It pisses me off that a bunch of organised liars can perpetuate...

It pisses me off that a bunch of organised liars can perpetuate such evil self-serving myths, even to the extent of slime like snooker calling the Palestinians retards. Hope I see your well-deserved outcome snooker. By 1922 only 11.25% of Palestinians were jews, and then the European Exodus.


The term Palestine originates with the Philistines, who inhabited the southern coast of the region in biblical times. The name appears to have been in continuous use from that time to the present. The Philistines were defeated in about 1000BC, but the Greek historian Herodotus writing 500BC, and believing himself to be writing nine centuries after Moses, referred to seemingly the entire eastern coast of the Mediterannean as Palestinian Syria. The Roman historian, Pliny the elder, writing before the first Jewish revolt also referred to this region as Palestine, though at the time that he wrote none of the official Roman names for regions in this area was "Palestine", and in this sense the name was no longer used. The name Palestine was officially reintroduced by the Romans following the second Jewish revolt of Bar Kokhba of 132-135 A.D in the province of Judea. The Romans adopted the name for the province, possibly in an effort to erase any memories of the Judean rebels they defeated. Similarly, Jerusalem, Palestine's historic capital, was renamed Aelia Capitolina.

For nineteen hundred years afterwards, the region was subject to successive waves of invaders, each of which left some mark on its people and landscape. This can be attributed to Palestine's strategic location at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and its unique religious status as a "Holy Land" to the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In 1917, the British captured the region from the Ottoman Empire and called it Palestine, after the longstanding Roman name for the area, Syria-Palestina. This came at a time of renewed interest in the country among the European powers, Arab nationalists, and Jewish Zionists, who sought to reestablish their ancient homeland there. Competition between the latter two groups came to a head immediately after World War II, when Zionist claims gained greater urgency after the murder of almost six million Jews in the Holocaust. The Zionists demanded an independent homeland to absorb the Jewish refugees from Europe; the local Arab population, called Palestinians, argued that they played no role in the Holocaust, so the refugee problem should not be resolved at their expense.

In 722 BC, the northern Kingdom of Ephraim (commonly referred to as Israel, sometimes as Samaria) was destroyed by the Assyrians, its inhabitants ("the Lost Tribes") believed to have been deported, and replaced by settlers from elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire. Many however fled to their southern Israelite sister kingdom, and many stayed behind; they (mixed with deportees from Mesapotamia) became the Samaritans. The Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar conquered the Kingdom of Judah in 597-586 BC, and deported the middle and upper classes of the Jews to Babylonia, where they flourished. Decades later, the Jews in Babylonia were permitted to return to Israel. However, a large proportion decided to stay in Babylonia for economic reasons. Most regard the collapse of the Israelite kingdoms as the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora.

The exiled Jews who returned to their traditional home encountered the Jews that had remained, surrounded by non-Jews. One group of note (that exists up until this day) were the Samaritans, who adhered to most features of the Jewish rite and claimed to be descendants of the Assyrian Jews; they were not recognized as Jews by the returning exiles for various reasons (at least some of which seem to be political). The return of the exiles from Babylon reinforced the Jewish population, which gradually became more dominant and expanded significantly.

In 539 BC the Babylonians were annexed by the Persian Empire, which held Palestine until the time of Alexander the Great, who conquered Gaza and the surrounding areas in the early 330s BC. After Alexander's death in 323 BC, his empire was partitioned, and the competing Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires occupied various portions of the eastern Mediterranean, including different parts of Palestine, until the Roman Empire swept through in 63 BC. Under the Romans the territory that became known as Palestine was in nearly constant revolt, and a number of events with far-reaching consequences took place, including the founding of Christianity, the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by the Roman army and mass suicide of Zealots in 66-70, and the sacking of the entire city of Jerusalem by the Romans in 132. (Some sources mark the failed Jewish revolts as the beginning of the Diaspora).

Over several centuries, the Diaspora grew even further. In addition to the large Jewish community in Babylon, large numbers of Jews settled in Egypt, and in other parts of the Hellenistic world and in the Roman Empire. This migration was primarily driven by economic opportunities, though the situation in Israel also contributed. Israel experienced a large amount of conflict, principally over Hellenistic and then Roman rule.

The Jews were divided between those who were Hellenists, and supported the adoption of Greek culture, and those who believed in keeping to the traditions of the past. This conflict caused frequent disputes, which resulted in political and military upheveal -- such as the Maccabean revolt of the 2nd century BC, the war of the 70s and the revolt led by Bar Kokhba in the 130s. The frequent conflict contributed to Jewish emigration, both as refugees, through deportation, and by reducing economic opportunities in the region compared to elsewhere. It also led to many deaths among the Jewish population of Palestine, both deaths in battles with the Romans and others, deaths due to massacres, and deaths due to the famine and disease that so often accompany armed conflict.

Palestine changed hands several more times in the post-Biblical period, becoming at first part of the Byzantine Empire after the division of the Roman Empire into east and west (a fitful process that was not finalized until 395), then an early acqisition of the first Islamic Caliphate in 638. From that point until 1948, Palestine was dominated by Islamic influences and without much in the way of political independence, and always under the administration of regional powers. The Umayyad dynasty controlled the Caliphate until they were overthrown by the Abbasids in 661. Over time the monolithic Caliphate fragmented, and the Fatimid Caliphate assumed control of Palestine in the 900s. It was during the aforementioned period of frequent conquests that the Jews became one of many minorities.

In the next century, Seljuk Turks invaded large portions of West Asia, including Asia Minor and Palestine, which was the proximate cause of the Crusades by the Christian European powers. Jerusalem and the surrounding lands, being holy places to Christianity, were the object of these military expeditions. The Christian forces established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted from 1099 until Saladin reconquered the city in 1187.

The Ayyubid Sultanate, founded by Saladin, controlled the region until 1250, when the Mamluks invaded. The Mamluk Sultanate ultimately became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of campaigns waged by Selim I in the 16th century.

Over time the Jewish population in Palestine declined, due to several causes: Jewish emigration, deaths due to the multiple rebellions against the Romans, the deportation of Jews and the settlement of pagans by the Romans in response to these revolts, and the conversion of some Jews to Christianity (and later Islam). This conversion was driven both by the attractiveness of these religions to some Jews, and the taxation applied to Jews by Christian and then Muslim rulers (see Dhimmi). These special taxes on Jews especially affected agriculture, in which the majority of the Jewish population in Palestine was involved (the Diaspora, by contrast, was primarily urban). As a result, the Jewish population in their original homeland dwindled over the centuries to a tiny percentage, both of the local population and of Jews as a whole. By the end of the first millennium almost all the Jewish population lived in the Diaspora; that is, in the Arab world beyond Palestine, or in Europe.

During this period Israel continued as a constant topic of Jewish thought and liturgy, though its Jewish population was by then minimal -- for many of the Jews of the period "Eretz Israel" was a mythical place of redemption, since few of them ever set foot in it, and those who did found it dramatically different from how they believed it once was.

Most Jews during this period believed that the Jewish people would return to Israel with the coming of the Messiah; some proposed that Jews attempt to return earlier, by their own devices, but until the rise of Zionism in the 19th century they were in a minority.

While up until the end of the 19th century, most Jews did not have aspirations to come to the land of Israel, there were always Jews in it; they settled mainly in the "four sacred cities" (Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron). Jews of European origin lived mostly of donations from off-country, while many Sephardic Jews found themselves a trade. By the end of the 19th century, the Jewish population of Palestine numbered 60,000, about 15% of the land's entire population on both banks of the Jordan river.