YONATAN HAMBOURGER/TZALI REICHER: The real history of Israel and Palestine

When people speak about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the conversation tends to fall into familiar tropes: Israel was a freebie given to the Jews as an apology for the Holocaust; the Jewish people’s only claim to Israel is in a supposedly mythical Bible; Palestine was a state before they were colonized by the British, who shipped usurping Jews in, and there was no tension between Jews and Arabs before the Balfour Declaration in 1917 or the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

All of this is incorrect and something that requires more education and widespread knowledge to correct the record and counter the prevailing narratives dominating the discourse today.

The Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land from time immemorial. The Jewish people’s first association is mentioned in the Bible when God commands Abraham to go to Cannan for the first time, and Abraham proceeds to buy land from the ancient (now non-existent) people of his time. He expands his brood that will grow to be the Jewish people in places and cities that still exist today, and prove the Jewish connection to the land since their inception as a nation in 1855 B.C.E., around 2,500 years before the founding of Islam.

Throughout the Bible, as verified by the archaeological sites uncovered in Israel, the Jewish people lived there and survived various exiles and displacements to return with Joshua around 1400 B.C.E. For the next millennium, the Jews were primarily based in Israel, and served God first with the Tabernacle in the still existent town of Shiloh and then in the two Temples in Jerusalem on the now Temple Mount.

They had many rulers and leaders in this period, including David, Solomon, Saul and Samuel, and relics of that time have been dug up to enlighten us about that era over recent decades. Jesus himself was born toward the end of this time period, about 600 years before Islam was founded.

After the destruction of the Temples in the Babylonian and then Roman times of global dominance, Jewish independent sovereignty was lost from 70 Common Era (C.E.) til 1948: just 75 years ago. Despite their right to self-determination taken from them, Jews maintained a consistent presence in their homeland, even with the ensuing parade of invaders of the next centuries, beginning with the Romans. The Romans imposed a colonial state (approx. 70-324 CE) on the Jewish people and renamed the area Syria-Palaestina, and eventually many Jews were killed, sold into slavery and exiled.

While the Jewish people were forcibly dispersed across the world, many of them stayed in their land until the height of the Byzantine period (324–638), when a majority were massacred or forced to flee. However, a tenacious group hid and continued the active Jewish people’s presence in Israel.

The Prophet Muhammed was born in 570 CE and established Islam, through which various factions and adherents invaded Israel and remained until 1099 CE. Then came the Crusaders, who invaded and overthrew the Muslims until they themselves were unseated in 1291 by Saladin, til the Ottomans conquered the land from 1517-1917.

In 1917, the British Mandate of Palestine occupied Israel following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, and issued the Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish homeland in the region, righting a historic wrong. That dream was fulfilled when the modern state of Israel was re-established in Israel in 1948 — a true modern-day miracle.

The history of the supposed state of Palestine is considerably shorter. In 1967, after Israel regained control over Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in a defensive war where they beat back five invading armies, the flag and rhetoric of the just three-year-old Palestinian Liberation Organization — then a recognized terror organization — was adopted, calling for the destruction of Israel and creation of a state bearing the name which Roman and subsequent colonizers had bestowed on it, Palestine, because they had no history of their own there.

Recognizing the reality of the situation and the need to share a small country with a people who had settled there, Israel has advanced peace talks at many times throughout its history to enable the two-state solution, yet have always been rebuffed by Palestinian leaders who refuse to accept a Jewish state, and will try again and again to wish it away through violence and terrorism. Notably, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, which it had captured from Egypt in 1967. In exchange for its magnanimity, all it got in return was tens of thousands of missiles leading to Oct. 7.

Israel was not a random country handed to the Jewish people in sympathy after the Holocaust. There was never an independent nation or state of Palestine in history with its own unique identity, currency or leaders that the Jewish people usurped, until one was invented to counter Israel’s establishment and historical claims to the land. The laughable claims that Jews were safe in Muslim lands until the founding of Israel is contradicted by years of Arab massacres on Jewish people for centuries beforehand.

Israel doesn’t exist because of the Balfour Declaration and isn’t a British colony or a nation of European settlers because the Jewish people are indigenous to the land and have returned home to stay.

History, archeology and, most importantly, truth testify to Israel’s indisputable right to their own homeland, the only Jewish state in a world with 22 Arab countries and 49 Islamic majority countries, a tiny strip of less than 11,000 kilometers, while the Arab countries comprise 13 million kilometers.

It’s time for the world to get educated and stand on the right side of history against the tidal wave of misinformation and anti-Semitism that we are witnessing today. The Jewish people have a land of their own, and it’s here to stay.