Jewish Roots in the Land of Israel/Palestine

The Jewish people have a very ancient history in Palestine, going back three thousand years. The reason for all this controversy, beyond the usual scholarly disagreement, is obvious: the Israel–Palestine conflict. Critics of Israel charge that modern Jews have no legitimate rights to Palestine. They claim that Israelis have dispossessed the rightful inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, whom they continue to oppress in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank (also known as Judea and Samaria).

Israel, they argue, is an example of what critics call settler colonialism. Just as the Europeans conquered the Americas, the French conquered Algeria, or the British conquered India, so, they say, the Jews conquered Palestine. The current war between Hamas and Israel has generated loud echoes on US university campuses.Both Arabs and Jews claim to be indigenous to the lands that are now Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan. The focus here is on the Jews, but Arabs also were present in ancient times in relatively small numbers. The Jewish claim to indigeneity is based on two things: (1) the three-thousand-year-old continuous history and (2) the status of the land since ancient times as “the focal point of Jewish existence and its expectations of the future. What Jewish indigeneity in Palestine does demonstrate, however, is that the Jews have a claim to the land. That account begins in ancient history and continues through the end of the Middle Ages, with immigration picking up in the sixteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth century. The ancient Jewish presence in Palestine is based less on the Bible as evidence than on archaeology and on nonbiblical ancient texts from a variety of sources, Gentile and Jewish. Palestine is the traditional scholarly term for what is today Israel. The name “Palestine” is ultimately derived from the Philistines, invaders from the Aegean and Cyprus in the twelfth century bce who intermarried with Canaanites and formed a series of kingdoms on the coast of what is now Gaza and southern Israel. Egyptians, Assyrians, and the Hebrew Bible each used a variant of “Philistine” to refer to the land of the Philistines. Ancient Israel emerges on the stage of history in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1400–1200 bce). The earliest reference to Israel appears in an Egyptian inscription of about 1210 bce. Most scholars read the hieroglyphic text of the Merneptah Stele, as it is known, as referring to “Israel”: one of several peoples or places in Canaan that the Egyptian king claimed to have defeated. The evidence suggests that “Israel” here refers to a group of people rather than a place. Note that the first mention of Israel in the historical record puts it into conflict with a great power—in this case, Egypt. That hints at the shape of things to come. Palestine has a strategic location. It is the sole land bridge between Africa and Asia, and it has ports on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It is little wonder that empires ancient and modern have fought over it. Who were the Israelites? How did they emerge in Canaan around 1210 bce where there is no earlier record of them? In any case, Israel prospered. Nearly three centuries later, in the ninth century bce, there are three nonbiblical references to Israel. “Ahab the Israelite” appears on an Assyrian stele, and there are mentions of the “king of Israel” in a stele of Moab (today in Jordan) and in one from Tel-Dan (Upper Galilee, Israel). The latter stele also refers to a king of the “House of David”. The Bible speaks of a single kingdom of Israel that was later split into two: a northern kingdom called Israel and a southern kingdom known as Judah. Most archaeologists believe that nonbiblical evidence indeed points to two separate kingdoms: a northern one with its capital at Tirzah (the later Sebaste), near today’s Nablus in Samaria, and a southern one with its capital in Jerusalem. Judah almost certainly had a temple to its God in Jerusalem because no ancient capital city would have been without one. But there is no archaeological evidence of what is referred to as the First Temple, let alone that King Solomon built it, as the Bible says. After it was conquered, Judah became the Neo-Babylonian province of Yehud. The Maccabees brothers and their descendants ruled Judea first as princes; eventually they took the titles of king and high priest. The Dead Sea Scrolls, another very valuable source of information, offer a remarkable window into Jewish life—religious, cultural, socioeconomic, military, and political— during the last centuries bce and the first century ce. The “scrolls” consist of fifteen thousand texts and fragments, mostly in Hebrew, with some in Aramaic and Greek. The ruins at Qumran are visible today. Archaeologists have also found the foundations of the Roman legionary camps and the artificial ramp built by the Romans to attack the fortress. Jews immigrated to Palestine in larger numbers after their expulsion from Spain (1492) and the Ottoman conquest of Palestine (1516). The cities of Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Hebron were regarded as the holy cities of Judaism and attracted the largest Jewish populations, but there were other centers of Jewish settlement. Jewish numbers in Palestine grew in the nineteenth century, and by 1880, Jews were a majority in Jerusalem. They formed only a small minority elsewhere in Palestine, where Arabs were the vast majority. To sum up, the Jews have an ancient history in Palestine going back three thousand years. Muhammad, on the other hand, was born in 570, and work on the Quran only started in 610. So the idea that the Jews oppressed and displaced “Palestinians” simply does not hold.