FACT SHEET: The Jewish people are both the indigenous and ancestral people of the land they currently live in known as Israel.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The modern state of Israel came into existence on May 14, 1948.  The Ottoman Empire ended during World War One and the British took over with their Palestine mandate. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration indicated that the British would welcome the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while at the same time safeguarding the rights of the non-Jewish population. This led to great hostility from the Muslim population to a Jewish homeland, and the British delaying their exit from the Palestinian Mandate. 

On August 23, 1929, Arab residents in the city of Hebron "led a pogrom against their 800 Jewish neighbors as documented by The Jewish Virtual Library. 67 Jews were killed. Synagogues and homes, lived in for generations, were destroyed."

It also explains why the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini was making visits to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to obtain "a German-Italian declaration recognizing the independence of Arab states and their right to work to prevent the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the Holy Land." He did not succeed in his mission.

According to Yad Vashem, "Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a despicable antisemite and ardent Nazi supporter. Nevertheless, the role he played in the Holocaust was marginal." 

Haj Amin al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, 1941Credit: German Federal Archives

The Jewish people without their own homeland since 70 AD had endured centuries of pogroms, persecution, ethnic cleansing, forced religious conversion, and in the 20th century in Europe the Holocaust. The revulsion of the international community in the aftermath of opening the death camps underscored the Zionist case for a Jewish homeland.  What goes unmentioned in the conversation over Israel and Palestine is that there had never been a Palestinian state or kingdom prior to its creation together with the reemergence of a Jewish state in 1948.

Let’s be clear:

Before Israel, there was a British mandate, not a Palestinian state.
-Before the British Mandate, there was the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
-Before the Ottoman Empire, there was the Islamic state of the Mamluks of Egypt, not a Palestinian state.…

— Jenn Griffin (@HotBrandMedia) October 11, 2023

Although the United Nations had authorized a two state partition: One Jewish and One Palestinian Arab.  The Palestinians allied with their Arab neighbors in a coalition to invade and destroy the new Jewish nation, and although outgunned in the first Arab-Israeli War 1948-49, Israel survived, and gained territory against their aggressors.  

Wars would continue with the Suez Crisis in 1956, and the Six Days War in 1967. Israel's victory in the Six Days War redrew the map of the Middle East with the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria taken over by the Jewish state.

The Arab states together with communist Cuba tried to destroy Israel in another war of aggression  fifty years ago October 6, 1973 during high holy Jewish holidays in what became known as the Yom Kippur War.

Communists lie, and one of their favorite past times is rewriting history. The case of Israel is an example of this on steroids. The Soviet Union assisted the Arab states in the lead up to the Six Days War, and in the disastrous aftermath initiated an active measures campaign that over a half century later has proven effective in harming Israel and the United States. A 2019 paper titled "THE KGB AND ANTI -ISRAEL PROPAGANDA OPERATIONS" by Eli Cohen and Elizabeth Boyd is available online that explains this in greater detail, but here is partial summary taken from it.

Operation SIG is the KGB operation to sow worldwide disapproval for the US and Israel. SIG is the Russian acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Jewish (or Zionist) Government.” The operation started shortly after 1967, when the drive for Arab unity collapsed along with the economies of the armies that attacked Israel (Shlaim, 2003). ...“After defeat of Soviet-controlled Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day war, the Soviet Union started a widespread under-cover campaign against Israel, involving propaganda as well as direct military support (funding, arms, training) to terrorist groups declaring Israel as their enemy. Additionally, the USSR took the decision to increase anti-Israeli sentiment by disseminating anti-Zionist propaganda and even referencing previous anti-Semitic tropes from Western culture… The overall goal of the campaign was to spread the idea that the state of Israel was an oppressive, imperialist state which was built on unjust terms operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972 to turn the Arab world against Israel and the United States”

This effort officially ended in 1988, but may have been resumed by former KGB officer and current Russian despot Vladimir Putin.

 

Twelve Tribes of Israel 1200 - 1050 BC

 

 

The rest of this blog entry focuses on the history of the Jewish people in the land currently known as Israel, and seeks to dispel this disinformation.

 

I have attended meetings in the United States were folks who identify as progressive would begin the meeting with a land acknowledgement. The Smithsonian Museum's National Museum of the American Indian on their website Native Knowledge 360° provides the following description of the practice.

Land acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native Peoples and non-Natives to recognize Indigenous Peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which we now live. Before public events and other important gatherings hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian, a speaker offers this acknowledgment displayed in the quote container on behalf of everyone present.

After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties.

The Jewish people are indigenous to the land they live on today, and lands inhabited by Palestinians, such as Gaza and the West Bank. Three thousand years ago the state of Israel was dominated by a Jewish community, until they were taken over by the Roman Empire in 63 BC and turned into a protectorate to rule over them, until the Romans crushed them, and drove many of them out of their homeland for violently resisting imperial rule beginning in 66 AD, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD and Jewish resisters to occupation were scattered across the Roman Empire in modern day Iraq, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Eastern Europe. 

The Romans erected the Arch of Titus which depicts the Emperor's sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD to celebrate their victory. It still survives today in Rome just outside of the ruins of the Colosseum. This past week following the start of the wave of terrorist attacks against Israel by Hamas the emblem of the modern state of Israel was projected onto it.

The Romans built this arch to celebrate their defeat of the Jewish people in ancient #Israel. The Roman Empire is long gone, but 2,000 years later, the #Jewish people and Israel are still here. !!!עם ישראל חי pic.twitter.com/T1IUKydKet

— StandWithUs (@StandWithUs) October 10, 2023

More Jewish people returned to Israel following the end of the Roman Empire with the rise of the Islamic Empire, when non-Muslims, including many Jews, were driven out of Saudi Arabia, Jews were allowed to return to their homeland in 637AD after being banished for 500 years, Israel had been renamed Palestine by the Romans, but the name was not formally recognized by the rulers of the Islamic empire.

This is to say that out of the past 3,000 years there has been a Jewish presence in Israel for 3,000 years. The name Israel is an indigenous name for an indigenous people who today are living on their ancestral lands, and the territories occupied by Palestinians today, used to be part of ancient Israel.

The term Palestine has a long history, but the word is a European invention. According to historians the name first appeared in the 12th century BC and derives from the Greek word Philistia,  the name Greek writers gave to the land of the Philistines, and revived by the Romans 1,400 years later in the 2nd century AD as "Syria Palaestina."  However the name Palestine, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, had no official status until the British took over the land from the Ottoman Empire after WW1 through the League of Nations and it was called the Mandate for Palestine, but it also recognized the right to a Jewish homeland.

Centuries of history in 18 minutes – @MelanieLatest unravels the truth and myth of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Full interview 👇
🗣️ @francisjfoster @KonstantinKisin pic.twitter.com/46bR8RNmfz

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) October 9, 2023

This is not to say that the self-identified Palestinians do not have a right to a sovereign state, but the problem has been when repeatedly offered one, many have preferred to take the opportunity to wage a war of extermination against Israel with the aid and encouragement of neighboring (or nearby) Islamic states. The Palestinian problem is truly a Palestinian problem with the existence of a Jewish state in a sea of Muslim ones. It has been compounded by communist misinformation first spread by the KGB in an active measure against Israel and the United States.