I AM A JEW (PART XXIII - Eating Crow!)

As the title shows this is the 23rd part (actually the 24^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on Part I and then scrolling upwards or by accessing the label I Am A Jew.

I have entitled this part “Eating Crow!” because I may have been wrong in one part of my presentations. In "IAM A JEW (PART VI - The Palestinians)" I stated:

As I have set forth, the Arabs of Palestine have lived there since at least 640 CE, whereas Jews have not lived in Palestine until 1882 when the concept of “Aliyah” came into vogue.

One of my blog subscribers, who prefers to remain anonymous wrote at that time:

One sentence in your September 22nd blog gave me pause. You wrote: (he then quotes the sentence set forth in italics above), and goes on to write:

I assume that you do not accept the theory, advanced as fact, I believe, that there is no genetic connection between what we now call Jews, and the Israelites who built the first and second temples; rather those who we now called Jews are either defended from a people who were converted to the Jewish religion by their king long after the exile of the Jews following the destruction of the first and second temples or people, or descendants of people, who converted to the Jewish religion after that time.  I therefore assume that you mean that there where no Jews living in Palestine at any time after, say, the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt until the late 1880s.  If this is what you mean, I think you are mistaken.

 It is my impression that there have always been Jews in Palestine, albeit not in large numbers.  I have this impression from, for instance, seeing note in the High Holiday prayer books that certain poems or prayers were written by Rabbis who lived in Israel in the 5th and 7th Centuries.  I believe also, that the Jerusalem Talmud was complied in Tiberius in the 4th and 5th centuries, during the time that you seem to say there were no Jews in Palestine.  Being an admirer of your research ability, but not very good at it, I tried researching the question.  Aside from stuff I found on Google what was obviously based in ideology, one way or the other, not in fact, I did come across one essay which seems to be fact based, although it is obvious that the facts the writer found fitted with what he wanted to find.  The citation is here.  If you skim over the “if I forget thee oh Jerusalem" stuff it starts with, there is what seems to be well documented evidence that there have always been Jews, in varying numbers, in Palestine during the period in question.

I also came across another article, which argues that there was a very large Arab immigration into Palestine, starting soon after the initial turn of the century Zionist immigration. If this is true, then your statement about the Arabs of Palestine having lived there since at least 640 CE is not quite accurate, since it would seem that both the Jewish and Arab populations include many recent immigrants and descendants of recent immigrants. 

 And if both articles are correct, then the fact would be that some of the ancestors of both the Jewish and Arab populations of what is now Israel and Palestine have lived in this area for centuries, and most of them, and their ancestors came more recently.

The articles referred to are: “Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land” posted by Eretz Yisroel and “The Myth of Jewish ‘Colonialism’: Demographics and Development in Palestine.” They make a convincing case for the presence of Jews in the Palestininan territory for far longer than I had set forth.

I include this in my writing because I am anxious to keep my facts as accurate as I am able.

However, to the extent that the facts are different from what I had believed them to be, I don’t think that they change the essential narrative. Regardless, of which group was there first, or how long that group had been there, I believe the essential fact is how many of each ehtnic group where in Palestine in 1948, when the UN authorized the creation of the Jewish State.

For that we don’t have to examine the historic record. If we look at my post "I AM A JEW (PART XIV - The Israeli Propaganda Machine v. The Alleged Power of the Arab Lobby)" we find that according to the United States State Department at the time of the partition in 1948 there were “650,000 Jewish inhabitants, 1,300,000 Muslim and Christian Arab inhabitants. I believe that those are the figures that count, not how long their forbears had been there.

At this point I invite all and sundry comments, criticisms, etc. I will publish them and as appropriate will comment on them.