The Nakba did not start in 1948—It began in 722 BCE and continued!

 

 

The Nakba did not start in 1948—It began in 722 BCE and continued!

By Rabbi Norbert Weinberg

 

One of the accusations levelled against the legitimacy of the State of Israel is that it was founded in 1948 upon a wholesale expulsion of Arabs from lands they held since “Time Immemorial”. That disaster has been labelled as the “Nakba,” the disaster, of the Palestinians.

[Note-Let us ignore, for this discussion, that the term originally referred to the failure of the great Aab nations to withstand a handful of Jews, per the Lebanese scholar, Constantin Zureiq. It was not widely accepted in reference to the Palestinian Arabs until Arafat created the Nakba Day in 1998, well after the Oslo Accords!]

The real Nakba was not in 1948, nor in 1918 with Lord Balfour, nor in 1896 with Herzl. The Nakba occurred multiple times over the course of millennia, but it was not by the Zionists! If anything, it is the Zionists who reversed history, and undid the destruction of the Land and People, benefitting Jews, Druze, Muslim and Christian Arabs alike.

Look at the past “Disasters.”

 

Nakba 1

There was such a Nakba in 722 BCE, when the bulk of the population of the northern tribes of Israel were carried off by the Assyrians, and yet again, in 586 BCE, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and carried off much of the population. This was our first “refugee crisis”. Verdi created his moving “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” at the heart of  his opera, Nabucco, which would then become the theme of the Italian movement for liberation from Austrian dominance.  (These two Empires did short shrift, as well, with the Philistines, Edomites, and other peoples of the region.)

                                   

 

However, with the Shah Cyrus and the Persian restoration, the exiles were allowed to return and the people and land  flourished once again.

By the time of the Roman occupation, in the first century, the population of Judea and the Galilee grew to as much as two million. There was also a large population of Samaritans (the original “Good Samaritans” of Christian Scriptures) cousins to the Judeans as descendants of the northern tribes of Israel who had been spared exile.

[ Contrary to common Jewish assumptions, the core of the Samaritans were descendants of ancient Israel, and that included a considerable number of Cohens, as DNA studies show. They also preserved an ancient version of the Five Books of Moses, still written in the Hebrew script of the First Temple period. See my essay http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/05/the-real-good-samaritans.html ]

A base population of two million when world population was three hundred million would mean, in proportion, a population of six million by 1800 (a date I will reference again to mark a turn-around) when world population grew 3-fold to one billion.

However, it turns out that by 1800, the total population of that area, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, was about 250,000, only a fraction of the original population.

 In fact, from the end of the Crusades, for several centuries, there were as few as 150,000 Jews, Christians and Muslims altogether.

Not for nothing did 19^th century Christian missionaries (not Zionists) called Palestine, “A land without a people, for a people without a land.”  A land that sustained barely 150 to 250,000, that once held two million, was functionally, a “land without a people.”

 

How could it be?

 

Nakba 2

 

The Roman wars against the Jews led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70.  It was then that the Roman Emperor erected  the massive Arch of Titus and the coins stating “Judea Devicta”(Judea Defeated).

 This was followed by the disastrous Bar Kochba rebellion in the year 135. This war was so bitter, that the conquering general, and Emperor, Hadrian, had to leave out the mandatory declaration of victory,” I and the army are well.”  As a consequence, in revenge, Judea was erased from the maps and the term “Palestine,” from Philistia, the ancient Gaza Strip, was used, in order to wipe the memory  Judea from the annals of history.  As a consequence of both wars, a sizable portion of that population was killed or enslaved and exiled to Italy and other parts of the Empire.

 

 

Nevertheless, a significant remnant survived.

That Jewish population was able to finish the compendium of Judaic law, the Mishnah, which set the basis for Jewish practice, by around the year 200. The Jewish population was still vibrant enough to continue to build synagogues, which are even now being uncovered by archaeologists. They created the literature known as the Midrash, commentaries on the Bible, and the collected debates of the Rabbis, (known, ironically, in English as the “Palestinian” Talmud). It was this defeated population that, by the 8th or 9th century, formulated the authoritative Hebrew text of the Bible, the Masorah, upon which the English King James would rely for his authorized translation.

 The Samaritan population survived this period as well and it is surmised that it may have grown to a population of one million.

There was, as well, a small population of Jews who had chosen to follow the teachings of Jesus; these, such as the Ebionites (the Poor), and early Jewish Christians laid the foundation for the rise of Christianity as a separate religion. Out of this portion of ancient Israel there probably arose the current Christian population of the Land of Israel.

 

Nakba 3

The  Christianized Roman Empire instituted draconian laws that led to the grinding down of the Jewish majority, so that some Jews chose exile and some Jews, out of desperation, converted to Christianity. By the 600’s, the Jews had endured enough, and they joined forces with the Sassanian Persians to rebel against the Romans and restore the Temple. That rebellion was put down with drastic consequences for the Jewish population.

 

 Nakba 4

The Christian oppression of Jews was finally ended by the Muslim conquest; the conquerors, at the start, protected the Jews, until the Muslim rulers also imposed draconian laws in order to enforce the subjugation of the enemies of Islam. Some Jews broke under the pressure and converted to Islam; they would become the basis of the Muslim population which mixed with the new Arab conquerors.

In total, though, not only Jews, but Christians and Muslims suffered as well, as the Seljuk Turks fought for control of the Muslim world. In the process, the Seljuks further despoiled the Holy Land , an act that may have prompted the Christian Crusades.

As a result of wars, plagues, and earthquakes, the total population dwindled yet more, from less than a million by the time of the Muslim conquest down to only half a million.

The once numerous Samaritans were forcibly converted to Islam; these closest heirs to ancient northern Israel suffered an almost complete genocide and barely one hundred Samaritans survived by start of the 1900’s. Today, there are about nine hundred, half living in Israel proper, half still in the region of historic Samaria ( Shomron, hence Shomronim, from which we get Samaritan).

Nakba 5

The war between the Crusaders and the Muslims led to further decline, so that by the end of the Crusades, the total population was again whittled down to a quarter million.

Then, just when things could not seem worse, they worsened. The Mamluks, former slaves who had been inducted into the Muslim armies, and then became rulers, applied a scorched- earth policy to the land to prevent the Crusaders from ever returning. They burned the coastal cities, expelled Jews, and destroyed the regional economy. The Black Plague finished off the rest. For the next 2 centuries, the land lay waste and empty, with only 150,000 total population. In the Middle Ages, this truly became a “Land without a People.”

 

The Undoing of History’s Long Nakba, Disaster

A slow turnaround came about only with the Ottoman conquest of the region, and only then did the population creep up slowly, as the Ottomans improved administrative and economic conditions.

The walls around old Jerusalem are the results of Ottoman efforts under Suleiman the Magnificent, mid 1500s, who saw himself as the new King Solomon. Accordingly, he invited Jews to return to the land; Safed became a vital center for new commerce and Jewish spiritual creativity. Thanks to this latter-day Solomon/Suleiman, the Jews could once again create major works of Jewish thought, the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria, and the great unifying code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch. In the 1700s, mystics from Yemen returned to found a school of Kabbalah while Chasidim from eastern Europe returned as well.  [It is thought that the Chasidic “peyos” were borrowed then from the Yemenite Jews “simonim”, signs.]

 

Even under the Ottoman Empire, at its most powerful, the land never returned to its original potential. The Empire surged and then fell back, to become the” Sick Man of Europe.”

 

What finally made the land flourish once again?

The first modern Zionist may well have been Napoleon Bonaparte! He attacked the Ottomans from Egypt and made his way up the coast to Acre and called for a Jewish homeland during his military campaign, in 1799, long before Lord Balfour!

 The Ottomans, realizing that they were falling far behind the European powers in many ways, initiated Improvements in general health services and administration under the Tanzimat reforms, including the modern concept of equal civil rights regardless of religion.

From this period, there is a renewed interest by Europeans, both Christians and Jews,  in what they termed “The Holy Land”. These Europeans revived the long defunct term “Palestine”, for a region which had no political standing the  Ottoman Empire ( The region was divided up between the Sanjak of Jerusalem, administered directly from Istanbul, the Sanjak of Acre,itself a district of Beirut Vilayet, and the Sanjak of Nablus).  Now begins the development of hospitals, schools, urban construction, and the printing press by European Christian missionaries.

Ongoing conflicts between Egypt leaders, such as  Mohammed Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, and the Ottoman Sultans led to an influx of Egyptians, and a further influx of Algerians, Circassians, and Bosnians as conditions improved. Surnames appear, indicating land of origin:” Masri (Egypt), Shami (Syria), Halabi (Aleppo), Hourani (Southern Syria), Boshnaq (Bosnian), Sharkasi (Circassian).

Jews once again began arriving in larger numbers and built new neighborhoods outside of the old city of Jerusalem, bringing investments and development of the land. The Jewish influx grew from a trickle to a stream.

Within the course of a century, the population of Palestine more than doubled, to 600,000!

Today, after another century and a quarter, despite accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the combined populations of modern Israel, West Bank, and Gaza, is one hundred times the population of the land at its lowest in the middle ages.

The population of the State of Israel, before the horrendous pogrom of October 7, 2023, was approximately 9 ​million, of whom 2.1 million are Israeli Arabs. The population of the West Bank was around 3.2 million and the Gaza Strip 2.1m. The combined population of Palestinian territories is thus around 5.3  million people, bringing the total population of Israel-Palestine to about 14.3 million people- that is Jews, Druze, Samaritans, Circassians, Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs, Bedouin and others.

As for the Nakba of 1948?

All the Arabs of British Palestine numbered 1.3 million. Today, adding Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, plus the Palestinians living in Jordan and other lands, the numbers about 15 million, a growth of over ten times since 1948. If we go back to the time of that first Zionist, Napoleon, from some 250,000 Arabs, it means a growth of forty-eight times, when world population grew only eight times!

That does not sound like a Nakba to me, but a sign of a rebirth and potential for even greater things to come when the Palestinian Arabs decide to work with, not against, their Jewish “B’nei Dodim”, cousins.

 

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Rabbi Norbert Weinberg of President of Memory in Action, a research project focusing on contemporary Jewish history, accessible at www.pastfuturememory.org. He recently published Courage of the Spirit II, The Story of the Jewish People in Europe in the Twentieth Century as Seen through the Events and Documents of Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg .

He is also Rabbi emeritus of Hollywood Temple Beth El.