Of Persians, Jews and Others, and the relentless march of History
By Femi Olugbile
These are turbulent times. It is high season for the public commentariat.
In Yelewata, near Makurdi, in Benue State, two hundred people, many of them already internally displaced, living in refugee facilities provided by a Catholic Church, have just been murdered. The reverberations are echoing across the nation. Celebrated newspaper columnists are digging deep to come up with fresh anti-government trope, tendentious pieces that give no mention to the government’s accomplishments, or how the fundamentals of the country are being irrevocably changed.
The standoff involving Senator Oshiomhole and Air Peace is still generating a lot of talk.
On a more pleasant note, ’Uncle Sam’ has just turned 90. You are reminded of your on and off relationship with him, in the days of your column ‘FILOFAX’, and Toye Akiyode’s editorship at The Canal. There were rare incursions into the holy of holies to see the diminutive publisher seated behind his huge desk. It was rumoured he had a private entrance, so nobody knew when he came and went. Staff were in genuine awe of a man who read every line of every page of his newspaper before it went to press. In a previous life he was the columnist Sad Sam, a man with a spare and crusty sense of humour to whom was attributed the nugget of wisdom that the columnist does not achieve anything, except the pleasure of his own writing.
In the larger world, the missiles have been flying between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Demonstrators against ICE and Mass Deportation have been on the streets of Los Angeles. Some demonstrators are carrying the Mexican flag, an act of visual sedition that confirms that idiocy is not the exclusive preserve of the MAGA crowd.
President Trump, on his seventy-nineth birthday, has finally got his wish to hold a military parade in Washington. On show are ponderous Abram’s tanks, and not the deadly-looking missile launchers and intercontinental ballistic missiles that real dictators like those in North Korea and Russia, who know a thing or two about military parades, regularly put out to intimidate their public, along with goose-stepping fierce-looking soldiers. The US soldiers, including the deadly Marines, are marching in good humour, as if they were on a picnic. As a spectacle it is a disaster, nowhere near the pomp of London’s Trooping of the Colours or Kim Jong Un’s birthday rally.
Your mind settles on the Middle East and its flying missiles. You recall visiting Megiddo and hearing Yemina, your guide, a bronzed Sabra whom you imagine would be deployed right now with other Reserves, with an Uzi machine-gun, among the IDF conducting massacres in Gaza, as she explains the story of Armageddon. The ancient prophecy has it that in the last days, all the armies of the world would come against Israel in the valley below, she says, pointing down. Israel would win, of course.
President Donald Trump has been at the G7 Summit in Canada. He is returning early to Washington. He has let such phrases as ‘I rule America’ and even ‘I rule the world’ slip from his mouth. He has suggested that the Israelis attacked Iran because ‘I gave Iran 60 days to sign a deal…or else there would be nothing left…’ The victory of Israel is certain, in his mind.
A little history might have taught the wannabe King of America to show some respect, that Persia and Israel go way back, long before there was America, and long before Christianity and Islam. As for their wars, one side wins one day, and on another day the boot is on the other foot.
The last really big war between Persia and Israel, before this war between the Shia Mullahs and Benjamin Netanyahu, occurred in the reign of Ataxerxes 1, King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, who ruled the known world from 465 BC to 424 BC after his grandfather Darius the Great conquered it. Jerusalem, the heartland of Israel was ravaged and left in ruins, with its surrounding wall broken. The Jews were enslaved and taken into captivity. They were dispersed into exile. Resourceful and adaptable as usual, many of them settled in the conqueror’s land in Persia annd thrived there over the years. Some even got jobs in the court of the Emperor.
Two stories from the Persian Emperor’s court may illustrate the complexity of the relationship between Jew and Persian.
A Jewish man named Nehemiah worked in the court of Ataxerxes 1. The Emperor observed that his favourite servant was miserable on a particular day, and, concerned, he asked him why. Nehemiah replied that he could never be happy when his home country was in ruins, and its wall broken. To make Nehemiah happy, Ataxerxes then decided to make provision for him to take men and materials, as well as the symbol of his authority, to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. The story of how he succeeded is told in the Bible, as well as in academic texts.
Some fifty years earlier, Ataxerxes’ father, the Emperor Xerxes 1, also known as King Ahasuerus, had grown disgruntled with his Queen Vashti. He organised a parade of virgin damsels in his Empire to choose a suitable replacement consort. A Jewish girl named Esther, brought up by her Uncle Mordecai, eventually won the ‘lottery’. She became Queen of the Persian Empire. It is not said if she had children, or if she was even the mother of Emperor Ataxerxes 1, the second son who would succeed her husband after his assassination, along with his heir apparent.
One day, when her Uncle Mordecai faced a threat, Queen Esther desperately needed to see the Emperor, to plead for his life. But so tight was the security around the King that anybody who came into his presence without his invitation was swiftly put to death. As Esther approached with trepidation, Xerxes 1 lifted his sceptre to welcome his Jewish Queen. Her life was saved, as was the life of Mordecai. The rest, as they say, is history.
A little History would help inform Donald Trump that nothing in what is playing out in the Middle East is ‘final’, whichever way this round goes. That is, unless the world is truly at the end of History, or Yemina’s prophecy of Armageddon is unfolding.
Assuredly, in the next round, there will be no Mullahs, and no Netanyahu, certainly no Donald Trump, and the reason for war will be something different from ‘Palestine’. Who indeed can see two thousand years ahead?
