By Lawrence Solomon | Published by Jewish News Syndicate
Israeli Jews are widely cast as colonists who immigrated to “Palestine” over the last century and then displaced Palestine’s indigenous Arabs.
This narrative has things backward. The Jews are indigenous; the Arabs are the colonists.
Israel and its capital Jerusalem were founded by King David, a Jewish king, 3,000 years ago. Over those 3,000 years, Jerusalem and its Jews were conquered and/or colonized by, among others, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamluks, Turks and the British. These invaders eventually left; the indigenous Jews remained.
The Romans were especially fateful, not least because their animus towards the Jews helped create the modern myth that Palestinians have always been Arabs.
Because the Jews for over a century kept rebelling against Roman rule and sometimes succeeded in humiliating the world’s greatest power, the Romans exacted revenge when they emerged victorious. They destroyed the temple that Herod the Great, the king of the Jews, had built; they packed tens of thousands of Jews in slave ships bound to Rome; they built the Arch of Titus to commemorate their victory over the Jews; and, to add insult to injury, they renamed the conquered land in honor of the Jews’ historic enemies: the Philistines. It became Syria Palaestina, i.e., Palestinian Syria.
Modern-day Arabs who now call themselves “Palestinians” appropriated the term to make it seem as if they have been the historic people of Palestine. Yet the Philistines were nothing like the desert people called Arabs. As DNA evidence confirms, the Philistines, also known as the “sea people,” hailed from the Greek islands, making them European in origin.
Arabs weren’t commonly called Palestinians until the 1960s, when the Soviet Union invented the “Palestine Liberation Organization” to wrest Israel from the West. Before the 1960s, “Palestinian” generally referred to Jews. The Palestine Post, now renamed The Jerusalem Post, was a Jewish newspaper. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra, now renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, was a Jewish organization.
Arabs wouldn’t make their mark in the land of the Jews until the 7th century AD with the emergence of the Muslim empire, one of the largest the world has ever seen. At its height, the Arabs had colonized everything from Spain and North Africa in its west to the Indian subcontinent to its east, covering an area exceeding 11 million square kilometers. The region vaguely known as “Palestine”—the Romans had given it no firm borders—was but a small part of the Arabs’ immense colonial empire.
“Palestine” never became a coherent country to the Arabs, who viewed the largely unpopulated expanse as part of Syria. Arabs didn’t even have an indigenous name for it—Filastin is the Arabic pronunciation of Rome’s name. Although Arabs and then later the Muslim Ottomans held Palestine as part of their empire, it was a neglected part, so much so that Jerusalem, once a Jewish metropolis of 600,000, stagnated under Muslim rule to become a backwater of 2,393 households, according to an 1871-1872 Ottoman census.
In contrast to the Arabs, the Jews never had much of an empire. According to the biblical account, Jews managed only a small empire under King Solomon, David’s son, around 1000 BC. Even if that account is true, and some dispute that Solomon had any empire at all, over the last 3,000 years the Jews’ only claim has been to their ancestral indigenous land.
Because the Torah, the Jewish constitution, never aspired to empire, Jews readily gave the Sinai back to Egypt after Israel won it in the 1956 Sinai War, and again after Israel won it in the 1967 Six-Day War. The Jewish territory within the region that constitutes the 22 countries of today’s Arab League is vanishingly small. It amounts to one-sixth of 1% of the land area, versus 99.83% for the Arabs.
In claiming that they are the indigenous people of Israel, today’s Palestinian Arabs faced a challenge: How could they counter the evidence in the Old and New Testaments, which describe at length the Jews of Israel in the centuries before and the century after Jesus’s birth.
The Quran overcame the challenge by claiming that Moses was a Muslim. So were Jesus and his 12 disciples. By trumping the biblical descriptions of Jews via the Quran’s revisionist history, Arabs lay claim to an origin that extends to the biblical era.
Never mind that Muhammad founded the religion of Islam six centuries after Jesus died; that archeological evidence corroborates biblical accounts of Jews in Israel; and that ancient Greek and Roman historians identify Jews as the inhabitants of the biblical lands identified as Israel.
The Arabs of Palestine, whose numbers have grown prodigiously over the last century, may have credible arguments for their land claims. They should make them and drop the absurd arguments that Jews aren’t indigenous to ancient Israel and that Jews who settle in their ancestral homeland are colonists.
The original version of this opinion piece is available at the publisher’s website here
Lawrence Solomon is a financial writer, a former contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a former op-ed editor of Toronto’s Financial Post and the author of seven books.
Image: Modern-day reconstruction of Jerusalem during the 10th century BCE from the City of David, part of the Jerusalem Walls National Park. Credit: Yoni Shifrah via Wikimedia Commons.
One reply on “The Jews are indigenous to Israel, the Arabs are the colonists ”
Jake Buhler writes: We are so sad that the hatred once shown to the Jewish people that finally resulted in the destruction of Hitler and Nazism has not resulted in a movement to statehood for the Palestinian people. The statehood of Israel took place in 1948. We ask you to use some of your energies to work for statehood of the Palestinian people.
L. Solomon replies: I agree that it is sad that the Arabs of Palestine never achieved statehood. They were offered statehood by the United Nations in 1947 and refused. They were also offered statehood on earlier and later occasions, always with the same result — the Jews in every case accepted a division of the land, the Arabs didn’t.
US President Bill Clinton, who negotiated one of the many compromise agreements over the years, thought he had a deal in 2000 — he persuaded the Jews to give the Arabs a deal so generous that they couldn’t refuse. Under the deal Clinton negotiated, the Arabs would get 97% of the West Bank, an increase of the Gaza Strip territory by about one-third, and the eastern part of Jerusalem, which would become the capitol of the Arab state.
Yet the Arabs not only again refused, they also launched an intifada using suicide bombers targeting supermarkets and buses, leading to 1,000 Israeli civilian deaths and thousands more injured.
There is only one reasonable explanation for the absence of a state for the Palestinian Arabs — the explanation that they themselves time and again have given. They refuse to accept the existence of a neighboring Jewish state, no matter how small.
Mr. Buhler, you ask that we devote some of our energies to work for statehood for the Palestinian people. We have done so in the past and will continue to seek viable solutions, but the task becomes ever more difficult. After Israel gave Palestinian Arabs the Gaza Strip — effectively a state of their own, that they could run entirely as they wished — they responded immediately with rocket attacks against Jews in Israel and, on Oct. 7th, with an invasion that slaughtered and kidnapped civilians. They say that, if given the opportunity, they will do so “again and again.”
If we are to take Palestinian Arabs at their word, we need to accept the sad truth: The Arabs of Palestine will not have a state of their own in future until they either agree to live alongside the State of Israel or succeed in eradicating the State of Israel.