History’s Fatal Lure: Conquer and Hold Israel

Natufians were the first real society to hold sway in what would become modern Israel. Their culture in the Levant, 15,000 to 11,500 years ago, predates even the Neolithic agricultural revolution, a unique and unusual instance of a sedentary, collective, urban population even before the advent of sowing crops. Such a civilization, advanced enough to be brewing beer and baking flatbread with the wild grains they harvested, required competent preservation, storage, fermenting, smoking and drying technologies, along with baskets, containers, pottery, casks, and vats in order to support large concentrations of hunter-gatherers.

Just how developed they were can be seen in the Hilazon Tachtit cave, located equidistant between present-day Haifa and the Sea of Galilee, where an ancient Natufian gravesite was discovered dating to 10,000 BC, the tomb of what is assumed to be one of their shamans. The diminutive woman, three inches less than five foot tall, was physically disabled but still must have been an important personage. She was buried with a boar, a leopard and an eagle, along with the shells of ninety tortoises—a considerable funerary investment.

It was the Natufians’ far-descendants, the Canaanites, occupying the land when Jewish people arrived from Mesopotamia almost four thousand years ago. At this inception of Jewish roots in Israel things are relatively simple, for there is only one other claimant to the land of Israel extant then, that being the defeated Canaanites. And the people today most closely related to ancient Natufians, by the way, are Saudi Arabians and Yemeni, neither of which thankfully has ever laid claim to Israel.

Things were destined to become very complex though. When the Jewish kingdom fell in 721 BC their territory went into one of the great geopolitical sovereignty freefalls in history. Israel became: Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Saracen, Byzantine, Mamluk, Crusader and Ottoman Turkish before France and Britain seized power after World War I. Their thirty year protectorate came to an end in 1948 when Jewish rule was re-established after an interlude of almost three millennia.

But what of the Palestinians there? Where are the shadows and vestiges of the era when the Palestinians ruled Israel amid all the other conquerors listed above? In 1516, the Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, defeated and incorporated the domains of the Egyptian Mamluks, to include Israel, into the now doubled in size Ottoman Empire. The following year, the great sultan, passing through one of his newly-won cities, Jerusalem, ordered its city walls to be repaired and a census taken. The first task didn’t come off without incident. When Selim discovered the overseer in charge had completed the construction in such a way as to leave the Jewish quarter of the city outside the safety of the walls, the sultan executed him.

A census was duly undertaken, the head-counters well aware that a fallacious tally sent to Selim probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Here are numbers to respect then: total inhabitants, 5,612; Jews, 1,194; Christians, 714; Muslims, 3,704.

There was indeed a Muslim presence in Jerusalem, of course, and continued until the Ottoman Empire fell in the twentieth century. Here then are the direct ancestors of the people granted sovereignty in 1948, never in charge for a single day prior in the almost interminable chronicles, but worthy nonetheless since the United Nations graciously deemed them entitled to it, a “Palestine” born right alongside an Israel.

Palestine, however in its first and only act, opted to make a dangerously impetuous “double or nothing” bet, a cursed decision that has plagued themselves and the world ever since, and immediately turned on its neighbor in a contest of arms. Several lost wars, blundered settlement negotiations, and three-quarters of a century later the self-imposed disaster of the Palestinians serves mostly as a warning for how fanatical, incompetent and suicidal statescraft can lay low a people: vae victis, woe to the vanquished.

Putting everything in perspective and considering the 15,000 year long history of Israel—from the original settlers to the present—the Palestinians came to power after the previous 14,924 years had elapsed, and held it for less than one year, a grand total of ten months.

The Knights Templar, the Hassassin, and the French Foreign Legion have as good or better a claim to Israel than do the Palestinians.