Our Indigenous Beginnings
A map of great significance
Here’s a great map from renowned historian Martin Gilbert’s book "The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Its History in Maps." (Thanks to the reader who re-did the map and diagram in color.)
As the caption states, for more than one thousand six hundred years the Jews formed the main settled population of the land that would later be known as Palestine. Although often conquered, by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians and Romans, the Jewish People remained, until the Roman conquest, the predominant people of the land, with long periods of complete independence. During the six centuries that followed the Roman conquest, some Jews remained in Palestine, mostly near Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem, the four “Holy Cities” of Judaism.
This information is crucially important when so many people think of Israel today as nothing more than a European settler colonial project.
Here's a good article: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bellerose-aboriginal-people
I hate the indigenous/colonial arguments. They are stupid. How far back do you want to go? Should every person on the planet be resettled? It’s a non argument for me. How do we know that Indians were native to their specific locations? There have always been wars. Population shifts. The “I was here first” argument that first graders use when getting on line for the water fountain does not translate to geopolitics.