The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 1
Origins, exile and immigration
“There is no such Country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! Our country for centuries was part of Syria.” Local Arab leader, British Mandate Palestine, 1937
On Saturday October 7, the world awoke to the terrible news of a deadly terrorist attack in Israel that killed over 1200 innocent civilians. Many more were injured and traumatized, and approximately 150 were kidnaped and taken back to the Gaza Strip by Hamas terrorists. In my last piece I put forward my postilion that Canadian’s can no longer afford to be uninformed or indifferent when it comes to the conflict in the middle east. I have since been shocked to see pro-Hamas protests all over the Western world. In my view, only a profound ignorance of the plight of the Jewish people and of the history of their ancestral homeland can lead one to support a terrorist group with the aim of eradicating the Jews. Some readers may feel this is not a Canadian issue. On that point I agree, it is an existential issue that impacts us all: A battle between Radical Islam and Western Civilization. The essay below is part one of a series I feel compelled to write. I stand with Israel, my Jewish friends, and I hope to convince all Canadians to do the same.
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The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 1
The known origins of the Jewish people go as far back as late 2nd millennium BCE, to a Semitic-speaking civilization and region of the Ancient Near East, known as Canaan (modern day Middle East). The Israelites were a group of Canaanite tribes who branched out into their own ethno-religious traditions, spoke an ancient Canaanite language known today as Biblical Hebrew, and built the Iron Age Kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the heart of the Southern Levant (modern-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan). It is from the Kingdom of Judah (also known as Judea), that the Jews and Judaism take their name.
Historically, the name of Israel first appears in the Merneptah Stele also known as the Israel Stele, an ancient stone inscription found in Egypt, dated approximately 1200 BCE. The inscription, for the most part, documents Pharoah Merneptah's victory over the ancient Libyans, but also makes mention of a separate campaign in Canaan, then part of the Egyptian empire. Most scholars agree that this section of the stele contains hieroglyphs that translate to the word “Israel.”
According to the biblical account, the Israelites are the direct descendants of Jacob (also known as Israel), each of his twelve sons representing one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob and his sons had fled to Egypt due to intense drought conditions in their homeland of ancient Canaan. However, in time the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, until Moses led their Exodus through the desert back to Canaan whereupon Joshua commanded the recapture of the Israelite homeland during the 13th century BCE. At this point, anyone who may have thought that the returned Jews would live happily ever after, would have been abysmally mistaken.
The first Jewish exile, the Assyrian exile, occurred in 722 BCE, and the second, the Babylonian exile, in 586 BCE, were followed by The Great Return in 515 BCE, which culminated with the completion of the Second Temple of Jerusalem (the first was destroyed during the Babylonian Exile by King Nebuchadnezzar).
Four centuries later, in 63 BCE, the Romans invaded Judea. The Jews were not exiled at this time but became subject to Roman authority. Soon after, as a consequence of an uprising over poor Roman stewardship in 70 CE, Jerusalem and the second temple were destroyed.
The period from 130 CE to 136 CE is known as the Bar Kokhba revolt or Jewish Revolt. Led by Simon bar Kokhba, the Jews of Judea, engaged in an unprecedented large-scale armed uprising against the Roman Empire. Unfortunately for the Jews their rebellion would end in crushing defeat. Bar Kokhba, their fearless and formidable leader, was killed by the Romans in 135 BCE in the town of Betar located in the Judean Mountains.
The victorious Romans, in an act of defiance against the insolent Jews who dared challenge their authority, decided to rename the region Syria Palaestina. “Palaestina” is a Greek word derived from the Hebrew “Pleshet,” which means invaders or penetrators.1 Calling the Jews invaders in their ancestral homeland was intended to insult them and dissociate them from the region.
This means that the first known use of the word “Palestine” in reference to the Middle East occurs more than a millennium after the Jews presence in Israel was established, as confirmed by the Merneptah Stele and other evidence in the archaeological record. Further, the original use of the term Palestine was meant to describe the region inhabited by the Jews. There is no historical reference of a Palestinian people until the mid twentieth century. According to Anthropologist Hymie Rubenstein:
“Before the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan to divide Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, the latter residents never regarded themselves as a distinct people with a separate Palestinian identity.”
More on this soon. Let’s return now to the history of the Jewish Holy Land in the Southern Levant.
In 705 CE, the Muslims proclaimed the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem to be an Islamic holy site. The Dome of the Rock, constructed at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount enshrined the Foundation Stone, the holiest site for Jews. The Jews were banned from worshiping on the Temple Mount2 for the next 1,000 plus years of Islamic rule3. Also, in 717 CE, new restrictions were imposed against non-Muslims resulting from the imposition of heavy taxes on agricultural land, forcing Jews to migrate from rural areas to towns. Social and economic discrimination caused substantial Jewish emigration from Palestine4.
The period known as the Crusades, roughly 1050 CE to 1300 CE involved religious wars with the Islamic world. Primarily, a series of military expeditions commenced by Christian Europeans with the goal of ridding the Holy Lands of Moslem "infidels." In 1302 the Mamluk Sultanate, a military caste of non-Arabic manumitted former soldiers, took control of the Levant, expelling the last Crusaders, formally ending the era of the Crusades. The Mamluks ruled until 1517 when they were overthrown by the Ottoman Empire, who ruled until the early twentieth century.
During this entire turbulent period of revolt, overthrow, subjugation, oppression, exile and return, the Jews maintained a constant presence in the Southern Levant. As mentioned, Palestine was the word the Romans used to rename Judea in order to insult the Jews. Over the many centuries of Jewish presence in the region, if the word “Palestinian” was used at all, it would have referred to the Jews living there, as the Romans had aimed to rebrand them “invaders.”
Jewish and Arab Immigration
“For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and widely-neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, described it as: ‘...[a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse....A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action....We never saw a human being on the whole route....There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country5’.”
The majority of population growth in Palestine came after the Jews returned in massive numbers. Between World War I and World War II, the Jewish population increased by 470,000, and the non-Jewish population increased by 588,000. In fact, the permanent Arab population increased 120 percent between 1922 and 1947 to more than 1.3 million.6 If it hadn’t been for the Jews tilling the land and developing the local economy, it is unlikely any additional Arabs would have immigrated to the area.
Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, wrote in 1913: “The Zionists are necessary for the country: The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country.”7
In 1875, at a meeting of the Palestinian Exploration Fund, the Earl of Shaftesbury said of Palestine, “We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country.8”
The First Aliyah was a significant pre-Zionist wave of Jewish immigration into the Levant (then known as Ottoman Syria) between 1881 and 1903. An estimated 25,000 Jews legally immigrated during this period, although many returned home after months of enduring poverty and/or disease.
In 1897 Theodor Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration in an effort to form a Jewish state in the Jewish ancestral homeland. And in 1917, during the first World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration proclaiming support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in the ancestral Jewish homeland (at the time still considered part of the Ottoman Region).
According to historian Benny Morris, Lord Balfour “had been motivated by a desire to do something for the Jews, because they had suffered greatly at the hands of the Christian world during the previous 1,900 years and because of the values and norms, including monotheism and the notions of social justice, that they had bestowed on humankind through the Old Testament.”
Further, the British were sympathetic toward Zionism. Historian Tom Segev has argued that, as religious Christians, Britain’s leaders admired the Jews and believed the Holy Land was their spiritual home. “Modern Zionism, they believed, would fulfill a divine promise and resettle the Jews in the land of their ancient fathers9.”
Violence and Land Acquisition during British Mandate Palestine
In 1920, Arab Nationalists, in a rejection of British authority and the Balfour Declaration, initiated a series of Arab riots designed to drive the Jews out of Palestine. In Jerusalem, six Jews were killed and two hundred were injured.
Following World War I, it was decided by the allied powers, through the League of Nations, that the British would administrate the territories of Palestine and Transjordan (both having just been conceded by the dissolving Ottoman Empire). Thus 1922 began the era of British Mandate Palestine.
The British applied the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 to all inhabitants. In practice, this meant that villagers did not need to register their lands, as they knew among themselves which of the village lands belonged to which families and which were owned in common (mashaa). Before the British Mandate, the notion of private property title was alien to local Palestinian tradition. However, under British administration the land was distributed to individual family units, and within the village and town perimeters, was reviewed to no longer be considered “miri” but “mülk” - an allodial land title independent of any superior landlord10.
Contrary to the Postcolonial activist belief that Israeli Jews stole the land they now inhabit through domination and occupation, the land obtained by Israeli Jews during various waves of Jewish migration was legitimately procured from Arabs. From the 1880s to the 1930s, most Jewish land purchases were made in the coastal plain, the Jezreel Valley, the Jordan Valley and to a lesser extent the Galilee.11 "The sparse Arab population in the areas where the Jews usually bought their land enabled the Jews to carry out their purchase without engendering a massive displacement and eviction of Arab tenants12".
In 1929, during the British Mandate, rumors circulated that the Jews were planning to seize the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This initiated a Massacre whereby Arabs killed over sixty Jews in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. This pogrom event, which left hundreds more injured and traumatized, was part of the 1929 Palestine riots, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed (the majority of Arabs killed by British police and military). The British evacuated all the Jews from Hebron, and even though many returned in 1931, almost all were re-evacuated during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. Ending for good the centuries-old Jewish presence in Hebron.
The Peel Commission was a British Royal Commission of Inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, who was appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in British Mandate Palestine. The commission concluded that the League of Nations mandate in Palestine had become unfeasible. For the first time a partition was recommended that would divide the Arab region from the Jewish region.
It is worth mentioning that the British diplomats involved in the Peel Commission seemed to have misunderstood the history of the area. Notice how the Arab’s are said to be indigenous. Did the Peel Commission not realize the Jews had a consistent presence in the region for centuries? From the Peel Commission report :
"The continued impact of a highly intelligent and enterprising race, backed by large financial resources, on a comparatively poor indigenous community, on a different cultural level, may produce in time serious reactions."13
Negotiations took place at the London Conference in February of 1939. Although for the most part, Arab delegates, who boycotted the Peel Commission, also refused to meet directly with Jewish representatives at the conference, claiming this would constitute recognition of Jewish claims over Palestine. British diplomats met separately with Jewish and Arab delegates (in spite of the official boycott by the Arabs), however the conference not surprisingly ended in abysmal failure. The next month the British government, on behalf of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, published the 1939 white paper assessing the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine (later known as the Great Revolt).
The Arabs unanimously condemned the white paper, which called for the first time to establish an independent Jewish state within 10 years (rejecting the Peel Commission’s partition plan). Arab’s instead argued for for an independent state of Palestine, "with protection of all legitimate Jewish and other minority rights and safeguarding of reasonable British interests14,” a stop to all Jewish immigration and land acquisition15, and maintained that the creation of a Jewish state and lack of independent Palestine was a betrayal of the word given by Britain16 17.
However, in an attempt to appease Arab hostility towards the Jews, the white paper also called for restriction on immigration. For a 5-year period, immigration of Jews was to be limited to 75,000, at which point additional numbers of Jewish immigrants would be determined by the Arabs, and restrictions on buying land from Arabs was to be enforced in all but 5% of British Mandate Palestine18.
The white paper was formally approved by the House of Commons in May 1939, becoming the governing policy from 1939 until the British departure in 1948. Considering the restrictions imposed on the Jews, it was not surprising Zionists rejected the white paper outrightly and called for a general Jewish strike. What was surprising: the rejection by Palestinian Arab nationalists, considering that appeasements were so favourable to Arab interests. These early rejections of compromise by the Palestinian Arabs would establish a pattern that would come to define politics in the region up to and including the present crisis.
In my next essay I will pick up the story with Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, whereupon every neighbouring Arab country immediately declared war on the Jews.
Continue reading Part 2 here.
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Thanks for reading. For more from this author on this topic read Israel, Islam and Settler Colonialism
Also relevant, Canadian trustee supports terrorist atrocities
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Élie Barnavi; Miriam Eliav-Feldon; Denis Charbit (2002). A historical atlas of the Jewish people: from the time of the patriarchs to the present. Schocken Books. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-8052-4226-3. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
Simon Sebag Montefiore (27 January 2011). Jerusalem: The Biography. Orion. p. 124. ISBN 978-0-297-85864-5. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
Porath (1977), p. 81.
Peel Commission Report p. 299
Bose, Sumantra (30 June 2009). Contested Lands. Harvard University Press. p. 223. ISBN 978-0-674-02856-2.
Elie Podeh, Chances for Peace: Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, University of Texas Press 2015 pp. 28ff.
Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine 1929–1948
H. G. L.; E. M. (19 November 1938). "British Policy in Palestine, 1937–38: From the Peel to the Woodhead Report". Bulletin of International News. 15 (23): 3–7. JSTOR 25642368.
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The Jews were atypical conquerors in that they returned to their ancestral land of Canaan and purchased the land they settled on. The decolonization crowd wants to remove Jews from their own territory.
The 1939 white paper had more of an effect that indicated. In 1939 the Jews of Europe were looking to escape the murderous Nazi regime and had no where to escape. They were unwanted by most countries. Even Hitler proposed that the Jews should go to Palestine but the British became complicit in their murder by shutting down immigration to Palestine. With nowhere to go, 6 million Jews were murdered and in Palestine the Jews expressed their rage against the British with numerous terrorist attacks.