Jason Hamaan Well, the land in question was first known as the Kingdom of Judea, hence why Jews are called what we are. It was led by King Saul, then King David, and then King Solomon. During the reign of King Solomon’s son, the kingdom of Judea split into two kingdoms, one was named Israel.
Eventually, the Roman Empire conquered the Jewish State and after some major revolts against the empire by the Jews. The second revolt occurred in 135 AD. In retaliation for the revolt, they exiled yet more Jews, took many more to Rome as slaves, outright banned us from Jerusalem.
But the idea of returning to Israel with Jerusalem as our capital became staunchly embedded in Jewish Culture.
As of today, Jews are the only ethnoreligious group who ever had a sovereign, independent kingdom embracing what is currently called Israel, a land we once had at the time of the Romans. We have a land with the same capital we used 2000 years ago, with the same language and religion being practiced.
But I hate seeing this as an argument as to why Palestinians don’t have a right to self-determination or a state of their own. Many migrated from north-western Arabia into the Levant during the Byzantine period. They’ve been living there and continuously for near 1800 years—who are we to disenfranchise such a people with a connection like that?
I see so many answers here about how Palestinians don’t exist or shouldn’t have rights, and frankly, it’s unsettling to see the lack of compassion. Palestinians did not identify as a unique people group for a while, but they found a unique idenity.
All ethnic groups at one point began to distinguish themselves from their neighbours, and Palestinians happened to form theirs slightly later. This obsession and bigotry flung at Palestinians helps nobody.
Palestinians and Israelis need to think of each other as people with thoughts, feelings, a history, and a future. We need to understand what we’ve both been through, and grapple with our pain together.
I’m genuinely curious about the history of the land that is now called ‘Israel’ and since there is an issue between Palestinians and Israel, who was really the first on that land?
There was a kingdom of Israel here centuries before Christ. The origins are cloudy, I think. The stele of Mernepta from about 1200 BC mentions Israel. And certainly there were Jews here in later times, there is massive archaeological evidence, and mention of it in documents of the time both by Jews and other countries. The Jewish scriptures origin are also clouded in time, but the beginnings of Jewish law - the Mishna - was in Israel in the 2nd century, and that is unarguable.
I see that the Wikipedia article “History of Israel” has a lot of detail and it’s easy reading. Check it out.
I’m not knowledgeable about the history of Arab people in this region.
If you mean later history, there were always a few Jews in what is today Israel, but the majority were dispersed in other countries. The city of Safed in the Galilee was a major center of Jewish mysticism in the 16th century. We also have evidence of the Jewish communities here in letters by the Meshulachs - people who went abroad to collect funds for the Jewish community here (see link at the end of this post.)
Jews began purchasing land here when this was still the Ottoman Empire. At that time there was no cohesive Palestinian identity, but Arab nationalism began to emerge (as a response to the Young Turk movement), and they did object to the Turkish government about Jewish land purchase. But the government didn’t do much.
When the Ottoman Empire broke up, the League of Nations decided what to do with the territory, and in the interim the British were given a mandate for control of the region that is Israel today. When the Mandate ended, the UN proposed to partition the land between the Jews and Arabs who lived here. The Jews agreed, even though the proposal involved a small strip along the coast and a lot of valueless arid desert.
The Arabs refused, and launched a war. They lost. Many Palestinians fled or were thrown out, and their land was taken over by the new Jewish state. The Palestinians who remained are Israeli citizens today, they make up one fifth of the population, they had a party in the previous governing coalition, and are better off than any of their fellows in the region.
In 1967 Jordan, Egypt and Syria went to war with Israel and after six days of fighting they lost. Israel then eventually made peace with some of them. Each time we made peace with one of the countries from which we took it, we returned the land, or offered to: Egypt took back the Sinai but did not take Gaza, and Jordan did not take the West Bank. There were negotiations with Syria (between Barak and Assad Sr.) and if we had made peace we’d have given back the Golan but the negotiations failed and we are still in a state of war with Syria.
The West Bank at that time was full of Palestinians who had fled in 1948 and lived in “refugee camps” which became towns (slums, mostly). Anarchy reigned, there were gangs, and people were afraid to send their kids to school from what I read. Then in 1995 Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, and the West Bank was divided into areas under Palestinian control (A and B) and an area under Israeli control ©, and a Palestinian government authority was established, the Palestinian Authority (PA) with a police. The PA police instituted law and order, and the PA began to build a civil infrastructure, mainly facilitated by Salam Fayyad, a very capable Finance Minister and then Prime Minister. But the PA was corrupt and Fayyad eventually got sick of that and quit.
Meantime there was a militant Islamist faction among the Palestinians, Hamas. Israel helped strengthen them, thinking this would prevent the PA from becoming too strong.
Israel had established some settlements on the West Bank (and also in Gaza), and after the Israeli PM was murdered and a right wing government came to power the settlements were increased and entrenched, so that today there are nearly half a million Jews living there in Area C.
In 2005 PM Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw all Israelis from Gaza, dismantle the settlements, pull out the army, and leave it to be controlled by the Palestinians. He explicitly declared that this was in order to preclude any similar pullout on the West Bank. After the withdrawal there were elections, and people voted for Hamas as the majority party in what was supposed to be a unity government. For various reasons Hamas and the PA couldn’t come to agreement (Israel also had a contribution to that), and in 2007 Hamas seized total power in a coup, and have been ruling with an iron hand ever since, and using all their resources to attack Israel ever since. As a result Gaza is on the border of humanitarian disaster, with 50% unemployment.
Hamas is also gaining power on the West Bank, as the PA weakens.
Israel keeps tight watch on the borders, but every time the attacks subside, they are loosened. The past few years they have been more open than any time since Hamas took over, with goods flowing through (even dual purpose materials) and thousands of Gazans coming into Israel to work every day. The conception was that Hamas cared about the economy and the welfare of the people and wouldn’t attack. This proved on Saturday October 7th to be incorrect.
