by Dr. Yechiel Shabiy
The claim by the elected representatives of the Israeli Arab public that they are the original owners of the land while the Jewish citizens of Israel -- are “colonialist invaders” is a complete inversion of historical reality.
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| Ancient synagogue in Gamla in the Golan Heights, built during the Second Temple period in the first century CE, photo via Wikimedia Commons |
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,455, February 23, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
claim by the elected representatives of the Israeli Arab public that
they are the original owners of the land while the Jewish citizens of
Israel (and, by implication, the State of Israel itself) are
“colonialist invaders” is a complete inversion of historical reality. US
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s declaration about the legality of the
West Bank’s Jewish communities, along with President Trump’s peace plan
based on that principle, offers a unique opportunity to correct that
mistaken notion by applying sovereignty to all Israeli West Bank
communities.
The elected representatives of Israel’s Arab
community claim that the Palestinians are the original owners of the
land—an indigenous minority disinherited by foreign invaders. According
to this notion, which is aimed at undermining the Zionist narrative
about the Jewish people’s return to its historical homeland, the Arabs
of the Land of Israel—like the Indians in America, the aborigines in
Australia, and the Zulu tribes in South Africa—are victims of European
imperialism/colonialism, which turned them into a disenfranchised and
oppressed minority in their own land. From this standpoint, Zionism is a
crude perversion of Judaism because the Jews do not constitute a people
but only a religious community with no national attributes or
aspirations, let alone any right to a state of their own in even a tiny
part of the Islamic-Arab-Palestinian patrimony.
That thesis is not only baseless but a complete inversion of the historical truth.
It was Arab/Muslim invaders who came to the Land
of Israel as an ascendant imperialist force in the decade after the
Prophet Muhammad’s death and laid the groundwork for the colonization of
this land by a long string of Muslim empires up to the fall of the
Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. During this lengthy era, the
non-Jewish and non-Christian residents of the land identified themselves
as Muslims—not as Arabs, and certainly not as Palestinians—until WWI,
when the idea of Arab nationalism gathered steam with the help of
British imperialism.
One need only look at common family names among
the Palestinians to see their colonialist origins: Hijazi, from the
Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula, from which the original invaders came;
Bosniak, from Bosnia; Turk, from Turkey; Halabi, from Syria; Hindi, from
India; Yemeni, from Yemen; Masarwa/Masri, from Egypt; Mughrabi, from
the Maghreb, and so on.
In contrast, countless place names in the Land of
Israel testify to a Jewish presence over thousands of years. Take, for
example, the Narbeta River in northern Samaria. Narbeta, which is the
Aramaic pronunciation of Arubot, the biblical city in which one of King
Solomon’s 12 governors lived, ruled the whole region of northern
Samaria. In Narbeta, as Yosef ben Matityahu (Josephus) recounts, the
Romans slaughtered thousands of Jews during the Great Revolt (66-73 CE).
The area teems with archaeological relics from the Second Temple,
Mishnaic, and Talmudic eras.
The Jewish population did not take to
Roman-Byzantine rule and over the centuries rebelled against it
repeatedly. The Great Revolt considerably depleted the Jewish
population, but it was the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-35) and the subsequent
religious and economic decrees that devastated the population,
particularly in the Judea region. Harsh taxes were levied on the owners
of Jewish estates and on farmers, and those who were struggling sought
respite in nearby lands, especially Syria.
Concerned about the Jewish character and
demography of the Land of Israel, the sages promised life in the next
world to those who dwelt in the land and even for those who simply
walked four cubits in it. In the words of Rabbi Meir: “Whoever raises
his children in the Land of Israel is promised a place in the World to
Come.” Settlement flourished, particularly in the Galilee, Samaria, and
the South Hebron Hills. Dozens of communities developed, among them
Tiberias, Baram, Gush Halav, Yota, Eshtemoa, Halhoul, Kfar Kanna,
Arraba, and Sakhni.
With the Christian conquest of the Roman Empire,
the Jews’ lot worsened. Whole populations of Jews and non-Jews converted
to Christianity and the Jewish presence dwindled greatly. Not for
nothing did the Jews of the Land of Israel play a major role in helping
the Persian conquerors in 614.
In 628, Byzantine Emperor Heraclius defeated the
Persians. Though he had promised the Jews and their leader Benjamin of
Tiberias that if they laid down their arms nothing would befall them, he
quickly broke his promise and murdered thousands of Jews.
Less than a decade later the Muslims conquered the
land, with the help of the Jewish population. Although, during Muslim
rule, the agricultural and urban Jewish population remained in good
condition, it was hit hard by the Crusader conquest and the subsequent
Mamluk conquest.
As evidenced by descriptions of Jewish and
Christian pilgrims, Jews lived in Jewish villages in the Galilee such as
Kfar Hanania, Parod, Baram, Alma, Ein Zeitim, Kfar Kanna, and others
until the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the
Ottoman Turks who forced the Jewish villagers to leave their homes,
either by expelling them, discriminating against them, persecuting them,
or increasing their taxes, causing Jews to migrate to the cities of
Safed, Tiberias, Acre, Haifa, and even Tyre and Sidon.
In the northern Samaria region, Jews lived in
Anin, near Umm al-Fahm, growing citrons for trade, until the Turks
settled Yemenite Arabs there. In addition, the community of Bitra
(Bitron in Aramaic) became Barta’a. In this village and its vicinity the
large Kaba clan, a branch of the Banu-Hilal tribe of Saudi Arabia, came
to settle, as did the Masarwa clan from Egypt.
The northern Samarian mountains are strewn with
thousands of relics of winepresses and of terraces that served as
vineyards for the Jewish and Samaritan residents of the region. As the
Muslim population took over, the wine industry collapsed and was
replaced by olive and carob cultivation.
The land speaks Hebrew. The names of the communities have a linguistic meaning in Hebrew: Jaffa = yafeh (beautiful), Haifa = hofa shel ihr (shore of a city), Shikmona = shkamim (sycamores), Nazareth = notzeret/shomeret (guardian), Beit Guvrin = ihr hag’varim/hat’kifim
(city of the strong), and so on. When the Arabs conquered these places,
they pronounced the names in their own way, distorting them and
changing their meaning: thus Shfaram (meaning “a people whose luck has
improved”) became Shfa’amr, Ganim became Jenin, Bitra became Barta’a,
Ashdod became Isdud, Tur Karem (meaning “mountain of the vineyards”)
became Tulkarem, and Jordan became Urdan—names with no linguistic
meaning in Arabic.
As Israeli military and political leader Yigal
Allon said, a people that does not know its past has a meager present
and an unknown future. When Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab member of
Knesset, protested to President Reuven Rivlin that the Arabs of the Land
of Israel are the land’s indigenous residents and hence its masters,
the president should have answered him appropriately, as in the dictum
of the Jewish sages: know how to answer an ignoramus.
Today the wineries and vineyards have returned to
the mountains of Samaria, and on the holiday of Tu Bishvat more and more
grapevines will be planted. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s
declaration about the legality of Jewish communities in the West Bank,
along with President Trump’s peace plan based on that principle, offers a
unique opportunity to apply sovereignty to all of the Israeli West Bank
communities, including those in northern Samaria where the Narbeta
River flows.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-jewish-palestinian/
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