While we wait for all hell to break loose. let us consider the words of Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus ben Matthias, in The Jewish War.
1950 years ago, Josephus wrote his contemporary account of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome. The insurrection began in 66 A.D. and lasted seven years.
The Middle East described by Josephus is perfectly familiar -- a politically fractionalized land populated with a humble of ethnic and religious groups, including Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Italians and a tiny community of Christians.
Each detests the others. Extreme political and theological views prevail. Terrorism and assassination are commonplace. Alliances are momentary. Grudges, personal. And neither colonial subjugation nor local autonomy suffices to keep the peace.
The political events are familiar too. Rome first intervened in the region as a peace keeper, brokering a dispute between Seleucid Mesopotamia and Ptolemaic Egypt. Later the Middle East appeared vital to Rome because Roman trade routes passed through the region and because of the Parthian threat to the empire's eastern frontier. The Romans were lured into deeper military and political involvement, and this triggered continual insurrections.
The rebellion of 66 A.D., however, did not begin as a war of national liberation. It began as communal rioting in the seaport town of Caesarea -- Greeks verus Jews over an empty lot next to a synagogue. This inspired sympathetic rioting in Jerusalem, and a ham-handed Roman attempt to quell the disturbances worsened them instead.
The result was one of those great wallows siege, massacre, treachery, persecution, revenge, plunder, and self-destruction to which the Middle East is so often host.
The rising in Jerusalem set off a reaction among the non-Jewish inhabitants of the region, who indulged themselves in wild pogroms, with killings taking place as far away as Damascus and Alexandria. Roman forces were not sufficient to quash the rebellion. Jewish forces were not sufficient to defeat the Romans in open combat. Guerilla warfare ensured, with predictable consequences to the populace.
The Romans were noted for vigorous foreign policy responses. The Emperor Nero sent Vespasian and three legions to pacify Judea. Using a great deal of slaughter and some tactics, Vespasian drove the rebels back to the environs of Jerusalem. He was prevented from ending the war, however, by political confusion at home. Sound familiar? Nero was ousted and three worthless and short-lived emperors followed within the year.
The Jews made use of this breathing space by engaging in urban warfare with themselves and committing all conceivable and some inconceivable atrocities upon their co-religionists. Vespasian himself was finally proclaimed emperor by the Roman army, and the war was resumed under the direction of his son Titus.
After a prolonged and disgusting siege, Jerusalem was taken. And after another prolonged and even more disgusting siege, Masada, the last rebel stronghold fell. The Temple was destroyed, the Jewish upper classes were dispersed, and a Roman army was permanently stationed in Judea. Even then the peace did not hold, and rebellion would break out anew during the reign of Hadrian.
Normally the patterns of history are reassuring. But in The Jewish War, the shock of recognition is just a shock. Here, sixty generations ago, is nearly the same cast of characters engaged in exactly the same obsessive, vicious, and fatal behaviour for the same terrifying reasons on the same cursed, reeking, ugly chunk of land.
Who fails to learn history is doomed to repeat it. But was seemed doomed to repeat this history anyway.
This review is adapted from "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old U.S. Middle East Policy Expert", by the late, great P.J. O'Rourke, in a little-known libertarian magazine called Inquiry, c. 1979. While you're letting that sink it, here's a very à propos musical interlude.
