Israel’s cultural rights to the Land

The following quotation can be read in its entirety in Israel’s Declaration of Independence:

”ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma'pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood”.

A well-known expression among the Jews in the Diaspora has been “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Jewish settlements have existed in Palestine even during the Diaspora. After the destruction of the Second Temple and during the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued to thrive and flourish. Large Jewish communities were rebuilt in Jerusalem and Tiberias during the 9th Century. In the 11th Century Jewish communities were built in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea. The Crusaders (Christians from Europe) massacred many Jews during the 12th Century, but the Jewish population recovered during the following 200 years because a large number of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and to the Galilee.

Aliyah and the Jewish immigration continued and different groups of Jews came to Palestine right up to the founding of the Israeli State 1948. After the birth of the Israeli State, aliyah increased considerably and during the first four months approximately 50 000 immigrants arrived. By the end of 1951, 687 000 men, women and children had arrived.

The name Palestine comes from the Roman attempt to humiliate and degrade the Jewish identification with the Land. Palestine has never been an Arab country, even though the Arabic language came to be the majority of the residents’ main language after the Muslim invasions during the 7th Century. When the prominent Arab-American historian, Prof. Philip Hitti at Princeton University, testified against the partitioning of the land before a British-American committee 1946, he said: “There is no Palestine in history, absolutely not.”

The Arabs, like the Jews, have also immigrated to Palestine. During the British Mandate alone (1917-1948) more than 100 000 Arabs immigrated from neighboring countries. The Arabs in Palestine did not want to be associated with the Jews who lived there, so they refused to be called Palestinians. It was only when Arafat founded the PLO that Arabs began to use the word Palestinian when referring to Arabs within Israel.

The Palestinian claims of having a connection to the Canaanites are a new phenomenon and are contradicted by Historic evidence. The Canaanites disappeared from the surface of this earth about 3000 years ago and no one knows if any of their descendants survived. If they did, who are they today? Those among today’s Palestinians who have lived long in the Land probably cannot be traced back more than about 1000 years in time, while the Jewish kinship with the pre-historic Hebrews stretches over 3000 years back in time and this is a commonly accepted view among serious Historians of today.