Who owned the land which we now call Israel/Palestine before the Palestinians?

Question

Seems to me that many Palestinians want to back to the Crusades and further to justify their actions and attitudes in the present day. Well, using that same logic what about the past owners of Israel. Who were they?

Answer 1

Israelites were there for approximately 4 millenia. You don't even have to believe in the bible to find lots of proof of that. There are vast amounts of archealogical finds that prove it all by themselves. The Palestinians like to pretend that they are decendants of a people who were residents of the land before the Israelites called Philistines, but this is untrue.

As stated in several Wikipedia references,

"A Semitic speaking culture followed the Ghassulian culture. Archaeologists refer to the culture as Canaanite. This usage differs from that of the Bible and related literature where the term is used in a more narrow sense for one group within the culture. Some historians regard it as part of a wave of migration of semitic-speaking peoples out of the Arabian Peninsula, while others suggest that they had been there ever since the original Semitic emigration from Africa.

"Later, the Israelites appeared. Archaeologists regard them as an outgrowth of the Canaanite culture. According to the Bible they were descended from Jacob whose sons generally had Biblical Canaanite wives. The Bible describes them as returning following the Exodus from Egypt, conquering, exterminating, and sometimes absorbing the tribes they found there and reclaiming the land it says God promised them. Successive waves of migration brought other groups onto the scene. Around 1200 BCE the Hittite empire was conquered by allied tribes from the north. The Phoenicians (which are a different group than the Canaanites conquered by the Israelites) were temporarily displaced, but returned when the invading tribes showed no inclination to settle. The Egyptians called the horde that swept across Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Sea the Sea Peoples. The Philistines (whose traces disappear before the 5th century BCE) are presently considered to have been among them, giving the name Philistia to the region in which they settled.

"Eventually, the Israelites established the Kingdom of Israel, which later split between a northern Kingdom of Israel and a southern Kingdom of Judah. In 722 BCE, the northern Kingdom of Ephraim (commonly referred to as Israel, sometimes as Samaria) was destroyed by the Assyrians, the elite amongst its inhabitants were deported (giving rise to the legend of "the Lost Tribes") and replaced by settlers from elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire. Many however fled to their southern Israelite sister kingdom, and many stayed behind; they (mixed with deportees from Mesopotamia) became the Samaritans. The Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar conquered the (southern) Kingdom of Judah in 597-586 BCE, and deported the middle and upper classes of the Jews to Babylonia in the Babylonian captivity, where they flourished. Most regard the collapse of the Israelite kingdoms as the beginning of the Jewish diaspora.

"Cyrus II of Persia conquered the Babylonian Empire by 539 BCE and incorporated Palestine into the Persian Empire. Cyrus organized the empire into provincial administrations called satrapies. The administrators of these provinces, called satraps, had considerable independence from the emperor. The Persians allowed Jews to return to the regions that the Bablyonians had exiled them from.

The exiled Jews who returned to their traditional home encountered the Jews that had remained, surrounded by a much larger non-Jewish majority. One group of note (that exists up until this day) were the Samaritans, who adhered to most features of the Jewish rite and claimed to be descendants of the Assyrian Jews; they were not recognized as Jews by the returning exiles for various reasons (at least some of which seem to be political). The return of the exiles from Babylon reinforced the Jewish population, which gradually became more dominant and expanded significantly.

"In the early 330s BCE, Alexander the Great conquered the region, beginning an important period of Hellenestic influence in Palestine.

"After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, his empire was partitioned, and the competing Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires occupied various portions of the eastern Mediterranean, including different parts of Palestine. The Jews were divided between the Hellenists who supported the adoption of Greek culture, and those who believed in keeping to the traditions of the past, which resulted in the Maccabean revolt of the 2nd century BCE.

"The Roman province of PalestinaFollowing the Roman conquest in 63 BCE, parts of Palestine - first a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, after year 6 CE Roman province Iudaea (Roman province), after year 135 CE province Syria Palaestina - was in nearly constant revolt (see Jewish-Roman Wars). A number of events with far-reaching consequences took place, including religious schisms, such as Christianity branching off of Judaism.
"The Great Jewish Revolt in 66-73 resulted in the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem (70) and the sacking of the entire city by the Roman army led by Titus Flavius and the estimated death toll of 600,000 to 1,300,000 Jews (see Josephus Flavius).

"The Philistines lost their independence to Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria by 732 BC, and revolts in following years were all crushed. Later, Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon eventually conquered all of Syria and the Kingdom of Judah, and the former Philistine cities became part of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. All traces of the Philistines as a people or ethnic group disappear. Subsequently the cities were under the control of Persians, Jews (Hasmonean Kingdom), Greeks (Seleucid Empire), Romans, and subsequent empires."

"In 135 CE, the crushing of Bar Kokhba's revolt by Hadrian resulted in 580,000 Jews killed (according to Cassius Dio) and the establishment of the pagan polis Aelia Capitolina on the site of the ruins of Jerusalem, in which Jews were forbidden to set foot. Hundreds of thousands were taken as slaves throughout the Empire. It was during this time that the Romans gave the name Syria Palaestina to the geographic area, in an attempt to erase Jewish ties to the land.
"Meanwhile, Palestine was increasingly Christianized and probably had a Christian majority by the time of Diocletian. Some areas, like Gaza, were well known as pagan holdouts, remained attached to the worship of Daqon and other deities as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. Gaza was probably an Arabic-speaking city by this time: it is referred to as an Arab city by 430 BCE. The Arabic language, meanwhile, was spreading as the majority language throughout the Roman epoch. Southern Palestine had been thoroughly Arabized by the Idumaeans and Nabataeans around the turn of the Era while the regions further north became Arabic in speech by no later than the fourth century.
"After 634, Palestine, under the Arabic name Filastin, became part of the newly established Islamic Caliphate, ruled by the "Rightly Guided" caliphs, then the Umayyads until they were overthrown by the Abbasids in 750. Over the following centuries it acquired a Muslim, Arabic-speaking majority, through conversion, language shift from Aramaic, and immigration.
In 1516 the Ottoman Turks occupied Palestine. The country became part of the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople appointed local governors. Public works, including the city walls, were rebuilt in Jerusalem by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1537. Napoleon of France briefly waged war against the Ottoman Empire (allied then with Great Britain). His forces conquered and occupied cities in Palestine, but they were finally defeated and driven out by 1801. Turkish rule lasted until World War I.

"Jewish immigration to Palestine, particularly to the "four sacred cities" (Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron) which already had significant Jewish communities, increased particularly towards the end of Ottoman rule; Jews of European origin lived mostly off donations from off-country, while many Sephardic Jews found themselves a trade. The rise of Zionism, a political movement seeking to have Jews return to their ancient homeland in Palestine, in Europe and Russia in the 19th century increased the trend. By 1920, the Jewish population of Palestine had reached 11% of the population.
"In World War I, Turkey sided with Germany. As a result, it was embroiled in a conflict with Great Britain, leading to the British capture of Palestine in a series of battles led by General Allenby. (See Third Battle of Gaza and Battle of Beersheba). Allenby famously dismounted from his horse when he entered captured Jerusalem as a mark of respect for the Holy City. He was greeted by the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders of the city with great honor.

"At the subsequent 1919 Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles, Turkey's loss of its Middle East empire was formalized. The British had in the interim made two agreements. In the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence there was an undertaking to form an Arab state in exchange for the Great Arab Revolt and in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to "favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" while respecting the rights of the indigeneous majority. McMahon's promises are seen by Arab nationalists as a pledge of immediate Arab independence, an undertaking violated by the region's subsequent partition into British and French League of Nations mandates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 which became the real cornerstone of the geopolitics structuring the entire region. Prior to the conference Emir Faisal, British ally and son of the king of the Hijaz, had agreed in the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement to support the immigration of Jews into Palestine as part of a larger Arab state. When the conference did not produce that Arab state, Faisal called instead for Palestine to become part of his new Arab Syrian kingdom.

"In 1920 the new League of Nations established the British Mandate of Palestine, which identified two territories of different administration, one to the west of the Jordan River, the other to the east. Article 25 specified that the eastern area did not have to be subject to all parts of the Mandate, notably the provisions regarding a Jewish national home. This was used by the British as one rationale to establish an Arab state, which it saw as at least partially fulfilling the undertakings in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. On 11 April 1921 the British passed administration of the eastern region to the Hashemite Arab dynasty from the Hejaz what later became part of Saudi Arabia as the Emirate of Transjordan and on 15 May 1923 recognized it as a state.

"Under the Mandate, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased substantially. Between 1920 and 1945, Jews went from less than 1% to 31% [citation needed] of the rapidly expanding population, partly due to an influx of Jewish refugees from Nazism in Europe and the refusal of the USA, France, Britain and other countries to allow Jewish immigration. Palestinian Arab leaders strongly opposed the immigration. In 1936 the British Peel Commission advised that the western part of Palestine be divided between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs then launched the Great Uprising against British rule in an effort to end the immigration. The Jews, for their part, organized milita groups like the Irgun and Lehi to fight the British and the Haganah and Palmach to fight the Arabs. By the time order was restored in March of 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Britons were killed

"Soon after World War II, the British decided to leave Palestine. The United Nations attempted to solve the dispute by putting forward the 1947 UN Partition Plan, dividing the land area between the two populations, on November 29, 1947; the Jewish Agency accepted the plan, while the Palestinian Arabs, along with their allies elsewhere in the Arab world, rejected it as inadequate. The Arab-Jewish fighting within Palestine escalated to full-scale war right after the UN partition plan was approved, and on May 14, 1948, the Jewish population declared independence as the state of Israel. The armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria then invaded, but did not succeed even in holding onto much of the areas reserved in the UN partition plan for the Arab state. (For a more detailed account, see 1948 Arab-Israeli War). Large numbers of Palestinian Arabs left at the behest of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem or were expelled from their homes during the fighting and to this day have not been allowed to return (see Palestinian exodus). Israel managed to maintain its independence and even expand its borders, but a new refugee problem, this one of Palestinian Arabs, was created, and was compounded by Jewish exodus from Arab lands.
What remained of the territories allotted to the Arab state in Palestine was annexed by Jordan (the West Bank) or occupied by Egypt (the Gaza Strip) from 1948 to 1967.

"In 1967 Israeli forces preemptively attacked Egypt and Jordan in what has come to be known as the Six day war. As a result of the 1967 Six Day War, the Israel Defense Forces occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula bringing them under military rule. The United Nation's Security Council passed Resolution 242, promoting the "land for peace" formula, which called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967 in return for the end of all states of belligerency. Since that time, the Palestinians refugees have struggled to assert their own independence, either in all the territories of Palestine or in the West Bank and Gaza Strip particularly. In the course of 1973 Yom Kippur War, the invading forces of Egypt and Syria were pushed back. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel."

There is of course much history I am leaving out, but that is a brief synopsis. In addition to all that is the history of the Israelite Kingdom as told by their own people and carefully perserved for aeons in the Bible, a very frank and open admission of the ups and down in the millenia spanning tale of the ancestors of the Jews. For an excellent treatis on the Jewish claim to the region I would suggest you obtain a book entitled "The Case For Israel" by Alan Dershowitz, just one among many good books on the subject.

Cheers!

Answer 2

this is the only time that God promised a man a portion of the earth. He had a son named Isaac who had a son named Jacob.
who god later called Israel. He promised him that land it is clearly recorded in the bible. In Genesis read the account about Abraham. Genesis 22:17 Every since that time Satan by means of the descendants of these wicked men who tried to stop it then and are trying to stop it now. they were called Amalek because that was the tribe that followed up the rear to kill the tired staggering and women and children the weakest of the ones traveling. they were the first terriorists who hid and do evil deeds
just for the sake of killing innocent people. There descendents are still doing that. Isreal is the descendents of Abraham the others are descendents of the Amaleks

Answer 3

Now you're getting into ancient History. The short answer is the land of Israel belonged to the Jews since Abraham, because it was Abraham's land and he gave it as an inheritance to his son Isaac and his decendents.

The long story is that Isaac had an older brother named Ishmael who was an illegitimate son of Abraham -- a scheme, if you will, cooked up by Abraham's wife to try to force God's promise to fruition. Sarah told her maid, Hagar, to have a son on her behalf because Sarah was barren. This was a common custom back in the day.

Years later, Isaac is born to Sarah and Abraham, Abraham's legitimate son and heir, and Isaac inherets the land. Hagar and Ishmael had been sent out away from Isaac because Sarah was afraid of Hagar and Ishmael, but God made the promise to Hagar that Ishmael too would be a father of many nations.

Abraham bequethed his land and his wealth to his son Isaac, as was his right back in the day to choose his inheritor, which is a custom still practiced today in many Arab countries, the right that the father has to "choose his first born son" and so choose who will inherit the father's "blessing," be it wealth or whatever.

The whole thing is a probate issue, really, when you get right down to it. The decendents of Ishmael -- the Arab nations -- think that dad should have given the land to them, but as it happens, dad gave the land to Isaac - the father of Jacob, whose name was later changed to ISRAEL.

Hope this helps. History is really fun when you get into it.

Answer 4

in case you truly favor to imagine about this... Who had the brilliant theory of land possession besides? It replaced into the theory that land ought to correctly be owned that enabled the Europeans to snatch administration of the u . s . continents from the interior of sight human beings. we are born from stardust and go back to stardust after we die. What solid does it do surely each and every man or woman to "own" land. It divides human beings and creates the circumstances for disputes and conflict. The traces we draw to mark the barriers of so-referred to as international locations are arbitrary human creations. overlook barriers and stay at the same time in peace. stop scuffling with and killing over dirt.

Answer 5

It was the home of the Jews 2000 years ago, hence "Jerusalem" and Bethlehem where Christ was born (you remember he was a Jew), but then the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70AD and later the Arabs occupied it. Now the Jews are back in it.

Answer 6

Those two midgets from the Real Estate infomercials????

Answer 7

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. - Native American Proverb... applies to any homeland in my opinion. And, now - we're all bombing it to pieces.

Answer 8

phoenicians then persians then jews then jews/muslims up to today

Answer 9

jews

Answer 10

God owns everything... we just get to share it... People tend to forget that...