The following blog was first written in 2019, but is even more apt today. It explains in detail that the Israelis or Jews, if you prefer, have owned what is now Israel for thousands of years while the Palestinians rented parts of it during the occupation by the Ottoman Empire. This would be like all Americans being driven out of the United States to live in other countries. Then Canada takes over what is now the U.S. and rents property here to a mixed group of central and South Americans. Finally, U.S. citizens begin to return and BUY property in the former U.S., which, following a war that defeats Canada, is given back to the U.S. citizens as their homeland. But the mixed central and South Americans who were sometimes slaves, sometimes servants, and sometimes renters under the Canadians decide that THEY should own the United States, and so for decades they live on our border, firing rockets into our cities and crying “Death to Americans!” So to whom would the United States really belong?
Here is the actual history of the Israelis in Israel.
Arab states in the United Nations and even American Muslims like Representative Rashida Tlaib of Minnesota, would have us all believe that Israelites are terrorists who stole the land of the Palestinians and now murder them with great glee at every opportunity. None of this, of course, is true.
Abraham, who was the father of Ishmael from whom Arabs are descended and Isaac from who Jews are descended left Ur of the Chaldees which was in southern Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq, and traveled 600 miles to Haran (modern day Turkey) and from there to Canaan (Israel). This area was settled throughout the ages by various groups including the Philistines, who many historians believe to have been Greeks, and by the Canaanites. The latter, were a mixed group who inhabited areas of what are now Syria, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. Ishmael and his mother, Abraham’s wife’s servant, were banished after Isaac’s birth, thus it was the descendants of Isaac, and not of Ishmael, who continued to live throughout the centuries in the land of Canaan. Still, the Israelis often were absent from what is now Israel. After a severe drought, they retreated to Egypt during the time of Joseph. Although Joseph was second in power to the Pharaoh, as the years passed, both Joseph and the Pharaoh died and the Hebrews eventually became slaves of the Egyptians. Later, under the leadership of Moses, they fled Egypt to eventually return to the land of their ancestor, Abraham.
The Hebrew, or Jewish people were repeatedly chased from their homeland over the ensuing centuries, first two of the tribes and gradually more until only two tribes remained. Then came the Babylonian captivity, the rule by Persia, which allowed Jews to return to their homeland, control by the Romans at the time of Christ, the conquest by the Byzantine Empire in 629, and finally by the Arabs in 637. The Ottoman Empire took control in 1516 and under their rule, the mixed group of various Arabs now known as “Palestinians” worked for the Turks as servants or sometimes slaves. Some of them were allowed to rent property from the Turks. The Jews, however, purchased property from the Turks, buying back much of what had historically been their lands. Thus, unlike the “Palestinians,” they owned the land. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, the British took control of Palestine, as the region was then known, and with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, declared their intention to create a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
In 1947, the United Nations devised a plan to divide “Palestine” into territory for the Arabs and territory for the Jews, ignoring the historical right which the Jews had to the land. While the Jews agreed to the plan, the Arabs did not, and a civil war broke out. In May of 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declared the state of Israel as an independent country. President Harry S. Truman of the United States recognized the sovereign nation of Israel that same day.
Since then, Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Arab countries including Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and the “Palestinians.” Israel has won every war and repelled the constant and repeated barrage of missiles from the Gaza Strip, now home to many Palestinians and controlled by the terrorist group, Hamas. Some Palestinians live quietly on the West Bank and in part of Jerusalem. Their homes are comfortable, they work, they have members who serve in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. Still, some of them also, from time to time, rebel against the Jews within whose land they live.
So when Representative Rashida Tlaib claims, “”There is a calming feeling when I think of the Holocaust and the fact that it was my ancestors. Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their dignity, their existence…. It was all done in the name of giving a safe place for Jews post the Holocaust, post the persecution of the Jews around the world…. It was my ancestors who had to suffer to make that happen,” she may be expressing her disgusting feelings correctly, but she is not correctly discussing history.
Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, the ancestors of today’s Jews moved into the land of Canaan, today’s Israel. Today’s Palestinians came a thousand years later and as renters and servants, not as property owners under the Turks. Palestinians didn’t lose their land. They didn’t own it to begin with, and as for suffering to make the Jewish state possible, that was and continues to be their own fault. It is not Israel who fires the first shot. Ever. But they most certainly will fire the last!