| Let me begin by telling you, dear reader, that what I discovered in the mid-1970s, written upon two placards left in a building near to the Hechal Hagevura (Hall of remembrance) in Jerusalem, forms the basis of this article. I would welcome the opportunity to learn from anyone if they know who may have been imprisoned and wrote such heartbreaking words on those placards. I had purchased a ticket to visit Hechal Hagevura but by mistake also entered an adjacent building. I found myself in the darkest part of what I later realized was a warehouse or perhaps it may have once been a building in which the British Mandatory power had held Haganah, Lehi, or Irgun Jewish resistance fighters. The Ministry of Defense restored the prison as the Underground Prisoners' Museum. It tells the spellbinding story of the underground's relentless struggle to oust the British and help create a Jewish state. There was little natural daylight entering the building except from one grimy window set high up in a wall, yet it was enough for me to discover something which immediately caught my eye. What I saw were two crude placards with writing on them almost missed in the gloom and lying across a flight of wooden stairs. Fortunately, I had my camera with me, I turned on the flash, pressed the button, and immediately the camera illuminated the two placards with words printed in English and in Hebrew. I was startled and deeply moved by what I saw written. What was written in English upon one of the placards were these words: "You took the Bible and gave us the White Paper." On the other placard, and written in Hebrew, was "Ha Anglim ha'bayita which in English clearly demands, "English go home." Those of us who know our Jewish history, be it Biblical and post-Biblical, are aware of its glorious and tragic path, especially down the dark centuries while in exile. This brief account of our 2,000-year-old history in the Diaspora will, I trust, explain the meaning of those heart-breaking words. The ancient Jewish homeland of Judea fell under the superpower of its day and become an occupied Roman province. Thus the People of the Book endured a succession of cruel procurators and governors who inflicted respective reigns of terror upon the hapless Jews. One such was the notorious Pontius Pilate whom Philo of Alexandria described as "inflexible in character and ruthlessly harsh." The inexorable result of such a procession of cruel governors led to the two Jewish uprisings against the colossus of the Roman Empire. This inevitably led to the horror of Judea's devastation, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the dispersion of the Jews from their ancestral and Biblical homeland. Thus began the Diaspora which lasted some 2,000 years until the reconstitution of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948. Though a Jewish remnant always remained in the homeland, surviving repeated alien conquerors and occupiers, Jewish history in exile was characterized by the Jews' fierce loyalty to their unbreakable faith in G-d's Unity and resolute rejection of the Christian concept of a triune G-d. This led to the relentless antagonism of the Church and centuries of persecution, forced conversions, massacres, and unspeakable crimes against the suffering Chosen People. Tragically this was done in the name of "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." The terrible anti-Jewish laws passed by successive Lateran Councils led to additional horrors inflicted upon the Jews. As the Crusaders, mostly comprised of Franks and Germans, marched through France and the Rhineland on their way to expel the Muslims from Jerusalem they fell upon the unprotected and vulnerable local Jewish communities, committing wholesale massacres and forced conversions on the few remaining survivors. Werner Keller in his book, Diaspora, which recounts post-Biblical Jewish history, calls this period, The Medieval Inferno. In 1099 Jerusalem fell to the same victorious crusaders who tormented the European Jews. They forced all the Jewish men, women, children, and babes in arm into the largest synagogue in Jerusalem, barred the doors and set light to it. They then marched around the burning building and, to the agonized cries of the dying Jews, sang: "Christ we adore thee." More horror descended later upon the Jews in Spain and throughout Europe resulting from the Catholic Inquisition. But as the centuries passed, endless misery darkened the fate of Jewry, be it from the pogroms of Poland and Russia to the repeat of the evil and infamous blood libel which first appeared in 1146 in the English city of Norwich, erupting again and again throughout Christendom. But the maniacal hatred by the Church persisted and all the while the Jews refused to surrender their identity or their faith in the One and Only G-d. In death and martyrdom, as in life, the Jew utters the affirmation of G-d's eternal Oneness, the Shema prayer, which in its six Hebrew words is to my mind the basis of all higher, ethical and spiritual religion. "Hear O Israel, the Lord Our G-d, the Lord is ONE." And so we continue, century after century of exile and suffering, to the worst tragedy yet to befall the Jewish people in post-Biblical times. It was in 1933 that set Germany on the terrible course that would lead to her committing the most monstrous crime in the history of the human race, the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler's German Nazi dictatorship had long planned what would come to be called, "The Final Solution." This was to set in motion a succession of vicious anti-Jewish libels in the German press and in all the schools and universities with the aim of demonizing the Jewish people. In this, they were also aided by the generational and seminal hatred of the Jews amongst Germans from the Church teachings. The Nazis concentrated on the German youth as this was the most potent weapon for the success of their anti-Semitic and Judeophobic policies. And we now see Jew-hatred disguised and employed as anti-Zionist and anti-Israel campaigns in the media, the schools and colleges growing in the United States and Europe. Many of the new appointees to office in the Biden/Harris administration have a seminal hatred of the Jewish state. Anti-Semitic tropes are seen and heard more and more in America, in the U.K, and throughout the European Union. The oldest hatred never dies. In 1939, the British Government, under pressure from the Arab world, and under threats of sabotage to Britain's desperately needed oil reserves in the Middle East, enacted legislation, known as the White Paper, to placate and appease Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine. Earlier, in 1921, British appeasement had resulted in Britain's Colonial Office severing two-thirds of the Palestine Mandate, in which a Jewish National Home was promised. A new artificial entity was created in the territory to be called Trans-Jordan. This arbitrary act of betrayal of the 1917 Balfour Declaration tore away all the land east of the River Jordan reaching as far as to that other new British entity, Iraq. Thus 35,000 square miles of the future Jewish homeland was lost leaving a mere 10,000 square miles between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan for the hoped-for eventual Jewish state, which included the very ancestral and Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. The 1939 White Paper effectively barred the Jews of Europe from reaching safety and refuge in British-occupied Palestine, even on the eve of World War 2 when they were already falling under the threat of Nazi annihilation. The White Paper had even barred Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine to a mere 75,000 souls over the next five years and then barring it altogether. The gates of Mandatory Palestine were thus effectively closed by Britain and the British Royal Navy to desperate Jewish men, women, and children who subsequently would be among the 6,000,000 Jews who perished in the Shoah. As Mitchell Bard wrote in his seminal work, Myths and Facts, "the gates of Palestine remained closed for the duration of the war, stranding hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe, many of whom became victim's of Hitler's "Final Solution." After the war, the British still refused to allow the survivors of the Nazi nightmare to find sanctuary in Mandatory Palestine which led to survivors, with the help of members of the Jewish resistance, trying to evade the British blockade. Many were captured and if lucky were sent to camps in Cyprus. Others were cruelly turned back. So now we come to what I found in Jerusalem and which is so inextricably linked to the tragedy of Jewish history in so much of the Diaspora? Were these placards used by unknown Jewish prisoners imprisoned by the British Mandatory police? Were they the written expressions of Jewish torment and protest at what had happened to the long-suffering Jews both in exile and then in Eretz Yisrael itself? My own conclusion is that those searing words, "You took the Bible and gave us the White Paper" was a searing indictment of both British policies and of Christianity itself. Britain's state religion is the Church of England. Thus the infamous White Paper was created essentially by British politicians, overwhelmingly members of the Protestant Christian faith, whose own Christian Bible both incorporates yet distorts the Hebrew Bible (the Torah and Tanach) which Christians then pejoratively call the "Old Testament." Hence, those bitter words written on one placard against British policies and also affirming the millennial Jewish agony suffered at the hands of Christendom. And thus the accusatory and bitter words: "You took the Bible and gave us the White Paper." Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer and author of seven books including his acclaimed four-volume work titled: Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. | 
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