A Historical Overview

There is no patch of ground in the world that has endowed mankind with as much religion and civilization as Palestine has, relative to its area and the number of its inhabitants.

The Greeks with all their philosophy, and the Romans with their law, have had less influence on human society than the Palestinians, Christians and Jews alike. The influence of the former arose and passed away, while that of the latter is enduring and will never fade.

The political sway of Paris and the civic dominance of London are nothing beside the spiritual authority of Jerusalem and its moral hold over the minds of millions of human beings, in every generation and every land.

The eye of the Muslim, the Christian, and the Jew — wherever Muslim, Christian, or Jew may be today — turns forever toward the Holy Land to draw revelation and inspiration, and their feet strive toward it seeking blessing and pilgrimage.

The historical events that have taken place in this country are greater than any other land of its size and population could contain. Its ancient history is like a window looking out upon all the earliest civilizations of the world — Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Persian, Greek, and Roman. To study the history of Palestine is to study the history of the ancient world. Its plains are a gallery in which most of the armies of the ancient kingdoms have been displayed. Its battlefields are a stage upon which the most important exploits of the greatest invaders and conquerors have been played out — from Thutmose, Sargon, Nebuchadnezzar, and Cambyses to Alexander, then Pompey, then Julius, then Augustus, then Titus; and from Amr ibn al-As and Saladin, then Hulagu, to Napoleon, then Ibrahim Pasha, then General Allenby. Everyone who ever dreamed of subduing the world and founding a realm that would encompass all other realms — whether the son of Macedonia the Greek, or the son of Corsica the Frenchman, or the son of Hohenzollern the German — set his armies to work in Syria — of which Palestine is a part — knowing that since antiquity it has served as the neck joining north to south and east to west. A battlefield, or a bridge across which the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa pass in time of war, and a marketplace for trade; or a road traveled by the caravans between East and West in time of peace — that is Syria and Palestine.

This geographical position of the country never helped it to establish an independent nationality or a unified nation. Its location is between two millstones — as its ancient writers likened it — the states of the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites to the north, and the states of the Egyptians to the south. In the brief intervals when it was not under a foreign yoke, it was divided among numerous native kingdoms — the Philistine, the Israelite, the Moabite, the Edomite, and the Ammonite — which competed and warred with one another, and few of them ever gained sole possession of the whole country or held long-lasting authority over it.

At first Babylon overran Palestine (around the year 3200 BC) and ruled it in alternation with Egypt, time and again. Then the Assyrians seized it, then the Chaldeans, then the Persians (around 550 BC), then the Romans (63 BC), then the Muslim Arabs (634 AD), then the Turkoman Seljuks (1072 AD), then the Frankish Crusaders, whose kingdom lasted from 1098 to 1187, then the Egyptian Mamluks, and finally the Ottoman Turks, who extended their authority over the whole of Syria from the year 1516 to the year 1918.

Despite all these upheavals, the Semitic peoples of Syria and Palestine preserved their letters, their customs, and their languages — Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Babylon ruled the country for hundreds of years and left in it no trace save a handful of words such as "temple" (haykal), "prophet" (nabi), and "offering" (qurban), and a few place names such as Jerusalem (Ur-Salem) and Mount Sinai, where the worship of the moon (Sin) flourished. Likewise the traces of Egypt, Nineveh, and Constantinople are almost nonexistent in Syria and Palestine. The Crusaders came and went in the country for two hundred years, and left behind no memorial save ruined castles, and blue eyes and red hair among their remnants — as we may observe today in the inhabitants of Bethlehem, for example. States came and states passed away, but the Palestinian stands firm, unshaken.

In the periods when Palestine was not under foreign authority, the country lay in the hands of native peoples who differed with the differences of time and region. The first of these peoples was the Philistine people, who settled the coastal strip [?] from Jaffa southward toward Gaza. This strip [?] was called "Philistia," while the rest of the country took the names of the tribes within it. To name the whole country Palestine, then, is a case of naming the whole after a part. Yet this name was not applied to the country until the Byzantine era — that is, after the fifth century AD. Palestine was not known by this name before that, nor did the country have any defined boundary until that period.

The inhabitants of this Philistia — the Philistines mentioned in the Torah — were not of the Semitic race, but of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan [?]) stock, as evidenced by the redness of their hair and the blueness of their eyes. Perhaps all of Palestine was in those days peopled by this stock, before the Semitic migrants occupied it.

But the peoples who flourished in Palestine and have clung to it from three thousand years before Christ to our own day are Semitic peoples. These peoples would trickle into the country one by one, then storm into it in droves, settling in one part of it that they would take as a homeland, making it their constant endeavor to expand their territory at the expense of their neighbors by means of raiding and warfare. The first of these Semitic waves to sweep over and cover certain parts of the country was the Canaanite-Phoenician wave, which occupied the coasts of Syria and Palestine about fifteen hundred years before Christ, and whose commerce later ripened in Tyre and Sidon — as is well known in history.

The second wave was the Aramaean-Syriac, which grew to prominence around the year 1500 BC and settled the interior of the country, accompanied by the Hebrew tribes, who were a part of this wave.

As for the third wave, it was the one that reached its peak at the time of the Islamic conquest, six centuries after Christianity, and which resulted in the introduction of the Arabic language into the country after Aramaic had been its language.

Comparing the dates of these waves, we find approximately a thousand years between one and the next.

The rise of these Canaanite, Aramaean, and Hebrew kingdoms side by side, in the wake of the original Philistine kingdoms, and during the intervals when weakness and turmoil held sway over Egypt and Babylon — and the rivalry of each of them with the others — can be traced out from the writings of the Old Testament, which, despite the obscurity of some of them, remain the most important source from which to draw. It is gathered from the tales of the Old Testament and from the cuneiform writings that the Hebrew kingdom — the most famous of those kingdoms — was united for the first time under the leadership of King Saul in the year 1095 BC, and soon split, in the year 975 BC, into two hostile halves: the kingdom of Israel in the north, which Sargon the Assyrian destroyed in the year 722 BC, carrying its ten tribes into captivity to the Euphrates; and the kingdom of Judah in the south, which endured until the year 586 BC, the year in which Nebuchadnezzar seized Jerusalem, took its people captive, and plundered what was in it. These two captivities put an end to Jewish national life, and no trace of it appeared thereafter, save for a brief spell in the second century BC in the time of the Maccabees.

The origins of the present-day inhabitants of Palestine, then, go back to the Canaanites, the Aramaeans, the Hebrews, and the Arabs. The Christians among them are the remnants of the Canaanite Phoenicians, their blood no doubt mingled with a little Arab blood traceable to the Christian Ghassanids, and a little blood of the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Frankish Crusaders.

The lineages of the Muslims of Syria and Palestine go back for the most part to the Arabs, who to our own day still creep into the country in a gradual advance in the guise of Bedouin, and who before long exchange their tents of hair for houses of clay and stone, and the herding of livestock for the cultivation of the land. Their blood is mingled with some blood of the Muslim nations [?] that had ties to the country — such as the Turks, the Circassians, the Kurds, and others — along with those of the Christians and Jews of Palestine who embraced Islam. Some Palestinian families still preserve their Arab lineages to this day, among them the House of al-Khalidi and the House of al-Husseini.

Besides these principal groups, among the inhabitants of Palestine there are Mutawali (Shia) whose origin goes back to the Persians, and some Turkoman-Tatar clans in the Golan, and the Samaritans in Nablus. These are the remnants of the tribes that Sargon the Assyrian transplanted to occupy the place of the tribes he carried into captivity in the late eighth century BC.

The Palestinian has a glorious past, thanks to his fathers and forefathers, and a happy present, and a future that depends upon his self-reliance, his diligence in work, his freeing himself from the force of inertia and the fetters of tradition. Yet a man is not entitled to boast of the deeds of his forebears unless he himself follows in their footsteps and treads their path.

His past belongs to his ancestors, and his present to others, but the future is his own — and the future is nothing but a blank page on which he inscribes whatever he wishes, and however he wishes, whether to his shame or to his glory.