israel (or the Northern Kingdom or Samaria) existed as an independent state until 722 BCE when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Kingdom of Judah (or the Southern Kingdom) existed as an independent state until 586 BCE when it was conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, followed by the Persians who conquered the Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Israel-Palestine conflict is a very modern phenomenon. It didn’t really formally begin until 1948, or at the earliest you might say in the early 1900s. That’s still a very long conflict, but it’s about 100 years at most, significantly less than the 3,000 years you hear people cite.
This gets to a bigger misconception: that the conflict is between Jews and Muslims over religion. In fact, those two religious groups have been coexisting in the region, for the most part peacefully, since Islam was first born in the seventh century.
The conflict did not really begin until the early 20th century, as thousands of Jews left Europe to escape persecution and establish a homeland in what is today Israel-Palestine (it was Ottoman Palestine until 1920, when it came under British control). Communal violence between Jews and Arabs escalated into a crisis, and in 1947 the UN proposed splitting the land into a state for Jews (Israel) and a state for Arabs (Palestine).
On October 6, 1973, an Arab coalition of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the Jewish holy day of atonement. Arab coalition forces led by Egypt and Syria carried out a surprise attack, successfully pushing Israel, for a time, out of the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. In response to Israeli losses and encouraged by Soviet support of Egypt and Syria, the United States, after much deliberation, decided to intervene on behalf of Israel. The United States offered Israel a full-scale airlift of military equipment on October 10.
In June 1982, Israel invaded South Lebanon in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, purportedly in retaliation for the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador to England.
In July 2006 Hezbollah launched an operation against Israel in an attempt to pressure the country into releasing Lebanese prisoners, killing a number of Israeli soldiers in the process and capturing two. Israel launched an offensive into southern Lebanon to recover the captured soldiers. The war lasted 34 days but left more than one thousand Lebanese dead and about one million others displaced. Several Arab leaders criticized Hezbollah for inciting the conflict. Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s ability to fight the Israel Defense Forces to a standstill won it praise throughout much of the Arab world.
The Oslo Accords
The Oslo Accords, signed by Israel and Palestine in 1993, were supposed to end the decades-old fight between them. Hesitation on both sides, however, derailed the process, leaving the United States and other entities once again trying to mediate an end to the Middle East conflict.
PALESTINIAN LIBERATION ORGANIZATION
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) formed in 1964. In 1969, Yasser Arafat became the PLO leader. Arafat long denied Israel’s right to exist. However, by the late 1980s, he reluctantly accepted the fact of Israel’s existence.
SECRET MEETINGS IN OSLO
Several factors contributed to the new negotiations on an Israeli-Palestinian peace: Arafat’s new position toward Israel; Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979; Arab cooperation with the United States in defeating Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1991; willingness of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin to explore new avenues of peace. Norway offered to provide a place where Israeli and Palestinian diplomats could hold secret meetings. In a secluded, wooded area near Oslo, diplomats gathered in 1992. President Bill Clinton presided over the negotiations.
Shimon Peres, Israeli PM, signs the Israel-PLO Oslo accords
OSLO ACCORDS
The negotiators emerged from the Oslo woods with a “Declaration of Principles,” or the Oslo Accords. They included:
- Israel recognized the PLO as Palestine’s official representative
- The PLO renounced the use of violence
- The PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist
- Both sides agreed to Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the Jericho area by 2000
- A five-year interim period would facilitate further Israeli withdrawals from other unspecified areas of the West Bank.
Rabin and Arafat signed the Accords at the White House in September 1993.
DERAILMENT
The PLO moved to validate its renunciation of violence by changing its name to the Palestinian Authority. Israel also began giving up territory in Gaza and the West Bank.
But in 1995, an Israeli radical, angry over the Oslo Accords, assassinated Rabin. Palestinian “rejectionists” began terrorist attacks on Israel. Hezbollah, operating out of southern Lebanon, began a series of attacks against Israel.
HAMAS
It includes its radical Islamic world view (conceived by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt), which has basically not changed in the 18 years of its existence. With regard to Israel, the charter’s stance is uncompromising. It views the “problem of Palestine” as a religious-political Muslim issue, and the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation as a conflict between Islam and the “infidel” Jews.
The Hamas government has pushed through changes that gave greater influence to Islamic law in the Gaza Strip. Since the mid-1990s, Hamas has gained widespread popularity within Palestinian society for its perceived lack of corruption and its anti-Israeli stance.
The Hamas Covenant
The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement was issued on August 18, 1988. Its Covenant is a comprehensive manifesto comprised of 36 separate articles, all of which promote the basic HAMAS goal of destroying the State of Israel through Jihad (Islamic Holy War).
The following are excerpts of the HAMAS Covenant:
On the destruction of Israel:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” (Preamble)
The call to jihad:
“The day the enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” (Article 15)
“Ranks will close, fighters joining other fighters, and masses everywhere in the Islamic world will come forward in response to the call of duty, loudly proclaiming: ‘Hail to Jihad!’. This cry will reach the heavens and will go on being resounded until liberation is achieved, the invaders vanquished and Allah’s victory comes about.” (Article 33
Anti-Semitic incitement:
The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.” (Article 7)
Shemini Atzeret 2023 - the worst massacre of the Jews since the Holocaust
The precise meaning of Shemini Atzeret is unclear, but it is thought to be a time of bonding between God and the Jewish people, which was demonstrated during their 40 years of exile after Moses received the 10 Commandments on Sinai on their behalf. It combines both thanksgiving for the harvest and prayer for rain to assure next year’s harvest.
It was supposed to be a time of joy. Yet Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah 5784/2023 will be remembered as a time of pain and anxiety. As news began to filter through of the terrible massacres that began on 7 October.
The Supernova Music Festival, an overnight trance rave, held in Israel’s Negev desert, had been planned for months. It drew thousands of young people, including international tourists, during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The event was billed as “the journey of unity and love.”
As the sun was rising in the east, the terror has replaced the trance.
About 6:30 AM Hamas rockets began to rain down on Israel. The Supernova electronic music festival is well underway. Festival goers stopped to look at the sky. Some take pictures, unaware of the horror to come. By 7:00 AM dozens of Hamas terrorists had reached the festival site. Within moments, panic erupts.
There was just one main road, Route 332, out of the festival grounds. Some festival goers start to escape by car. One dash cam video camera from 7:40 AM captures a driver taking repeated fire by Hamas terrorists while trying to escape. As cars began to pile up, some drive east into the desert. People were ditching their cars and running across the desert for their life. There was panic and chaos. People were being shot. Where is the Army? Where is the Police?
One of the videos shot by Hamas shows attackers stop by the portable bathrooms. In the video, one of the stalls appears to be occupied. Someone is inside. The terrorist fired into the bathrooms one by one.
Some festival goers hide in the bushes and trees. Others seek refuge in a bomb shelter. Dashcam footage from 7:55 AM shows terrorists outside that bunker. It was about an hour into the attack.
Hersh was inside that bunker. He was the only survivor. He texted his mother at 8:11 AM. The first text said, ”I LOVE YOU”, followed by the second, “I’m sorry.”
“I knew immediately wherever he was, it was a terrible situation,” Joseph mother remembers.
One of the terrorists threw a grenade into the bomb shelter. Shortly after a man runs out of the bunker before he was shot.
Hersh’s arm from the elbow down was blown off. He tied a tourniquet around it with his shirt. Hamas came in after the gun fire settled down and commanded, “Anyone, who can walk, stand up and walk out.” Hersh got up and walked out with five other people. “The police had told us that one thing they knew was that last cell signal was on the border with Gaza.”
Hersh is likely among 199 hostages in Gaza.
Gall and his friend walked through the desert for four hours before being brought to safety. Another girl and her boyfriend hid in the bushes for eight hours before being brought to safety.
The terrorist attack at the festival went on for more than five hours. It was the site of Hamas’ deadliest assault on October 7th.
More than 100 bodies were discovered in one Kibbutz alone, according to the NGO Zaka.
For 15 hours, Inbal Reich Alon was locked in a shelter while Hamas gunmen killed and kidnapped dozens of Israelis around her home, just outside the Gaza Strip.
This 58-year-old woman remembers hearing explosions on Saturday morning.
Reich Alon initially thought the noise was “a storm”, not the large-scale Hamas offensive that killed more than a thousand people. But she soon realised that her small, close-knit community was under attack.
She and her family took refuge in a safe room in their house, originally designed to protect residents from rocket fire.
The building was set on fire by the attackers. “We had no idea what was going on”, she says, adding that she could hear screams in Arabic. For hours, her husband and children “didn’t let go” of the door handle of the shelter, which does not lock, as is customary in this type of structure.
She was able to escape and is now staying in a hotel on the shores of the Dead Sea along with around 150 other residents of the Beeri kibbutz in southern Israel.
But others were not as lucky. In her kibbutz alone, “more than 100” people were killed, said the spokesperson for the NGO Zaka, who participated in the identification of bodies.
“There were very many, more than 100” dead, said spokesperson Moti Bukjin. The Hamas men “shot everyone, they murdered children, babies, elderly people, everyone in cold blood,” he added.
The deaths were part of a multi-front assault by Hamas militants on Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip last Saturday.
Hamas gunmen rolled into as many as 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip, including towns and other communities as far as 24 kilometres from the border.
The Israeli military said more than 1,000 people have died in Israel since Saturday’s incursion. More than 150 people were kidnapped by Hamas. In Gaza and the West Bank, 830 people have been killed, according to authorities.
‘They shot children, babies, old people, anyone’
In the Kfar Aza kibbutz, the bodies of Israeli citizens and Hamas fighters are still lying next to the burnt-out remains of homes – as soldiers just recently started the collection effort.
One resident described the harrowing events on Saturday: “[The militants] came into every home, into every room, every place.
“They would burn their house with them inside so they would die,” he said.
“They shot children, babies, old people, anyone. No one was safe from it. The first victim was a 90-year-old woman who was sitting on her porch. She saw them coming and she got shot.”
Another resident described hours spent hiding from the gunmen: “We were in this panic room for I think about over 30 hours. Then they broke windows and started shooting everywhere. I think at some point they shot at the door of the panic room.”
HAMAS = ISIS. Israel will take every measure necessary to protect itself.
Right 👍 pic.twitter.com/5cLGkXjjTg
— शिवम् हिंदुस्तानी 🇮🇳 (@shivamkhodani) October 11, 2023
