By Barry Rosenfeld
What exactly are the roots of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, two peoples claiming the same piece of land? In the New Testament Book of Matthew, we read how Yeshua Jesus warned his disciples of the coming destruction of the Jewish Temple, an event that took place when Titus surrounded Jerusalem to stop the Jewish rebellion and completely destroyed the Temple in 70 AD and the surrounding city, about 40 years after the event described in Matthew where the Messiah warned of this future destruction. The Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus reports that as many as 1.1 million were slaughtered by the invading Roman Legion. This led to a massive scattering of the Jewish people to the Diaspora or the dispersed settlement of Jews already living outside of the Land of Israel, which was now called Judaea by the Romans. Sixty years later the plowing under of the Temple site and the beginning of construction of a pagan temple by the Roman Emperor Hadrian responded in yet another Jewish revolt under Rabbi Akiva and Simon Bar Kokhba in which it is reported that 580,000 Jews were killed. This again led to a scattering of those still living in the land. Jerusalem had already been renamed Aelia Capitolina by Hadrian who built a temple to Venus which later became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, making Jerusalem into a pagan city. Jews were only allowed access into the city on one day of the year, Tisha B’Av (The Ninth of Av), the day on which the destruction of both Temples is commemorated.
It was at this time that Hadrian joined Judaea with the Galilee calling it the province of Syria Palaestina, taking the ancient name of Philistia (the Philistine of the Bible) in an attempt to cut off any Jewish connection with the land. (Wikipedia) The Romans then continued to refer to the area as Palaestina and this was carried on into the Byzantine period with the division of the Roman Empire into east and west.
And so the land that God had promised to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12:7; 17:7; 22:18) had become a desolate wasteland and a habitation of Jackals but as God foretold through the prophet Isaiah (54:7), though he had forsook them “momentarily” with great loving compassion would he gather them up.
It took 1800 years but that regathering began to emerge with the early roots of labor Zionism that first appeared in the writings of Moses Hess who in 1862 published his book, “Rome and Jerusalem,” in which he argues for a return to Zion, at that time still referred to as “Palestine,” to form a socialist state where Jews would cultivate the land through a process that he described as “redemption of the soil,” one that would bring about a true nation where Jews occupied the productive professions such as in manufacturing and agriculture. European Jewry, because of pressures placed upon them by Gentile society had formed into a non-productive merchant class and occupied the professions. Now a new generation of Jews was to rebuild the Jewish nation functioning in all capacities, starting with the reclamation of the soil.
And the soil of Zion was truly in need of reclamation. For the most part it was being tended by Bedouin goat herders and tenant farmers. In his visit to the Land in 1867, Mark Twain described it as follows: “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies… Palestine is desolate and unlovely… It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land… [a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country…”
In 1870, Mikveh Israel, the first modern Jewish agricultural school and settlement was established in the Land by the recently formed Alliance Israélite Universelle. Between 1870 and 1890, Havevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), set up 30 agricultural communities.
Between 1880 and 1884 pogroms (civil outbreaks against Jews) broke out in Russia encouraging hundreds of thousands to flee, many to the US but some to Palestine. The Bilu movement also took form at this time, which encouraged resettlement in the Land and the development of agriculture. The first group arrived in Palestine in the summer of 1882, and consisted of 14 university students. They established Rishon LeZion (“First to Zion”), an agricultural cooperative on land purchased from the Arab village of Ayun Kara. A second group in 1884 established Gedera on land bought from the Arab village of Qatra.
Meanwhile the establishment in 1909, of the modern city of Tel Aviv meant the creation of jobs while the early settlements and concomitant economic developments both in agriculture and industry, drew increasing numbers of Arabs to the Land from surrounding Arab countries.
In 1850 Palestine contained about 350,000 inhabitants, 80 percent of which were Muslims, 4 percent Jews. By 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94 percent were Arabs. By 1947 the population of the Land had grown to almost 2 million with about a third being Jews. The Jews had returned to their land.
(to be continued)
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