There are moments when history is debated. And then there are moments when history itself appears to be rewritten.

As someone who has spent much of my life connected to Israel, who has lived in the Middle East and studied its history, archaeology, religions and civilizations, I find the current distortion of Israel’s history deeply troubling.

I first experienced Israel as a child. I arrived in Haifa in 1978, at the age of eleven, and although I was young, I remember something that has stayed with me ever since: Israel felt like home.

Since then, I have returned many times. I have walked through Jerusalem, visited archaeological sites, studied historical maps and read extensively about the civilizations that have existed in this small but extraordinary piece of land.

The more I learned, the clearer one thing became:

The Jewish connection to this land is not a modern invention.

It is thousands of years old.

Yet today, millions of people are being presented with a radically different story. A story in which Jews are portrayed primarily as foreign Europeans, Israel as a colonial project and the entire Jewish connection to the land as something invented in the twentieth century.

That is a political narrative imposed upon history.

Before Israel, there was no Palestinian Arab state

One of the most frequently repeated statements today is that Israel is “occupying Palestine.”

The word Palestine itself has a long and complicated history. It has been used as a geographical designation and, at different periods, as an administrative term. The Romans used the name Syria Palaestina. Islamic rulers subsequently used forms of Filastin. The British later administered the territory under the Mandate for Palestine.

But a geographic name is not the same thing as an independent sovereign state.

Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there was no independent sovereign Arab state called Palestine.

For centuries, the territory was ruled by empires and foreign powers, most recently the Ottoman Empire. After the First World War, it came under the British Mandate.

That historical distinction matters enormously today.

Because when people are repeatedly told that Israel “stole a country called Palestine,” they are being encouraged to imagine a historical state that did not exist in the form being described.

This does not erase the existence of Arab communities.

It does not deny Palestinian identity.

It does not deny the suffering experienced by Palestinians.

But acknowledging those realities does not require erasing Jewish history.

Judea did not disappear because the name changed

Long before Islam emerged in the seventh century, Jewish kingdoms existed in this land.

Jerusalem was the capital of ancient Israel and Judah.

Judea was not an invention of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)