For centuries, the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel was universally acknowledged, but not today.
(January 3, 2024 / JNS)
The history of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel did not begin in 1948, as those who want to erase Jewish history and the Jewish connection to Israel would have us believe. In fact, Jews have been living in their ancestral homeland continuously since antiquity.
Throughout that long history, there have been adversaries who attempted to drive the Jewish people out of their land, such as when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE. Those exiled as a result sang, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat; we also wept when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137).
The Romans also attempted to drive out the Jewish people when they destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. Images of the ancient Roman looters can still be seen in Rome today, carved on the Arch of Titus.
Many more conquerors have tried to incorporate the Land of Israel into their own territories, including Persian, Greek, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman conquerors.
Yet Israel has always been the sovereign country of the Jewish people alone.