Dr Chris James

 

 

 

 

Cuban street. Google images.

In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt at the Bay of Pigs that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.  The dictator’s regime had been friendly with the US government and had allowed US interests (often corrupt) to flourish.  The US government distrusted the communist Castro and was wary of his relationship with Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union so the US planned an attack using support from Cuban exiles.

Before his inauguration, John F. Kennedy was told of a plan that was already in place, whereby  the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had developed a strategy during the Eisenhower administration to train Cuban exiles together with the military for the invasion.

President Eisenhower approved the invasion program in March 1960. The CIA set up training camps in Guatemala and by November they had a small army for an assault landing on Cuba. José Miró Cardona led the anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the United States. A former member of Castro’s government, he was the head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, an exile committee.  Cardona was poised to take over the provisional presidency of Cuba if the invasion succeeded, it did not succeed.  Despite efforts of the government to keep the invasion plans  a secret,  the plan was leaked and  through Cuban intelligence, Castro learned of the guerrilla training camps in Guatemala.

Shortly after his inauguration, in February 1961, President Kennedy authorized the invasion plan.  The landing point at the Bay of Pigs was a remote swampy area on the southern coast of Cuba, where little resistance was expected, but the invasion was plagued with difficulties.

The first problem occurred on April 15, 1961, when eight bombers left Nicaragua to bomb Cuban airfields. The CIA had used obsolete World War II B-26 bombers, and painted them to look like Cuban air force planes. The bombers missed many of their targets.   As news broke of the attack, photos of the repainted U.S. planes became public and revealed American support for the invasion. President Kennedy cancelled a second air strike.

On April 17, the Cuban-exile invasion force, known as Brigade 2506, landed at beaches along the Bay of Pigs and immediately came under heavy fire.  Over the next 24 hours, Castro ordered roughly 20,000 troops to advance toward the beach, and the Cuban air force continued to control the skies.

Some exiles escaped to the sea, while the rest were killed or rounded up and imprisoned by Castro’s forces. Almost 1,200 members of Brigade 2506 surrendered, and more than 100 were killed.

The brigade prisoners remained in captivity for 20 months, as the United States negotiated a deal with Fidel Castro,  prisoners in return for baby food.   Castro eventually settled on $53 million worth of baby food and medicine in exchange for the captives.

Determined to make up for the failed invasion, the US administration  sabotaged and destabilized the Cuban government and economy, but this  only worked to lift the determination of the Cuban people to build their state independently of the major powers.   . 

The American plan failed when Russia came to Cuba’s aid placing nuclear missiles on a base in Cube pointing towards the US.  The US in turn retaliated with threats of a nuclear war. We were just the press of a button away from total destruction.

Most people in Europe and America thought a Third World War was imminent.  People took to the streets in protest.

I was still at school when I joined the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament.  One of the teachers at my school organised a group of students to go on a march in London.  I ended up committed to the cause of global peace and marched across the country with thousands of others.  We thought we had won when the Nuclear Weapons Treaty was signed, but we were wrong. Today, we are still threatened by the war that could end all wars and all of humanity.

In recent years a lot of doubt has been cast on the Exodus story, but it could just turn out to be true.

The following article has been reproduced from Breaking News Israel. 

Did Archaeologists Find First Ever Evidence of Biblical Exodus?

By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz October 2, 2018 , 1:33 pm https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/114501/did-archaeologists-find-first-ever-evidence-of-biblical-exodus/

“Then they stepped up to him and said, “We will build here sheepfolds for our flocks and towns for our children.” Numbers 32:16 (The Israel Bible™)

Moses Smiteth the Rock in the Desert, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902), gouache on board, 7 3/8 x 11 1/16 in. (18.7 x 28.2 cm), at the Jewish Museum, New York (Photo: James Tissot)

Archaeologists have long disputed whether the Exodus described in the Bible was a factual, historical account of the Jews’ arrival from Egypt or whether the evidence points toward a non-Biblical version – an internal social development in the region. A recent discovery that may prove Iron Age nomads dwelt in the Jordan Valley may bring researchers one step closer to determining the truth.

In an article published in the Biblical Archaeology Review, David Ben-Shlomo, an archaeologist with Ariel University and his American dig partner, Ralph Hawkins of Averett University, described their findings at Khirbet el Mastarah, five miles north of Jericho.

“By the end of our 2017 season, we were struck by the fascinating picture that had begun to emerge in the Jordan Valley, a region that up until recently had been virtually unknown archaeologically,” they wrote. “Within a range of just a couple of miles, we may be able to see the evolution of early Israel from a domestic-scale culture to a political-scale culture.”

The site contains ruins of low walls that researchers believe were used to fence in grazing animals. Pottery shards found at the site have been dated to the early Iron Age, around the time traditionally associated with the Israelite arrival in the Promised Land. No shards were found inside the stone fencing, leading researchers to believe that the people lived in tents.

“The floors of the structures were virtually empty of finds, and thus, we could not date them by conventional archaeological methods,”  Ben-Shlomo wrote. “In Bedouin settlements, people live in tents made of perishables which are relocated every season, thus artifacts would not be associated with stone architecture. So the structures might have housed animals, rather than people, who lived in tents around them.”

The theory that the many low stone enclosures discovered in the region were the campsites of the Israelites when they first entered the land was first put forth by Professor Adam Zertal of Haifa University, who surveyed the area for 38 seasons until his death in 2015. This theory has been contested by archaeologists who claim the rise of the early Israelites was an internal development and not a foreign invasion.

Ben Shlomo and Hawkins believe the people who built the fences were nomadic, just passing through the area due to the harsh climate. Temperatures frequently exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit and the area receives an average of less than half of an inch of rain annually. The site is enigmatic. Semi-concealed by the topography, it is located one mile from the nearest spring.

“The landscape is arid most of the time and even in modern times, most of the population here are Bedouins,” said Dr. Ben-Shlomo. “Sites like Khirbet el Mastarah and other similar ones in the Jordan Valley seem – at least from survey material – to appear suddenly during the Iron Age. Since this area is not densely populated in many periods, this might indicate a new phenomenon like nomads suddenly creating settlements, or a new population.”

Soil from the site is currently undergoing analysis in a laboratory. Samples from underneath the walls are being tested for a build-up of electrons, which become trapped over the years and are only released by light radiation. Samples from the walls are being tested for elevated levels of phosphorus, which would be consistent with animal dung accumulation.

“It is difficult since many aspects of the material culture of different groups (say those from east or west of the Jordan River) may be too similar or not indicative enough,” said Dr. Ben-Shlomo.

“The story of Exodus is a matter of religious belief, yet, some parts of it may be, in principal, inspired from historical events,” Dr. Ben-Shlomo told Breaking Israel News. “The appearance of new sites in the Jordan Valley that may be dated to the early Iron Age (1200-1000 BCE), as suggested by Adam Zertal according to his survey, may fit a situation where there is a movement of some population from east of the Jordan River to west of it. This is possibly a part of the Exodus story.”

Dr. Ben Shlomo added a disclaimer to his statement.

“So far the finds themselves from Khirbet Mastarah do not support this since we have not yet dated the construction of the structures there; finds from other excavations in the Jordan valley are slightly more informative, but we still need more data.”

The role of the Bible in Israeli archaeology is a source of fierce debate among researchers. As head of the Sifting Project, Dr. Gabriel Barkay is elbow-deep in Second Temple artifacts. When asked how he approaches the Bible in the context of archaeology, Dr. Barkay answered simply, “Very carefully.”

“The Bible is not, nor was it intended to be, an auxiliary reference book for archaeologists and historians,” Dr. Barkay told Breaking Israel News. “The Bible is a religious work that has within it historical data, some of it reliable, some of it mythical, some of it legendary. People, especially researchers, have to be very careful when referencing the Bible. Each verse needs to be weighed for its own relevance.”

Dr. Barkay noted that this ‘careful’ approach to the Bible is especially true when dealing with the significantly more ancient period of early Israel.

“There are some archaeologists who claim that the Exodus from Egypt never took place while other archaeologist believe that it did. Those who do, generally place the date around the 13th century BCE, which, in the ancient Near East, corresponds to the Iron Age,” Dr. Barkay said.

“There is some circumstantial evidence that the Exodus did take place but there has yet to be any direct evidence,” Dr. Barkay said. “This find is circumstantial.”

“Some researchers claim the cause of the regional upheaval in the Iron Age was an internal development; that some Canaanites passed out of the stage of nomadization. Other researchers claim these were people from the outside,” Dr. Barkay continued.

“So even if the researchers at Khirbet el Mastarah prove that the remains were from the 13th century BCE, it would not be proof of a Biblical Exodus. Proof would be in the form of an Egyptian inscription describing a slave revolt or if we found the remains of an Egyptian army in the sea,” he said.

Dr. Ben Shlomo and Hawkins are determined to continue their search for definitive proof to settle this archaeological debate. Towards this end, they will be continuing their research next season Auja el-Foqa, located south of Khirbet Mastarah. The project is currently organizing volunteers for the dig

Fairy. Art by DuBrae 2012.

Bruno Bettleheim wrote:

“In order to master the psychological problems of growing up and overcoming narcissistic disappointments, productivity and oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries; becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation –a child needs to understand what is going on within his (or her) conscious self so that he (or she) can also cope with that which goes on in his (or her) unconscious. He (or she) can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his (or her) unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams – ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures.  By doing this, the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which then enable him (or her) to deal with that content” (my parentheses). [1]

The psychoanalyst Marie Louise von Franz suggested that the fairy stories told to children in their formative years are more than exaggerated   tales. The social and emotional fairy stories have a huge impact in the shaping of children’s developing minds. Franz suggested that children connect incidents to their favourite tales and the struggles they face in their every daily life.[2]  As the theory goes, children who have heard fairy tales from a young age are introduced to some of the problems they fear the most, which include the death of a caregiver, violence or being taken away by a stranger; a wicked witch.[3]

The theorists have suggested the real fear for a child is that of abandonment and loss.   In fairy tales these traumas are presented in such a way that the child is believed to feel safe and protected because the setting is more often a magical place in a make-believe land, (once upon a time,) a long time ago.

The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim said that “no sane child ever believes that fairy tales describe the world realistically” but “every child believes in magic, and (s)he stops doing so when he or (s)he grows up”.[4] (My parenthesis.)

In the earliest moments in our childhood we endeavour to acquire some kind of unity between body, mind and those around us, just as we try to find a connection between ourselves and the magic in the stars and the universe. We imagine, but connection does not come automatically, we have to practice using our instincts and first learn how to connect with our immediate surroundings.   As we grow the attention shifts from the ephemeral universe to the material world and we find a different connection in objects and people who have since become objectified.  We live in a world of objects that cloud our subjective experience and this is one way of losing our primary identity and invoking the experience of primary trauma; but there are many more occasions where trauma enters our lives.  Not knowing who we are or where we belong is a feeling of abandonment. For most, understanding life begins with some form of identity. Who am I? Where did I originate from? Why do I feel different or abandoned?

We form our identity in relation to other people, we learn their beliefs, copy their ideas and sentiments and act out their behaviours in much the same manner as history and polity has dictated. We acquire these doctrines of life through our families, friends, relatives, kindergarten, schools, the workplace and from our environments.  We learn from real stories, fairy tales, religions, historiographies, images and texts as well as sublimation and all the other fictions surrounding us; and we create ourselves as a fiction.

   

---

[1] Bruno Bettleheim 1976. The Uses of Enchantment. UK Penguin, p117.

[2] Marie Louise von Franz 1996 The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Shambhalah Boston London.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bettleheim Ibid.

 

 

 

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake.

Last year I made the decision to give up teaching and go back to research.  This time the study would be far more personal, it was more about retracing my roots.  My intention was to write a book about my childhood, but as I began to think about what to write there was a bigger issue on my mind.   Israel had just passed a law making the criteria for Israeli citizenship to be based on the Jewish faith and lineage.  There are many people who can call themselves Israeli, but who are not Jews, many are Arabs, but there are other ethnic groups too and then there are the Reform Jews (those who take a modern view of religion) and who would find qualifying for citizenship in Israel a problem. It begged the questions what does it mean to be Jewish?  And how true to Judaism’s modern ideals is the Jewish Bible?  This would be the essence  of my research.

When I was growing up the separation between Jews and Christians was based on differences in belief, but also on the alternative perspectives of history. For example: Those who were Christian placed a lot of importance on the Crusades, despite the fact that most of them were lost  bloody battles.  The Christian quest was always to secure power over the City of Jerusalem and its grand Temple, whoever ruled the Temple ruled the ancient world.

For the Jews, the religious story began long before the Crusades and there were many battles to secure a home and a Temple for worship.  Moreover,  for the Jews the Crusades were not a heroic campaign commanded by kings and saints, but a campaign of terror where thousands of Jews were tortured and killed alongside other believers of different faiths.  Britain had a penchant for locating its grandeur on battles and wars. Britons mostly stemmed from a warrior culture.

The British put their battles  to song and taught the words to children in schools. To this end, we hailed Jerusalem (albeit lost) in the same manner we hailed the British Empire, but neither were truly the property of the respectable Englishman. Wars are created by the rich and fought by the poor.  Catchy tunes helped to spread the mythology of a valiant war in the past as they do today.

The British version of the Jerusalem story was written in a poem by William Blake that alluded to the possibility that Jesus the messiah had set foot on English soil. “And did those feet in ancient time” was the preface to Blake’s epic that had been based on a previous work by Milton. A Poem in Two Books, was a collection of writings known as the Prophetic Books (1804). Later it was known as the hymn “Jerusalem“, set to music written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916.  As children we sang the hymn Jerusalem every morning in school, but my Jerusalem was not the same city landscape as that beleaguered by the English Crusaders.  “Jerusalem was a place in Heaven and it was yet to be built on earth”, so said the wise old woman who was my grandmother.

Few people actually knew the story that inspired Blake’s poems. They were prompted by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, had  travelled to the region of Glastonbury, England. Jesus was said to have visited Glastonbury during the prophet’s unknown years.  The poem’s theme could be linked to the Book of Revelation (3:12 and 21:2) describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a New Jerusalem. [1]

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s  mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen![2]

This was not a theme for the Jews, but for the Christians. For the Jews, there was no second coming. For the Jews Jesus was not a Messiah, but a Zealot who had attempted to drive the Romans out of his country and thus had contributed to the Roman’s destruction of the second Temple, a Temple that had already been destroyed before and rebuilt on the site of a mosque.  There zealots battled for a long time before the final Jewish War that was described in the classic book by Josephus. Some theorists believed that Jesus was crucified, not because he claimed to be the Son of God, but because he overthrew the tables of money changers in the Temple.  Certainly, the crowds that gathered around Jesus would have been a threat to the Roman Empire who were already suffering from a string of failed Emperors.

The destruction of the second Temple had heralded in the building of the Christian churches, whereby the Roman form of Christianity introduced by Constantine had become the adopted religion of Great Britain.  The Jews had lived in Britain since the 14th Century, but they were not given citizenship until 1829.

For Jews,  it was hard to call England home and Jerusalem was, and always would be  the home of a Covenant made between God and the Jewish people, first through Abraham and then through Moses.  They had their own songs and poetry.

Such is the nature of literature to raise questions and draw out the deepest and most tenuous of emotions that reside in the human soul.   In every word of Blake’s exhalations there is also the element of war-torn trauma. Blake responded to the Dark Satanic Mills, but after the Second World War there was another kind of trauma that became apparent,  the Holocaust.  It brought some  groups of people together in pain and shame and divided others.   Trauma impacts the world and the way we live our lives. With this in mind, my memories of my childhood are sometimes positive and at other times melancholy and   I imagine these moods will be prevalent in moving forward with my research, which gives a impetus to Jewish history and Jewish life.

[1] William Blake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time Retrieved 1^st January 2019.

[2]William Blake “Milton a Poem, copy B object 2”. The William Blake Archive. Retrieved 1^st January 2019.

t a people that had somehow given me a sense of belonging.

 

 

I have been saying for a long time now that the language we use and the images we watch adversely affect the human brain. Our brains are structured by the world around us, the words, the images, the overt emotions people display when happy, sad, disturbed, angry and disenchanted. Critics dismiss the evidence because we live in a self-perpetuating and competitive system, which for reasons of capital growth, is unlikely to change. We copy others because it seems to be in vogue. No one wants to be different. We need to change. We can change individually. We can be mindful of our speech and our behaviour. If we are to create a better non-violent world then we must look at those behaviours we dismiss as normal, because acceptable they may be in this modern age, harmless they are not.

 

                                                      The Exodus. Wikipedia.

 

On the Jewish calendar communities across the world are reading the  Book of Exodus and the story of their ancestors pathway out of Egypt and slavery.  It prompted the following thoughts.

Following World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons set their sights on aliyah, (immigration to Israel) but the British government who had been in control of Palestine since 1917 were keen to maintain friendly relations with the Arab world and their valuable material resources, namely oil.   To this end, the Jews were refused to admittance to Palestine. The Jews were not unaccustomed to being stateless, they already had a long history of wandering and exclusion, but as the violence in Palestine between Jews, Arabs, and the British grew,  Britain decided to hand the problem of Jewish settlement over to the United Nations.[1]

At the end of World War II, the conflict over Palestine gained particular momentum. Jewish resistance increased dramatically and in order to keep the peace, Britain had more than 100,000 troops in the vicinity, but their efforts were in vain.  In 1942, the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) appealed to the United States for support of the Jewish state in Palestine. Despite the atrocities of the Holocaust, Britain still refused to change its policy of not allowing Jewish immigration into the region.  As a result, hundreds of thousands of Jews languished in displaced camps with little hope of any real future. The British interned more than 51,500 Jews who were desperately seeking a return to their homeland.

The British went to great lengths to keep Jews out of Palestine and forced them back onto prison ships and into camps.   There was constant outrage and violence against the British rule and as a consequence in 1947 the British lost even more support when they intercepted the Exodus, a ship loaded with 5,200 Jewish refugees sailing toward Palestine from Marseilles.  The British then launched two refugee ships back to Hamburg, Germany, where they forced the Jews into displaced persons facilities. The intervention scandal shook the British government, which is when they handed the problem to the United Nations hoping that they would recommend that the British retain control of the area, but the United Nations did not concede to British demands. Instead, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended an Arab state and a Jewish state be brought into effect. (The recommendation was known as the Partition Plan).  The land was divided between Arabs and Jews and Jerusalem became an international city.

On November 29, 1947, by 133-13 majority, the United Nations voted that, beginning on May 15, 1948, if the Jews agreed, there would be two independent states in Palestine, and the British mandate would end. In 1948, (the year of my birth) the State of Israel was born.

[1]https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/israels-war-of-independence/ Retrieved 10^th  January, 2019.

This work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is of one of his favourite models, Alexa Wilding (c.1847 – 25 April 1884). She was one of the best known models of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and featured in some of his finest paintings of the later 1860s and 1870s. She sat for more of his finished works than any other of his muses.

  Aleksandr Nikolayevich Benois was born May 4 [April 21, old style], 1870, St. Petersburg and Russia died on Feb. 9, 1960. He was a Russian theatre art director, painter, and ballet librettist who with Léon Bakst and Sergey Diaghilev cofounded the influential magazine Mir iskusstva (“World of Art”), from which sprang the Diaghilev Ballets Russes.

‘The Soul of the Rose’ is a painting by John William Waterhouse

Created in 1908 The soul of the Rose is by Waterhouse who was one of the lesser known artists of the British Romantic Movement. The painting is based on a poem called ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Sir John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia
(1851–2) is very well known and one of the most popular works reproduced. The scene depicted is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, in which Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, falls into a stream and drowns. It was originally derived from Greek word ophelos meaning “help”. This name was probably created by the 15th-century poet Jacopo Sannazaro for a character in his poem ‘Arcadia’.

 

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.  (Shakespeare).

 

How do I feel about social media?

Daily I open my account on Facebook and ask myself, why am I doing this?  Out of almost 5,000 friends how many are truly friends?  Most of these people are hardly known to me and if it were not for Facebook I probably would never refer to them as friends, or even acquaintances.

From another perspective, Facebook brings the news of what is happening in far off places, but how much accuracy does this news contain?  We have to trust our judgement on all accounts.

Facebook is also addictive and this is indicative of a chronic need in society to connect to a power that is greater than ourselves.  In the external world such powers are deemed unsafe and sometimes fraudulent.  Facebook appears to be safe ground because everything happens at a distance, but Facebook is also discursive and it can eat into the emotions if one allows it to penetrate the mind too much.  To this end, I ask myself, why have so many chosen to engage with Facebook.? The answer seems to be that in a time when we have lost touch with community we turn to virtual communities to fulfill those same social and emotional needs.

However, there is another question. Does Facebook truly fulfill those needs for connection?  Can Facebook replace real friends and family, or the beauty of nature.  The answer is no.  Too much time spent on screen can be damaging in a myriad of ways.  I open Face book once and day, but I choose nature for resilience, love and respect.