Hadrian: Glad We Agree On Erasing Jewish History In Holy Land

By Publius Aeoliua Hadrianus Caesar, Emperor of Rome

It is not often that a political and military leader of the mighty Roman empire sees eye to eye with the inhabitants of the barbarous areas beyond the mighty Legions’ reach. But indeed, what we are seeing is nothing less than broad agreement that it is necessary to rename the Jewish land and its various towns and cities so that the Jewish connection to the place is eliminated from the popular consciousness. Remember, I’m the one who officially renamed the place Palestine.

We need not get into a discussion of why such a renaming effort is necessary; you future cultures have your reasons, and I have mine. Where our considerations clearly dovetail, though, is the necessity for not calling Judea or Samaria by those pedigreed names. Despite my efforts, as late as the year MCMXLVIII what you call the West Bank was still being widely referred to by those names. Only time will tell if that set of new appellations sticks, but so far so good. Good one on you, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for rebranding the territory you captured with such a catchy, convincing moniker.

Nomenclature is key, and you grasp that. There are vanishingly few place names in all of “Palestine” with names that originated in Arabic; they are all corruptions of earlier Hebrew, Turkish, or Greek toponyms. That of course challenges the no-Jews version of history, so you have all been hard at work contriving Arabic etymologies – and the back stories that go with them – for Mamilla, Ramallah, and many other locations. I salute your creativity in that regard.

I renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, but unfortunately that didn’t catch on quite in the way “Palestine” did. You win some, you lose some – or as in the case of the Jews, if we get our way, you win some, you win some. Thanks also to those Hashemites – and their friends in the Arab League – there’s such a thing as “East Jerusalem.” Back in my day, when you wanted to create an artificial political and geographic entity, you had to go whole hog, but it’s amazing what a little propaganda ingenuity can accomplish: despite near-universal familiarity with the centrality of Jerusalem to Jewish thought and longing, the world sees no problem in trying to wrest control of just the part of the city that counts, religiously and historically speaking, from the Jews. They conveniently forget that when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian control, no one gave a rat’s rectum that Jews were expelled, their synagogues destroyed, their graves desecrated, and their reentry barred, in explicit violation of UN-endorsed armistice agreements. Enough has changed in the world since my day to make this ancient potentate’s head spin, but at least I’ve got the old constant of Jew-hatred to hang onto.

Good thing that never changes.