Occupiers

For most Americans, ancient history is, well, ancient history. I say that in a jokey way, but the truth is that the history of ancient and medieval times is covered—to the extent it is covered at all—in our American high schools in a cursory way that by its nature cannot possibly lead students to a clear understanding of the specific way in which the roots of the modern world in all its political, inter-ethnic, and polarized complexity are to be found in much older times. Yet an argument could be made—and a cogent, compelling one at that—that there is no real way to understand the present other than as a function of the past, including the distant past. And this is particularly true, I think, of today’s Middle East: to understand the place of Israel in the world without any knowledge of the specific way modern Middle Eastern reality is rooted in antiquity is basically impossible. And yet I see, day after day, people writing about Israel on various web sites and in newspaper articles who seem to have no firm grounding in the study of ancient or medieval history at all.

The period I’d like to write about this week has the distinction of being (and by far) both the most obscure and the most crucial for any who wish to understand today’s Middle East. I’ll begin with the events of 614 C.E.

There are some years that themselves are famous. 70 C.E. is sort of in that category. 1492 definitely is. So is 1776. But who has ever heard of 614? And yet a convincing and fully cogent argument could easily be made that modern Jewish history began in 614 and that the events set in motion that year reverberate to this day in the region. Let me explain in more detail.

That Rome once ruled the world is the rare fact about ancient times that actually is known to almost all. The fact that the Roman Empire eventually split in two and that its two halves met their respective ends almost a full millennium apart, not so much. But that single detail is at least subtly crucial to understanding today’s Middle East. The Western part collapsed in 476 C.E. when the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustus—a hapless weakling with an unfortunate overbite—was obliged to hand over his throne to a man named Odoacer, the leader of the Germanic tribes who had successfully invaded the Italian peninsula and established themselves as the new overlords of Rome and its provinces. So that was the end of Rome in Italy. But the Eastern part of the empire, eventually called Byzantium after the original name of its capital city, continued to exist for many centuries and only met its end when the capital, by then called Constantinople, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 precisely five hundred years and two days before my birth. And that detail continues to echo throughout the Middle East today.

Ancient Israel was part of the Roman Empire. That too is relatively well known. Christians know it because the gospel narrative is set in Roman Judaea. And Jews—or at least traditionally observant ones—know it because we are still fasting on the Ninth of Av each summer to commemorate, among other catastrophes, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century when the Jews revolted against their unwanted Roman masters. But what happened after that? That’s where the thinking of even relatively sophisticated students of today’s Middle East gets seriously fuzzy.

To get a running jump at 614, let’s start three years earlier when, in 611 C.E., Iran (then called Persia) went to war with Byzantium and invaded from the east. Things went back and forth for a while, but then, in 613, the Jews of Byzantine Israel joined with the Persians to revolt against the Byzantines. And it worked too: in 614, the Persians, fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters—including men famous in their day but long since forgotten by all like Nehemiah ben Hushiel or Benjamin of Tiberias—captured Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled to Persia. But, as it always seems to, the tide eventually turned. By 617, the Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally forbidden. 

And now we get to the good part. Or at least to the relevant part for the situation as it has devolved down into our day. Just ten years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. (This is the empire ISIS today would like to restore.)  The Byzantines retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arabs until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later in 1099.

It was a tumultuous time. The Islamic State was called a caliphate. (Is this starting to sound familiar?) There were several. The first, named the Rashidun caliphate, ruled Israel from Medina in what is today Saudi Arabia. Then power passed to the so-called Umayyad caliphate that ruled from Damascus. And then, eventually, power passed from the Umayyads to the third caliphate, called the Abbasid Caliphate that ruled from Baghdad.

At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun caliphate, eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against non-Muslims. Things were dismal, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last, particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism.

And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine, a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half millennia. The progression of foreign overlords feels almost endless, particularly if we count off the years since biblical times. The Babylonians ruled Israel for a mere 48 years before the first Persian occupation of the land, the one featuring such famous personalities as King Cyrus and King Darius, began and lasted for 206 years. The Romans ruled for 388 years, then were succeeded by the Byzantines. They ruled for 297 years until, as noted above, the Persians returned in the 7^th century for a paltry seventeen years. Then the Byzantines returned for a decade and were followed by the Arabs, who ruled the land for 461, until they themselves were cleared out by the Crusaders starting in 1099, who ruled for 192 years.

Working all that data yields the semi-astounding result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63 B.C.E.  That’s a lot of years of occupation by a wide range of occupiers.

When I read modern columnists who seem to know nothing of Jewish history talking about the “occupation” and meaning the presence of Israelis in the parts of the Land of Israel that were lost to Jordan in 1948 and recovered more than half a century ago in 1967, I see red. I am fully sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, who have been pawns in a game not of their own devising for more than seventy years and who truly do deserve to be treated justly, fairly, and decently. But when I notice people stigmatizing Israelis as occupiers of their own homeland without reference to the fact that Arabs first came to Israel when their armies invaded in the seventh century and occupied the land for centuries until they were finally defeated by invading armies from the West—that seems, to say the very least, to martial half-truths in the defense of an already-adopted argument.

To understand where things in Israel are now, it’s necessary to take the long view. I understand that not everybody can take the time to earn a Ph.D. in ancient history. But to write authoritatively about the Middle East without appearing to have any knowledge of history, to reference Israelis as occupiers of Arab land without appearing to know that the Arabs themselves came to Israel as an army of occupation—that could be, I suppose, a mere oversight prompted by an abysmal ignorance of history. But why is it that I don’t think that? Not even a little bit!