Palestinian Myth
Introduction
We hear a lot about Palestine and the Palestinians and the attempt at peace with Israel. There’s the claim the Palestinians were there first and have a right to the land. There’s also an ongoing dialog that peace should be obtained between Israel and the Palestinians and everything will be fine. But with each “peace” deal, they want more.
It’s always been my belief that Israel was there first and it’s their land. But I had no real substantiation for this belief so I began the task of doing my own research to find the “truth”. About half way through my project I read the book: Bibi: My Story by Benjamin Netanyahu and about a third of the way through the book he described it detail, substantiating what I’ve done with only minor corrections and meaningful
additional facts.
What follows is his wording on the subject beginning on page 207. I may have added some of my own notes.
The Biblical History With Bibi’s Comments:
The history of the Jewish people spans almost four millennia. The first thousand years or so are covered in the Bible, and are attested to by archaeology and the historical records of other, contemporaneous peoples. As the centuries progress, the mists of time and the myths gradually evaporate and the unfolding events come into sharp historical focus.
Abraham and Sarah on their long trek from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan almost four thousand years ago. Abraham envisions one God, unseen but present everywhere. He buys a burial cave in Hebron and bequeaths the new land to his progeny.
The descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob are enslaved in Egypt for centuries, until Moses takes them out of bondage. He leads them for forty years in the wilderness to the Promised Land, giving the Children of Israel the Ten Commandments and a moral code that would change the world.
The indomitable Joshua conquers the land, wily David establishes his kingdom in Jerusalem, and wise Solomon builds his Temple there, only to have his sons split the realm into two.
The northern kingdom, Israel, is destroyed, its ten tribes lost to history. The southern kingdom,Judea, is conquered and Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, by whose rivers the exiled Judeans weep as they remember Zion. They rejoice when in 537 BCE they are reinstated in their homeland by Cyrus of Persia, who lets them rebuild their destroyed Temple.
The Persian rulers are replaced by Alexander the Great, one of whose heirs seeks to eradicate the Jewish religion. This sparks a rebellion led by the brave Maccabees, and the independent Jewish state they establish lasts for eighty years.
It is overtaken by the rising power Rome which initially rules through proxies, the most notable of whom is Herod the Great. Herod refurbishes the Jerusalem Temple as one of the great wonders of the ancient world.
In its bustling courtyard a Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, overturns the tables of the money changers, setting off a chain of events culminating in his eventual crucifixion and the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
When the Jews rebel against Roman rule, Rome destroys Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple in 70 CE. Masada, the last rebel stronghold, falls three years later. Despite the devastation, sixty-two years later the Jews rebel again under the fearless Bar Kokhba, only to be crushed even more brutally. The Roman emperor Hadrian bars the Jews from Jerusalem and renames the country Palestina, after the Grecian Philistines, who have long disappeared.
Unlike them, the Jews do not disappear. Under Roman rule they flourish in the coastal plain and in the Galilee in cities like Yavneh, Bnei Brak, Safed, Tiberias and Zippori. Denied a central temple, they build
hundreds of smaller temples, called synagogues. They communicate with the great Jewish centers of learning in Babylon, Yemen and others that soon spread in the eastern Mediterranean and other parts of the world.
Contrary to the common belief that the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel is ended by the Romans, the country remains primarily Jewish. In 212, the Roman emperor Caracalla bestows Roman citizenship on the Jews because they are considered “a people with their own country.”
The Jews of Palestine are granted considerable autonomy by Rome and later by its successor, Byzantium. Over the next three centuries in the Land of Israel, great rabbis compile the Mishna, Gemara and the Jerusalem Talmud, interpretations of the Torah that guide social conduct and religious worship. Despite centuries of Roman and Byzantine domination, the Jews continue to yearn for independence, rebelling unsuccessfully against Rome once again in 3 51.
Incredibly, in 614 the Jews of lsrael are still fighting for their freedom. They raise an army that joins the Persians in seizing Jerusalem and ousting the Byzantines from Palestine. In the siege of Tyre alone, the
Jews deploy more than twenty thousand fighters.
But in 636 a historical turning point occurs that tragically affects the Jewish people’s presence in their homeland. The Arabs burst into the land from the Arabian Peninsula, having earlier destroyed the Jewish communities there. The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it is under the Arabs that they are finally reduced to an insignificant minority.
Though small numbers of Jews continue to live in the Land of Israel throughout the centuries, it is during the first two centuries of Arab rule that the Jewish people cease to be a national force of any consequence in their own land.
Jewish emigration from the Land of Israel is prompted by several factors, including the economic allure of Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean. But it is conclusively finalized by one other phenomenon that had never occurred before in Jewish history. Unlike previous conquerors,
the Arabs pour in a steady stream of colonists, often military battalions and their families, to Arabize the land. Expropriating Jewish property, houses and labor, the Arabs succeed over the next two centuries
to achieve what the might of Rome had not: the final uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil.
Reversing the Myth
Thus it is not the Jews who usurp the the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurp the land from the Jews.
Anti-Israel propaganda paints it backward. The truth is simple: The Jews are the original natives, the Arabs the colonialists.
Arab colonial rule leaves the country in ruin. For the next one thousand years, Arab rulers are replaced by the Crusaders, who are in turn ousted by the Muslims led by Saladin. They are supplanted by the Mamluks, who are booted out by the Ottomans, until they too are evicted four centuries later by the British in World War I.
Throughout these long centuries, no people claim the land as their distinct homeland except the Jews. Alone they cherish Jerusalem as their eternal capital, proclaiming on each Jewish New Year “next year in Jerusalem.” Dispersed for centuries, suffering unparalleled persecution in their rootless sojourn among the nations, the Jews never lose hope of returning to the Promised Land. Individual Jews continue to return throughout the ages, joining the tiny Jewish communities that never left.
But the land is barren, sparsely populated and undeveloped. Visiting the Holy Land in 1867, Mark Twain echoes many contemporary travelers when he says, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action … the desolate and unlovely land is hopeless, dreary and heartbroken.”
A century later, Arab propaganda depicts things differently. It describes Palestine in the nineteenth century as a lush land teeming with a flourishing Arab population.
“The Jewish invasion began in 1881,” says Arafat at an infamous United Nations speech in 1974. “Palestine was then a verdant area.”
It wasn’t.
Visiting me Holy Land in 1881, the famous British visitor Arthur Penrhyn Stanley reaffirms Twain’s observation fourteen years earlier: “In Judea, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles mere was no appearance of life or habitation.”
In the second half of of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigration brings the fallow land back to life. The Jews build farms, plant orange groves, erect factories. This induces immigration of Arabs from
neighboring countries who join the indigenous Arab population. From 1860 on, the majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are Jewish.
Even so, by the turn of the twentieth century the total population in the Holy Land doesn’t exceed four hundred thousand, less than 4 percent of the present population. As the visiting German Kaiser notes in 1898, “There is room here for everyone.”
With the advent of Zionism, the Jewish national movement, the call goes out to establish a full-fledged modern Jewish state in the Jewish ancestral homeland. This call receives added moral weight after the Jews help the British oust the Ottomans in 1917, as reflected in the Balfour Declaration, which pledges that Britain favors “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Under Arab pressure between the two world wars, the British renege on this promise and block the Promised Land to Jewish emigration, trapping millions of Jews in Europe who are doomed to perish in the Holocaust.
Modern Day
In 1947, the UN resolves to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews agree, the Arabs refuse. Five Arab armies set out to destroy the newly declared Jewish state. Outnumbered, outgunned and with enormous sacrifice, the Jews win. The Jewish state of Israel is reestablished in the Jewish ancestral homeland.
Failing to destroy it time and again, Israel’s enemies now seek to delegitimize its existence with an outrageous attempt to wipe out history. No, the Arabs were not here before us. No, the Philistines were not Palestinians. No, the Romans did not end the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. The Arabs
conquered the land and greatly contributed to the dispossession of the Jews following thousands of years of Jewish habitation.
Now, with unparalleled chutzpah, anti-Israel propagandists claim that the one people who clung to this land for more than three thousand years has no right to live there in its own sovereign state. That’s why at 2 a.m. in the Knesset I simply said, “Enough is enough.”
NO MATTER THE truth of ancient and modern history, the outright distortions continued to abound in the Arab world as well as in the West.
