In order to place these realities in proper perspective,
its first necessary to reject some thirty years of wildly
irresponsible anti-Israel propaganda. First of all, its not
true in any sense that the modern Jewish State ever supplanted or destroyed an existing nation of
Palestine.
From the time of definitive destruction of the ancient
Jewish commonwealth in 70 A.D., the land that
comprises the current State of Israel never enjoyed
independent existence but, rather, passed back and
forth among competing world empiresRoman,
Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamaluke, Ottoman and
British.
Over the course of more than 1,800 years, no
nation with the name Palestine appeared on
any maps, anywhere.
The distinguished Arab-American historian Philip Hitti,
professor at Princeton University, testified to the Anglo
American Committee in 1946: There is no such
thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.
Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, shortly
before the commencement of modern Jewish
resettlement, and described it as a desolate
country whose soil is rich enough, but is given
over wholly to weedsa silent, mournful expanse
A desolation is here that not even imagination
can grace with the pomp of life and action.
According to the careful population figures of the
Ottoman Empire, in 1882 (at the very beginning
of the modern, organized Jewish immigration
back to the ancestral home), the total population
of land between the Jordan and the Sea was less
than 250,000 in an area that today supports ten
million people, Israelis and Palestinians.
(Palestinians being arabs who have adopted the
name Palestinian.(gs
The resettlement of the sparsely populated Holy
Land by the descendants of its ancient inhabitants,
however, did not take place solely in the modern era.
Throughout Jewish history, waves of returnees came
back to the sacred soil of their ancestors. In the 8th
and 9th centuries, A.D., Jewish immigrants re-
established major communities in Jerusalem and
Tiberias; by the 11th Century, they had built new
communities in Jaffa, Ashkelon, Caesarea and Rafah.
In the 16th Century, more Jewish immigrants developed
the famous center of mysticism in Safed and beginning
in the 1700s religious scholars and pilgrims intensely
repopulated Jerusalem.