|
Trending Topics
|
The Only People on Earth Being Told Their History Has Expired
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) Micha Danzig - Anti-Israel activists in Ireland, Canada, Britain and the U.S. insist that Jews are not really a people at all, but merely adherents of a religion who displaced an "indigenous" population. This is saying that conquest erases indigeneity, that exile voids peoplehood, that a nation can lose its connection to its homeland if enough centuries have gone by. And somehow this principle applies uniquely to Jews. No one says to Greeks, "Well, maybe Athens mattered 2,500 years ago." No one says to Native Americans that centuries of forcible removal erased their connection to ancestral lands. Only Jews are routinely told that indigeneity comes with a statute of limitations. Yes, Rome destroyed Jewish sovereignty. But Jews were never fully expelled from the Land of Israel. Jewish communities remained continuously in places like the Galilee, Tiberias, Hebron and elsewhere. Within two centuries of the Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome in 135 CE, Jews were again living in Jerusalem. Nor did Jews ever stop attempting to restore autonomy or national life there. For over 2,000 years Jews in the diaspora prayed facing Jerusalem three times a day and prayed for a return to a rebuilt Jerusalem. The Hebrew calendar anchors Jewish holidays to the seasons of the Land of Israel. Hebrew itself - now spoken daily by millions - is indigenous to the land. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Jews kept returning. By the mid-1800s, Jews had become the largest population group in Jerusalem. Had the Arab world accepted partition in 1947, there would have been both an Arab state and a Jewish state west of the Jordan River nearly eight decades ago. No refugee crisis. No generations of bloodshed. Yet the Jews - alone among the nations of the world - are seen as not entitled to self-determination in any part of the land where their civilization, language, calendar, faith and national identity were born.