#918 8/26/18 – These Past Almost 2000 Years: “If Israel Really is the Historic Homeland of the Jews, How Come There Weren’t More of Them There in 1948?”

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  All the ‘dirty words’ [“West Bank …1967 borders … occupation …”] that I plead with us to stop gratuitously using aside, where we fail in making our Jewish homeland case to people in the West is in not emphasizing both the reality and tenacity of the Jews’ continuous post-biblical homeland presence.  Perhaps we discount it because we were long the minority, but Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Judaea, and the succession of foreign empire conquerors specialized in massacring us.

These Past Almost 2000 Years:  “If Israel really is the historic homeland of the Jews, how come there weren’t more of them there in 1948?”

To some of those of us who agree with mid-twentieth century historian James Parkes that the continuous post-biblical homeland presence of the Jewish Yishuv [organized homeland Jewish community] wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds,” a nagging riddle resides in the statistic that in 1947, when the UN set out to partition what remained of the Palestine Mandate (after the excision of all-Arab Jordan) between western Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs, how come the Jews were the minority?  Western Palestine at that time held about a million Arabs [the British said 1.2 million, but Katz in Battleground cited sources showing fewer] and 600,000 Jews.

But to those of us familiar with what Parkes rightly called the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” the keys to unraveling the riddle that there weren’t more 1948 homeland Jews are held in the bloody hands of the British, Arabs, Turks, Mamluks, Mongols, Crusaders, Muslim empires, and Byzantines back to the Romans.  And add to that centuries of European proclamations banning “transport of Jews to the East.”

But the Jews’ homeland claim was staked all through those long, dark exclusively foreign rule centuries between Judaea’s fall in 135 and Israel’s 1948 sovereign rise as the land’s next native state by the tenacious endurance of the homeland Jews who endured and survived “every discouragement.”  Some years ago, I wrote a book on it.  Come take a quick look.

Destruction of Homeland Jews By Rome

The Jews’ biblical kingdoms and succeeding Maccabee-founded kingdom Judaea, crowned by Jerusalem Jewish Temples that successively stood for a millennium, were real and substantial.  A wealth of hard non-biblical evidence confirms this.  The two major revolts against Rome, 66-70 and 132-35 CE, were major wars of that empire.  Roman historian Dio Cassius:

     “But Severus [the Roman general, recalled from governing Britain to put down the Jews] risked not giving open battle against the enemy in any place, seeing their numbers and their fury. Therefore, cutting them piecemeal by flying columns of greater strength under commanders of lower ranks, intercepting also and depriving them of supplies, he was able by this method, a slower one indeed, yet one less perilous, to wear them down and so to crush them utterly. Very few in fact survived. Of their forts the fifty strongest were razed to the ground. Fifty-eight myriads of men were slaughtered in skirmish and in battle. Of those who perished by famine and disease there is no one that can count the number.”  [emphasis added]

Destruction of Homeland Jews by Byzantines

A popular belief is that the Romans, on defeating Bar Kochba, “exiled” Judaea’s surviving Jews [e.g., Jimmy Carter in Peace Not Apartheid], but remains of Roman-Byzantine era Jewish communities and synagogues, religious works including the Mishna and Palestinian Talmud, and Roman-Byantine recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the fifth century evidence that this was not true.  Twenty-thousand or more homeland Jews in their own self-mustered battalions fought alongside the autonomy-promising seventh century Persian invaders.  Ultimately, the Byzantine Christians regained control and went on a Jew-slaughtering massacre, accounting for the serious diminution of Jews in Palestine for several centuries.  (DeHaas, History of Palestine: The Last 2000 Years, pp. 119-20)

Homeland Jews During the Muslim Dynasties Period

Homeland Jews then aided the shortly-following Arab-led Muslim invaders, and endured in the land during the ensuing foreign Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasties (with short interruptions by Tulunides and Ikhshids – really).  Archeologist Bahat has compiled a map showing a hundred Abbasid era homeland Jewish communities.  Homeland Jews “played an important part in the Fatimid conquest,” and “the fortress at Haifa was given to the Jews with the caliph’s consent.”  (Ben-Gurion, ed., The Jews in Their Land, p. 209)

The Yishuv was “badly hit” by Fatimid time persecution (The Jews in Their Land, p. 210), but the deadly for-us disease that infects the world still is what occurred in the aftermath of Fatimid caliph al-Hakim’s destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the year 1010.  “The story circulated in the West that it was at the instigation of the Jews that al-Hakim had given the order, and widespread massacres and forced baptisms were the result.”  (Parkes, Whose Land, p. 77)

Crusader Destruction of Homeland Jews

The Crusaders of 1099 acknowledged that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them in Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  They wrote of Haifa, “which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.”  And, “apart from a few places in the south, we have no information about Jewish participation in the defense of other Palestinian towns, but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”  (Ben-Gurion, ed., The Jews in Their Land, p. 215)

Tales of Crusader-wrought carnage in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the land curdle one’s blood to this day.

     “‘On the third day after the victory, at their commanders’ orders, the Crusaders carried out a dreadful massacre of all the people who still survived in the city [Jerusalem]. The Christians gave themselves wholly to their murderous urges, and not a suckling babe, not an infant, escaped the sword; the streets of Jerusalem were strewn with the corpses of men and women, and the shattered limbs of children.’

     “According to the few refugees who managed to escape from the city, ‘the Franks killed all the Ishmaelites and Israelites in it.”  (The Jews in Their Land, p. 214)

The famous Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited the Holy Land, as it’s called, during Crusader times, recording various places’ number of Jews.  The fact is he did not count very many.  Crusader authority Runciman and others have attributed this to the Crusaders having greatly reduced the land’s number of Jews.  (Whose Land, p, 152;  Bahat, The Forgotten Generations, p. 40)

Mongols’ and Mamluks’ Destruction of Homeland Jews

     “After the Crusaders, there came a period of wild disturbance as first the Kharezmians — an Asian tribe appearing fleetingly on the stage of history — and then the Mongol hordes, invaded Palestine. They sowed new ruin and destruction throughout the country. Its cities were laid waste, its lands were burned, its trees were uprooted, the younger part of its population was destroyed.”

Per Parkes and Joan Peters:  In 1244, the Kharezmians [a/k/a Khwarizmians], instigated by Ghengis Khan, invaded Palestine, and 1247 sacked Jerusalem and slaughtered its Christians and Jews.

Katz in Battleground (p. 92) quotes a late 1400’s Christian traveler on what life under Mamluk rule was like for homeland Jews:

     “. . . Martin Kabatnik (who did not like Jews), visiting Jerusalem during his pilgrimage, exclaimed: ‘The heathens oppress them at their pleasure. They know that the Jews think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised to them. Those of them who live here are regarded as holy by the other Jews, for in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies they suffer at the hands of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.”

Ottoman Turks’ Destruction of Homeland Jews

“The Ottomans, to whom Palestine was merely a source of revenue, began to exploit the Jews’ fierce attachment to Palestine. They were consequently made to pay a heavy price for living there. They were taxed beyond measure and were subjected to a system of arbitrary fines.”  (Katz, Battleground, pp. 94-95)

Mark Twain and others have driven home that during their four century misrule the Turks drove down Palestine’s population to its lowest of recorded times.  Particularly during World War I, they reduced the Jewish population considerably.

A chapter titled “Dhimmi in The Holy Land” in Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial details a chronology of persecution of homeland Jews by Turks and Arabs that is exceedingly difficult reading.

British Blockade

It seems incredulous to us today, though those of my age will never forget or forgive it, that during and even after the Holocaust, Great Britain, charged with an international Mandate to facilitate in Palestine a Jewish National Home with close settlement of Jews on the land, did all that it could to keep Jews from Palestine and frustrate Israel’s independence.  Yet, its White Paper shut down Jewish flight from Europe and barred Jewish land ownership almost entirely.

The Significance of the Yishuv

The last full chapter of my book deals with the four hundred year misrule of the Ottoman Turks.  I followed that with a two-page account of Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, re-proclaiming homeland Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.  I quote all the grounds for that sovereignty – biblical era presence, exile and return, the Zionist movement, explicit international recognition of historic connection and right to reconstitute the National Home, “the natural right of the Jewish people, like any other people, to control their own destiny in their sovereign State” – he recited in reading Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

And then I ended that he might have added one more, that the Jewish people’s title deed had been written, in blood and fire, by the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”

Does it make sense for us to discount, even ignore this?