“Jews are returning to a land they ruled 3,000 years ago, so it belongs to them”

The historical kernel is real and uncontested: Hebrew-speaking Israelite kingdoms existed in the hills of Palestine — the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are archaeologically attested roughly from the ninth century BCE until the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE, with a later Hasmonean Jewish kingdom around 140–63 BCE. But even on the most generous reading, Jewish sovereignties covered part of the country for a few centuries, ending some 2,500 years ago. Mainstream archaeology has also scaled the story down considerably: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed (2001) — Finkelstein was director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University — marshals the evidence that there was no Exodus or military conquest as the Bible describes, and that the “united monarchy” of David and Solomon ruling an empire from Jerusalem is not supported by the archaeological record.

What the record does show is continuity of habitation. After 70 CE the country was ruled by Romans, Byzantines, the early Islamic caliphates, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans, and its population — Christians, Muslims, and a small continuous Jewish community of perhaps 50,000 at the end of the nineteenth century — changed languages and religions over the centuries, as populations do everywhere. The UN’s historical study describes Palestine’s Arabs as a people “whose forefathers had inhabited the land for virtually the two preceding millennia.” Zionism’s own most thoughtful early observer confirmed the land was full: after his 1891 tour, Ahad Ha’am wrote in Truth from Eretz Yisrael, “From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert… But in truth it is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled.”

The moral logic does the remaining work. A historic and religious attachment — which Palestinians have never needed to deny — is not a title deed. If sovereignty 2,500 years ago transferred ownership of a country from its current inhabitants to the descendants of ancient ones, no state on earth would have a legitimate population. The documented question is not whether ancient kingdoms existed, but whether their existence can license the dispossession of the people who demonstrably lived in the country in 1917, 1947 and today.

Sources

• Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel (2001) — Internet Archive
• Ahad Ha’am, “The Truth from the Land of Israel” (1891), quoted and discussed — The Balfour Project
• The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem, Part I: 1917–1947 — United Nations