That’s What’s In A Name

Leonard Cohen composed “Lover Lover Lover” on the back of a stage in the Sinai Desert while entertaining Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  It contains these lyrics:

I asked my father,
I said, “Father change my name.”
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
with fear and filth and cowardice and shame.

And the latest news about a name is here:

Israeli researchers from Haifa University have uncovered a 1,900-year-old inscription bearing the name of the Roman-era province of Judea after an underwater excavation at Dor Beach, in the Zikhron Yaakov area…It was a rectangular stone 85 centimeters high and weighing over 600 kilograms…

The name “Judea” has only been found in only one other Roman-era inscription, according to a Haifa University press release…The researchers explain that following the Bar Kokhva Jewish revolt in the 130s, the Roman Empire decided to completely erase the memory of Judea province and make it part of a new province called Syria Palaestina.

We live in an era of identity-theft and in this area of the world, our Arab enemies are stealing everything of ours: our identity, our history, our heritage. And they are doing it with the assistance of those who hate Jews, those who love Arabs, those who believe in a new-world order and mainly by those who are ignorant and easily persuaded.

Because of this, despite this name alteration being well-known, it has to be repeated, again and again. Just as we need to repeat that the Arabs arrived here in the Land of Israel, as a conquering armed invading force, in 638 CE.  They are not the progeny of Natufians, Canaanites or Jebusites.

The Arabs-who-refer-to-themselves-as-Palestinians first considered themselves as Southern Syrians. They never had a state or any other political entity here. The Palestine Liberation Organization was established three years before Israel, in the 1967 defensive war against, yet again, Arab aggression, and it was trying to o”liberate” Israel, not their “West Bank”. And the “West Bank” came into being only when Jordan, in April 1950, illegally occupied and annexed Judea and Samaria.

So, here we are again, with Judea as in Jesus was born in Judea in Bethlehem, not in Palestine.

Saved from the watery depths, again the proof is there: this land was Judea, part of the Land of Israel.

It became “Palestine” only because of the Romans, to their shame, wishing to obliterate the Jewish connection and memory bound up with this land.

Let us not shame ourselves, our identity, our history.

Let us not play name games.

^