Now Serving #99

Walk into a deli or bakery on a busy day and you’ll see the same little ritual: customers take a red paper ticket from a small plastic dispenser, glance up at the glowing sign that reads Now Serving #99, and wait for their turn. It’s fair, predictable — civilized, even.

Judea and Samaria have operated under a similar system for the past three thousand years. One empire after another has taken a number, stepped up to the counter, and claimed its turn to “govern” this small, stubborn stretch of land.

The Philistines had their number called. Then the Assyrians. The Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, Jordanians — and now, the latest in line, the self-declared “Palestinians.”

Everyone wants a turn. But strangely, no one ever really wants the land itself.

A Land Without the Usual Temptations

There’s no oil beneath the hills of Judea. No gold or silver veins waiting to be mined. It’s not a shipping hub or a vital trade route. The soil is rocky, the terrain unforgiving, the geography awkward.

By every modern measure of strategic value, it’s not worth the trouble. Yet for millennia, armies have marched, empires have built and burned, and rulers have proclaimed dominion.

The reason, of course, has never been about what could be gained — only what could be taken from the Jews.

The Mandate and the Meaning of “From the River to the Sea”

After World War I, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the League of Nations issued the Mandate for Palestine — explicitly recognizing “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and calling for the reconstitution of their national home.

That homeland was defined geographically: from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

In other words, the very phrase now chanted as a threat once described the legal, moral, and historic territory designated for the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty.

But history, like deli lines, doesn’t always move in straight order.

When Occupation Didn’t Matter

Fast-forward to 1948. The State of Israel is declared. Arab armies invade and fail to destroy it — but Jordan occupies Judea and Samaria (which it quickly renames “the West Bank”) while Egypt takes Gaza.

For nineteen years, Jews are barred from Jerusalem’s Old City. Synagogues are leveled, graves desecrated, stones from the Mount of Olives used to build latrines.

And the world? Silent.

There were no emergency sessions at the United Nations. No calls for a Palestinian state. No protests in Paris or New York demanding “liberation” for the West Bank.

Apparently, occupation was acceptable — as long as it wasn’t Jews doing the occupying.

The Outrage That Arrived in 1967

Then came the Six-Day War. Israel, surrounded and threatened with annihilation, pushed the Jordanians back to the east bank of the Jordan River and reunited Jerusalem for the first time in nearly two millennia.

And that’s when the world suddenly found its outrage.

The same nations that shrugged during Jordan’s occupation began crying out that Israel was “illegally occupying Palestinian land.” The same international bodies that ignored Jewish exclusion from their holiest sites began passing resolutions demanding division and withdrawal.

The hypocrisy was — and remains — staggering.

It’s not the land the world mourns to see “occupied.” It’s the idea of Jews standing on it, sovereign and secure, that seems to offend.

History by Another Name

The Romans once renamed Judea Syria Palaestina — not to honor a people, but to erase one.

Jordan later renamed it the “West Bank” — as if geography could overwrite history.
Now, the word Palestine has been retrofitted again, turned into a modern political construct used to invert victim and occupier.

And those are just the conquerors most people remember from world-history class. Between them were scores more — Seleucids and Hasmoneans, Umayyads and Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks — each claiming their brief dominion, each scribbling their number on the same order ticket. By any fair count, Jerusalem and Judea have been conquered, occupied, or renamed nearly a hundred times.

To Israel — and to history — this is merely the same story playing out with new actors and a new script. Conquest by any other name still smells of conquest.

The Real Story of “Occupation”

Through it all, the Jewish people never disappeared from the land. Empires rose and fell, but Jewish life — in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias — endured. They were never foreign here; only patient. To the uneducated, today’s headlines tell a simple story: Israel is trying to take land from the Palestinians.

To anyone who’s read even a modest slice of history, the story is older and far more tragic: the Jews have spent three thousand years defending the same land from a revolving door of occupiers.

Every generation of conquerors believed it was their turn at the counter.

They renamed the menu, changed the décor, and claimed the deed — until their empire fell and another took their place.

Israel’s presence today isn’t a new occupation; it’s a return home after a long wait in line.

Now Serving #99

So yes, another number has been called. The 99th? The 109th? It hardly matters.

Empires have come and gone. Borders have shifted and blurred. The deli counter of history keeps serving up new claimants.

But the order never changed: one people, one homeland, one capital — Jerusalem.

So to those waiting impatiently for their turn to “liberate” what isn’t theirs — take a number.

Israel is finally being served.