Jews Are Indigenous to Israel; They Are Not Colonizers

“Decolonize Palestine” and “Colonizers Back to Europe” are the demands of pro-Palestinian activists at protests that erupted in North America and Europe after October 7. Based on the lie that Israel is a European colonial-settler enterprise, these slogans ignore the fact that more than 50 percent of Jews living in Israel today are from the Middle East, many violently expelled from the Arab/Muslim world after the establishment of Israel. Moreover, these slogans deny the historic connection between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, and fail to acknowledge the continuous presence of Jews in the Holy Land through the centuries.

Indiscriminate rocket attacks from Lebanon on northern Israel, by the terrorist group Hezbollah, have accompanied the current war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. On reading that Kibbutz Bar’am, located close to the border, was one of many Israeli sites evacuated, I remembered my first visit to Israel 45 years ago. It was a 10-month sabbatical visit to Haifa with my wife and children.

We bought a small car that we used extensively for day trips to archeological sites, mainly in Galilee, and the very first site we visited, Bar’am, stunned me. Here was the ruin of a large synagogue, an architectural gem, built in the 3rd century CE, and used as a synagogue for centuries, perhaps as late as the 13th century!

There were other wonders, such as the synagogue at Korazim, built between the 3rd and 5th centuries, and in use until at least the 700s. There also was the elaborate mosaic synagogue floor at Beit Alpha, built in the 6th century (as indicated by an inscription), and in use until it was destroyed by an earthquake in 749.

The remains of at least 80 synagogues, built after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE have been identified, and while most are in Galilee, others have been discovered throughout the land.

I had initially been under the impression that Jewish life in the Holy Land more or less ceased after the fall of Masada in 70 CE. I knew the 70 CE date was not a sharp demarcation. After all, the Bar Kokhba revolt, an even greater challenge to Roman rule than the one that ended at Masada, occurred 70 years later, and the meeting of rabbis in Bnei Brak portrayed in the Passover Haggadah must have taken place around the year 100. Yet, the ruins I’ve described indicate that a large and prosperous Jewish community persisted for hundreds of years after the destruction of the Temple.

I was not the only one blown away by the Bar’am ruins. Edward Robinson, one of the first to identify the Bar’am ruins as synagogues (there were two), who was an important Bible archeologist of the 1800s, made the same point in a book (written with Eli Smith) called Biblical Researches in Palestine (1856).

Encountering the synagogues at Bar’am (Kafr Bir’im), they wrote, “The size, the elaborate sculptured ornament, and the splendour of these edifices do not belong to a scattered and down-trodden people.” They add, “All these circumstances would seem to mark a condition of prosperity and wealth and influence among the Jews of Galilee in that age, of which neither their own historians, nor any other, have given us any account.”

The comment about the lack of attention to this period of Jewish life is still true today, 168 years later. One of the only news articles about the history of the Bar’am synagogues that I could find was one by Joe Yudin (“Baram’s Ancient Synagogue,” The Jerusalem Post, 2012).

In fact, Jews formed a majority of the population of Palestine until at least the 5th century. An autonomous Jewish Patriarchate existed until the year 425, and the Jerusalem Talmud was written there (mostly in Galilee) during the early centuries of the Common Era. Two additional Jewish revolts, against Byzantine rule in the 4th and 7th centuries, also indicate that a substantial Jewish population lived in Palestine.

While it is true that from the sixth or seventh century until modern times, Jews formed a minority of the population of Palestine, periodic immigration (aliyah) ensured that their numbers were appreciable throughout the years. Besides, indigeneity is not dependent on numbers, and Palestinian indigenous status does not invalidate the Jewish one.

Palestine is the name given Judea by the Romans in 136 CE, as punishment after the failed Bar Kokhba revolt. The Arab conquest of Palestine took place in 637 CE, when Umar Al Khattab captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. Now, in a deliberate inversion of the truth, the indigenous homeland of the Jews is “occupied” when Jews live there.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.

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