Who does Israel belong to? The Jews or the Palestinian Arabs?

[AgnosticBoy]

After the Holocaust, there was a mass migration of Jews to Palestine, some hundreds of thousands of Jews. During this migration in 1948, the state of Israel was established with the recognition from the international community. Since then, Israel has been engaged in several wars and conflicts with its neighbors, including its own Palestinian population. The Jews claim that the land was always theirs dating back to ancient times. The Palestinian Arabs claim that the land is theirs and that the Jews have taken over their land. Sure, the Jews have a history of being on the land, and were exiled from it at various times in history. But then the Palestinians inhabited the land and were in control of it until 1948.

Let's discuss.

Who does the land of Israel belong to?
What should we go by to answer this? History? Whoever currently occupies it?

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Who does the land of Israel belong to?
What should we go by to answer this? History? Whoever currently occupies it?

Here's an explanation that says the land belongs to the Jews. The writer factors in ancient history, and I assume the logic behind that is that the owner would be whoever first occupied the land.

Newsweek Article, Why the Jewish People Are the Rightful Owners of the Land of Israel | Opinion by Yair Netanyahu (I'll only post some of the highlights):

These truths, drawn from ancient and modern history, archaeology, and even international and U.S. law, do not simply disprove the Palestinian propaganda depiction of Jewish usurpers who swooped in a century ago to steal Arab land. These truths demonstrate that the Jewish people have a long-standing and exclusive right to the Land of Israel.

Countless archaeological artifacts have been discovered confirming the Bible's descriptions of the ancient Kingdoms of Judea and Israel.

The "Siloam Inscription" is one of the most important of those archaeological discoveries. These are ancient Hebrew engravings on the wall of the Siloam tunnel, which transported water and was built during the reign of Hezekiah, the king of Judea, almost 2,800 years ago.

n the 1st century B.C.E., the Kingdom of Judea was conquered by the Roman Empire. There is no historical dispute that in both the early Roman period and the Greek period, most of the Jewish people lived in the Land of Israel.

After more than a century of Roman rule, the Jews rebelled against the Romans in the Great Revolt of 66 C.E. The Jewish revolt was a resounding failure, resulting in the destruction of the Second Temple. Still, even after the crushing military defeat, many Jews remained in the Land of Israel.

The last Jewish revolt against the Romans, the Bar Kokhba revolt, broke out in 132 C.E. in response to harsher anti-Jewish persecution by the Roman Empire.


Following the suppression of the revolt, Emperor Hadrian decided to punish the Jews by changing the name of the province from "Judea" to "Palestine."


The Romans knew the coastal region of the Land of Israel as "Palestine," which was named after the ancient Philistine people who once inhabited the coastal territory of the Land of Israel.

cont'd

The Philistines were part of the "sea people" who were said to have come from the island of Crete and invaded the eastern Mediterranean 3,200 years ago. The Philistines disappeared from the history books when the Assyrians conquered and exiled them some 700 years before the Roman period.


A 2019 DNA study of skeletons exhumed from Philistine tombs in the coastal Israeli cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon found that the Philistines come from a "southern European gene pool." In other words, the ancient Philistines have no genetic relation whatsoever to the modern Palestinian-Arabs.

The Holy Land was largely emptied of Jews only after the Arab conquest in the 7th century C.E. The Arabs dispossessed the Jews of their farmland, leaving most of them with no choice but to leave. Despite this, the Jews maintained a continual presence in the four cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed.

More recent history...

The land began to develop again only with the start of the Jewish settlements after the establishment of the Zionist movement, initiating waves of Jewish immigration to the Holy Land.

Significant development came only after the conquest of the land by the British Empire in 1917. This period is when many Arabs from neighboring countries made their way into the Land of Israel as migrant workers.

A mandate to rule the Land of Israel—the British Mandate for Palestine, from the ancient Roman name—was given to the British (among other areas) by the League of Nations, the organization that preceded the UN. A mandate was given for a limited time, with the aim of preparing the local people for eventual independence and self-rule. With the Mandate for Palestine, Britain officially reiterated all its commitments from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.

The Mandate for Palestine's founding document explicitly stated that a national home for the Jewish people would be established in its territory. It did not expressly mention a national home for any other people.

The Mandate documented the deep historical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, from biblical times to the present day. The territory designated for the British Mandate of Palestine included Transjordan (today, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), Israel, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria (i.e., the West Bank).

The charter of the British Mandate for Palestine has been ratified by the British Parliament, the U.S. Congress, and the League of Nations. When the UN was established, it ratified all the Mandates of the League of Nations, including the British Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate, therefore, is a binding international treaty which has become part of international law, British law, and American law.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan tried again to destroy Israel. The State of Israel won the war and took the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria (West Bank), the Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza strip. All the territory occupied in the war (except for the Sinai) belongs to the Jewish people according to international law, in accordance with the Treaty of San Remo and the British Mandate for Palestine. Israel returned the whole of Sinai to Egypt in the peace treaty of 1979, and unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

This is an interesting but easy to understand summary. There are definitely some things I want to follow up on, like if the Philistines are related of the Palestinian Arabs. Interestingly, I've heard some fundamentalists Christians making that claim, esp. them being associated with the biblical Esau (Jacob's brother, Jacob was later called Israel).

Another thing I'd want to follow up on is the point about the Arabs taking the land by force at one point in time. If true, then that might leave them open to a double standard for being against the Jews for doing the same.

I'll also try to find some articles that offer the Palestinian Arab side. Or anyone else feel free to contribute.

Edit to include some follow ups:
1. The study posted in the article above does check out. I went to the study directly here. It's a hard to read study but it does mention that the Philistines were of European descent. A CNN article also sums up that study.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Who does the land of Israel belong to?
What should we go by to answer this? History? Whoever currently occupies it?

And here goes a perspective that says the land belongs to the Palestinian Arabs, and it tackles some of the arguments from the article in my last post...
From Decolonize Palestine

A frequently recurring theme when discussing the history of Palestine, is the question of “who was there first?”. The implication being, whoever was there first deserves ownership of the land. I have lost count of how many times I have encountered the argument that “The Jewish people have been in Palestine before the Muslims/Arabs,” or a variation thereof. This has always struck me as an interesting example of how people learn just enough history to support their world view, separating it completely from any historical context or the larger picture of the region.

Since this question is so widespread, and since I see it answered in different, and in my opinion, unhelpful ways, I would like to open up the topic for wider discussion.

The argument is simple to follow: Palestinians today are mostly Arabs. The Arabs came to the Levant with the Muslim conquest of the region. Therefore, Arabs -and as an extension Palestinians- have only been in Palestine and the Levant since the seventh century AD.

cont'd

There are a couple of glaring problems with this line of thought.
First of all, there is a clear conflation of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. None of these are interchangeable. Arabs have had a long history in the Levant before the advent of Islam.
For example, The Nabataean kingdom ruled over Jordan, southern Palestine and Sinai a whole millennium before Muslims ever set foot in the area. Another example would be the Ghassanid kingdom, which was a Christian Arab kingdom that extended over vast areas of the region. As a matter of fact, many prominent Christian families in Palestine today, such as Maalouf, Haddad and Khoury, can trace their lineage back to the Ghassanid kingdom.

The second problem with this is that there is a misunderstanding of the process that is the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa. Once again, we must view the Islamization of newly conquered lands and their Arabization as two distinct phenomena. The Islamization process began instantly, albeit slowly. Persia, for example took over 2 centuries to become a majority Muslim province. The Levant, much longer. The Arabization of conquered provinces though, began later than their Islamization. The beginning of this process can be traced back to the Marwanid dynasty of the Ummayad Caliphate. Until that point, each province was ruled mostly with its own language, laws and currency. The process of the Arabization of the state united all these under Arabic speaking officials, and made it law that the language of state and of commerce would become Arabic. Thus, it became advantageous to assimilate into this identity, as many government positions and trade deals were offered only to Muslim Arabs.

Following from this, the Palestinian Arabs of today did not suddenly appear from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century to settle in Palestine, but are the same indigenous peoples living there who changed how they identified over time. This includes the descendants of every group that has ever called Palestine their home. When regions change rulers, they don’t normally change populations. Throughout history, peoples have often changed how they identified politically. The Sardinians eventually became Italians, Prussians became Germans. It would be laughable to suggest that the Sardinians were kicked out and replaced by a distinct foreign Italian people. We must separate the political nationalist identity of people from their personhood as human beings, as nationalism is a relatively modern concept, especially in the Middle East.

Therefore (conclusion)...

If the Jewish people were in Palestine before the Arabs, then the land belongs to them. Therefore, the creation of Israel would be justified.

From my experience, whenever this argument is used, the automatic response of Palestinians is to say that their ancestors were there first. These ancestors being the Canaanites. The idea that Palestinians are the descendants of only one particular group in a region with mass migrations and dozens of different empires and peoples is not only ahistorical, but this line of thought indirectly legitimizes the original argument they are fighting against.

This is because it implies that the only reason Israel’s creation is unjustified is because their Palestinian ancestors were there first. It implies that the problem with the argument lies in the details, not that the argument as a whole is absolute nonsense and shouldn’t even be entertained.

The ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first.
It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years.

If we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Here's a good history summary of Israel from late 19th century to the 20th century:

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Who does the land of Israel belong to?
What should we go by to answer this? History? Whoever currently occupies it?

I have concluded that I am agnostic on these issues, and the main reason is that I don't know what standard to use to say who Israel belongs to. One option is to determine who was there first. Another option is to go by who last owned the land. I'll go into my detail on the first option, but even that standard would not justify removing or even killing millions of Jews (some groups have advocated for that). Nor would it justify removing millions of Arabs or containing them in bad conditions.

Elaborating on the first option of who was there first (out of the Jews and Arabs), I would say that the Jews first owned the land. Others races lived there, but that doesn't necessarily mean they owned or ruled over any land. The earliest documentation I could find for the Arabs owning the land of Palestine is in the 7th century, after the Arab Conquest (scroll down to purple highlighted text). Besides that, they were likely some Arabs that inhabited the land along with other races, and all living under the rule of various empires.

The above point leads me into the second option of who last owned the land. Of course, most recently it was the Arabs pre 1948. The problem with that point is that a lot of groups of people took over land. Europeans took over much of the land in the Western Hemisphere and they still occupy it. Even the Arabs took over the land in the 7th century. So it's hard to argue that taking over land is wrong when the accuser has done the same.

And as a bonus, here's even more good information regarding the Canaanites and the Jews and Arabs:

The team extracted ancient DNA from the bones of 73 individuals buried over the course of 1,500 years at five Canaanite sites scattered across Israel and Jordan. They also factored in data from an additional 20 individuals from four sites previously reported.

“Individuals from all sites are highly genetically similar,” says co-author and molecular evolutionist Liran Carmel of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. So while the Canaanites lived in far-flung city states, and never coalesced into an empire, they shared genes as well as a common culture.

The researchers also compared the ancient DNA with that of modern populations and found that most Arab and Jewish groups in the region owe more than half of their DNA to Canaanites and other peoples who inhabited the ancient Near East—an area encompassing much of the modern Levant, Caucasus, and Iran.

Both Israeli and Palestinian politicians claim the region of Israel and the Palestinian territories is the ancestral home of their people, and maintain that the other group was a late arrival. “We are the Canaanites,” asserted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last year. “This land is for its people…who were here 5,000 years ago.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said recently that the ancestors of modern Palestinians “came from the Arabian peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years” after the Israelites.

The new study suggests that despite tumultuous changes in the area since the Bronze Age, “the present-day inhabitants of the region are, to a large extent, descended from its ancient residents,” concludes Schwartz—although Carmel adds that there are hints of later demographic shifts.

Source: National Geographic