The Stone of 'Amaleq and Hatred in the Arab World
Written by Ruvy in Jerusalem
(from a great site - Blogcritics - worth giving it some space on my blog)
When I was still a university student thirty-six years ago, I lived in the North Bronx in an apartment covered with a giant Israeli flag on one wall, and a huge map of the country on the other. My fellow roommates and I dreamt of moving to a kibbutz in the Arava valley, known today as Yotvata.
We immersed ourselves in the politics of the country and of the region as much as we were able with the books and radio broadcasts available and discussed the security of the country, and what it needed to do to make it truly secure, and how the Arabs could possibly defeat the country. While we ate Halvah bought in Arab stores on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, we conjured up scenarios that Anwar el-Sadat could use in attacking Israel and posssibly defeating it. Scenarios in hand, we tried to figure out counter-strategies that would stop him...
You'd be surprised what a couple of ignorant college kids could dream up munching Halvah in their bull sessions — a coordinated attack by Syria, Jordan, and Egypt on a Yom Kippur that fell also on the Sabbath, bridges over the Suez to move tanks, airborne troop landings in Sharm el-Sheikh to seize the point from Israel, a tank assault across the Golan by Syria...
So imagine how I felt when on Yom Kippur in 1973, during a break in the services, I walked along Kings Highway in Brooklyn and saw the New York Post blaring out the news headline of the day in huge letters...
EGYPT AND SYRIA IN SURPRISE ATTACK ON ISRAEL!!
Yom Kippur that day fell on the Sabbath...
But let's return a year earlier to the apartment in the Bronx. I had wanted to be a science fiction writer. One day while eating a can of tuna in the apartment in 1971 or 1972, a strange idea came to me for a plotline, one that was very vivid and clear.
The story was set in the future, in the year 1994 or 1995, the Hebrew year 5755, (taf, shin, nun heh), letters which form the Hebrew word, "she will change." A modus vivendi of some sort had been reached between Arabs living under Israeli occupation and Israelis, and between Israel and the confrontation states around it, Jordan and Lebanon. In fact a treaty of sorts had been signed with Egypt by which the Israelis agreed to an international border running from the coast of the Sinai just west of El-Arish down to Sharm el-Sheikh, which remained under Israel's control.
Riots begin to break out in Gaza and in the Negev with Arabs demanding the downfall of Israel. The riots get worse and worse, in spite of the attempts of the Israelis to use a carrot and stick method, promising improvements in living conditions, etc.,
Apparently unrelated to these events in Israel, an asteroid is spotted speeding towards the planet Earth.
Astronomers using a super powerful telescope or a satellite probe see a shiny outcropping on the asteroid with strange markings. As the riots continue to worsen in Israel and as they begin to spread to the Arab world, the scientists work to decipher the markings on the shiny smooth stone on this asteroid.
Finally, they succeed. The script is a Sinaitic Semitic script and the stone bore this inscription, beginning...
I AM THE THE GOD OF 'AMALEQ, COME TO SEEK VENGEANCE UPON THE HEBREWS WHO HAVE SOUGHT THE DESTRUCTION OF MY PEOPLE.
The stone continues on hurling curses upon the people of Israel and their G-d, promising destruction in it wake. The closer the Stone of 'Amaleq approaches to Earth, the worse the Arab riots get.
I couldn't figure out a decent end to this story, so I let it go. But its imagery has never let me go. To this day I wonder if there is some terribly evil force at work that has aroused the animus of the Arabs against my people, so much so that a local Arab leader here (Amin el-Husseini, "grand mufti" of Jerusalem) lobbied Hitler to murder off Jews in Europe so that their corpses would not litter his country. Could the mind of el-Wahhab, who wrote so many centuries ago re-interpreting the Sunna into the nightmarish form that the Salafis (Wahhabis) of today follow, have been poisoned by this evil force? Could Ahmnadinejad of Iran be poisoned by this same evil?
I can't try to write this story now. History and reality have overtaken the events it would have sought to portray. The theological underpinnings for a "stone of 'Amaleq," a pagan god hurtling through space to seek vengeance on the G-d of Israel and His people, are just unsupportable without admitting to polytheism and denying the truth of the Bible altogether. But I was too young and uneducated to know that a quarter century ago.
So, there is no Stone of 'Amaleq hurtling through space.
But the Children of 'Amaleq appear as determined to kill us today as they were 3,500 years ago in the deserts south of here near Mount Sinai.
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