Exceptionalism

Subject: Exceptionalism

Exceptionalism, that belief that has so tainted mankind is still alive and well.
In the case of Jerusalem the Jews a chosen people, the city a chosen city and the land Palestine a chosen land all based on the belief in each being exceptional, more than just special but chosen by God as the founding place for the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and the Muslim faith and is destined to be the final place on Earth when god returns to issue his final condemnation of mankind's evil with the Apocalypse.
A melting pot of ideological connivance, the source of so much disharmony and hatred it is amazing that the players in this mystical bonanza are all meant to flourish from the same God as revealed to Abraham.
The complexity of the historic story of a town situated in a dry Spartan landscape burnt by the sun, not astride an ancient trading route nothing to suggest it had any of the brilliance of Athens, Rome, Constantinople and yet Jerusalem was the crucible of the major exportable religions. The impact of its religions has been both traumatic as well as  a yardstick for something which the secular world still grapples with. The faith of millions of people are tied up in the story of this city, and its political contrivance to plead, not only its exceptionalism but to export its message to the four corners of the world.
With the exception of China, a closed region for many millennia and the strong hold that Hinduism has in India, the monotheistic concept of one god was unique in Abraham as was his instruction to live in the "Promised Land" Canaan, the land of Israel.
And so bequeathed, this Spartan land with its equally Spartan city, Jerusalem was to grow and became the focus for that other alternative premise. That not only did we prosper from Darwinian development but were also blessed with a patriarch who would care and look after us, even after death.
Given the prospect of a good life with a good outcome we seem to have pretty much reneged on the deal and especially insofar as the very religions which were primed to spread the word but have been at each other's throats ever since.
If ever there was a focus of man's inhumanity to his fellow man it has to be the continuing rampage across this barren land which continues to this day. The Israeli contempt for the Palestinian, his cousins in terms of his geographical history but clearly despised as the events showed last week in the cold blooded murder by the Israel soldier of a Palestinian laying on the floor incapacitated with a bullet and yet deemed by the soldier to be worthless. The instant protection of a pardon by the Israeli Prime Minister showed the depth of the contempt and how far this nation, promised so much has fallen even one supposes in the eyes of God.