I often write an article, post it, and then write a sequel. This essay is a follow-up to my What I Discovered paper. Dancing with death and feeling dumb and poor affects my Weltanschauung in the present. In The Life of Reason, George Santayana stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” While his mindset was a shorter way of saying the same thing, both thoughts are true.

This is a short history lesson about the walls around Jerusalem after the Babylonian Captivity. Cyrus II of Persia defeated the Babylonians and allowed the exiled Jewish leaders to return to Jerusalem. Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt both the society and a wall around the city. Both the society and the wall were designed to keep the Gentiles, non-Jews, from the Holy City. That was 2500 years ago.

A part of the old wall

Over the next half millennium, there were wars that Israel won and also lost. The Romans laid seized to Jerusalem due to the First Jewish Revolt. As a result, the Romans sent the Jews into the diaspora between 66 and 135 CE. Therefore, Israel didn’t exist for almost two millennia.

After WWI, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, replied Lord Rothschild, a prominent Zionist founder, wanted the British to create a new country in the Middle East called Israel. Balfour’s reply was called the Balfour Declaration.

Balfour Declaration

The British couldn’t create Israel, so the Balfour Declaration went nowhere during the next two decades. However, when the Nazis controlled Germany before the run-up to WWII, Hitler tapped into German antisemitism. That mindset continued during the war. The Germans moved Jews into ghettos. The most famous one was the Warsaw ghetto in Poland.

The Nazis rounded up all the Jews in and around Warsaw and put them into the old Jewish area of Warsaw. Basically, it was designed as a massive holding cell awaiting transferring the Jews to the concentration camp at Treblinka. A brick wall replaced a barbwire fence to keep the Jews contained. The brick wall fenced in a half million Jews into an area of less than a thousand acres. Before being killed at Treblinka, disease and starvation killed thousands inside the ghetto.

After WWII, the Zionists decided to invade Palestine. The UN had wanted to partition Palestine into two independent states: Palestine and Israel. European Jews deemed that they wanted another country, which they hadn’t had for two millennia, and took it.

This is the map of Palestine since the Balfour Declaration.

Enter my previous essay. In that article, I demonstrated some examples of learning from my past. I would not enjoy replicating my subdural hematoma or prostate cancer that spread outside my prostate. It is also true I wouldn’t want to relive feeling dumb and poor in Mt. Lebanon. Both the medical and the moving issues were curses initially. However, those curses became blessings. I believe the old adage, no pain, no gain. My Weltanschauung is the direct result of learning from the past.

Jews learned during their ancient past that walls didn’t work, nor did they benefit them. That was true in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah up to WWII. In the present day, the wall around the Warsaw ghetto resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews dying due to starvation and various diseases. Estimates range from 600,000 to 800,000 who died in the ghetto or after they were transported to Treblinka.

Zionists invaded Palestine and disobeyed the Balfour Declaration. Read again Balfour’s letter, which says in part, “... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Netanyahu’s military is doing precisely what Hitler’s military did in the Warsaw ghetto and all the other detention centers and concentration camps during WWII.

Apparently, Netanyahu’s IDF didn’t recall the Warsaw ghetto. This is a before-and-after video of Gaza.

This video graphically shows Netanyahu’s IDF moving ghettos all over Gaza and then attacking them.

This is a drone video of the devastation of Gaza.

George Santayana warned us, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”