Jewish Claims to Palestine
Updated 2024-04-03
[MEK Note: Zionists justify that Israelites are the native people of Palestine because they were there some 2000 years ago and have had some representative presence there since. Jewish people are not the only people who have been displaced or marginalized in past 2000 years. It was quite common as changing empires and wars have had tremendous effects on all people of the world. Zionists want us to believe that their claims to land supersede all other people’s interests and heritages.
Islam accepts Judaism and Christianity as part of Islam religion thus those who are Muslim have roots as far back as any Jewish people in the land of Palistine/Israel.]
Pre-State Israel: Jewish Claim To The Land Of Israel A common misperception is that the Jews were forced into the diaspora by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. and then, 1,800 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back. In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years. A national language and a distinct civilization have been maintained.
The Jewish people base their claim to the land of Israel on at least four premises: 1) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham; 2) the Jewish people settled and developed the land; 3) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people and 4) the territory was captured in defensive wars.
The term “Palestine” is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word “Filastin” is derived from this Latin name.
The Twelve Tribes of Israel formed the first constitutional monarchy in Palestine about 1000 B.C. The second king, David, first made Jerusalem the nation’s capital. Although eventually Palestine was split into two separate kingdoms, Jewish independence there lasted for 212 years. This is almost as long as Americans have enjoyed independence in what has become known as the United States.
Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.
Many Jews were massacred by the Crusaders during the 12th century, but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement-more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel.
When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.” In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called “the holy land” (al-Arad al-Muqaddash). https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-claim-to-the-land-of-israel
2024-02-11 The ‘settler colonialists’ of Palestine The anti-Israel epithet is a misdiagnosis that inverts the truth: It was the Jews who were exiled from their native land.
In the case of these other countries, there is actually some historical basis for this finger-pointing. What can be done practically to remedy the situation today is, of course, less clear. But only Israel is expected to reverse its supposed status as a settler colonialist state basically by disappearing.
Clearly, the negative impact of settler colonialism on indigenous native populations can be real, but in the case of Israel, this is a gross misdiagnosis. An honest analysis of the history of Israel/Palestine actually points to the conclusion that it is the Jews who are the true native indigenous population of the region and who have been forcibly exiled for more than 2,000 years.
An unbiased analysis of history will indeed accept the description of genuine settler colonialism in the Middle East but with a serious misidentification of the true victim of this injustice. The Jewish People have the longest consistent history as the legitimate native indigenous nation in the territory under question. The Jews began their romance with this land several hundred years BCE, even before they built the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Since then Jews have, on numerous occasions, been subject to military assault, eviction and banishment from their homeland.
The Zionists returning to Israel did not come to replace native indigenous populations. They themselves were the real natives and the indigenous population of the land of Israel. Let us bury once and for all the slanderous charges against the State of Israel as representing the colonial part of the phrase “settler colonialism”.
Had the Arab inhabitants of Palestine welcomed the Zionist immigrants instead of attacking them, the Middle East country would really have become a Garden of Eden instead of a recurrent battlefield. It is never too late to begin. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/who-were-the-settler-colonialists-of-palestine/
2024-02-06 Jewish Roots in the Land of Israel/Palestine https://www.hoover.org/research/jewish-roots-land-israelpalestine
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