AuH20 wrote:
The following was a very brief history written by a Duke University history major with a minor in Middle Eastern history.
A Bit of History
There was no Palestinian state until 1988. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan. Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip.
Let’s take a step back and look at the history of that region for a minute. The first evidence of a Jewish presence in the Levant starts showing up in the late Bronze age, 1550-1150 BCE. By the early Iron Age, there was ample evidence of two major Jewish/Israeli kingdoms, Israel and Judea.
Israel and Judea Late 9th century BCE.
The boundaries changed fairly frequently over the next thousand years due to external wars and successional ones. What didn’t change was the fact that there were Jews living there the entire time. During the reign of Herod the Great, 72-4BCE, the Jewish kingdom was a client state of the Roman Empire. the boundaries of Israel, or more properly Judea and Samaria, looked pretty similar to what they do today.
I should note here that during the Roman occupation the areas to the south of Judea were called Philistine, after the tribes that lived there. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the entire region was renamed Palaestina – which was intended as an insult to the Jews, the Philistines were notoriously uncultured – and became a Roman province. This becomes important later.
The Islamic conquest of the Levant started in 634, more than 2000 years after the first Jews appeared there. The conquest was swift and Sharia, or at least the version of Sharia that was practiced then, was imposed. From that point up until the end of WWI, the lands of Israel were controlled by the various Muslim caliphates.
Fast forward a thousand or so years to the Ottoman Empire period. The Turks controlled the Levant and thus the lands that would become modern Israel. During the time the Ottomans controlled the lands, they were known as the Mustaffarate of Jerusalem. I probably should let you know that during the entire Muslim period, Jews were treated as Dwimmi and paid Jizaya, that is the tax on non-muslims and were subject to periodic pogroms. Yet they were still there.
At the end of WWI, the Ottoman lands outside of Turkey proper were divided between the French and British.
It was at this point that Palestine came into common use with British Mandatory Palestine.
Prior to 1922 and the establishment of the Mandate, you could not find the word Palestine used on any map or in any textbook. The Brits, being the insufferable toerags they were back then, insisted on a call-back to the Roman era insult, and chose a ‘modernized’ version of Palaestina.
Regardless, the Brits had promised a Jewish homeland in the Mandate, and many European Jews emigrated at this time.
First up is a complete lack of knowledge about the history of the Levant and the Jewish presence there. I keep hearing the Israelis being called ‘colonizers’ yet their presence in the region predates almost every ethnic group or religion. If anyone could be accused of being colonizers it’s the Muslims. They took over the land with fire and sword more than a thousand years after the Jews had settled there.
It would appear it is the nonexistent people who are colonizers, not the Jews as so often, of late, they have been accused. Further, when the Jews were evicted from Gaza to make way for the colonizers, they left greenhouses and other infrastructure that could sustain life in Gaza. The nonexistent people tore down and destroyed all of that infrastructure thus becoming paupers and requiring humanitarian aid.
b The following was a very brief history written ... (
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