Part I When Syrian Arabs Came Into "Palestine" Before 1948

                                  

Nadene Goldfoot
Setting the Scene:  During World War I of 1914-1918, the Ottoman Empire, who had held Palestine for the past 400 years, entered the war on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and they were defeated.  The Ottomans had carried on Genocide on the Armenians and Assyrians.  This had impacted northern Syria.  In the middle of the war, 2 diplomats, the French Picot and the British Sykes, secretly agreed on the post-war division of the Ottoman Empire in 1916.  For starters, they separated 2 territories by a border running a straight line from Jordan to Iran, but oil was discovered in Mosul just before the end of the war. Mosul lay in northern Iraq.  "The city's fortunes revived with the discovery of oil in the area, from the late 1920s onward. It became a nexus for the movement of oil via truck and pipeline to both Turkey and Syria." Now France decided in 1918 to cede this region to Zone B or the British zone of influence.   When Syria became a League of Nations mandate in 1920 this border was recognized.  The French held the mandate over Syria and Lebanon.  The British had Palestine. 

At the same time in 1920, the independent Kingdom of Syria was established under Faisal I of the Hashemite family, the same family that had Trans-Jordan granted to them by the British out of  the land to be the Jewish Homeland.   Faisal had worked with Chaim Weizmann and had agreed to the idea of a Jewish Homeland, thinking he would get his fair share, too.  After all, he and his men had fought with the British against the Ottoman Empire and helped them as much as the Jews and Chaim Weizmann had, he  figured.  Faisal wasn't as lucky as King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, however, as his rule lasted only a few months.  There was the Battle of Maysalun when the French troops occupied Syria later that year after the San Remo conference (see references below).  That was when it was proposed that the League of Nations put Syria under a French mandate.  That didn't stop Sultan al-Atrash in 1925 who led a revolt that was engulfing the whole of Syria and parts of Lebanon.  He won several battles against the French who sent thousands of troops from Morocco and Senegal until 1927.  The Sultan was sentenced to death but he escaped to Transjordan and was later pardoned.  He returned to Syria in 1937 after signing the Syrian-French Treaty.  Atassi then became the first president elected in September 1936, but the French refused to ratify it.  Then France fell in 1940 during WWII, and Syria came under the control of Vichy France until the British occupied the country in July 1941.  The French finally left in  1946 and Syria was again independent.  
                                                                       

It was Chaim Weizmann and others who finally were able to see that the League of Nations  passed the law of making Palestine the Jewish Homeland  in 1921, and in the Balfour  Doctrine  of 1926  The British held the mandate over Palestine and were given the job of seeing to it that it became as such.  However, suddenly the Arabs from Syria and elsewhere were coming in illegally and the count by the British was not being kept.  The Arab population in "Palestine" had remained static for 200 years and now was suddenly increasing.

In the 1931 "Palestine" census, 23 different languages were reported in use by the Moslems, and most of those plus an additional 28 were in use by Arab Christians-and these plus 28 more were in use by Arab Christians entering Palestine.  The non-Jews in Palestine in 1931 listed their birthplaces in 24 different countries in addition to the Americas and Europe.  Just in Jerusalem, 20 different places of birth outside the Armericas and Europe were listed by the Moslems.  those plus another 4 countries were listed by the Christian Arabs.

The Mandate Commission reported on August 12, 1934, from Tewfik Bey El-Hurani, governor of the Hauran, (Syrians) that in the last few months from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese had entered Palestine and settled there. Syrians from the Hauran district were admitted freely to "Palestine" without any passports or visas from the beginning of the British Mandate after WWI until the 1940's.p. 231   Some Syrians had gone back to Syria  to avoid prosecution for violence in the riotsof 1936.  The British looked away when they entered, and the fact that they managed to settle in the Jewish-settled portions of the country.  One report said, "that more Arabs entered illegally and stayed in Palestine than the total number of Jews for twice that length of time in 1934 who were "approved" to immigrate into their designated "Jewish National Home."  Yet the British report only said that 1934 recorded just 1,784 non-Jews with only about 3,000 as travelers remaining illegally, and those figures supposedly included Arab immigrants from all points into all of Palestine.  False Reporting!!  The Jews, however, had everything about them recorded;  age groups, occupations, amount of capital brought in.  

" Yet, illegal Jewish immigration was fastidiously reported."p. 226.  Being it was to be the Jewish Homeland, I do not see how their entrance could be listed as illegal, but it was, whereas the immigrating Arabs were not listed as illegals.  This showed up when Jews finally tried to enter Palestine through Trans Jordan.  Arabs were coming in that way as well, "but the Arabs were not marked illegal until their detection had become flagrant."

The British Peel Commission report of 1937 said that developing the Jewish National Home had to depend on the rate and volume of Jewish immigration over many years.  The Arabs were watching this immigration and were afraid of being overwhelmed and dominated by the Jewish immigrants.  The British had not made any attempt to count how many Arabs had come into "Palestine" from neighboring Arab lands but they estimated that 9/10s of the growth was due to natural increase and was a growth of over 50% in 17 years.  They realized the the Arab population during the Ottoman Empire of 400 years had remained quite stationary.

In 1938, at the height of the Germans' treatment of their Jewish population as horrific, with all sorts of rules and regulations against them, Palestine would have been the logical place for them to flee.  They couldn't get in.  At first the British blamed the improved health conditions brought by Jews that was extending Arabs' lives, brought on by the appropriation of tax-revenue contributed by the Jews.  They were blaming the increased Arab population on the Jews for helping the indigenous Arabs already existing there.

There had been Arabs going to and from Trans-Jordan.  The Peel report did mention that 4,866 "travellers" who entered Palestine during the year were registered as immigrants.  Of these, 4,114 were Jews and 752 were non-Jews.

By 1939, at the height of German anti-Semitism, when the last ship with Jews left their shores for the USA, leaving many to die soon in the Holocaust, Churchill said, "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."  Had the British considered the fact that Moslems could have up to 4 wives at the same time?  The Arabs had been hurling out anti-Semitic propaganda, probably hot off the presses from Germany.  The British then came out with their White Paper of 1939 halting Jewish immigration at the time they needed it the most.  Neville Chamberlain made it clear that Britain would only allow 75,000 Jews to enter Palestine over the next 5 years from 1940 to 1944, the height of the Holocaust period.  Even at that, only 10,000 each year would be allowed in, holding 25,000 spaces in abeyance.  It was almost like they were helping Germany exterminate Jews.  
                                                                       

In 1941, the Arab, Haj Amin al Husseini (1897-1974),  the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, visited with Hitler in Germany in a meeting of exterminating Jews, thus ending their chances of creating the Jewish Homeland.  He was also on the side of the King Faisal, Hashemite ruler of Syria.  Perhaps that's why his rule ended after a few months.  Husseini was the opposite of Faisal, and was totally against Faisal  making any agreements with Jews.   

Britain left the country when their mandate was up in May 1948, probably glad to get out of there as they felt the Arabs would slaughter the Jews.    David Ben Gurion addressed the world with the voting in the United Nations which said yes to their becoming a state, and minutes later they were attacked by all their Arab neighbors.  The miracle of all miracle happened.  They were able to hear the League of Nations and the new United Nations vote them in as a state, and they won their first of many battles against their Arab neighbors who disagreed with the majority vote.  

When asked who they were, the Arabs would say they were Syrian Arabs.  They never said they were Palestinian Arabs until many wars later in 1967, when they again lost that very serious battle of the Six Day War.  Now the leaders of other Arab nations nudged them to want their own state, after being offered the opportunity since 1947 and many times thereafter, always with the answer of no!  Their leaders were holding out for taking all of Israel.  

Malcolm MacDonald, British secretary of State in 1938 said of the over one million Arabs in Palestine, "The Arabs cannot say that the Jews are driving them out of their country.  If not a single Jew had come to Palestine after 1918, I believe that the Arab population of Palestine today would still have been around about the same figure at which it had been stable under the Turkish rule.
  
In 1934, 42,359 Jews were registered, 1,494 Christians and 290 Muslims.  
In 1938, Britain registered 12,868 Jewish immigrants, 473 Christians and 1,922 Moslems making a total of 15,263.  
In 1939 they registered 16,405 Jewish immigrants, 376 Christians and 1,652 Moslems.  
In 1940, when Jews could not get out of Germany, 4,547 Jews, 390 Christians and 674 Moslems were registered.  .  That's what they showed on the books, but it wasn't the reality at all.  Moslems were getting in illegally without being registered.  1934 was a good example where they only showed 1,784 non Jews entering when they had already listed the 30,000 to 35,000 Hauranis (Syrians) who immigrated to Western Palestine that weren't included in the British calculations.  No wonder so many Arabs, when asked, said they were Syrian Arabs.  They really were!  They were not native Palestinians.  

Folke Bernadotte said in 1950-51, and by then were referring to them all as Palestinians,  "The Palestinian Arabs have at present no will of their own.  Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism...

Resource:  
"From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
http://www.ifcj.org/site/PageNavigator/sfi_about_war_league
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramallah
Updated: 4/24/14 http://www.2nd-thoughts.org/id350.html San Remo Conference

Arabs' Attempt in Reviving the Dead 181 Partition Resolution

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                         

World War I was fought from 1914 to 1917 with the Ottoman Empire losing and the West winning which resulted in Palestine being taken over by the Western Powers in which Britain held the mandate from 1917 to May 14, 1948  to create a Jewish Homeland.  This was decided through the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations.  The League of Nations died because they were breaking their own rules. It was started January 1918 by the USA and ended 12 April 1946.  It wasn't able to prevent WWII.   It changed over to become the United Nations on June 26, 1945 and in 1947 Britain put the matter of Palestine into their hands.  The UN Commission RECOMMENDED partitioning what was left out of the original Mandate into 2 new states; one Jewish and one Arab with Jerusalem to be an international zone belonging to neither.
                                                                       

David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, said that the Balfour Declaration implied that the whole of Palestine, including Transjordan, should become a Jewish state, but in 1922 it had been taken illegally by the Hashemite ruler, Abdullah which was later called Jordan.  During all the attack on Israel after declaring itself a state, Jordan had invaded and annexed it illegally.  The UN did not call them on it.  That was one state created out of the Jewish Homeland already.   Abdullah had taken 77% -80% of the landmass of the original Mandate for the Jews.  He set up an Arab Kingdom.

 There are already 57 Muslim majority countries in the world and 22 of them are right in the Middle East: Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Libya, Kuwait, Oman,  Bahrain, Qatar, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates.  Now Arabs living in the land and others who came in looking for work are calling themselves Palestinian Arabs.  Jews who lived there were called Palestinian Jews.  The Arabs want to create a state and call it Palestine but they have been refusing every offer made since 1947.

17,000,000 Arabs live on 1,290,000 square miles while Palestine, after losing the 76% of land to Transjordan has been decimated to having only 8,000 square miles.  In 1967 Israel picked up what Jordan had taken of Samaria, Judah, East Jerusalem and Golan through winning against a gigantic Arab attack.  The proposals would have taken the 10,000 square miles they had and reduced it by 1/2 for Palestine to be carved out of it.  UNSCOP wanted to eliminate the Western Galilee from the Jewish state which would have meant taking Safed, my city which had been Jewish since time memorial.  It was the center of Kabballah.

In 1947 talk was If another state is to taken out of the remainder of the Jewish state, the Jews would be getting only 1/8th of their original promised Homeland.  Originally, their Israel and Judah had covered more space than this original allotted Jewish Homeland  including Trans Jordan was to be, but the Jews accepted the deal  called Resolution 181 or the Partition Plan and the Arabs refused.  this was a non-binding RECOMMENDATION  WHOSE IMPLEMENTATION HUNG ON ACCEPTANCE BY BOTH PARTIES.  Not only did the Arabs refuse but they threatened bloodshed if the UN adopted the Resolution.  This scared Britain since the Arabs proposed to attack and impede its work in every possible way.    This means that Resolution 181 was rejected by the Arab world.   Not only that, but it was the last straw.

Before that were many other recommendations from the Mandate people and other international commissions.
1. 1922:  Great Britain partitioned Palestine; Arabs wanted the whole country to be Arab.
2. 1937  Peel Commission
3. 1938 Woodhead Commission
4. 1946  Two proposals championed a bi-national state,
            a. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, April- single state with equal powers
            b. Morrison-Grady Plan, July - federal state with 2 provinces

The Arabs rejected them all.

Now they want to divide and conquer.  They won't recognize Israel as the Jewish state and their charters all call to destroy Israel.  when Resolution 181 was read in the General Assembly of the UN, each Arab country spoke from the dais to sound off their rejections.  Iraq's Mr. Jamali said the decision was anti-democratic, illegal, impractical and contrary to the Charter (?) and Iraq doesn't recognize the validity of this decision and those who pass it are responsible for the consequences.  Syria's Amir. Arslan  said that the charter was murdered and his country would never recognize the partition, and the consequences were on the heads of others, not theirs.  Yemen's Prince Abdullah said that the partition plan is contrary to justice and to the UN Charter (?).  They did not feel bound by such a decision and would reserve its freedom of action towards it.  All the others were of the same mind.

 Israel was created May 14, 1948 through a UN vote  and within seconds was attacked by all the Arabs in a bloody war..  3 days later, the Palestine Commission adjourned sine die without picking a date after the General Assembly appointed a UN Mediator in Palestine, which relieves the UN Palestine Commission from the further exercise of its responsibilities.  181 then became a moot issue.  The establishment of an armistice-line (the "Green Line") was just a temporary ceasefire line expected to be followed by peace treaties.  No peace treaties were signed.  Since Israel was later attacked in 1956, 1967, 1973, etc. to this day, one wonders about peace treaties since states change hands, thus politics.  Egypt had a peace treaty signed by Sadat in 1979 after the 1973 war.  It's still in effect.  Jordan has a peace treaty signed October 26, 1994, still in effect.

By July 30, 1949 it was seen that the Arabs rejected the scheme entirely.  Armistice agreements were reached after much fighting between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Trans-Jordan with the help of UN Mediator, Dr. Ralph Bunche.  By now the UN had abandoned the recommendations of Resolution 181 and its ideas "were drained of all relevance by subsequent events."  The Arabs continued to reject 181 after the war.  This was possibly because they controlled Judea and Samaria (West Bank) from 1948 to 1967 when they, including  Jordan,  again attacked Israel.

Now, the Arabs are trying to revive Resolution 181.  For over 60 years they have rejected it and are now trying to bring it to life to use as a leverage to  make Israel withdraw from Western Palestine so they can attack the rest of Israel easier because  it would have no defensive borders.

Professor Sir Elihu Lauterpacht of Cambridge, Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice and renowned expert on international law said that from a legal standpoint, the Resolution 181 had no legislative character to give territorial rights to either Jews or Arabs.  Any binding force would have had to come from the principle pacta sunt servanda, or treaties must be honored.  This would be from agreement of the parties at variance to the proposed plan.  The right of a State to exist come from its factual existence.  When that existence is prolonged it shows every sign of continuance and is recognized by the generality of nations.

Professor Julius Stone, authority on the law of Nations, " one of the world’s best-known authorities in both Jurisprudence and International Law. His publications his activities and the many honours conferred on him are eloquent evidence of his high standing in these two fields.said that Israel's "legitimacy" or "legal foundation" for its birth does not reside with the UN Partition Plan, which as a consequence of Arab actions became a dead issue."

  He then said that its validity rests on assertion of independence by its people and government, on the vindication of that independence by arms against assault by other states, and on the establishment of orderly government within territory under its stable control.

He just described Israel.  This is a legal state, not matter how you look at it.  For a variety of reasons, it again lives.

Resource:  UN Resolution 181-The Partition Plan of November 29, 1947 by Eli E. Hertz http://www.mythsandfacts.org/article_view.asp?articleID=135
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim-majority_countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_Peace_Treaty
http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/peacetreaty.html
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/leagueofnations.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-united-nations-is-born
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel
Update: 12/7/13 videohttp://unitedwithisrael.org/the-video-that-is-driving-the-palestinians-crazy/ *****

The Counterfeit Arabs, by Victor Sharpe

                                                                          

By VICTOR SHARPE—
Posted on November 18, 2013 by Jerusalem Connection

Posted in Israel's wars, Palestinian Authority, Quote, Victor Sharpe, Writers Archive

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2013/11/18/the-counterfeit-arabs.html

They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War 1.

Both of these European powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey’s empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain have left a resulting legacy of war and violence ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine.

But there is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history – let alone an Arab independent state of Palestine.

You will search in vain for Palestinian Arab coinage or Palestinian Arab archaeological artifacts specifically related to any Palestinian Arab king or ancient leader. But what you will find are coins, pottery, ancient scrolls, all providing conclusive, empirical and millennial evidence of Jewish civilization dotting the land known correctly as Israel – not Palestine.

The present-day so-called “Palestinians” are an Arab people sharing an overwhelmingly Muslim Arab culture, ethnicity and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions.

Yasser Arafat, the arch-terrorist, who imposed himself undemocratically upon the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, was fond of creating the absurd myth that Palestinian Arabs were descended from the Canaanites and the Philistines.  As we know, the bigger the lie the bigger the number of people will believe it. And so Arafat twisted history in order to disinherit the indigenous native people of the land: the Jews.

Canaanites, without doubt, were the first known inhabitants of the Land of Israel before the first Hebrews, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, settled there, and before Moses brought their descendants back to the Promised Land during the Exodus from Egypt.

The Canaanites lived both along the coastal plain and in the mountain regions, which run like a spine down the biblical territory of Samaria and Judea. Their language was similar to Hebrew and their territory stretched north into present day Lebanon and included the present day Golan Heights.

The Canaanites were finally subdued during the reign of King David. Most Canaanites were gradually assimilated into the Jewish people and were no longer a distinguishable people.

After the 8th century BC, the Canaanites no longer existed and the only people, therefore, who can trace back an historic link to ancient Canaan are the Jews, not the Palestinian Arabs. So much for Arafat’s nonsense and for the on-going attempts by today’s Palestinian Arabs, financed by vast Arab oil wealth, to hoodwink the world.

The term “Philistines” provides the source from which the term “Palestinians” is derived. Like the Arabs who gave themselves the concocted name “Palestinian,” the Philistines were alien peoples who entered the land from other lands, mostly from the Mediterranean island of Crete. That is why they were also known as the Sea People.

The modern “Palestinian Arabs” are primarily the descendants of those itinerant Arabs who illegally flooded British Mandatory Palestine from Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). They were attracted during the early decades of the 20th century by new employment opportunities provided by the Jewish pioneers, whose heroic efforts were turning the desert green again and restoring centuries of neglect that the land had endured under a succession of alien occupiers.

Britain, during its Mandate over the territory, turned a blind eye to the flood of illegal Arab aliens entering, while at the same time often arbitrarily limiting Jewish immigration into their ancient, biblical and ancestral homeland. This was a betrayal of the Mandate given to Britain to facilitate a Jewish Homeland in the geographical territory known as Palestine.

The Philistines were non-Semitic peoples who had entered the land from their homes throughout the Aegean Islands in general and from Crete in particular. These ancient Cretans arrived in Southern Canaan and along the Egyptian coastline and were known as “Pelestim and Keretim” by the Hebrew tribes. It appears that their first settlement may have been Gaza. Later they settled in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gat and Ekron: the Pentapolis.

Their territory was primarily along the coastal Mediterranean; interestingly, a territory not dissimilar to the present day Gaza Strip. They attempted at different times to invade Judah but were turned back by the various Jewish biblical heroes and finally defeated by King David. From that time onwards they were diminished as a threat and as a separate people, finally disappearing from history and any “Palestinian” Arab attempt to claim a lineage with them is as absurd as that of links with the early Canaanites.

Moving fast forward to 73 AD, the first attempt of the Jews to reclaim their independence from the repressive yoke of Roman occupation ended when Jewish warriors and their families fled to the fortress of Masada from Jerusalem. The Romans had destroyed the Jewish capital city along with the Second Jewish Temple.

Historically documented and universally recognized, Masada, which rises to great height overlooking the Dead Sea, is where the heroic last stand took place and where the surviving warriors and their families took their own lives rather than be sent as slaves throughout the mighty Roman Empire. The Land where these stirring and epochal events took place was in the province known as Judæa. There is absolutely no mention of any place called “Palestine” before that time.

After the suppression of the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 AD against the Roman occupation, the Emperor Hadrian replaced the name of Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew from where the name Yehudim, Jews, originates) to Syria-Palæstina after the “Philistines” who were the ancient enemies of the Israelites. Hadrian did so with the explicit purpose of effacing any trace of Jewish history.

Ancient Romans, as well as so-called Palestinian Arabs, have fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptural prophecy that declares: “They lay crafty plans against Your People… they say: ‘come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more’.” – Tehilim 83:3-4 (Psalm 83:3-4). They failed, as Israel is reconstituted as a modern Jewish state in its ancestral and biblical homeland.

No such name as Palestine occurs in any ancient document. It is not written in the Bible, neither in the Hebrew Scriptures nor in the Christian Testament, not even in Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, Seleucian or other Greek sources. There is no “Palestinian” people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans that invented the term.

If “Palestinians” allegedly are the historic inhabitants of the Holy Land, why did they not fight for independence from Roman occupation as Jews did? How is it possible that not a single “Palestinian” leader revolted against the Roman invaders or is mentioned in any historic record?

Why is there no Palestinian rebel group mentioned, as for example the Jewish Zealots? Why does every historic document mention the Jews as the native and aboriginal inhabitants, and the Greeks, Romans and others as foreigners dwelling in Judea; but no “Palestinian” people, neither as native or as foreigner? What is more, there is no reference to any “Palestinian” people in the Koran, although Muslims claim that their prophet was once in al-Aksa (meaning the farthest place) which Muslims, for political purposes, chose to be Jerusalem – an event not even mentioned in the Koran.

Saladin, a Kurd, knew the Jews and invited them to resettle in Jerusalem. He had no trouble in recognizing Jerusalem as their eternal capital city and the territory as their rightful Homeland. But he did not know any so-called Palestinians and to claim otherwise that Palestinians are the original people of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel,  is not only counter to secular history but also is opposed to Islamic history.

The so-called “Palestinians” who claim Jerusalem want it so that they can take it away from the Jews for whom Jerusalem, known also as Zion, is the eternal, 3,000 year old Jewish capital.

Perhaps what links the modern day Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” with the ancient Philistines is that both are invaders. The Philistines wanted to take from the Israelites the Holy Ark of the Covenant, while today’s so-called “Palestinian Arabs” want to take from the Jewish people the Holy City of the Covenant – Jerusalem.

A wealth of information about this and related subjects may be found at the following website. I encourage all to read it:

http://www.think-israel.org/archives/oldindex.html#featured

So let me close, beginning with the words of a Christian Arab, Joseph Farah, who has made his home here in America and who knows of what he writes:

“There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians (another recent invention), Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that the Arabs control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents one-tenth of one per cent of the landmass. But that’s too much for the Arabs. They want it all. And that is ultimately what the fighting in Israel is about today… No matter how many land concessions the Israelis make, it will never be enough.”

Joseph Farah, “Myths of the Middle East”

Let us hear what other Arabs have said:

“There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it”.

Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937

“There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not”.

Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946

“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria”.

Representative of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956

Concerning the Holy Land, the chairman of the Syrian Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919 stated:

“The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 AD hardly lasted, as such, 22 years.”

The preceding declarations by Arab politicians were issued before 1967 as they had not the slightest knowledge of the existence of any Palestinian people.

How and when did they change their mind and decide that such people existed?

When the State of Israel was reborn in 1948 the Arabs had still not discovered that “ancient” people. They were too busy attempting to annihilate the reconstituted sovereign State of Israel, and did not intend to create any Palestinian entity, but only to distribute the seized Jewish lands among the already existing Arab states.

The Arab armies were miraculously defeated by a tiny handful of Jewish defenders. The Arabs attempted again to destroy Israel in 1967, and were humiliated in only six days, in which they lost the lands that they had previously stolen and usurped in 1948. Those lands included Judea and Samaria, which comprise the biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland, tracing its history back some 4,000 years.

Now the world forgets such empirical history and prefers to name the ancestral Jewish territory, the West Bank, which was illegally occupied by the Jordanian Arabs for 19 years from 1948 until its liberation in 1967.

In all those years, when Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, neither of them created a “Palestinian” state, since the still non-existing Palestinians would have never claimed their alleged right to have their own state.

Paradoxically, during the British Mandate, which lasted from 1920 to 1948, it was not any Arab group but the Jews that were known as Palestinians!

But read what other Arabs declared after the Six-Day War:

“There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity… yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel”.

Zuhair Muhsin, military commander of the PLO and member of the PLO Executive Council

“Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people”.

Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat

“As I lived in Palestine, everyone I knew could trace their heritage back to the original country their great grandparents came from. Everyone knew their origin was not from the Canaanites, but ironically, this is the kind of stuff our education in the Middle East included. The fact is that today’s Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today’s Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to 30,000 inhabitants”.

Walid Shoebat

During the long years of alien occupation of the Land of Israel, though Jews were always living in the Land in whatever numbers they could sustain, visitors were always struck at how the land had become a barren waste with malarial swamps and a remarkably sparse population. The following reports from travellers to the desolate landscape that had become a mournful waste are quite telling:

“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilee); not for thirty miles in either direction… One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee… Nazareth is forlorn… Jericho lies a mouldering ruin… Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation… untenanted by any living creature… A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent, mournful expanse… a desolation… We never saw a human being on the whole route… Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country… Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes… desolate and unlovely…”

Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”, 1867

One wonders, therefore, where were the “Palestinians” hiding so that Mark Twain could not see them? Where was that so-called “ancient” people in the mid nineteenth century? Of course, Arab politicians now attempt to discredit Mark Twain, retreating into that realm of all scoundrels by calling him a racist.

“In 1590 a ‘simple English visitor’ to Jerusalem wrote: ‘Nothing there is to be seen but a little of the old walls, which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds much like to a piece of rank or moist ground’.”.

Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund

“The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil”.

British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s

“Palestine is a ruined and desolate land”.

Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian

“The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it”.

Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s

“The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population”.

James Finn, British Consul in 1857

“The area was under populated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880′s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained “The Holy Land” in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants – both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts… Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen… The plows used were of wood… The yields were very poor… Schools did not exist… The rate of infant mortality was very high… The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert… Many ruins were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants”.

The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913

Far too many otherwise decent people have come to accept Arab oil financed falsehoods masquerading as history about the origins of the so-called Palestinian Arabs. These lies now permeate the mainstream media, schools, colleges, and universities and are perpetrated by the tenured leftist professors and the colleges who all too eagerly accept Saudi blood money.

The historical facts given above may be of help to those who have otherwise fallen hook, line and sinker for duplicitous Arab propaganda and what constitutes one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon the world.

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including a collection of short stories called The Blue Hour and Volumes One, Two and Three of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.

Jesus Used in Fight Over Jerusalem

Nadene Goldfoot                                                              

                                            Christian Church in Jerusalem

The latest weapon being used against Israel by the Arabs is to say that Jesus of Nazareth was a "Palestinian."  When you hear a statement like that, you immediately think of him as an Arab, because today "Palestinians" refer to the Arabs that call themselves Palestinian Arabs.  The city of Nazareth has been taken over by the Arabs. It is the largest Muslim majority city in Israel today.  It has a population of 60,000 of which 2/3 are now Muslim.   So has Bethlehem, which was turned over to the Arabs in 1995.  It has a population of 30,000.  Christian Arabs have become a minority in these places.    These used to be Christian communities and of course before them, Jewish communities.

The fact is that until May 14, 1948, both Arabs and Jews were referred to as "Palestinians."  The land was called Palestine from 135 CE on, renamed by the Romans.  But Jesus wasn't alive in 135.  He was living in Judah in the northern Galilee as the nation of  Judah existed up till the year of 70.

 Palestine was never a country.  It was simply the name given to the previous "Israel and Judah" that came to be owned by the Ottoman Empire from their take-over.  After the Romans had taken Judah, there was the Umayyad Dynasty, Abbasid Empire, Khanids and Mamluks, Safavid and then the Ottomans of Turkey.  None of them lived in this desolate swamp/desert weed filled dried out piece of land except mosquitoes and camels and maybe the few nomads that rode camels.  It was a place to tramp through to get to the other side.

 Turkey held onto it until they lost it in WWI and the British were given the mandate as to carry out the League of Nations' decision to turn it over to be a Jewish Homeland.  Jews were considered "wanderers," people without a nation who lost theirs to the Romans.  Even a plant was named, "Wandering Jew."  Yes, we had wandered through many a nation in the last 2,000 years looking for a home.

Of course this is a false claim.  The story of a Jewish Jesus puts him in the position of being born December 25th, and the year would be 1 CE as the calendar places it.  He was to have died from crucifixion at the age of 37. According to the Christians, who own this story, he was Jewish, not a pagan Arab.   Some put his death at 29 CE.  The name, Jesus, is the Greek translation of Joshua, a Jewish name as Joshua was the leader of the Israelites who was given the title and responsibility  by Moses.  The branches separating Arabs from Jews from their common relative of Abraham, born  in the 2nd millennium BCE  was about 2,000 years previously.

 It was in the year 70 CE that Jerusalem was attacked by the Romans where it was destroyed and burned down.  Almost all the Jews were either taken away as slaves or fled in different directions.  Some were able to hide and stayed.  By 132 CE a Jewish man by the name of Simon Bar Kokhba, descended from King David, made a last stand against the Romans when the Romans were rebuilding  Jerusalem as a Roman colony and not allowing circumcision for the Jewish inhabitants still there.  By 133 the Romans held a counterattack with 35,000 soldiers led by Hadrian as Kokhba had retaken Jerusalem, but he was killed in 135 and the revolt ended in a slaughter.  It was then that the Romans renamed the land  in Latin, the language of the Romans, as Palaestina, now called Palestine.  They did that  to erase the connection of the Jews to the land of Israel.

Now, logistically and truthfully, Jesus was not alive then nor was he an Arab of that period.  How could he have attended a Synagogue?  No, the whole argument about Jesus has always been that he was a Jewish person, son of Mary who was married to Joseph, and both of them were Jewish.

What the Arabs are doing is trying to connect all Christians to their side of the fight of taking away all of Israel from the Jews and giving it to the Arabs.  Don't fall for such nonsense.  The Toronto Star Newspaper has.  Write them a letter telling them they have fallen for propaganda against Israel.  "Anti-Israel adherents continue to peddle the fiction that Jesus was a “Palestinian” who preached Islam."  They're peddling the idea that he was a "Shahid."  They have the concept of Christianity and Islam all mixed together to use against Israel.  

Resource:  http://www.honestreporting.ca/toronto-star-columnist-wrongly-portrays-jesus-as-palestinian/12872/print/
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vie/Nazareth.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vie/Bethlehem.html

Syrian Officials: Keeping Hatred Going Against Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                                             
                          
                                     Palestine- Small Notch in the Arab World

Joan Peters wrote in her book, "From Time Immemorial,"  that Arab refugees "have been bred to believe that the fraudulent history they learn by rote is true."  They have been brought up to believe that their identity can only come true at the cost of the destruction of the Jews.  Their dream of their history has been drilled into them wherever they are; in or out of refugee camps; to return to their Palestinian homeland.

Jordan has many Palestinians living there.  Those taken in have citizenship rights now, but Jordan refuses to take in anymore.  Jordan had a Civil war with the Palestinians from September 1970 to July 1971 called "Black September,"  a fight to see who would have control of the kingdom, for the Palestinians, led by the PLO, demanded control of the whole state.  Many feel this is already a Palestinian state.

Syrian officials were interviewed in Damascus in June 1977 and said they wanted Americans to help them develop arable Syrian land.  They themselves did not have a population to develop the land as they all had jobs then, so they were in need of people and technology.   They were even willing to give land to those who would come and work on it.

Joan Peters asked them, "Why not give the land to those Palestinian Arabs who would choose to accept your offer?
One official answered angrily, "  We will give the land to anyone-the Ibos, the Koreans, Americans...anyone who comes---anyone but the Palestinians!  We must keep their hatred directed against Israel!"

Isn't it ironic?  Many of the so called Palestinians actually did come from Syria because when they did, they were looking for jobs and there were none in their own country.  The Jews living all the time in "Palestine" were not the builders, but the Jews that returned in the late 1800's from Russia were, and some did employ Arabs to help with building projects.  The Ottoman Empire was in power over the land then, but had very few Arabs living on the land.  They were getting preferential treatment over the Jews, however.

Levin's book tells about Palestine from the turn of the century around the 1880's to the Balfour Declaration, written November 2, 1917, covering about a quarter of a century of turbulent events.  It said, "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."  Of course, the British themselves were the ones who screwed up the whole deal by practicing favoritism for the Arabs and rejected the Jews. They had also made promises to the Arabs at the same time to establish their kingdom and turn a Sheik into a king.   By doing this they did everything against the Jews to achieve the goal of establishing a national home.   

The first Jewish pioneers that came  had many hardships to endure, comparable to our American pioneers' living.  They had to deal with the Turkish overlords, the relationship between neighboring Jews and Arabs where the wars of the present were foreordained in blood feuds and hatreds of an earlier generation.  The First World War and the Russian Revolution caused great upheavals.  This all helped to create a Jewish fighting force.  The novel's main characters are the Chaimovitch family who had fled Czarist Russia's pogroms who came to their motherland which turned out to be rocky, parched arid land ruled by the cruel Turks and dominated by hostile Arab villagers, disease infested but yet, their Jewish land.

Joan Peters was studying the original documents about Palestine which were a part of Winston Churchill's papers and came across a dynamite statement.  It was the claim that Jewish settlement in Palestine had caused the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, something they are using today to claim their "right of return."
                                                                         

Churchill said in 1939, when Hitler was closing the door on doomed Jews in Germany trying to get out, and  plotting their massacres with the 2nd most powerful Arab, Sayyid Amin al-Husseini, also known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,   "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."

Because of real people who developed the land from neglect that had become a wasteland made up of sand, rocks and mosquito-infested swamps, we have a beautiful state of Israel today.  The land has returned to it's natural life-fulfilling state from all this hard work, but the Arabs are clinging to their dreamed up  imagined history.  They are clamoring for all of Jerusalem right now.  Tomorrow it is all of Israel as their charters call for as written in Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Arabs like to spread the false information that Ashkenazi Jews are not real Jews.  They keep the fallacy going that only the Jews of the Levant were from the 12 tribes of Jacob.  They should develop the habit of reading more about our history.  Jews, whether they are Ashkenazi (recently from Europe), or Sephardi (recently from Spain and Portugal) or Mizrachi (from Egypt and that area), are all from the same group that survived the Roman Empire's attack in 70 CE.  Even DNA is proving this.  It happens that many Jews were forcefully taken to Rome as slaves, and from there finally were able to break away and went into Germany, and then went northwards into eastern Europe where our Russian Jews fleeing from pogroms finally decided after 2,000 years to return and settle their own land once again.  This is one way they keep trying to stoke the hatred against the Jews.

There are 10 Palestinian camps in Syria created from 1948 till 1967 with 3 unofficial ones built from 1955 to 1962.   About 112,550 occupants are in Yarmouk built in 1957, located in Damascus, which is the largest.  The latest reports are that on a Sunday in July Syria gassed people in the camp by bombing it with chemical weapons.   22 were reported dead.  It is still home today to over 100,000 Palestinians.  Syria would rather keep them in  camps on the UN dole than have them work and own land.

Resource: Book:  "From Time Immemorial", by Joan Peters.  copyright 1984- non-fiction, p. 406 paperback
Book: Historical Novel:  "The Settlers" by Meyer Levin, copyright 1972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_in_Jordan
http://www.timesofisrael.com/syria-accused-of-gassing-palestinian-refugee-camp/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_refugee_camps

Jews' Return to Their Land Sparked By Pogroms and Government Restrictions

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                    

                                           19th Century Pogrom in Russia
Ever since 70 CE, life was one event after another of persecution for Jews. 1096 saw Crusaders slaughtering Jews as they went through European towns on their way to take Jerusalem.  1492 was the year of the Spanish Inquisition and forced conversions of Jews in Spain.   In 1648 to 1656, 100,000 Jews were murdered in the Chmielnicki massacres in Poland.  In 1727 and 1747, Jews were expelled from Russia.   In 1838, the entire Jewish community in Meshed, Persia (today's Iran) were forcibly converted to Islam..

 Jews finally had a formal emancipation in Central and Western Europe from the 18th to 20th centuries, but it did not put an end to discrimination and social ostracism of Jews. This was supposed to be the removal of the disabilities imposed on Jews that had been in place from the 4th century  on.  The Christian Empire enacted an elaborate system of discrimination against Jews which was adopted and intensified in medieval Europe as well as in the Islamic world.  It brought in the Ghetto system aiming at keeping Jews away from the gentile society.      The Dreyfus case in France was a good example of Jewish discrimination and anti-Semitism in 1894 when he was condemned to life imprisonment and ordered to Devil's Island. This led to the affect it had on Herzl and to the development of Zionism.

Continued oppression and outbreaks of pogroms in Eastern Europe were combined with extreme poverty for most of the Jews.  The Hep Hep riots against them began on August 2, 1819 in Wurzburg, Germany. Hep! Hep! was an anti-Jewish slogan used during these riots.  The cry was then said to be of Crusader origin, being formed from the initials of the words Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is lost).   This continued and reached Denmark, Poland, Latvia and Bohemia.  By 1821 Odessa, Russia  had pogroms against them.  This started up a wave of pogroms.  More occurred in 1859.

A new movement came out of all this suffering of returning to their land and of a revival of Jewish national life.  The Yishuv-the Jewish community already living in Palestine that had never left, started it all.  In 1860, they built the first quarter outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.  Two Hebrew periodicals were regularly published in Jerusalem calling for a return to the Land.  It couldn't have happened at a better time.

In 1870, the first Jewish agricultural college was established in Mikveh Israel which today is on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.  Back in Russia, the next year of 1871 and non-stop until 1921 were years of anti-Jewish pogroms in the towns of Russia including the Pale.  By being in the Pale, it was so much easier to attack Jews.  It was no wonder that the early 1900's saw the immigration of over a million Jews.

By 1881 and subsequent years, Jewish immigrants that belonged to the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement arrived in Israel from Eastern Europe.  Meyer Levin's "The Settlers", a historical novel, tells about their arrival from the turn of the century to the Balfour Declaration and covers over a 1/4 of a century of turbulent events and their hardships as pioneers.  Some had joined existing villages while others founded new ones.  Some of the villages established during the last 2 decades of the century are large towns today; Hadera and Rishon Le-Zion, for example.

From  1882 to 1890, 750,000 Jews living in Russia were forced to re-settle in the Pale of Settlement; 25 provinces of Czarist Russia,  areas under Catherine II's reign of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, White Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Crimea.  In 1891 Jews were then expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg and sent to the Pale.

The Jews who returned to the Land during this period are known as "the First Aliya."  Aliya  literally means: going up-spiritually, ascent;.  In practice, it has come to signify immigration to Israel.   The conditions in which the first Aliya-and subsequent waves of immigration-settled in the Land were extremely harsh.  The population was small and dispersed.  Communications were poor and insecure.  The Land had been completely neglected.  Pioneers faced swamps,and with it,  malaria,  The Ottoman Empire, which lasted for 400 years by 1917, was hostile and oppressive towards both Arabs and Jews, which is probably  why the native Jews hadn't been able to keep up the land.  Life for these pioneers was a continuous ordeal and new villages survived precariously.

By 1897, Theodor Herzl organized the First Zionist Congress in Basle and founded the World Zionist Organization.  Zion  had been the traditional synonym for Jerusalem and for the entire land, so was the proper word to use.  A growing realization that Jews should follow the path of self-determination which other nations were following such as the Greeks, Italians and Poles.  Zionism became the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.  It's aims were to carry out the return of Jews to the Land and the revival in it of Jewish national life; socially, culturally, economically and politically.

So a 2nd Aliya came to Israel in 1904 to 1914 which reinforced existing villages and founding new ones.  The Yishus began to organize itself politically with socialist groups figuring prominently.  In 1909 the first kibbuts-Degania-was establish on the southern shore of Lake Kinneret.  That same year was when Tel Aviv was founded on the sand dunes outside of Jaffa.

Hebrew was becoming the principal language of the Yishuv with the emerging Hebrew literature.  Life was still harsh and many of the newcomers left.  However, by 1914, there were 85,000 Jews in the Land.  The Land became occupied by Britain 4 years later with the end of WWI and they governed it for 30 more years.  They left and Israel was declared a state on May 14, 1948.  .

After all the suffering Jews have had to endure for 2,000 years at the hands of the governments of the world, they finally passed the Balfour Declaration that gave Jews the right to have their own land back, a decision on November 2, 1917 with the League of Nations.   The promise on paper was given to establish the Jewish National Home, and now even that is in limbo with nations today with discrimination in the UN.  The struggle continues for rights and recognition in our own homeland.  This time we're not going to be driven out.  

Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
Facts About Israel by the Division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem 1973

THE Land, Ha'Aretz- PALESTINE

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                      

Territories for Simeon, Judah, Dan, Benjamin, Reuben, Ephraim, Gad, Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali and Manasseh

Palestine was Jewish land.  It was a basic tenet to Christian theology that the loss of the Jews' national independence was an act of G-d.  It was designed to punish the Jewish people for their rejection of "Christ." Christians felt they had to help G-d so that some emperors' minimal criteria of oppression and restriction of the Jews was always maintained as well as the maximum sort, such as in the Spanish Inquisition of 1492.

Eretz Yisrael (Israel and Judea) was the country of the Jews of which even the size and geography is outlined in the Torah/Bible.  That it was his country was a part of his theoretical exercise, an article of his theology and a sophisticated political feeling.  It was a pervasive and inextricable part of his daily life.

Jewish prayers and Jewish literature are filled with the love and longing for and the feeling of belonging to Eretz Yisrael and has been going on for the past 4,000 years.  It's part and parcel of our DNA.  It's in our soul.  "There is no theme so pervasive in the literature of any other nation," no theme that has yielded so much thought and feeling and expression as the relationship of the Jew to his land in Jewish literature and philosophy.  After all, G-d had led Moses back to the land and through Moses directed the people of the Exodus  where they should settle.

Jerusalem was taken and burned in 70 CE by the Romans.  The Jews' attachment to this land has never wavered.  Though many of the Jews were led away then as slaves, there were others, especially in the Galilee, who had never left.  Jewish life was maintained in the country.

In 135 CE, Simon Bar Kochba led a revolt against the Romans which failed. It had been the fiercest and longest revolt ever faced by the Roman Empire.  There were 580,000 Jewish soldiers that died defending their land.  Many civilians died of starvation and pestilence.  985 Jewish villages were destroyed.

 That was over 60 years after the 2nd Temple was destroyed.  The Romans decided to waste the country then in a determined effort to stamp out the Jewish identity.  They plowed over Jerusalem at the direction of Emperor Hadrian.  Then they renamed it Aelia Capitolina, and Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina.

Banished from Jerusalem, Jews went to the Galilee in the northern section of their land.  Refugees returned.  Jews sold into slavery were redeemed and returned.   There arose some of the most important creativity of the Jewish people when the Mishnah and the Jerusalem Talmud were finished.  Most of the people farmed the land.

The Roman Empire became Christian by the 4th century CE.  Their policy was to stop any spark of Judaism that might show up.  Even so, 43 Jewish communities in Palestine in the 6th century were revived:  12 towns on the coast, in the Negev and east of the Jordan,  and 31 villages in Galillee and in the Jordan Valley were reborn.  National restoration was in the hearts of the Jews.  In 351 they staged another revolt which was put down.  In 438 the Empress Eudocia ended the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site.

This caused the Jews to think that a period of restoration had finally come and they made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614.  Jews fought at their side and overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem.  They governed the city for the next 3 years.  The Persians made peace with Emperor Heraclius and Christian rule was reestablished.  This meant that Jews were banished from the city again.  The Byzantine persecution started up again but was short-lived because in 632, when Mohammed died, the Moslem Arab invaders came and conquered the land.  By 640, Palestine had become part of the Moslem Empire.

They ruled for 450 years, first under the Omayyads (mostly all Arabs) who governed tolerantly from Damascus, and then under the Abbasid dynasty (mostly all Turkish) who governed from Baghdad.  So Jews were governed either tolerantly or persecuted and then ruled by the Fatimids from Cairo.  The Moslem Arabs took away lands from the Jews that they had held onto for 20 generations after the fall of the Jewish state.  The Crusaders came after them and had ruled Palestine or parts of it for a little more than 2 centuries and it was they who massacred the Jews in the cities.  Under the Moslems and Crusaders, the Jewish communities of Palestine held on with their prayers and chutzpah and survived.  The Jews had been some of the best fighters against the Crusaders.  When the city of Jerusalem fell, the Crusaders had gathered the Jews up in a synagogue and burned them.  Haifa was defended by the Jews for a month from June to July 1099.  In that year, 1,000 years after the 70 CE fall of Jerusalem, there were Jewish communities that had sprung up all over Ha'aretz (Palestine).  50 of them remain well known, such as Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea and Gaza.

In 1516 the Ottoman Turks were tolerant and fairly  friendly towards the Jews.  30 Jewish communities were recorded then:  Haifa, Sh'chem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem and many in the north.  Their center was Safed (Tzfat) which became the largest in Palestine and took on the spiritual leadership of the whole Jewish world.  The mystic Caballa was developed.  8,000 to 10,000 Jews lived here in 1555 and the population grew to 20,000 or 30,000 by 1600.  Some of the Galilean villages survived, showing that Jews clung to the land for 15 centuries in succession.  Jews brought in the first printing press into Palestine, and Asia, for that matter.  It was brought to Safed and printed in Hebrew.  Maybe it was their prosperity that caused Sultan Murad III in 1576-77 to deport 1,000 wealthy Jews from Safed to Cyprus, where he needed some economic assistance.

                                          Chronology of Jews in Ha'aretz

1250 BCE    Moses' appointed leader, Joshua, led the 600,000 Israelites into the Land of Israel
1000-922 BCE  King David and son Solomon ruled a united Jewish kingdom in Israel
721 BCE           10 of 12 tribes of Jacob  are defeated by Assyrians and taken into exile, slavery
586 BCE           Babylonians defeat kingdom of Judah and exiled leaders, people to Babylon
539 BCE          Cyrus the Great of Persia sends Jews back to Israel, live and rebuild temple
458 BCE          Ezra leads exiled Jews back to Israel
332 BCE          Alexander the Great conquers Israel
167 BCE          Jewish Maccabees revolt against Greek  Antiochus IV Epiphanes
37-4 BCE        Herod, appointed by Rome, ruled over Judea, works on Temple
70 CE              Titus, emperor of Rome, crushes Jewish revolt
135                  Bar Kokhba Revolt
1096          First Christian Crusade massacre Jews across France, Rhineland, Bohemia on way to Jerusalem
1146                Second Christian Crusade, Jewish communities attacked
1453               Ottomans conquer Constantinople, invite Jews to return to the city
1880-1897      Theodor Herzl holds 1st Zionist Congress for return to Eretz Yisrael, Jews have returned
1904-1914      2nd Aliyah, 40,000 Jews from Russia return to Ha'Aretz, 3rd and 4th aliyote followed
Nov 2, 1917   Balfour Declaration of Jewish National Homeland Declared
May 14, 1948  State of Israel Declared; 600,000 Jews in Population
2013               Israel population :  6 million Jews, 1.7 million Arabs

There is no other people in the world who have maintained their love for their original land as much nor as long as the Jews have, nor has there been a people from the ancient days that have existed for so long as this people maintaining their religion.  Though Judaism has grown along with the generations, the main concept has remained the same.  It is not an "old time" religion but one that is prevalent in today's age along with its people who are  among the most creative and intelligent. Judaism is based on social righteousness.   Jews in Israel continue to cling to their beloved Ha'Aretz; the tiny speck of land of Israel;   the granted 20% of what used to be theirs.

Jews were chosen by G-d to carry out a heavy duty, and only G-d knows how hard they have tried to do this.  They were chosen not because they were the best of all people but because they had such a stubborn trait, a stiff-necked people.  They had been chosen to carry the message of G-d's law to the world, based on the covenant between G-d and Abraham and renewed at Sinai with Moses.  Isaiah described Israel as  those whose sufferings will bring salvation to the world.  One thing we know.  Jews have long suffered in the world.  Israel was said to be a kingdom of Priests and a holy nation.  How many people of the world still scoff at the Golden Rule today?

Resource:  Battleground-fact and fantasy in Palestine by Samuel Katz
Jews and Power by Ruth R. Wisse
The Source by Leon Uris