A brief history of Jews in Israel

from 70 CE onwards

This isn’t a well thought out essay. It’s a simple recitation of some facts. Why? Because I posted this definition of Zionism on Twitter:

And some guy going by the handle @harrlyquinn wrote the following:

Rather than reply to him there, which is incredibly cumbersome, given that I only get 240 characters at a time, I thought I’d post it here. It’s a brief sketch and lacks a ton of detail that would be worth including. But it’ll serve the purpose. And maybe this can serve as a resource for other people facing the cuckoo bananas claim that our land was empty of Jews for thousands of years and that we suddenly decided to come back, as if out of nowhere.

And here we go… (pay attention, Harold):

In 70 CE, the Romans crushed our rebellion. They burned the Temple, destroyed Jerusalem, killed over a million of us, and sold another hundred thousand into slavery.

In 135 BCE, the Romans crushed our rebellion. They killed over half a million of us and exiled a bunch more.

In 352 BCE, the Romans crushed our rebellion. The son of Constantine was a bitch and supported some of the earliest Christian pogroms against us, so we rebelled. Again. And lost. Again.

In 438 BCE, the Romans removed the ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount.

In 611, the Persians invaded the Byzantine Empire, and in 613, the Jews revolted against the Byzantines and sided with the Persians. In 617, the Persians turned on us, banned us from the Jerusalem area, and destroyed a synagogue that had been built on the Temple Mount. In 628, the Romans promised to restore our rights if we'd help them kick the Persians out. We did. They reneged, and massacred us. To this day, Coptic Christians fast in penance for this broken promise.

In 638 CE, Islam invaded and conquered us. There were still around a third of a million of us living in Israel. Most of the Christians converted to Islam. Most of the Jews did not.

At first, the Muslims let us settle in Jerusalem and worship freely. But in 717, they instituted harsh taxes on Jews, and in 720, they banned us -- again -- from praying on the Temple Mount. The Patriarch Michael the Syrian mentions 30 synagogues that were destroyed in Tiberias alone during the earthquake of 749.

Documents from 1015 and 1080 refer to a significant Jewish community in Rafah. During the late 900s and early 1000s, according to the Muslim historian Al-Muqaddasi, most of the assayers of corn, dyers, bankers, and tanners were Jews. There were Jewish communities in coastal cities and in Hebron.

During the Crusader reign of terror (the 1100s and 1200s), the Christians persecuted the hell out of us.

In 1187, when Saladin defeated the Crusaders, he invited us to return and settle in Jerusalem.

In 1260, the Mamluks took over our land and held it until the Ottoman conquest in 1517. The Mamluks persecuted the Jews fiercely.

In 1266, the Mamluks barred Jews from entering the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. This ban continued until 1967, when we liberated Hebron.

In 1267, when Nachmanides arrived in Jerusalem from Spain, he found only two Jews there. Tons in the country as a whole, though, so he brought a Torah scroll to Jerusalem from the Jewish community of Nablus.

During much of the 1300s and 1400s, the Christians got the Pope to issue an order forbidding sea captains from carrying Jews to their land.

In 1470, there were 150 Jewish families in Jerusalem. By 1495, there were 200 Jewish families in Jerusalem.

But the Christians prevented us from returning to our land, and those of us who were already living there were being treated like garbage by the Mamluks.

In 1569, a thousand wealthy Jewish families in Safed were to be deported to Cyprus. When the Muslims realized the vast financial loss they would incur by losing all the Jewish rent, they cancelled the order.

In 1662, the Druze destroyed the Jewish towns of Safed and Tiberias.

In 1714, a Dutch researcher named Adriaan Reland recorded significant Jewish population centers throughout the country, particularly in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Gaza City.

In 1834, the Jewish community of Safed was looted, and the Jewish community of Hebron was massacred.

By 1890, Jews were the majority of people living in Jerusalem, even though we were only about 10% of the population of the country as a whole.

With the birth of modern political Zionism as a movement, Jews began to purchase land in the country and sponsored settlements.

I don't have to explain the rest of the story. The Ottoman Turks lost WWI, Britain was charged by the League of Nations with the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Jewish ancestral homeland of Palestine, the name Europeans had used for Judea since the failed revolt in 135 CE. The Brits almost immediately reneged on their agreement, giving 79% of the designated area to an Arabian prince named Abdullah, which is now called the Kingdom of Jordan, and doing everything they could to hamper Jewish immigration to our land. The Arabs of the 21% remaining land refused to countenance any Jewish sovereign presence in the land, and in 1948, when the Brits left, they called their fellow Arabs, and 7 armies descended on the tiny piece of land with the intent of wiping out every single Jew living there.

When they lost, Israel was established as a state.

To conclude:

At no point between the Roman destruction of Judea in 70 CE and the current day was there so much as a single day when Jews were not living in our communities in Israel. If we sometimes shrank to only a matter of a few thousands, it was because of Muslims and Christians taking turns massacring us.

But anyone who thinks Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” have a right to our land because some of them lived here before Israel became a modern state — and let’s not forget that UNRWA defines a “Palestinian refugee” as including any non-Jews who arrived in the area even as late as 1946 (!) — must recognize that any argument to that effect is thousands of times more applicable to the Jewish ownership of the land.

The Arabs here are squatters, plain and simple. We paid insane prices for our own land in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And much of that land, which we actually bought for exorbitant prices, is what they dare to call “occupied Palestinian lands” today.

They have no sovereign rights to so much as a grain of sand anywhere in the Land of Israel. And the time is coming when they will have made themselves sufficiently odious that even the pathetic battered women of the Israeli government will realize there’s only one solution. They have to go somewhere else.

For the first time, I am opening comments. I probably should have done so on my earlier pieces, and I may, in fact, go back and change them. But if anyone has comments to make, have at it.