"There is a reason Jesus spoke Aramaic rather than Sacred Hebrew. Hebrew was the language of the Temple and of the High Priest; it carried prestige and authority. Greek was the language of administration and of the empire. But He chose to speak Aramaic, the language of ordinary men." Camila Rocha

 

Camila Rocha

 

@Camila_Rocha

 

There is a reason Jesus spoke Aramaic rather than Sacred Hebrew. Hebrew was the language of the Temple and of the High Priest; it carried prestige and authority. Greek was the language of administration and of the empire. But He chose to speak Aramaic, the language of ordinary men.

 

The Jews expected an earthly king from the High Priest’s line. Jesus was from the line of David, a Judahite, not from the line of the High Priest. But God had reserved a most humble and generous coming for His Son.

 

Jesus was born a Nazarene, born in a manger. He also spoke the low vernacular, because He came for all, for the just and for the poor. And the measure of someone’s value was not in status or in what he possessed, but in what his heart carried: love for the Most High.

 

That is the essence of God’s most beloved souls: poor in spirit, independent of whatever their status might be.

 

For before Him all stand as children, and God alone is the true Father.

 

https://x.com/Camila_Rocha/status/2032967019461808306

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‘One of the oldest urban centres on the planet’: Gaza’s rich history in ruins. The territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present- William Dalrymple in The Guardian

The bombed-out Great Mosque of Gaza, once a crusader church, in January 2024. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

William Dalrymple

Fri 17 Oct 2025

"As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.

Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.

Gaza was first referenced as a strategic prize in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE, where it is referred to as Ghazzati. It is also one of the most fought-over and contested spaces: for more than 4,000 years this area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean. It has also been a crucial strategic and economic hub: an often incredibly rich and prosperous port from which the spices, incense, perfumes and wines of western Asia were exported to Greece and Rome, the end of the caravan route from Arabia via Petra. As well as a fortress guarding the strategically crucial route leading from the eastern Mediterranean coastline to Egypt.

Travellers who visited Gaza over the centuries have often remarked on the fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture, both of which are the products of its underground waters and the Mediterranean climate. It is this that enabled Gaza to grow the excellent grapes that for many centuries were made into a much celebrated sweet wine, the Château d’Yquem of the classical world. An exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris opens with a fabulous display of the distinctive “torpedo jars” in which the Gazans exported their wine. As late as the sixth century AD, these amphorae were reaching both Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England..." READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/17/one-of-the-oldest-urban-centres-on-the-planet-gazas-rich-history-in-ruins

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Empire: The History of Gaza, PODCAST presented by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, is available online https://www.playpodcast.net/podcast/empire/

AFTER SAVAGERY: "The West’s moral exceptionalism has expired. What’s left is the hard work of rebuilding universality from the camp outward, universality as solidarity, not domination. Palestine is not a cause on your list; it is a lens. Through it, everything sharpens: climate justice, policing, borders, surveillance, labour. The same empire, the same alibi. Choose your side."

"... He is not trying to make “both sides” feel seen; he is trying to make the dead visible and the living responsible. 

The book will irritate readers clinging to elite decorum or academic hedging. It will thrill and steady readers who have been gaslit by years of “context” that never quite manages to include Palestinian lives.

For an average reader who’s been told that Gaza is too complicated, After Savagery is a relief. 

It is not simplistic; it is clarifying. It arms you with frames that travel: read the news critically; translate “security” claims into real-world harms; watch for the “humanitarian crisis” label that surgically removes politics; test every universal against Gaza. If it fails there, it fails everywhere.

This book also gives you a language of joyful defiance. The Kanafani thread is not nostalgia; it’s instruction. The lantern is a method. Culture is a method. Sumud is a method. You don’t wait for elites to license your humanity. You practise it, publicly, until it becomes ungovernable. 

After Savagery ends not in despair but in a forward tilt: the old metaphysics are collapsing; help the new one be born.

The argument you’ll carry away when you finish, three convictions stick: Gaza is the measure. Any politics or philosophy that can’t look Gaza in the eye is not worth your time.

The West’s moral exceptionalism has expired. What’s left is the hard work of rebuilding universality from the camp outward, universality as solidarity, not domination.

Palestine is not a cause on your list; it is a lens. 

Through it, everything sharpens: climate justice, policing, borders, surveillance, labour. The same empire, the same alibi. Choose your side.

This is a book of witness and a book of strategy disguised as philosophy. It will be shelved under Middle East Studies; it belongs on your desk, annotated, next to your news feed. Dabashi does not ask you to admire his argument. He asks you to risk something for it.

In a season of euphemisms, After Savagery tells the truth with its gloves off and its lantern on."

https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/hamid-dabashis-after-savagery-detonates-wests-moral-alibi-gaza 

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"Dabashi accuses mainstream media of producing processed news, like processed food.

Such outlets, he says, provide additives, preservatives, artificial colouring, manufactured to stabilise a political diet rather than nourish understanding. "

'After Savagery' by Hamid Dabashi detonates the West's moral alibi on Gaza

The Columbia professor's new book argues that Gaza is the measure by which any moral framework must be judged

 

Book Review By Hossam el-Hamalawy 12 September 2025

Palestinian children in Gaza struggle to collect food from an aid operation in this image from June 2025 (AFP)

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After Savagery is the latest work by Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi (Haymarket Books) currently available for pre-order from Haymarket Books  etc...

"Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.

 

 

The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism.

What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.

If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism―and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination." 

After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization

"Not only is Palestine on the cross but so too are its inhabitants. The people of Palestine have been occupied, crushed, and oppressed by one empire after the other... It is tough to see one's country as a perpetual battlefield, to see it divided and torn apart. It is enervating to feel that one's country and people are occupied not by an equal but by an empire. Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, Pastor in Bethlehem, Palestine

Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, Pastor in Bethlehem, Palestine