The palm branches and the shouts harked back a century-and-a-half to the triumph of the Maccabees and the overthrow of the brutal Antiochus Epiphanes, the Saddam Hussein of his day. In 167 B.C. Antiochus had precipitated a full-scale revolt when, having already forbidden the practice of Judaism on pain of death, he setup, right smack in the middle of the Jewish temple, an altar to Zeus and sacrificed a pig on it. Hard to imagine a greater slap in the religious face to good Jews. Stinging from this outrage, an old man of priestly …