You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. The short-term rental company, Airbnb, has announced that they are going to de-list Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria, the historic heartland of Israel. This move specifically discriminates against Jews, as they will still allow non-Jews in these regions to list their properties for rental.

They claim that this is because of the status of the so-called “West Bank” as disputed territory. However, there are numerous occupied and disputed territories all over the world, where Airbnb operates, for example, Crimea, Tibet, and Western Sahara. All of these areas are considered occupied territories by the international community, yet Airbnb lists them for rental. Why? Because Jews are involved in Judea and Samaria, and not in these other areas.

This is anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head once again to oppose “evil Jewish settlers.” To put this in context, if our forefather Abraham lived today, he would be considered an “evil Jewish settler.” And the tent where he welcomed the three angels in Genesis 18 would be de-listed from Airbnb. The most famous so-called “evil Jewish settler” in human history was named Yeshua of Nazareth. Here is that story, which I recently shared, following the similar United Nations decision to condemn Jews living in Judea, Samaria, and even entire neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.

Michael: To help us to understand what this settlement means, and to tell us about an early Jewish settler, we have Nehemia Gordon with us. Nehemia, thanks for being with us back together, here.

Nehemia: Michael, it’s great to be back. You know, when they established this UN ruling recently, it basically categorized 500,000 Israelis as war criminals. And I saw Obama’s spokesman on television, and he was saying, “Well, what this is really about…” He was justifying it. He was saying, “These Jews are on a lone hill somewhere, and they’re trying to steal Palestinian land.”

Actually, the place you lived, Michael, that we’re talking about, was in the neighborhood of Arnona, which is just a neighborhood of Jerusalem that was built on what, before 1967, was the no-man’s land between Israel and Jordan. There was no Palestine. There was the Kingdom of Jordan and there was the State of Israel, and the no man’s land. Today, thousands of Jews live there, and they’re calling that “occupied territories.”

Michael: That’s right.

Nehemia: And Jews who live there, they’re deeming war criminals.

Michael: Don’t be deceived by the explanations you get from these people. You have to look at the legal parameters by which they can charge people with war crimes. That is what the Obama administration has done. This is what happened at Hanukkah. We have history repeating itself, ladies and gentlemen.

Nehemia: Really, if you go to the Western Wall and pray, you’re now impinging upon occupied territory. I mean, this is delusional. They talk about how there’s a million Palestinians who are under Israeli occupation. Those Palestinians have been self-ruled since 1998 by the Palestinian Authority, by the PLO.

Michael: Brutally ruled. Brutally ruled.

Nehemia: Right, okay, but it’s not by us.

Michael: By their people. Right.

Nehemia: We don’t occupy and control a million Palestinians. That’s delusional; that’s just an outright lie. Michael, I don’t know if you know this, but the first Jewish settler in history, and maybe not the first in history, but did you know that there was a Jewish settler 2,000 years ago, and they used this word “settler,” which is a Jew who lives on land that the Jews have conquered from their enemies. They use this word to demonize people, but there was an ancient Jewish settler named “Yeshua of Nazareth.”

Michael: Oh, tell us about this evil settler.

Nehemia: Yeah, well, people think I’m joking when I say Yeshua was a settler, but he literally was a settler. Joseph’s grandfather was a settler. You know, there’s this story in the New Testament. It’s the Christmas story where they go back to Bethlehem for the census. And a lot of modern scholars who don’t believe in the New Testament will say, “That’s all contrived. Why would somebody be going back to Bethlehem if he’s from Nazareth?” And it’s a very simple answer. They weren’t from Nazareth.

If you went back before the year 105 BC, then Nazareth was in an area called “Galeel HaGoyim,” “The Galilee of the Gentiles.” And it had been called that since the time when Hiram and Solomon had made an alliance, and Solomon gave 20 cities to Hiram of Tyre. And he, basically, turned over the Galilee to the people of Tyre and Sidon. And since that time, it was called “Galeel HaGoyim,” “The Galilee of the Gentiles.” That’s how it’s referred to in the Book of Isaiah.

And it’s in that very place that in the year 105 BC, one of the Maccabee kings named Aristobulus I, he conquers the Galilee of the Gentiles, and he does something really interesting. Let me read this to you from Josephus. It says, “Aristobulus made war against Etruria.” That was that area; there was a tribe there called the “Etrurians,” who were a Greek tribe, “and they added a great part of it to Judea, and compelled the inhabitants that they would continue in that country to be circumcised, and to live according to the Jewish laws.” And this is actually something unprecedented in Jewish history.

Aristobulus I forcibly converted the Greeks of the Galilee to be Jews. That didn’t happen at any other time in history. It’s very unusual. But from the time, 105 BC, when the Jews conquer Etruria in the Galilee, then there’s this flood of Jewish settlers who come up from the south. And one of those families was the family of Joseph, who came from Bethlehem and settled in the Galilee, in Nazareth. And I’ve heard this from people, they’ll say, “Well, there is no such town as Nazareth. It’s not a real town. It’s never mentioned in the Tanakh,” in the Old Testament, because it didn’t exist. It was a Jewish settlement.

Michael: That’s right. And tell us, why was it called “Nazareth?” What is it in Hebrew? What does it really mean?

Nehemia: Well, it’s from the word “nezter,” and netzer is a branch that comes out of an olive tree. And if you go to there, to this day, to that area, you’ll see all these olive trees. And it’s the little branches coming out that form a separate tree out of the same root system. And, of course, that reference is Isaiah chapter 11:1, “But nezter shall come out of Jesse.”

But here’s the important thing. We have hints of Yeshua being a Jewish settler in the New Testament. We have this scene where Peter is denying Yeshua, and he says, “No, no. I don’t even know that guy, I’ve never met Him.” And it appears in, let’s see, it’s in the New Testament. It’s in Matthew 26:73. “And after a while, they came unto Peter and to him, and they stood by and said to Peter, ‘Surely, thou art also one of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.’” I don’t know what that means in English.

Michael: I’ve got it right here. It’s in 187 of the chronological Gospels. Yeah, “bewrayeth.” What does it mean? “After a while, those who stood by said, ‘Surely, you are also one of them. Your speech betrays you.’” I put it in more modern English there, but same meaning.

Nehemia: So, what does it mean, “Your speech betrays you?” They knew from his accent that he was a Galilean. And when you read the New Testament, you have no idea what that means until you read in Josephus that the original indigenous inhabitants… and indigenous, I mean, before Aristobulus I in 105 BC, the inhabitants of the Galilee were these Etrurian Greeks. And the Greeks don’t have certain sounds that we have in Hebrew.

And so, when these Greeks converted to Judaism and spoke Hebrew, it sounded different from the Hebrew of a Judean, from a Judean settler. And we have this great passage in the Talmud. I have a teaching about this on my website called “Netanyahu Schools the Pope.” I won’t go into all of it; it’s really exciting stuff. But there’s this great passage in the Talmud where the Rabbis are mocking the Galileans, and they say as follows. They say, “The Judeans are exact in their language, and the Galileans are not exact in their language.”

And what they mean is that the Judeans have a different accent that distinguishes different sounds in Hebrew, which in the Galilean speech of Peter and these other people who lived among the Etrurians, and maybe their ancestors were Etrurians… Talk about, Michael, a picture of the nations being grafted into Israel, that you have later developed in the New Testament. It’s possible that Peter’s ancestors weren’t direct descendants of Jacob, but that they were people who joined the people of Israel in the time of Aristobulus I, and that’s why they spoke differently with a different accent.

But Yeshua was a settler among them, and he and his family, that’s why they went back to Bethlehem, because they were Jewish settlers. They weren’t originally from Nazareth. They were from Bethlehem. And to demonize Jewish settlers… Well, I guess we’re in good company, right? We’ve been settling the land. You know, there’s this unbelievable speech given by Jeremiah Wright, who was Obama’s pastor for over 20 years.

Michael: Yeah, it was “The brave men of our day and time.”

Nehemia: He has this speech where he says, “The Jews have been stealing the land from the Palestinians since the time of the Judges, because they believe their God gave it to them.” Wait a minute. We’re all agreeing that we’ve been settlers stealing land since 1400 BC? Are you kidding me? So, how are we not the indigenous population of the land?

And one of the places this comes up, Michael, is the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Qumran, which is a town that was liberated by Israel in 1967. The world calls it “occupied territory.” So, according to the international community, the Dead Sea Scrolls are a property of the Palestinian people, and the place they were found is really Palestine. Now, wait a minute. The Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew by Jews, not in Arabic by Arabs. We’re not an occupying power, we are the indigenous population.

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