Dragons To Slay, Idols To Cast Down

At a demonstration against the genocide of Gaza, nothing could be more appropriate than the Flag of Saint George. There is a legend about Saint George, but he himself is not a purely legendary figure. His tomb at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod, was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948.

In similar vein, it is proposed to expand Jerusalem Walls National Park to include the Mount of Olives, under the control of Elad, a militant Israeli settler organisation. Even before the Government of National Unity, Benjamin Netanyahu depended for his parliamentary majority on people who spat on passing in the street those who shared in the Ministerial Priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who actively believed that there was a religious obligation to burn down churches, since they held the Divinity of Christ to be an idolatrous assertion.

They recently desecrated the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion, where it is maintained by the local Anglican diocese on behalf of a British owner. They obviously bombed that diocese’s previously Baptist hospital in Gaza, and they have erected as a loyalty test the willingness to parrot their ever more ludicrous accounts of what the whole world can see and most of the world has no compunction about saying.

While fourth generation Israelis could not possibly be told to “go home”, the State of Israel’s having been founded in the same year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, it is clear from the Bible that the pre-Israelite population, the founders of Jerusalem, never went away. They never have. They became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did, and they adopted the use of Arabic at the time of a Muslim Conquest contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of what is now England. Those ancient indigenous Christians are still there. The founders of modern Palestinian identity, they are the people of Shireen Abu Akleh, the people of Saint George. 

But parties that spit on their priests and burn down their churches are now in government in Israel, they are about to take control of the Mount of Olives, and they do not even bother to deny that they have bombed the Church of Saint Porphyrius, which has never been noted as a stronghold of Hamas or of Islamic Jihad. The lowest number of fatalities being cited so far is 18, almost all women and children. Although the present building dates from the twelfth century, a church on that site was first mentioned in 425, only five years after the death of Saint Porphyrius, who as Bishop of Gaza had Christianised what had been a recalcitrantly Pagan city because of course it was in old Philistia, meaning that its synagogue had never paid tribute directly to the Temple at Jerusalem, since it was not in the Land of Israel. Think on.