Palestine Homeland Stolen by Israel? Not According to History!

It annoys me when people ignore - or worse, pervert - historical data to justify their own position. Everybody seems to overlook the fact that the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah were taken from the Jews by the Romans as retribution for the "Great Revolt" in 66AD (or 66CE [Common Era] as the PC folks now identify it).

The Romans first occupied Israel in 63BC (or 66BCE) at which time there was no "Palestine". At the beginning of the Common Era, a new group arose among the Jews: the Zealots. These anti-Roman rebels were active for more than six decades, and later instigated the Great Revolt. Their most basic belief was that all means were justified to attain political and religious liberty.

The Jews' anti-Roman feelings were seriously exacerbated during the reign of the half-crazed emperor Caligula, who in the year 39 declared himself to be a deity and ordered his statue to be set up at every temple in the Roman Empire. The Jews, alone in the empire, refused the command; they would not defile God's Temple with a statue of pagan Rome's newest deity. Only the emperor's sudden, violent death saved the Jews from wholesale massacre.

In the decades after Caligula's death, Jews found their religion subject to periodic gross indignities, Roman soldiers exposing themselves in the Temple on one occasion, and burning a Torah scroll on another.

In the year 66, Florus, the last Roman procurator, stole vast quantities of silver from the Temple. The outraged Jewish masses rioted and wiped out the small Roman garrison stationed in Jerusalem. Cestius Gallus, the Roman ruler in neighboring Syria, sent in a larger force of soldiers. But the Jewish insurgents routed them as well.

This was a heartening victory that had a terrible consequence: Many Jews suddenly became convinced that they could defeat Rome, and the Zealots' ranks grew geometrically. Never again, however, did the Jews achieve so decisive a victory.

When the Romans returned, they had 60,000 heavily armed and highly professional troops. They launched their first attack against the Jewish state's most radicalized area, the Galilee in the north. The Romans vanquished the Galilee, and an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed or sold into slavery.

During the summer of 70, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem, and initiated an orgy of violence and destruction. Shortly thereafter, they destroyed the Second Temple. This was the final and most devastating Roman blow against Judea. It is estimated that as many as one million Jews died in the Great Revolt against Rome. When people today speak of the almost two-thousand-year span of Jewish homelessness and exile, they are dating it from the failure of the revolt and the destruction of the Temple

After Rome destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70, the Great Revolt ended - except for the surviving Zealots, who fled Jerusalem to the fortress of Masada, near the Dead Sea. There, they held out for three years. Masada is situated on top of an enormous, isolated rock: Anyone climbing it to attack the fortress would be an easy target. Yet the Jews, encamped in the fortress, could never feel secure; every morning, they awoke to see the Roman Tenth Legion hard at work, constructing battering rams and other weapons. If the 960 defenders of Masada hoped that the Romans eventually would consider this last Jewish beachhead too insignificant to bother conquering, they were to be disappointed. The Romans were well aware that the Zealots at Masada were the group that had started the Great Revolt; in fact, the Zealots had been in revolt against the Romans since the year 6. More than anything else, the length and bitterness of their uprising probably account for Rome's unwillingness to let Masada and its small group of defiant Jews alone.

The Zealots were Jewish extremists, even the Jews recognize that. The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah had existed for about 1,000 years before the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, partitioned it around 135AD and renamed the land that was Israel and Judea "Syria Palaestina".

In 1922, the League of Nations recognized the "historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the "grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country", the 28 Articles of the Mandate for Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine were ratified, and Israel was rightfully re-established - at least in a technical and legal sense.

His Britannic Majesty, King George V, was nominated for and accepted the function of, the Mandatory for Palestine. That mandate continued until 1947, when Israel was recognized by the United Nations as a sovereign entity. However, "the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away" ... the U.N. Partition Plan also gave most of what once was Judah to an Arab State.

Following the time line, it is fairly obvious that the Jews, established by the year 1004BC/BCE, had their homelands seized and redistributed by the Romans in 135AD/CE, and that prior to that time there was no Palestine. The Palestinians should stop their whining and their terroristic acts, accept the fact that Israel does exist as a legitimately recognized Nation State, and concentrate their energies on living in peace with their neighbors.

I won't argue with history, however keep in mind that history is written by the victors. I could be wrong in how I see this ... but I'm NOT!