Israel did not spring into being after the Holocaust; it was the historic homeland of the Jewish people going back to ancient times. The unique Jewish entitlement to Israel is not just a Biblical story but historic fact. The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national homeland. They first entered the land around 1300 BCE, living under a tribal confederation. By 1000 BCE they established a united monarchy under King David, ruling themselves independently and continuously for over four hundred years--more than a millennium before Islam was established in the seventh century and the Arabs invaded. In 586 BCE, the Jews were conquered and driven out of their kingdom, later returning to rebuild it only to be defeated and finally exiled again in 70 CE.
Even then, the Jews maintained an unbroken presence in the land of Israel through centuries of Roman, Christian and Ottoman occupation, with Jewish majorities in several towns. There was a brief resumption of Jewish rule in Jerusalem after a revolt against the Romans i 135 CE and again in 614 CE; by the ninth century, Jews had re-established communities in Tiberias; in the eleventh century, in Gaza; in the thirteenth century, Jewish families restored the community of Safed; in the sixteenth century, refugees from the Spanish Inquisition led to a substantial expansion of the Jewish presence in Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias; from the mid nineteenth century onwards, there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. [1, pp. 55-56]
Who is occupying whose land today?
Far be it from me to argue that question here, but following from Melanie Phillips' summary, one may start by lookiing over the archeological record online at these locations:
http://www.allaboutthejourney.org/israel-archaeology.htm
Let's begin our look at Israel archaeology with the "Merneptah Stele" (also known as the Israel Stele), which is an upright stone slab measuring over seven feet tall that contains carved hieroglyphic text dating to approximately 1230 BC. This Egyptian monument describes the military victories of Pharaoh Merneptah and includes the earliest mention of "Israel" outside the Bible.
http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/exodus.html
Today, the picture is different. The invaders of the Early Bronze/Middle Bronze Interchange seem to have appeared out of nowhere in the Sinai and the Negev. Initially, they moved up into the transjordan, and then crossed over north of the Dead Sea, conquering Canaan and wiping out the inhabitants. Of course, since we are dealing with cultural remnants and not written records, we don't know that the previous inhabitants were all killed. Some of them may have remained, but if so, they adopted enough of the newcomers' culture to "disappear" from the archeological record.
Two archeologists have already gone on record identifying the invaders as the Israelites.
http://www.jewishmuseum.net/collections/archeology.html
When the Hebrews came into Palestine, they replaced the Canaanite culture with their own and the Miller Museum also owns pieces of pottery that are artifacts used by ancient Hebrews after the Canaanites had been pushed out of most of Palestine. The shape of these vessels differs from earlier examples.
Where are the Canaanites and so many others whose artifacts remain in the earth's record of inhabitation but whose cultures have passed beyond retrieving?
That question too I will leave rhetorical.
For any more enthused about getting into the mess, especially the mess being made and approved of, so far, by leftward revisionism and its abhorent compromises, there may be this conflict to return to and reconsider in review:
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem Hebrew University's Dr. Eilat Mazar, along with representatives from the Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities, was in the Israeli High Court of Justice attempting to halt the work on the Temple Mount being conducted by the Muslim Waqf, the religious trust charged with oversight of the location. The excavation, a trench 500 meters long and 1.5 meters deep, is, according to the complainants, "causing irreversible damage to antiquities and archaeological artifacts of the greatest importance . . , is being carried out illegally, [and] entails damage to ground layers, some of which may have been in place since the first Temple stood there 3,000 years ago."
The effrontery of this recent, but not isolated, act by the Waqf is made all the more troubling by the fact that the archeological contempt shown by the trust reflects their attitude that a Jewish historical connection to the site is only apocryphal, that, in the same way that El-Haj denies a Jewish component to the archeology of Israel, the Waqf's oversight of the Temple Mount has contributed to an effort, in pursuit of the Palestinian's nationalistic cause, to erase or obscure Judaism and replace it with a Muslim historical narrative which predates a Jewish one.
Source: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4255
The world expects criminals to deny, destroy, ignore, or hide evidence, not Ph.D's.
Reference
1. Phillips, Melanie. The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power. New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010.
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