The Indelible Bond
The chant “From the River to the Sea” is a catchy refrain popularized by those who seek to deny the Jewish people—the indigenous people of the Land of Israel—the right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. The irony is difficult to ignore because accusations that Jews are “occupiers” of Israel are often advanced by the descendants of peoples and empires that historically conquered and ruled the land. Yet the record of antiquity, supported by extensive archaeological evidence, tells a far more complex and enduring story—one that chronicles the ancient Jewish connection to the land across millennia.
History records that two-thousand years ago, well before the emergence of Christianity and Islam, the Romans initially referred to Israel as Judea because that was its longstanding and universally recognized name—the land of the Kingdom of Judah and the Jewish people who inhabited it. The very word Jew derives from Judean, a reminder that despite those who would re-write history to fit their political or theological agenda, Jewish identity and the land are historically inseparable.
Around 135 CE, Roman Emperor Hadrian, after putting down the revolt of the Jews led by Bar Kokhba, reorganized and renamed the country Syria Palaestina. This was not an innocent administrative adjustment or an exercise in cartography. It was an act of imperial retribution. Having brutally suppressed the Jewish revolt, Hadrian sought to erase the land’s association with its indigenous Jewish population, extinguish Jewish national aspirations, and sever the connection between a people and its ancestral homeland.
He failed.
Over the ensuing centuries, variations of the name Palestine persisted under Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule. The fabricated term functioned as a geographic designation rather than the name of a sovereign state or a distinct national political entity. In the twentieth century, Palestine became the official designation of the territory administered under the League of Nations’ British Mandate, when the majority population was living under the mandate were Palestinian Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and Palestinian Christians.
Historical irony is profound. The very name that some invoke today to deny Jewish indigeneity originated in an imperial effort to obscure and diminish it. Linguistically derived from Philistia and institutionalized by Rome as Syria Palaestina, the name Palestine has assumed different geographic and political meanings over more than two millennia.
Empires rose and fell. Conquerors renamed provinces. Borders shifted and rulers changed. Yet the Jewish physical and spiritual attachment to the land proved stronger than every attempt to erase it. The continued existence of the Jewish people—and the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in their ancestral homeland—stands as perhaps the most compelling refutation of ancient Hadrian’s, and modern antisemites’ failed attempts to sever an indelible bond between the Jewish people and Eretz Yisrael—The Land of Israel.
