WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: While Arabs claim that Jews are colonial invaders in an Arab Palestine comprising all of the Mandate west of the Jordan, we American Jews don’t counter with a comparable homeland claim. Our leaders instead call for creating an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state on “the 1967 borders,” sacrificing Judea-Samaria and seemingly the heart of Jerusalem.
Perhaps our reticence in claiming the entirety of the land of Israel – Palestine west of the Jordan – as the national homeland of Jews resides in uncertainty of the strength of extra-biblical confirmation of the Jews’ biblical kingdoms and of the evidence documenting that we weren’t exiled by Rome for almost two thousand years but in fact Never Left.
I wrote a book about this, citing the extra-biblical confirmation of the Jews’ biblical kingdoms and documenting our continued homeland presence from the Romans’ destruction of ancient Judaea through Israel’s sovereign rebirth as the land of Israel’s next native state.
And my brief (143 pages) book delves into roots, into the evidence on both sides of seminal moments of Jewish peoplehood: When and how did we arrive or arise in Canaan; was there King David, and was he a real king or hill village chieftain; when was the Bible committed to writing; how did we survive the Babylonian exile; was the Maccabean revolt just a civil war between Jews; what evidence is there we weren’t exiled by Rome; how did we survive post-revolt foreign rule by Romans-Byzantines, Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks and Turks.
This Week: Time At Last For Us Unapologetically To Make Our Homeland Case: WE NEVER LEFT
What bothers me more than much of the gentile world accepting the Palestinian Arab claim to the entirety of the land of Israel, encapsulated in the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” is our own grassroots American Jewish community acquiescing in if not actively advocating AIPAC’s and our Reform and Conservative movements’ lay and rabbinical leaders’ call for creating an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state.
These leaders’ mistaken concession in their open letter this spring to President Trump that the long-gone 1949 military ceasefire lines, which left Israel nine miles wide in the lowland middle and without historic Jerusalem, were “the 1967 borders” to which borders with that new Arab state should “precisely hew,” wrongfully undercut our homeland claim to the land of Israel in its entirety, sacrificing its most meaningful and strategically needed parts.
Perhaps our community’s reticence to claim the entirety of the land of Israel as the Jewish national home resides in a lack of appreciation of extra-biblical confirmation of our biblical kingdoms’ historicity, and of the documentation that we weren’t exiled by Rome but never left.
I wrote a book about that, Israel 3000 Years. I like to believe that it’s not a boring book filled with dry historical and demographic facts. Just as with the Holocaust in our own time, virtually every significant event in Jewish history is seriously challenged as not having occurred. My book discusses these challenges. E.g., “Was there King David?” “Weren’t we exiled by Rome for almost two thousand years?” I hope my book leaves you with historian Parkes’ point, which was what I set out to document: that the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Jewish people’s “real title deeds.”
Jewish homeland beginnings: I wrote as the first sentence of chapter 1: “A book claiming for Jews a continuous three-millennia homeland presence in Israel must take up at the outset how the Israelites, as Jews were originally called, arrived or arose in that land.”
Arrived or arose? “The Great Debate,” as I titled section 1.1, is between archeologists arrayed in “Conquest” [arrived, e.g., Hoffmeir, Herzog] and “Indigenous Origins” [arose, e.g., Finkelstein, Dever] camps. I concluded that neither side is wholly convincing (but I root for Joshua). What’s important for us, beyond seeking Roots, is that both camps take note of the Israelites in the land in the twelfth century BCE, a Long time ago. And if Israelites did indeed arise out of the already-in-the-land Canaanites, then their “Palestinian” blood is that much the bluer.
King David, and all of that stuff: The first draft that I sent to my long-suffering non-vanity publisher set the opening scene in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. He fired back: “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” Me: “If we can’t connect the dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then King David and all of that stuff doesn’t matter.” He persuaded me, being my non-vanity publisher, that King David and all of that stuff matters a lot.
But was there King David? One non-lonely archeologist, reveling in the absence of tenth century BCE remains in Jerusalem, famously quipped: “King David was about as real as King Arthur.” But soon evidence began piling up with a bang, starting with unearthing of a ninth-century BCE enemy king’s inscription referencing “the House of David.”
So David was real, but, given the absence of Jerusalem and environs David-era remains, was he truly a King or just a dusty hill village chieftain? Then came a succession of sensational findings at Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tel Zayit, and in Jerusalem’s City of David of what may be King David’s fabled Jerusalem palace.
But what about Solomon? Do the six-chambered gates in cities in the north date from a United Kingdom or later from the successor kingdom of Israel? And what about Solomon’s Temple, described in architectural detail in the Bible, a description believed by many to have been the imagination of writers centuries later? Then came unearthing in Syria of the just a bit earlier Canaanite Ain Dara Temple, matching these very architectural features.
At the heart of these ancient Israel history debates is the contested key question, When were the Hebrew Bible’s J, E, D and P sources written? Credentialed debaters’ datings range from the tenth century BCE for J through mostly post-exilic for deprecators of ancient Israel’s political significance and literacy levels. (I root for tenth century J.)
Taking on Alexander’s Successors and Imperial Rome: How did the Israelites’ kingdom of Judah survive Babylonian destruction to become the Jews’ Jewish Persian province Yehud (after Alexander, Judaea)? Exiles returned, but more had remained on the land than had been believed.
Was the Maccabean revolt against Alexander’s Seleucid successors, Hanukkah and all, just a Jews’ civil war? Far from all the colonists in America in 1776 supported George Washington. The end result in each case was an independent state where one hadn’t existed before. I recount the battles against the Seleucids.
Judaea’s two major revolts against Rome, 66-70 and 132-35, were major Roman empire wars. They ended Jewish sovereignty in ancient times, but they were the final evidence that the native nation that stood up to Rome was a thousand-plus years’ nation of Jews, not one of Arafat-ancestor Palestinian Arabs. It was to disassociate Judaea from Jews that Hadrian renamed Judaea as “Palestine.” (Cf Jordan renaming Judaea-Samaria “West Bank”).
The Jews In Their Land in the Talmudic Age: I put that heading just now in italics because it’s the name of a book by a post-Judaean revolts’ scholar, Gedaliah Alon. He emphasized (Jimmy Carter to the contrary notwithstanding) that the Romans did not exile the Jews. Parkes and other historians agree. This popularly believed even-by-us “exile” myth is the biggest, most damaging misperception of all of Jewish homeland history. As Parkes put it in Whose Land?, quoted by Katz in Battleground, it’s this supposed eighteen hundred year absence of Jews from the land that gives rise to claims that we returned to a long-standing nation of Palestinian Arabs.
Roman-Byzantine era synagogues and evidence of Jewish communities and Jewish presence being dug up all over the land; schools of scholars’ having written in the land the Mishnah and then Palestinian Talmud; Roman recognition of the Patriarch until the fifth century as head of the homeland Jews; and homeland Jewish joinder in self-mustered battalions in fighting alongside the 614-invading Persians all testify to the Jews’ continued organized presence through the post-revolts Roman-Byzantine rule centuries. Among the ruling Byzantines’ final acts was the slaughter of countless homeland Jews.
Surviving Muslim Dynasty rule: The five post-revolt centuries of European Roman-Byzantine foreign rule were succeeded by four and a half centuries of Muslim Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasty foreign rule. We Jews were still living all over the land. Archeologist Bahat includes in The Forgotten Generations a map of c. a hundred communities of Jews. Homeland Jews materially aided the Fatimid takeover and were given the fortress of Haifa. Records show Jews living in many places and engaged in many types of gainful work.
Surviving Crusader rule: Contemporary Crusader account of their assault on Jerusalem: “And here, in front of us, were the foreigners, Jew, Turk and Arab, fighting for their lives with slingstones, with catapults, with fire and venom …. And though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword; the Turk, the Arab and the Jew were among the fallen. The Jew is the last to fall.”
Albert of Aachen: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” The Jews held off the Crusaders, alone, for a month.
Israeli historian: “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.”
Despite the Crusaders’ ban on Jewish immigration, Jews continued to come. Benjamin of Tudula recorded Jews’ (low, given the Crusader massacres) numbers in numerous places.
A Crusader-time Christian pilgrim’s writings, a millennium after the Roman destruction, half a millennium after the Muslim conquest, show that neither effort at obliterating the land’s Jewish connection had worked: “… the citadel of King David … the gate of David,” Hebron, where the patriarchs are buried, “the region called Judea” between the Jordan and Sea.
Surviving the Mamluks: Following population-decimating Mongol invasions in the wake of the Crusaders’ ouster by Turks, Turk-Circassian Mamluks ruled Palestine and surrounding regions from 1260 to 1517. At great personal peril, Jews continued to come, heightened following the Inquisition in Spain. A Jewish geographer listed Jewish communities. I compiled in my book a fifteenth century Jerusalem Jewish chronology, including Christian travelers’ notes: “In Jerusalem dwell many Jews …. Very many Jews in Jerusalem.” Other contemporaries noted nearly thirty urban and rural sixteenth century Jewish communities. This despite: “Time and again Jews were charged with offenses against the Muslim faith.”
Surviving the Turks: Over their four hundred year benighted misrule, driving the land’s population down to its lowest of all recorded times (see Mark Twain, among others), the Turks managed to make the Mamluks seem enlightened. The Jews dwelt in their four holy cites – Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land, under severe continuing persecution. And yet, towards the end of the Turk era, the Yishuv, again becoming Jerusalem’s majority in pre-Zionist times, led the breakout from Jerusalem’s medieval walls, establishing new communities, schools and agricultural settlements. It was to an already reviving Yishuv that the Zionists came.
Summing Up
We do our Jewish homeland claim a great disservice by ourselves speaking of “exile and return,” just as Parkes said. And we need to stop acquiescing in mainstream media et ilk harping upon “Israel’s creation and founding in 1948,” and on Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem as “captured by Israel in 1967,” as though there was no prior three thousand-year Jewish presence connection.
Instead of championing an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state, in addition to alongside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan (78% of the Palestine Mandate), we have to be as clear and succinct as our homeland’s enemies in stating our homeland claim to the land of Israel, in its entirety. We have to make plain: We Never Left.