It Always Remained the Land of Israel
Jews have lived in the Land of Israel continuously for the last 3300 years at least. This fact will be documented in this section. The Roman triumph over the Jewish Great Rebellion of 69 AD that resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple, the central place of Judaic worship, did not disseminate the Jewish nation. Just 60 years later the Bar Kokhba revolt took place. This rebellion required far more Roman military strength to crush than the Great revolt. After the latter rebellion, inspired and led by Rabbi Akiva the great Mishnaic scholar who was executed by the Romans for sedition like Jesus one hundred years earlier, Judaism continued to flourish in the Land of Israel. This is evident in the Mishnah, the recorded scholarship of that period. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (the Patriarch) (135-219 AD), scholar and leader of the Jewish community, who compiled and redacted the Mishnah (the first compilation of the Pharisaic “oral Law”) in the Galilean town of Zipori (Sepphoris) less than 70 years after the Bar Kokhba revolt, was also an affluent merchant and owner of plantations with lots of political clout in the Roman administration. The accomplishments of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (born during the Bar Kokhba revolt) following the devastating losses of the Jews in their two major revolts against the Roman Empire are testimony to the resilience of the Jewish nation. It is noteworthy that as many as 18 synagogues were excavated in Zipori this far; objective testimony to the presence of large Jewish communities in Israel in the third Century, less than 200 years after the destruction of the Second Temple.
Debunking the myth of “Zionist Myths”
One of the common misconceptions concerning the Jewish state is that this country is a new creation of European Jewish settlers who arrived there starting in the 1880’s. Arab propaganda claims that the Romans vanquished the Jewish nation in 72 AD, destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem (the very existence of which is a “Zionist myth” according to Yasser Arafat the Rais of the “Palestinian” Arabs), and exiled the Jews to Europe where they somehow vanished. Then they somehow reappeared in the 19th Century as crusader “colonists” who are trying to steal Arab land that never belonged to them in the first place. One version of this propaganda claims that the Jewish European “colonialists” are not the descendents of Jacob but of the Khazars who for some odd reason converted to Judaism. All these stories could be discounted and forgotten like bad jokes, if not repeated by some “history” professors, often endowed by Petrodollars. This information is included here because you may encounter these falsehoods on campus and must be prepared to refute them. Many maps are included in this section to allow you to comprehend the historical evidence. They will give you a geographic – historical background to allow you to surprise your tourist guide!
The first two maps are of Israel during the two major revolts against the Romans.
In this map you can see the routes of the seven Roman legions (out of a total of twelve legions in the whole empire) needed to crush this revolt (but not the Jewish people!) in more than two years!
Following the compilation of the Mishnah, Jewish scholars continue their intellectual activity in the Land of Israel. The Mishnah was followed by the Talmud (the "Jerusalem" version, 3rd to 5th Century), the Tosephtah (additions to the Talmud, 5th to 7th Century), the Zohar (the main exposition of the Cabbalists, 13th Century), the "Shulkhan Arukh" (the authoritative compilation of rules of social and religious daily behavior of Rabbinical Judaism, 16th Century), plus hundreds of Jewish religious and philosophical monographs (11th through 19th Centuries).
Such extensive intellectual activity required the contributions of thousands of Jewish scholars over the last two millennia. The intellectual activity of those scholars required a social and economic infrastructure of scores of non-scholar Jews for every Jewish scholar. In brief, history tells us that with the exception of a short period in the 7th Century, following the Arab bloody conquest of the Land of Israel, Jewish intellectual activity flourished in the homeland of the Jewish people, as did extensive Jewish presence. Large Jewish populations existed over the years in many urban centers, notably in Tiberias, Safed, Hebron and Jerusalem. The hiatus in Jewish intellectual activity in the Land of Israel immediately following the Arab conquest refutes another claim of Arab BIG LIE propaganda that Arabs were historically friendly to Jews until recently, when "European Zionist colonialists" showed up. The following map shows the archeological evidence for Jewish communities in the Land in the Third and fifth Centuries respectively. Notice that even in the 5th Century Jews constituted the majority in the Galilee.
The following map shows the documented sites of Jewish communities up to the 11th Century.
In brief, the Land of Israel has been truly an "occupied territory" since the 7th Century - occupied by barbarian Arab invaders, similarly to the occupation of Italy by barbarian Germanic invaders. However, unlike the latter, the Arabs have not assimilated the prevailing Judeo-Christian culture but have been maintaining their militant xenophobic culture up to date.
Anther aspect of Muslim propaganda is that the Jews are European illegitimate “crusaders”. The following map refutes this false assertion.
This map, depicting Jewish communities within 100 years after the Arab invasion, demonstrates that at that time there were by far more Jewish communities under Islamic rule than under European Christian rule. Almost a million of the descendents of those Jews, who were persecuted for centuries by the Muslims, immigrated to Israel once the country was open to Jewish immigration under its “Law of Return”. This much for the Muslim BIG LIES about the origin of the Israeli Jews and about the tolerance of non-Muslims by Muslims.
Since the 1880’s there has been a significant increase in the immigration rate of Jews to their homeland. It started before the formulation of modern political Zionism and was enhanced again when the British international mandate was established to create a political refuge for Jews in their historical homeland. The following map shows the enhanced land acquisition and establishment of Jewish agricultural communities in Israel. This map refutes another Arab BIG LIE that the Jews stole Arab land. The truth is that Arab real estate was purchased wherever available, as can be seen from the spotty distribution of the growing number of green patches on this map.
This expansion and spread of Jewish communities was accompanied with a parallel increase of the infrastructure as illustrated in the following roadmaps.
If there was an established Arab population in Israel in 1917, as claimed by the Arabs it is not evident from the limited network of roads in that period. Notice the Jewish acquisition of land south of Jerusalem on the way to Hebron already before 1928 and it extension in the following 20 years, before the 1948 war. This land happens to be south of “Green Line” the 1949 armistice line, and Israel must now to argue with the US about building a security fence around the resettled Jewish communities on that Jewish land. (Gush Etzion that you will visit on your trip).
A highly informative map is that of Jewish Settlements in the Land of Israel before WWI and before the Balfour Declaration. In the following map one can see the distribution of the Jewish immigrants and the rapid increase of the number of Jewish immigrants to Ottoman’s “Southern Syria” long before the international community politically recognized their presence.
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