PROLOGUE:
When the Zionists began to talk about creation of a state in Palestine, the number of Jews living in Palestine did not exceed 10,000. Accordingly, creation of a “Jewish State” in Palestine required Ethnic Cleansing and Land Theft. And this is exactly what started in 1948 and is still going on to this date.Indefinite: Stone Age: earliest pre-historic unidentified settlements.
10,000-5,000 BC: Establishment of settled agricultural communities.
3000 BC: The Cana’anites settled the land, which was named after them, the “Land of Cana’an”.
1850 BC: Abraham left his home in Ur of the Chaldees (Mesopotamia) and journeyed to the Land of Cana’an.
1700 BC: Abraham’s descendants immigrated to Egypt. Their position in Egypt deteriorated so much around 1250 BC that they were mere slaves. God told his prophet Moses to act and save his people.
1200 BC: Moses died before reaching the ‘Promised Land’. It was Joshua who led the Israelites into the Land of Cana’an and established the twelve tribes.
1154 – 1000 BC: Local rule: Cana’anites, Philistines and Jews.
1000 BC: King David conquered Jerusalem.
1000 - 927 BC: Israelites established a monarchy under David and then Solomon.
At about 927 BC, the northern tribes broke away from the southern kings in Jerusalem and formed their own kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel, which opposed the smaller Kingdom of Judea in the south.
722 BC: King Tiglath-Peleser III of Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel. The ten northern tribes of Israel were deported, forced to assimilate and disappeared from history forever.
589 BC: Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and most of the inhabitants of Judea were deported to Babylonia, leaving behind only a few peasants and poor people.
Exile to Babylon was traumatic, but the Jewish deportees did not disappear like the ten northern tribes.
Some of the exiles lived in Babylon itself and others lived in a settlement on the banks of the Cheder in an area, which they called ‘Tel Aviv’.
538 BC: Following the Medes and the Persians conquest of the Babylonians, Cyrus, the King of Persia, gave the Jews permission to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple. Some Jews left Babylon and ‘Tel Aviv’ and began the long journey home. However, most of the Jews remained behind in exile. They no longer saw physical possession of the Holy Land as essential to the Jewish identity.
333 BC: Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great brought Palestine under Greek rule.
323 BC: Death of Alexander led to alternate rule by Ptolemies of Egypt and Seleucids of Syria.
165 BC: Maccabees revolted against the Seleucid ruler and went on to establish an independent Jewish State.
63 BC: Incorporation of Palestine into the Roman Empire.
70 AD: The Romans conquered Jerusalem and burned down the Temple. The Roman Empires (Western and Eastern) ruled Palestine until 614 AD.
132-135 AD: Bar Kokhba revolt suppressed. Jews were barred from Jerusalem and Emperor Hadrian built new pagan city of Aelia Capitolina on its ruins.
638 AD: Moslem Arabs under Caliph Umar captured Palestine from the Byzantines. The Arabs settled in the land and mixed, intermingled and intermarried with its natives who were arabized and their majority converted to Islam.
Umar invited the Jews to return to the holy city and built a simple wooden mosque where al-Aqsa Mosque now stands.
661-750: Omayyad Caliphs ruled Palestine from Damascus. Construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was done by Caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) and construction of the al-Aqsa mosque was done by Caliph al-Walid I (705-715).
750-1258: Abbasid caliphs ruled Palestine from Iraq.
969: Fatimid dynasty, claiming descent from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and her cousin Ali, ruled Palestine from Egypt. They proclaimed themselves caliphs in rivalry to the Abbasids.
1071: Saljuqs, originally from Isfahan, captured Jerusalem and parts of Palestine, which remained officially within the Abbasid Empire.
1099: European Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and founded several states on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean including the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1187: Saladin (Salah al-Din) defeated the Crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem.
1260: Mameluks succeeded Ayyubids, defeated the Mongols and ruled Palestine from Cairo.
1291: Mameluks captured the last Crusader strongholds of Acre and Caesarea and re-established Islamic rule in the area.
1492, January: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella defeated the Muslim Kingdom of Granada. The Jews of Spain were given the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving the country. About 100,000 Spanish Jews left, but many were so attached to Spain and chose baptism.
For 800 years, Jews, Christians and Muslims had, for the most part, been able to live in Christian as well as in Muslim Spain quite amicably side by side and built a rich and dynamic culture.
1517: Ottoman Sultan Selim defeated the Mameluks and incorporated Jerusalem and Palestine into the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, which ruled Palestine until WWI.
1831: Mohammed Ali of Egypt occupied and ruled Palestine until 1840.
1841: Restoration of Ottoman Turkish rule in Palestine.
1862: Moses Hess called for the creation of a Jewish national state in Palestine.
1870: Mikve Israel, a Jewish agricultural school, was established north of Jaffa.
1878: Colony of Petach Tiqva, financed by Lord Rothschild, was established.
1881: Czarist pogroms in Russia sparked Jewish migration and settlement in Palestine.
1882: Leo Pinsker urged the Jews to settle in Palestine and founded the society of Hovevi Zion, which sponsored emigration of Jews to Palestine.
1882 – 1903: First wave of 35,000 Jewish émigrés arrived in Palestine.
1880’s: The first signs of Palestinian resistance were a direct and spontaneous reaction to the efforts of the pioneer Zionist settlers to dispossess and displace the Arab fellahin.
1891: German Jewish millionaire Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which began its operations in Palestine in 1896.
1896: Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and writer, published a pamphlet calling for the creation of a ‘Jewish State’.
Ottoman Sultan Abd-al Hamid II rejected Theodor Herzl’s proposal that Palestine be granted to the Jews.
1897: The first Zionist Congress (ZC) met in Basle, created the Zionist Organization (ZO) and adopted the Basle Program, which called for Jewish colonization in Palestine.
1898: Herzl paid a visit to Palestine to meet with the Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who was visiting Jerusalem, to lobby for the Zionist project.
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