Understanding the chain of custody for the “Holy Land”
With a surprise twist at the end
The following article is NOT an argument for who should currently have sovereignty over the “Holy Land.” I simply intend to show a pattern of ownership that illuminates one narrow aspect of the current controversy. So here’s how things went…
The Canaanites ruled/possessed the land first in terms of recorded history. Surely others were there before them, probably including Neanderthals, whose remains have been found in the area.
The Israelites came second. They may have been a version or subset of the Cannites, or some outside group that conquered the land. The Jews were one of the tribes of Israel.
A succession of empires then conquered the land over hundreds of years — the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and finally the Greeks.
The Jews would occasionally regain full or partial control between these episodes of imperial subjugation. In a notable instance that is celebrated by the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, the Jews took the land back from the Greeks.
Then the Romans conquered it.
The Jews did not like that, so they revolted twice, in 66 and 132.
The second Jewish revolt (the Bar Kochba rebellion) was so traumatic to the Romans that they expelled most of the Jews from the land and changed the name to Palestine.
Thus, the name Palestine was created by an imperial power for an imperial purpose.
The name Palestine was then retained by three other imperial powers right up to the 20th Century.
In the 4th Century administrative responsibility for the “Hold Land” passed from the Roman Empire seated at Rome to the Eastern (or Byzantine) Roman Empire seated at Constantinople.
Then the Arab Muslims conquered it.
Then the Christian Crusaders from Europe conquered it.
Then the Arabs conquered it back.
Then the Ottoman Turks conquered it from the Arabs.
Then it was taken over by the British Empire after World War 1 as part of the Palestinian Mandate conferred on the British by the League of Nations. The purpose of the Mandate from the British point of view was partly to help establish a Jewish homeland in the region.
Do you see the pattern of possession…
Empire 1, empire 2, empire 3, empire 4, empire 5, empire 6, empire 7, empire 8, empire 9, empire 10. It was empires all the way down.
And these imperial episodes were occasionally interrupted by short periods of native Jewish rule until the Romans expelled most of the Jews in the 2nd century.
At no point was sovereignty over the land achieved through something like a democratic vote. Instead, sovereignty was always determined by imperial conquests or Jewish revolts. Thus…
The creation of the modern Jewish state actually breaks the imperial pattern. Yes, the British Empire was involved, but so was the League of Nations and the United Nations. Plus…
All the Jews who lived in the Mandate prior to the United Nations partition that created Israel bought the land they lived on. They did not conquer it or steal it. (What’s going on now with the settler movement in the West Bank is a different story, and I’ll tackle that in a future article).
All the Jews who came into the land were also individuals, not representatives of or descendants of a foreign imperial power.
And finally, nearly all the Zionist Jews were fleeing persecution in other lands, including Arab Islamic persecution by the kinspeople of the current Palestinian Arabs.
None of this implies that the Israelis have a greater claim to sovereignty than the Arabs do. Or vice versa. In a future article, I will use entirely different arguments to make my case about who should have sovereignty now. But…
The chain of custody for the “Holy Land” does put the lie to the claim that Zionism was an imperial colonial enterprise.
The use of the word “colonial” is a tricky attempt to make the Zionist Jews look like a conquering imperial power. They were/are nothing of the sort. They were/are refugees from persecution in other lands. However…
There are beneficiaries of imperial conquest living in Palestine. They are the Palestinian Arab descendants of the Arab empire that conquered the land from the Byzantine Empire in the 7th Century and then again from the Crusaders in the 12th century.
This is not to imply any just cause for Israeli Jews to impinge on the property rights of the Arabs who still live in Israel-Palestine, though it might be possible to establish some such “just cause” through other lines of argument. Rather, my narrow purpose here is simply to assert that…
The Palestinian Arabs, who are descendants of imperial conquers, should not throw colonial epithets at the descendants of persecuted Jewish refugees.
Kapish?
Thank you to John McAlister for making my work possible. None of my heretical opinions should be confused with his views, which are probably more sober and wise.
Copyright © Perry Willis 2024
Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the National Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.
