The Palestinians, a Brief Historical Sketch - by Reinhard Schaap

My good friend Reinhard from the Netherlands sent this to me. He says it’s part of a seminar he gave to the college of his Baptist Congregation about Jacob and Esau. I value history and this article certainly has information I was not aware of!

The emphasis in underline are mine.

“Behold, your house is left desolate for you,” Matt. 23:38.

“If they build, I will destroy” Mal. 1:4.

“The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are Esau’s hands.” Gen. 27:22.

The destruction!

According to the Word of the Lord, the Roman legions came to put down the Jewish uprising and destroy Jerusalem in 70 AD. The army commander Titus did not originally intend to demolish the temple, but was ordered to do so by the emperor and his soldiers were so enraged by the fierce resistance of the Jewish fighters that they left no stone unturned in the sanctuary.

The Jews also received a treacherous dagger in the back. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions the following in “The Fall of Jerusalem”: “Just before all the approaches to the city had been closed by the besiegers, the Romans, the Jews had admitted a large crowd of Idumeans (Edomites), who joined the defense would help.” However, when one reads how suddenly these “allies”, once they were inside the wall, changed their face and – quite unexpectedly – proceeded to massacre tens of thousands of civilians in the most brutal manner. An act with which they contributed not a little to the fall of the city.

It is also interesting what Rabbi Maimonides (A.D. 1135-1204) mentions about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in particular. In his tract Taanith, c. 4, he says: “The foundations of the temple were excavated according to Roman custom.” He further said, “On the ninth day of the month Ab, the fatal vengeance was executed by the wicked Turnus Rufus, of the children of Edom, who plowed the temple and the places round about, that the word of Isaiah might be fulfilled.” that Zion shall be plowed into a field” (Isaiah 64:10). This Turnus, or rather Terentius Rufus, was the left-handed general in the army of Titus, with orders, as the Jews assume, to destroy the city and the temple.

Not all expelled.

The Jews were not all taken into captivity in 70 AD. Roughly a third of the population was killed, a third taken captive and a third remained in Palestine. This became apparent in 132-135 AD at the time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion. Afterwards many were expelled from Judea who settled in Galilee and the spiritual center (Sanhedrin) initially resided in Jawneh on the coast and later elsewhere in the north of the country until the year 425 AD. Then the center was moved abroad to Baghdad. But many Jews remained in their homeland for centuries.

Under Byzantine (i.e. Eastern Roman) rule, they led a fairly quiet existence. When the Arabs conquered the country in the 7th century, they were not exterminated, but, probably forced, they converted to Islam and so these Jews became Palestinians! There may have been a mixture with the Arabs, but there is an interesting DNA study on this.

Sons of Abraham.

A frequently heard claim is that the Jewish settlers in the 19th century ended up in an uninhabited, empty country, which is not entirely true, to say the least. The priest Elias Chacour wrote in his book “Sons of Abraham” what he had experienced in the last century, before the Jewish state was founded in 1948.

Fighters of the Jewish Hagana, who wanted to liberate Palestine from British rule, had expelled the “Arabs” from their villages in Galilee. However, they were lucky, because some other villages had been massacred. The victims had been hastily buried ‘sloppily’, while arms and other limbs were still sticking out of the sand!

Jews exterminating other Jews? That would be pure fratricide!

DNA research among Jews, Israelis and Palestinians:

The first scientist to conduct such a study was Dr. Ariella Oppenheim, biologist at the Hebrew Yeshiva University, who published her findings in a voluminous work in 2001. Her conclusion was that some Palestinians had Jewish DNA and that there was even a group that had a DNA chromosome showing that they were descendants of the “Cohens”, priests of the ancient temple and synagogues of the Jews.

This study was confirmed several years later by Dr. Eran Elhaik and his associates at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine (John Hopkins University, School of Genetic Medicine), although he was primarily concerned with the Khazar ancestry of many Azkenazi Jews. Khazaria was a large empire in southern Russia that converted to Judaism in the eighth century.

That finding is also supported by Tel Aviv University professor of History Shlomo Sand in his 2007 book, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which caused a stir in Israel.

In this book, Sand quotes David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of modern Israel, who publicly and in writing acknowledged that the original Jews of Palestine had converted to Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries and had never left their homeland.

Ben-Gurion then stated: “The Fellahin (the Palestinian people) are not descendants of the Arab conquerors who took over ‘Eretz Israel’ (the Land of Israel) and Syria in the 7th century (AD). The Arabs did not exterminate the ordinary population they found in the country. They only expelled the foreign Byzantine rulers, but left the local population untouched.”

An article from the Daily Mail on May 4, 2013 reported that a documentary by Jewish producer Ilan Ziv, in which he also exposed these matters, was narrowly canceled by the BBC in the United Kingdom. This information is apparently too sensitive and puts a damper on Zionist efforts to “repatriate” the world’s expelled Jews to modern Israel.

Those who want to know more about the “Palestinian cause” could read the English-language book by Israeli author Ilan Pappé, entitled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Pappé currently holds a chair in History at the University of Exeter in England and has written several books about the peoples of the Middle East.

It is clear that both DNA research and the historical findings of scientists show that there are Jews in the Palestinian people and an infusion of Khazars among the Israelis. You can only wonder whether the percentage of Chazars in Azkenazi Jewry that they claim is indeed 90% or (much) less, is still the question in my opinion. It is notable that at the beginning of the last century there were only 500,000 Sephardic Jews, while the number of Azkenazi Jews exceeded 11,000,000, which is considerably more.

R. Schaap