The Jewish People’s Historical Presence in Palestine

Misleading: Biblical Jewish History is a Post-Babylonian Exile Creation; ‘King David Is As Real as King Arthur’

Biblical Jewish history – the First Temple-era kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the Second Temple-era culminating in the Jewish kingdom Judaea – happened. Archeological evidence abounds. A ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription found at Tel Dan mentions “the House of David” just a century after the founder of that House lived. Second Temple-era Herodian construction, including the Temple Mount and its Western and other retaining walls, is extant today.

Misleading: The Romans Exiled the Jews, Who Were Gone from Palestine for Almost Two Thousand Years

Post-biblical homeland Jewish history happened. Multiple lines of evidence, including increasingly unearthed post-Roman destruction Jewish community and Roman-Byzantine era synagogue remains, the writing by homeland scholarly groups of the Mishnah and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the Firth Century, and the joinder of twenty-thousand or more homeland Jews in fighting in their own self-mustered battalions alongside the 614 Persian invaders against the hated Byzantine Roman heirs, all testify that the Romans did not exile Judaea’s Jews.

And the homeland-claiming Jewish Yishuv remained in the land all through the long, dark Hadrian-to-Herzl foreign rule centuries between Romans’ defeat of the final Bar Kochba revolt in CE 135 and the eventual greatly increased aliyah (return home) with the late Nineteenth Century-commenced Zionist Movement.

Misleading: Following Judaea’s Destruction by Rome, Palestine Became an Arab-Ruled Country

It did not. The Romans renamed Judaea as Palestine, in memory of the long-gone Philistine Sea People who had occupied the southern coast in biblical times, but it was a province of Rome, not a country. With a brief Persian interlude, the area remained under Roman-Byzantine rule into the 630’s Muslim invasion (which the homeland Jews aided and received rewards). Foreign Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid Muslim dynasties, which began as Arab and faded to Turk-controlled, ruled from afar until the Crusade of 1099. The European Crusaders wrote that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.” Haifa’s Jews courageously (Crusaders’ term) held off the invading Crusaders for a month. After a century’s rule, these Europeans were defeated by Turks led by a Kurd. Following Mongol and other invasions, the area was ruled by non-Arab Mamluks for two hundred years, and then, into the Twentieth Century, for four hundred years by Ottoman Turks. When modern Israel declared its independence and its homeland army of homeland Jews threw back the instant invasion of neighboring Arab states in 1948, Israel became Palestine’s, the land of Israel’s, next native state following Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea in 135.