A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu Read Free Book Online Page B

Jews finally forced off the land? The most prevalent assumption is that the Jewish people’s state of homelessness
was owed solely to the Romans. It is generally believed that the Romans, who had conquered Palestine and destroyed Jewish
sovereignty, then took away the country from the Jews and tossed them into an exile that lasted until our own century. However
common this view, it is inaccurate. It is true that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. was a highly important factor in the ultimate decline of Jewish power and presence in Palestine. But it was not the exclusive
factor; nor did it depopulate the country of its Jewish inhabitants. Therefore, the common refrain about “two thousand years
of exile,” uncritically repeated by many Jewsand non-Jews alike, is misleading. The Diaspora did not begin with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem—vibrant Jewish communities
in Alexandria, Babylon, and elsewhere had antedated the Roman conquest by centuries. Nor did the Romans end Jewish national
life in Palestine. That did not come until many centuries later. Thus in 135 C.E. , sixty-five years after the razing of Jerusalem, the Jews under Bar Kochba revolted once more against Rome, “until the whole
earth seemed to have been stirred up over the matter,” according to the third-century Greek historian Dio Cassius. 28
    Although this three-year Jewish revolt against Rome was also brutally crushed, the country remained primarily Jewish, and
shortly thereafter the Jews were granted a considerable measure of autonomous power, an authority that was recognized by Rome
and later by Byzantium. In 212 C.E., when the Roman emperor Caracalla bestowed Roman citizenship on most subjects of the empire, he denied that privilege to those
who lacked a country of their own. The Jews were granted Roman citizenship, because they were recognized as a people with
their own country. 29 This is not to say that they did not continue to rebel, attempting to expel Rome yet again in 351. And it should be noted,
too, that the great Jewish legal works of the Mishna and the Jerusalem Talmud were composed in Palestine during the centuries
of Roman and Byzantine domination, reflecting the dynamic Jewish intellectual life that persisted there even in the face of
occupation. In 614 the Jews were, incredibly, still fighting for independence, raising an army that joined the Persians in
seizing Jerusalem and ousting the Byzantines from Palestine. The size and vitality of the Jewish population at the beginning
of the seventh century may be judged by the fact that in the siege of Tyre alone, the Jews contributed more than twenty thousand
fighters. 30
    But in 636, after a brief return of the Byzantines under Her-aclius, the Arabs burst into the land—after having destroyed
the large and prosperous Jewish populations of the Arabian Peninsularoot and branch. The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it was under the Arabs that the Jews were finally
reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be a national force of any consequence in their own land. The Jews initially
vested their hopes in the “Ishmaelite conquerors” as they called them in contemporary sources, but within a few years these
hopes were dashed as Arab policy became clear. Unlike previous conquerors, the Arabs poured in a steady stream of colonists,
often composed of military battalions and their families, with the intention of permanently Arabizing the land. In order to
execute this policy of armed settlement, the Arabs relied on the regular expropriation of land, houses, and Jewish labor.
In combination with the turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest, these policies finally succeeded in doing what
the might of Rome had not achieved: the uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil. 31
Thus it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.
    Why is this important? After