By Yoram Getzler. The people who are today called Jews, are the direct modern, contemporary decedents, both culturally and genetically of those known in the past as the People of Israel, and/or the Tribes of Israel in the world of antiquity.
These are the first and only coherent, corporate body to have inhabited and ruled exclusively the land area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River in all of recorded history. By exclusively I mean not as part of a larger empire such as the Palmyrene/Babylonians/
Keeping in mind that this land area was the first stepping stone of per-historic two legged animals that left Africa to inhabit the entire planet.
Thus there are archeological sites south of the Sea of Galilee that are over one million years old. There is also a site near the Benot Yaakov bridge, spanning the upper Jordan river, where signs of these two legged creatures are found, that are estimated to be 400,000 years old. In caves on the southern section of the Caramel range, in canyons flowing West are caves in which remains were found of those same two leggers dating back 85,000 years. In other words the origins of the truly indigenous peoples of this land are beyond the concepts of Arab, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hebrew. We are all late comers.
BUT there was a linear process of arrival in recorded history.
The Hebrews / Children of Israel came from the East around three thousand years ago, not long after the sea-tribes, originating in Crete , including the Philistines, arrived on the west coast, from that island.
The first record is of them attempting to colonize the coast of Egypt. Egyptian records account for the dynasties driving them off. So they moved north and settled in the less guarded areas of western Canaan.
Now the Canaanite peoples lived in city-states. There was no overall rule of the land. It was each community as a separate and independent entity.
The Hebrews and Philistines competed for the valuable low lands for centuries.
The Hebrews and the Philistines both “were carried away captivity” by the Babylonians around 500BCE. But only the Hebrews returned. Only the Hebrews were so deeply connected to this particular land that they chose to leave the comforts of the largest and most powerful empire of the time and return to the ruined wasteland of their homeland.
this by-the-way marked the END OF THE PHILISTEANE experience.
In 135 A.C.E., the Romans succeeded in suppressing the Bar Kochba Rebellion only after suffering punishing military losses. The enraged and vindictive Caesar Hadrian determined to put an end to the Jewish religion and to erase Judea from the map. Although there were no Philistines left in the world, Hadrian changed the land’s name to Syria Palestina as a way of severing the connection between the land of the Jews and the Jews themselves. He made use of the same historical geographic technique in regard to the holy city of the Jews, Jerusalem, Yerushaliyim. Renaming it Aelia Capitolina.
It took the Muslim/Arabs (from Arabia) another five hundred plus years to arrive at the eastern border; conquer and occupy the land all the way to the sea.
Until the British conquest in 1917 the lands today known as Lebanon, Jordan, Israel & Palestine were all sub-provinces of Syria, with the capital in Damascus.
After the division of the land by the British & French the Arab leadership of what is now Israel/Palestine fought to be reunified with Syria..
Both the more modern American author Samuel Clements (Huckleberry Fin, Tom Sawyer) and the 17th Cen European traveler author Hadriani Relandi, describe all but land empty of humans. Vast areas of desolation. The few inhabitants being Christians, Jews and some Bedouin.
“From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdividisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.”
Even under Muslim rule in the 7th century the area was not called Palestine.
