You heard if from Helen the Whore and it will be repeated by antisemites later in their thread. Very ignorant antisemites like PF Tinmore will say there were no Israeli nation in ancient times. That they Romans didn't hit the country and displace the people. Other less ignorant, but fully ignorant antisemites will say they Jews were either killed or exciled from Israel after the 2nd great Jewish revolt.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in the 1800s the Jews were the majority in Jerusalem (Esp East Jerusalem), Tel Aviv was founded in the 1800s and Jewish communities were all over Israel. During the 1800s Israel was sparsely populated. The so called Palestinians of today mostly migrated to the area when the Jews were coming back to their home land during the 1800s and mostly during the British White Paper days.
These are facts that only ignorant antisemites will overlook!
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in the 1800s the Jews were the majority in Jerusalem (Esp East Jerusalem), Tel Aviv was founded in the 1800s and Jewish communities were all over Israel. During the 1800s Israel was sparsely populated. The so called Palestinians of today mostly migrated to the area when the Jews were coming back to their home land during the 1800s and mostly during the British White Paper days.
These are facts that only ignorant antisemites will overlook!
Articles: Israel: Some Basic Facts
The charge is this:
After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the Jews lost their country and forfeited any right to it by going into exile for nearly 2,000 years.
The answer:
Indeed, the destruction of Jerusalem ended the Jewish state with appalling loss of life. But the Jews maintained a continuous presence in their homeland, and it is this continuity which gives them an absolute, inalienable right of self-determination, historically, spiritually, and politically, in the reconstituted Jewish state.
In AD 132, the charismatic Jewish hero Simon Bar Kochba rallied his countrymen against continued Roman persecution. Another war of liberation -- the second Jewish uprising -- was launched against Rome. Bar Kochba's Jewish warriors freed large areas of the homeland from the Roman yoke, just as Jewish fighters had similarly freed the homeland from Greco-Syrian occupation in 165 BC, liberating Jerusalem and the Holy Temple and giving the world the festival of lights, Hanukah, which every year falls on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev.
Bar Kochba (known as Son of the Star) also liberated Jerusalem, but the Roman emperor, Hadrian, who wanted to build a giant temple to the god Jupiter in place of the Holy Temple, sent an army of 35,000 soldiers against the Jewish warriors. After a desperate three-year struggle, the Jewish resistance ended at the fortress of Betar. It is estimated that in the ensuing Roman repression, some 500,000 Jews were either killed or sent into slavery throughout the Empire.
Even after this second catastrophe, the Jews nevertheless remained an absolute majority in the land up until the 5th century AD, and they were the single most important community up until the Arab conquest in the 7th century.
In 1099, the Crusaders arrived and massacred not only Jews, but also Muslims. On July 15, the entire Jewish population of Jerusalem was forced into the chief synagogue, and the building was set on fire. The Crusaders marched around it, singing, "Christ, we adore thee" in a diabolical accompaniment to the screams of the men, women, and children burning alive.
In the ensuing centuries, during which the land was invaded by successive alien conquerors, the Jews maintained themselves in whatever numbers they could sustain. In fact, they refounded the holy Jewish city of Tiberius in Galilee three separate times. In the 16th century, some 15,000 Jews lived in another holy Jewish city, Safed, in Upper Galilee -- a center of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah.
Throughout the dark centuries of exile, Jewish pilgrims and refugees returned again and again to restore the ancestral Jewish homeland. Jewish prayers and festivals recited and celebrated in synagogues throughout the Diaspora, then as now, are based in large part upon the agricultural cycle of ancient Israel attesting yet again to the inextricable spiritual and aboriginal links with the ancestral homeland.
In the 1850s, the first Jewish agricultural villages were re-established in what was then largely barren and empty territory under Turkish Ottoman occupation. By 1844, the Jews constituted the largest community in the eternal Jewish capital, Jerusalem.
In that year, according to the Prussian Consul, there were 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims, and 3,390 Christians in Jerusalem. Even before the State of Israel was re-established in 1948, Jerusalem was primarily a Jewish city, with 100,000 Jews out of a total population of 165,000. Many of the non-Jews were not Arabs at all, but Europeans, Americans, Ethiopians, and other Christians.
The assertion that Jewish ties to the ancestral homeland came to an end in 70 AD is utterly without foundation. Those Jewish ties have remained unbroken since Abraham, the first Jew, came to Hebron, the other Jewish holy city, and purchased a burial plot for his wife Sarah, his son Isaac, his grandson Jacob, and some of their wives. These are the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish people, who are buried in Hebron.
The truth, then, is that Jews always maintained a continuous presence in their own land despite the depredations of a succession of alien occupiers. There is an absolute continuity between the Israel of the Bible and the Israel of today.
It is the same land, the same people, the same language, the same God, the same prophets, the same holy Book. There has never been a time in the last 35 centuries when there haven't been Jews living in Israel -- sometimes as a sovereign nation, sometimes as isolated enclaves occupied by an enemy power.
And when Jews have been few in number inside Israel itself, they have nevertheless continued to pray for its welfare daily, to pray daily for their return to nationhood, to recount the biblical promises, and to pray for a quick return.
This is continuity par excellence. Why is this important? Because part of the Big Lie of today is to deny it and to consider the Jews illegitimate newcomers to the land who can legitimately be pushed right back out. Yet the continuity of the Jewish people in Israel is a basic fact.