JRV1335

Today’s Israel is the Land of Israel’s NEXT Native State After Roman-Destroyed Jewish Judaea, Which We Never Fully Left

#1335 August 16, 2026

If ever we were called upon to do so, we American Jews today must stand by Israel in its claim to the entirety of the land of Israel, western Palestine, with historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria highland as its defensible and Jewishly meaningful core.  Knowing that our people has never abandoned that homeland and that today’s Israel is the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea enables us to confidently justly do so.

Today’s Israel is the Land of Israel’s NEXT Native State After Roman-Destroyed Jewish Judaea, Which We Never Fully Left

“What, would you give America back to the Native Americans!?”  That’s how some Jewish “two-state solution” believers summarily dismiss my argument that the land of Israel, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria heartland as its very core, is historically ours.  Ok, giving back the Crab Apple, for one place, appeals to me, but there are two key differences between the cases of American Indians and Israelis. 

[1] A successor independent state, the United States (mazel tov on 250), has intervened in America, but today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s NEXT native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, EVERY ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader (and, btw, mostly non-Arab at that, and “The Palestinians,” as even we foolishly call them, have never ruled Palestine ever.)

[2] We never left.

I’m not making this up.  This week, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon (Daily Alert, Thursday, 8/13/26, Israel Rejects Claims that Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria are Obstacles to Peace) correctly told the UN

“When speaker after speaker refers to ‘settler violence,’ it is an insult to thousands of years of continuous Jewish history in the Land of Israel. Jews have never been and will never be ‘settlers’ in Judea and Samaria.”  [emphasis added]

Danon’s not alone. Eminent historian James Parkes wrote in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (p.266) that the continuous post-biblical homeland-claiming presence of Jews, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”  Indeed, he criticized us for harping on a narrative of “exile and return,” allowing our adversaries to charge “What right have you to come back and claim the land following an absence of almost 2,000 years?”

So taken was I by Parkes’ “real title deeds” assertion that I wrote a book, Israel 3000 Years, the Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, tracing and documenting that tenacious homeland-claiming presence. (Here’s a typical conversation between ok layman me and folks that I meet: “I wrote a book.”  “What’s it about?”  “The history of the Jews in Palestine.”  “What’s it really about?”)

The Romans Did NOT Exile the Jews: The Jewish wars against Rome were indeed ferocious, with Hadrian omitting from his report of the final of four revolts “I and the army are well.”  Romans destroyed and banned Jews from Jerusalem, but what evidence do we have they didn’t exile the Jews?  Several lines of evidence.  Post-independence Roman-Byzantine era synagogues and other Jewish remains dotting the land. The writing by sages in the land of the Mishnah and then Palestinian Talmud.  Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish population until the fifth century. Joinder in their own self-mustered battalions of 20,000 or more homeland Jews fighting alongside the autonomy-promising invading Persians in 614 against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs.

Jewish Presence During Foreign Muslim Empire Rule: The Byzantines took back rule but were soon conquered by invading Arabs, whom the Jews helped and received rewards, inaugurating 638 – 1099 periods of decreasingly Arab-led foreign Muslim Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasty rule.  Archeologist Dan Bahat includes in The Forgotten Generations a map of New Jersey-sized Palestine showing a hundred ninth century Jewish cities and communities.

Homeland Jews Fought the Crusaders: Yes, we did, and the Crusaders acknowledged this themselves. Ben-Gurion (ed.) The Jews In Their Land, p. 214:

“A contemporary Crusader account of the conquest of Jerusalem acknowledges the valor of the Jewish fighters: ‘And here, in front of us, were the foreigners, Jew, Turk, and Arab, fighting for their lives with slingstones, with catapults, with fire and venom … and when the end came upon the foreigners, they withdrew from one battlefront, only to find a second battlefront facing them. And though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword: the Turk, the Arab, and the Jew were among the fallen. The Jew is the last to fall.’”  [emphasis added]

And not in Jerusalem only. Bahat, The Forgotten Generations, p. 37, quoting Albert of Aachen: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.”

Ben-Gurion (ed.) The Jews in Their Land, p. 215:

“Apart from a few places in the south, we have no information about Jewish participation in the defense of other Palestinian towns; but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”

The Yishuv During Mamluk Foreign Rule: Parkes, Whose Land? p. 80: “… the reversion of the country to Islam, when it came, was not to come from Arab sources, but from a fresh wave of Turkish invaders represented by Saladin the Kurd.” Following Mongol and other invaders in the Crusaders’ wake, Turk-Circassian Mamluks ruled for over 200 years. A Christian traveler recorded that Jerusalem Jews “think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised to them” and that “in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies they suffer at the hands of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.” I compiled a timeline of Jews in Jerusalem during Mamluk rule in my book (pp.115-117).  Authorities cite Acre, Haifa, Caesarea, Shechem, Galilee and other Mamluk period Jewish communities.

Still There Under the Turks: The Turkish Ottoman Empire misruled Palestine for four centuries, 1517 – 1917, driving its population down to the lowest in all recorded times.  Jews lived at times in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land, becoming again Jerusalem’s majority population during pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule. 

A Good Third of the Population Under the British: Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 97: “Modern Zionism did start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new.  The living movement to the land had never ceased.”  Bevin (no friend of ours) summed up the land’s partition-time population as 1.2 million Arabs (Katz argued less) and 600,000 Jews.  Why, after 3,000 years, weren’t there more Jews?  Ask the Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and other empire invaders, and in most recent times, Turks, Germans and British. And count the Jews still in “displaced person” camps in Europe and intercepted Aliyah Bet immigrants confined by Britain on Cyprus, plus the dhimmi Muslim land Jews who’d have fled to the homeland if they could.

Bottom Line

After citing some pre-State immigrations, I summed up my own book (p. 141):

“And so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.”

Last week (#1334) I listed the several bases – biblical, historical, legal, equitable, indispensable, indivisible – of our Jewish peoples’ Jewish homeland connection.  UN Amb. Danon this week cited “our biblical rights, our historical rights, our legal rights to Judea and Samaria” and flatly told the UN “We are not going anywhere.”  We American Jews of today must stand with Israel and its UN Ambassador.  Appreciating that a homeland core of our people remained and that today’s Israel is the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea, we can confidently justly do so.