Brief History of Palestine

What was the history of Palestine between Biblical times and the modern era?
In 539 B.C. the Persians conquered the Babylonians. The Jewish Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians, was rebuilt (516 BC). Under Persian rule the Jewish state enjoyed considerable autonomy. Alexander the Great of Macedon, conquered the area in 333 BC His successors, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, contested for control. The attempt of the Seleucid Antiochus IV (Antiochus Epiphanes) to impose Hellenism brought a Jewish revolt under the Maccabees, who set up a new Jewish state in 142 BC The state lasted until 63 BC, when Pompey conquered the region for Rome. At the time of Christ the Jewish state was ruled by puppet kings of the Romans, the Herods. When the Jews revolted in 66 AD, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem (70 AD). The Bar Kokba revolt between 132 and 135 AD was also suppressed, Jericho and Bethlehem were destroyed, and the Jews were barred from Jerusalem. The Roman Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe out the identity of Israel-Judah-Judea. Therefore, he took the name Palastina and imposed it on all the Land of Israel. At the same time, he changed the name of Jerusalem to AeliaCapitolina. The Romans killed many Jews and sold many more in slavery. Some of those who survived left the devastated country (and established Jewish communities throughout the Middle East) but there was never a complete abandonment of the Land of Israel. That is, there were always Jews and Jewish communities in Palestine, though the size and conditions of those communities fluctuated greatly. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity (312), he took steps to elevate the status of Jerusalem and the city became a center of Christian pilgrimage. Constantine relaxed some restrictions on Jews, but renewed the prohibition on the residence of Jews in Jerusalem, permitting them to mourn for its destruction once a year, on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Palestine over the next few centuries generally enjoyed peace and prosperity until it was conquered in 614 AD by the Persians. It was recovered briefly by the Byzantine Romans, but fell to the Muslim Arabs under caliph Umar by the year 640. During the Umayyad rule, the importance of Palestine as a holy place for Muslims was emphasized, but little was done to develop the region economically. Few Arabs came to Palestine; the Muslim rulers ruled Christians and Jews. In 691 the Dome of the Rock was erected on the site of the Temple of Solomon, which is claimed by Muslims to have been the halting station of Muhammad on his journey to heaven. Close to the Dome, the al Aqsa mosque was built. In 750, Palestine passed to the Abbasid caliphate, and this period was marked by unrest between factions that favored the Umayyads and those who preferred the new rulers. In the 9th century, Palestine was conquered by the Fatimid dynasty, which had risen to power in North Africa. The Fatimids had many enemies the Seljuks, Karmatians, Byzantines, and

Bedouins and Palestine became a battlefield. Under the Fatimid caliph al Hakim (996-1021), the Christians and Jews were harshly suppressed, and many churches were destroyed. In 1099, Palestine was captured by the Crusaders, establishing the Latin Kingdom. Jews were seen by the Crusaders as infidels, as bad as the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem, and were slaughtered by Christian soldiers along their way to liberate Jerusalem and then thousands in the city when they got there. Following the first Crusade, a Papal Bull was issued in 1119 AD to reinforce St. Augustines earlier plea, in 427 AD, not to kill the Jews, but to allow them to wander the earth as evidence of their rejection by God. By the time the Crusaders were defeated by Saladin at the battle of Hittin (1187), and the Latin Kingdom was ended, Palestine had become a wasteland. Mongol invaders who arrived in 1260 destroyed many of the villages. The Mamluks ended the Crusader period in 1291, but under Mamluk rule Palestine declined further. Mamluks burned and sacked towns and villages, uprooted orchards, and destroyed wells. In 1351, the Black Death was reported in Palestine and by 1500 the population had declined to barely 200,000 people. For comparison, the state of New Jersey, roughly comparable to Israel in size, had a 2001 population of about 8.5 million people and still had rural, undeveloped areas.
In 1516 the Mamluks were defeated by the Ottoman Turks. The first three centuries of Ottoman rule isolated Palestine from outside influence. The discovery of sea routes to the East began to erode the importance of the Middle East to commerce. In 1831, Muhammad Ali, the Egyptian viceroy nominally subject to the Ottoman sultan, occupied Palestine. Under him and his son the region was opened to European influence. Ottoman control was reasserted in 1840, but Western influence continued. The Ottoman tax system was ruinous and did much to keep the land underdeveloped and the population small. When Alexander W. Kinglake crossed the Jordan in 1834-35, he used the Jordan s only bridge, a survival from Roman antiquity. Among the many European settlements established, the most significant in the long run were those of Jews, Russian Jews being the first to come (1882).

It is important to note that there was a Jewish population in Palestine continuously. Even after the Jewish state was ended by the Romans, Jewish communities continued to exist. All of the successor governments tried to eliminate the Jews at one time or another, but none succeeded as numerous accounts testify over the centuries. When the Zionists started the modern return to EretzYisrael in the 19th Century, they were joining Jews who never left. In 1918, a Yiddish book by David BenGurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi,EretzYisrael in the Past and Present, was published in New York by the Poale Zion Palestine Committee. The authors note that long after the destruction of the Second Temple ?and even after the defeat of Shimon Bar Kokhba, leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in the second century C.E. ? large masses of Jews still tilled the soil of EretzYisrael. In the wars and uprisings, many cities were ruined and many communities destroyed,but the farm population could not be wiped out so easily. Under foreign oppression, city dwellers ?the propertied and educated classes ? chose to leave their homes and migrate to freer countries such as Babylonia. The Jewish peasant, however, like peasants the world over, would not leave his

land so quickly, for it was land developed by his sweat and that of his parents. The conclusion of the book contains historical facts that establish the denationalizing of EretzYisrael. The authors ask us to remember that after Bar Kokhbas fall, Rome and Byzantium held on to Palestine for 500 years (136 C.E. to 636 C.E.), but neither the Romans nor the Byzantines made Palestine their national homeland, an organic part of their national existence. Likewise, the book says, the Arabs and Egyptians, who reigned over Palestine for about 880 years ?from 637 to 1517 ? never had organic ties to the land. During their rule, it continues, the cradle of Arab nationality remained in the great expanse of the Arab peninsula. And when it came to the Turks, who ruled from 15 17 to 1917, the authors tell us that they were even less integrated into the country than the Arabs. After a 400-year reign, Turkish culture and the Turkish language remained as foreign in Palestine as they were 400 years earlier. The denationalization of EretzYisrael resulted in a state of affairs where the country lay in ruins and desolation, the book says. And the land waits for the Jewish people to come and repair and restore its old home.