Israel or Palestine? The Jews Were There First

There is a powerful oped in Israel’s Ynet news that puts things in proper perspective. The Jewish people have a historic homeland in Israel. They were there in any organized fashion before the Islamists ever showed up. Be sure to read the whole thing. An excerpt:

“The claim of national sovereignty and the level of steadfastness in face of adversity are derivatives of the attachment to the territorial cradle of history and national security requirements.

Nations which highlight their non-conditional attachment to their territorial cradle of history (irrespective of diplomatic, security and economic considerations) enhance steadfastness and gain strategic respect. On the other hand, nations which consider their cradle of history a negotiable-real-estate may gain short-lived popularity, but undermine their attachment to the land, lose long-term strategic respect and erode their own posture of deterrence.

A nation which negotiates away its cradle of history is giving away its future.

Prof. (emeritus) Menasheh Har-El, a leading expert on the history and geography of the Land of Israel, a recipient of the Israel Prize and author of 13 books, documents national Jewish roots in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as early as the 13th century BC: 2,000 years before the appearance of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, 3,200 years before Arabs from Egypt, Syriaand Lebanon migrated to the Land of Israel and 3,350 years before the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

According to Professor Har-El’s 55 years of research, the Jews were the first to coalesce the various regions of Canaan into a unified country. They settled in the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria rather than along the coastal plain, introducing agricultural innovations into barren, rugged mountains, developing irrigation systems, establishing stone and metal shops, ushering advanced architecture and construction, building roads from the Mediterranean to Jerusalem, which became the crown jewel of the Jewish people.”