The Jewish Claim to Israel

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Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian activist and writer whose bio on X states, “[I]ndigenous daughter of Jerusalem (with receipts, unlike the colonizers). On October 27, she posted the following on X,

Hollywood’s brainwashing is in full force. There’s a new TV series on Prime called ‘House of David,’ meant to imply that the 70-year-old [J]ewish [Z]ionist settler colony in Palestine actually has ancient roots. These people are parasites.

This claim, that modern day Jews have no ties or claims to the land of Israel and that Zionists are only colonizers of Palestinian land, is becoming more common, even though the archaeological and historical evidence for the existence of ancient Israel is beyond dispute.

For example, the Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates the Roman defeat of the Jews in A.D. 70, events that were documented by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, as well as others. Nearly every book of the Old Testament tells of the twelve tribes of Israel and of their descendants in this region of the world. The New Testament describes Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew who lived in Galilee, Judaea, and Jerusalem. Ancient inscriptions from Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt also attest to the existence of Israel. The earliest of these inscriptions is the Merneptah Stele, which dates to 1208 B.C. and was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It describes a pharaoh’s victory over the Israelites and is now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There’s also the Tel Dan inscription, from the ninth century B.C., which was found in northern Israel and commemorates “the king of the House of David.” Countless inscriptions in Hebrew also further confirm that modern Israel is founded on the territory of ancient Israel.

There is also ample evidence of Jews living in the region throughout the Christian era, with one exception. In A.D. 135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian banned Jews from Jerusalem due to their repeated rebellions against Roman authority. After the Muslim conquest of the city in 638, the Jews were invited back by Caliph Umar, who also invited them to pray on the Temple Mount. By the ninth century, between 200 and 500 Jewish families were concentrated in the Jewish quarter of the city.

During the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1099, the Jews in the city were massacred and banned from re-entering, though they were allowed to live in the surrounding villages. When Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, he invited the Jews to return to the city. The Jewish presence remained throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, though with increasing restrictions on their freedoms.

With the rise of the Ottomans and the recapture of Jerusalem in 1517, Jews were granted more freedom. Multiple waves of immigration into the region followed, and the Jewish population especially grew in the nineteenth century. According to Ottoman census records, there were about 2,000 Jews in Jerusalem in 1800, about 25% of the population of the city. By 1900, that number had increased to about 35,000 Jews, or 65% of the population of the city. There are also 150,000 Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives from the Ottoman period. When Ottoman rule ended in 1914, there were about 45,000 Jews in Jerusalem.

In other words, aside from the period between A.D. 135 to 638, the evidence is strong of extensive Jewish presence in the Holy Land. In fact, much of that evidence comes from Muslim sources. The evidence is overwhelming both for the existence of ancient Israel and for the continuing presence of Jews in the Holy Land, especially in the centuries prior to the founding of Israel in 1948.

Another common argument against the legitimacy of Israel is the claim that modern Jews are not related to the ancient Israelites. Some argue that Ashkenazi Jews, historically centered around Eastern Europe, are descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted to Judaism to maintain independence. However, genetic studies have disproven this theory. When the Ashkenazi genome is compared to genomes extracted from skeletons from bronze and iron age Israel, there is 50 to 60% continuity between them. The remaining 30 to 40% of the genome dates back only 600 to 800 years ago, and reveals intermarriage during the medieval period, well after the Khazars. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews have an even higher genetic continuity with ancient Israelites.

Facts always tend to interrupt ideology, but especially when it comes to antisemitic tropes. The evidence is abundant of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, of the nearly continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land, and of the links between modern Jews and ancient Israelites.

On the other hand, there is no archeological support for Arabs in the region prior to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century.

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John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.