Why the Jewish People Are the Rightful Owners of the Land of Israel | Opinion

This article is adapted from a Hebrew-language version of the same article, which ran earlier this year at the Israeli publication ICE.

Anti-Israel lies have taken such a strong hold in Western college campuses and throughout the media that basic historical truths about the Jewish people's undeniable right to the Land of Israel have been tossed aside and replaced with falsehoods that fuel conflict and ignorance.

These truths, drawn from ancient and modern history, archaeology, and even international and U.S. law, do not simply disprove the Palestinian propaganda depiction of Jewish usurpers who swooped in a century ago to steal Arab land. These truths demonstrate that the Jewish people have a long-standing and exclusive right to the Land of Israel.

Countless archaeological artifacts have been discovered confirming the Bible's descriptions of the ancient Kingdoms of Judea and Israel.

The "Siloam Inscription" is one of the most important of those archaeological discoveries. These are ancient Hebrew engravings on the wall of the Siloam tunnel, which transported water and was built during the reign of Hezekiah, the king of Judea, almost 2,800 years ago.

The Hebrew inscription describes the tunnel's construction, confirming the story of the mining of the Siloam tunnel as described in the Bible. It was unearthed in the ancient City of David in eastern Jerusalem.

In the 1st century B.C.E., the Kingdom of Judea was conquered by the Roman Empire. There is no historical dispute that in both the early Roman period and the Greek period, most of the Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel.

After more than a century of Roman rule, the Jews rebelled against the Romans in the Great Revolt of 66 C.E. The Jewish revolt was a resounding failure, resulting in the destruction of the Second Temple. Still, even after the crushing military defeat, many Jews remained in the Land of Israel.

To celebrate their triumph over the Jews, the Romans erected the Arch of Titus, which depicts the scene of the Roman victory procession in Rome after the suppression of the Jewish revolt. This huge marble gate, which dates to the 1st century C.E., shows Roman soldiers hauling off holy vessels from the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, including the Menorah (which is today the official symbol of the State of Israel).

The Arch of Titus can still be found today in central Rome. Near the arch is the Colosseum, which was partially erected thanks to the money and treasure the Romans plundered from the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Some Roman coins have also been discovered from this period bearing the inscription "Judaea conquered." The "Judaea Capta" coins were a special edition of Roman currency issued by the Roman Emperor Vespasian to celebrate the quelling of the Jewish rebellion by his son Titus.

The last Jewish revolt against the Romans, the Bar Kokhba revolt, broke out in 132 C.E. in response to harsher anti-Jewish persecution by the Roman Empire.

Following the suppression of the revolt, Emperor Hadrian decided to punish the Jews by changing the name of the province from "Judea" to "Palestine."

For the Romans, the name "Palestine" had nothing to do with modern-day Palestinians, who of course did not even remotely exist at the time. The Romans knew the coastal region of the Land of Israel as "Palestine," which was named after the ancient Philistine people who once inhabited the coastal territory of the Land of Israel.

The Philistines were part of the "sea people" who were said to have come from the island of Crete and invaded the eastern Mediterranean 3,200 years ago. The Philistines disappeared from the history books when the Assyrians conquered and exiled them some 700 years before the Roman period.

A 2019 DNA study of skeletons exhumed from Philistine tombs in the coastal Israeli cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon found that the Philistines come from a "southern European gene pool." In other words, the ancient Philistines have no genetic relation whatsoever to the modern Palestinian-Arabs.

The decision of Emperor Hadrian to change the name of the land to Palestine led to the use of that replacement name in the Roman Empire—and from there, to the various languages of the peoples of Europe.

After the Bar Kokhba revolt suppression, a large Jewish settlement remained in the Land of Israel for the next 600 years, throughout the first centuries of the Christian Byzantine period.

The Holy Land was largely emptied of Jews only after the Arab conquest in the 7th century C.E. The Arabs dispossessed the Jews of their farmland, leaving most of them with no choice but to leave. Despite this, the Jews maintained a continual presence in the four cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed.

Throughout the Ottoman period in the Land of Israel, from 1517 to 1917 C.E., the land was an insignificant part of the Ottoman Empire. It was not even an Ottoman province in its own right, but only a part of the province of Syria. All the historical records of Europeans and Americans who visited the Holy Land during the Ottoman Empire period depicted an empty and abandoned land.

In the mid-19th century, for example, Mark Twain visited the Land of Israel. Twain described it as a "hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land."

The land began to develop again only with the start of the Jewish settlements after the establishment of the Zionist movement, initiating waves of Jewish immigration to the Holy Land.

Significant development came only after the conquest of the land by the British Empire in 1917. This period is when many Arabs from neighboring countries made their way into the Land of Israel as migrant workers. Interestingly, the most popular surnames in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza Strip today include "Hijazi" (a region in Saudi Arabia), "Al-Masri" (which means Egyptian in Arabic), and "Halabi" (which is the city of Aleppo in Syria in Arabic). Other examples abound.

Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the only people who called themselves "Palestinians" were the Jews. Many Zionist and Jewish organizations in Israel even incorporated the name Palestine into their names, such as the Zionist Jewish newspaper Palestine Post, which is now known as The Jerusalem Post.

After the end of World War I, the victorious powers gathered in the city of San Remo, Italy. There, it was decided that the new territories that France and Britain occupied from the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East would be managed as temporary mandates. Turkey officially ceded to Britain all its territory in the Middle East, including Palestine.

A mandate to rule the Land of Israel—the British Mandate for Palestine, from the ancient Roman name—was given to the British (among other areas) by the League of Nations, the organization that preceded the UN. A mandate was given for a limited time, with the aim of preparing the local people for eventual independence and self-rule. With the Mandate for Palestine, Britain officially reiterated all its commitments from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.

The Mandate for Palestine's founding document explicitly stated that a national home for the Jewish people would be established in its territory. It did not expressly mention a national home for any other people.

The Mandate documented the deep historical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, from biblical times to the present day. The territory designated for the British Mandate of Palestine included Transjordan (today, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), Israel, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria (i.e., the West Bank).

The charter of the British Mandate for Palestine has been ratified by the British Parliament, the U.S. Congress, and the League of Nations. When the UN was established, it ratified all the Mandates of the League of Nations, including the British Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate, therefore, is a binding international treaty which has become part of international law, British law, and American law.

The international legal status of the Land of Israel has not changed since the British Mandate, except for Israel's formal renunciation of Transjordan as part of the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.

After the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, the Arab armies invaded with the aim of eliminating every Jew there. They failed in their mission, but the Jordanian army managed to conquer Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem (naming it the "West Bank"), and the Egyptian army seized the Gaza Strip.

The armistice line with the West Bank was, and still is, called the "Green Line." Crucially, this line constituted only a temporary ceasefire line, and attained no formal legal or political validity. Israel appealed to Jordan and Egypt after the 1948 invasion to designate the Green Line as an international border, but the Arab nations did not agree because they did not recognize Israel as a legitimate state at all.

Jews were forced to flee from their communities that fell on the "Arab side" of the Green Line. Immediately after the war, the Jordanian army blew up all the synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem and chopped up Jewish gravestones to pave roads.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan tried again to destroy Israel. The State of Israel won the war and took the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria (West Bank), the Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza strip. All the territory occupied in the war (except for the Sinai) belongs to the Jewish people according to international law, in accordance with the Treaty of San Remo and the British Mandate for Palestine. Israel returned the whole of Sinai to Egypt in the peace treaty of 1979, and unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Unfortunately, these facts have been replaced with propagandistic Palestinian lies, which have permeated Western media and academia alike. That narrative must be countered, and the best way to do so is with the cold, hard facts.

Yair Netanyahu is an Israeli radio host and columnist with a M.A. in government. He is the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.