Pre-State Israel: Jewish Claim To The Land Of Israel
by Mitchell Bard
Category » Pre-State Israel (Palestine/Eretz Israel)
Reference
“All of Palestine is Holy Muslim Waqf Land”: A Myth and its Roots
The Cairo Conference
Dunam
Historical Sites in Central Palestine
“The Innocents Abroad” by Mark Twain, Excerpts
Jewish Claim to the Land of Israel
Origins of the Name “Palestine”
Origins of Palestinian Arabs
Pre-State Israel Polls
The Tobiansky Affair
Turks Surrender Jerusalem to the British
Footage of General Allenby Entering Jerusalem. December 11, 1917.
International Relations
League of Nations
Partition Plan
Truman Administration
The Vatican
Arab-Jewish Relations
The Arab Revolt
The Forgotten Tiberias Pogrom of 1938
Photographs
Arab Riots of the 1920s
Photographs
The Arabic Name of the Jewish State
Arabs in Palestine
Assassination of of Count Bernadotte
Assassination of Hayim Arlosoroff
Berit Shalom
Hadassah Convoy Massacre
Hebron Massacre
The Palestine Arab Congress
Pre-State Peace Efforts
War of Israeli Independence
Ottoman & British Rule
Atlit Prison Break
The British Mandate
During World War I
Jewish Immigration to Palestine
The Mahane Yehuda Police Station
Nebi Samwil Photos
The Safed City Police Station
Special Session of GA on Palestine
Under Ottoman Rule
Ottoman Rule
U.S., Polish and Swedish Consulates Bombed Over Partition
When Churchill Severed Transjordan From Palestine
Primary Source Documents
Eleanor Roosevelt: My Round-the-World Adventures
CIA Report on Possible Developments in Palestine Following Partition Vote
Statement by UK Foreign Secretary Bevin
U.S. Proposes Temporary Trusteeship
CIA Report on the Consequences of Partition
CIA Report on Palestine Before Partition
CIA Report on Situation in the Mediterranean and the Near East
Martin Buber's Open Letter to Gandhi
Robert Kennedy's Reports from Palestine
Roosevelt-King Saud Correspondence
OSS on Arab Opposition of U.S. Support of Zionists
Speech: The Jewish Homeland and the Palestine Mandate
Convention Between the U.S. and Great Britain Regarding Palestine
Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence
The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence
Zionist Organization Statement on Palestine
Important Figures
Ruth Aliav (Kluger)
Arthur Balfour
David Ben-Gurion
Menachem Begin
Winston Churchill
Theodor Herzl
Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky
Walter Rothschild
Herbert Samuel
High Commissioners for Palestine
Committees & Conferences
The Sykes-Picot Agreement
The Balfour Declaration
King-Crane Commission
San Remo Conference
Jewish National Home Determined by San Remo Conference
Minutes of Palestine Meeting of the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers
The Shaw Commission
The Peel Commission
The St. James Conference
The Biltmore Conference
The Anglo-American Committee
Building a Jewish Army
The Altalena Affair
Evolution of Jewish Defense in Palestine
Jewish Brigade Group
Jewish Defense Organizations
Ha-Shomer
LoHamei Herut Israel
The Jewish Legion
Olei Ha-Gardom
Palestinian Jewish Parachutists
Hebrew-Language Clandestine Radio
The Zion Mule Corps of Gallipoli
Zionism
Table of Contents
Ahdut Ha-Avodah
Bilu
Bustenai
Congress of Berlin
The Histadrut
Jewish Colonial Trust
Jewish Settlements
Keren Hayesod
The Labor Battalion
Palestine Office
Solel Boneh
Stockade and Watchtower
Va'ad Leumi
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Pre-State Israel:Table of Contents|Origin of "Palestine"|Origins of Palestinians
A common misperception is that the Jews were forced into the diaspora by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. and then, 1,800 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back. In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years. A national language and a distinct civilization have been maintained.
The Jewish people base their claim to the land of Israel on at least four premises: 1) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham; 2) the Jewish people settled and developed the land; 3) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people and 4) the territory was captured in defensive wars.
The term "Palestine" is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word "Filastin" is derived from this Latin name.
The Twelve Tribes of Israel formed the first constitutional monarchy in Palestine about 1000 B.C. The second king, David, first made Jerusalem the nation's capital. Although eventually Palestine was split into two separate kingdoms, Jewish independence there lasted for 212 years. This is almost as long as Americans have enjoyed independence in what has become known as the United States.
Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.
Many Jews were massacred by the Crusaders during the 12th century, but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement-more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel.
When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not." In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called "the holy land" (al-Arad al-Muqaddash).
Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."
The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria" and that, "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."
Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's capture of the West Bank.
Israel's international "birth certificate" was validated by the promise of the Bible; uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of Israel by most other states; and, most of all, the society created by Israel's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence.
Sources: Moshe Kohn, “The Arabs’ ‘Lie’ of the Land,” Jerusalem Post, (October 18, 1991); Avner Yaniv, PLO, (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Study Group of Middle Eastern Affairs, August 1974), p. 5; Encyclopaedia Judaica.
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