The Right of the Jews to the Land of Israel

Hello! 
Wow, it sure has been awhile.... who knew summer vacation could be so busy??? (Vacation?? What's that?? I think I may have heard that word somewhere before....)
This is part of the thesis I am currently working on about the legitimacy of the Jews' claim to Israel. This thesis consists of four proofs - historical right, right of conquest, right of merit, and legal right.In the first proof, I have attempted to prove through history why the Jews should possess Israel.
Any comments and criticisms will be much appreciated. I hope you enjoy! (Note: This is only part of proof one - for those of you who know me, you won't be surprised to learn that I got a little carried away :) )

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity. It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store." (Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998)

Shakespeare said, “Time is the justice that examines all offenders.” It is an honored element binding together nations, peoples, traditions, beliefs… and possessions. Often we give credence to an idea because it is old. We value objects with long pasts, not merely because they have been widely accepted, but because they have stood the test of time. Likewise nations dwelling in an area of the world for centuries have proven that they are bound to their land; they possess a connection stronger than money or legal documents – this bond is their past, and a past is perhaps the most significant of all links between person and place that exist.

The Jewish people settled the towns and states of ancient Canaan around 3000 BCE under Joshua.  King David conquered Jerusalem in 1000 and established a powerful Israelite kingdom over much of Canaan including parts of Transjordan. When his son Solomon died, the kingdom was divided into Judea in the south and Israel in the north. The Assyrians conquered Israel in 722 BCE and 136 years later the Babylonians took over, sending the Jewish people into exile. 50 years after that, the Persian king Cyrus conquered the Babylonians and allowed some of the Jews to return to their homeland. Cyrus was followed by Alexander the Great and then by Alexander’s general Seleucus. Finally, in 167 BCE, the Jewish people drove the Seleucids out of their land. 

However, the Jews were foreordained to enjoy their freedom for only 106 years –the new masters of the world, the Romans, sacked Jerusalem in 61 BCE. They ruled Israel until the 300s, (AD) when the Byzantines took over, followed by the Muslims, the Turks, the Crusaders, the French and then the British. It seemed as though every nation in the world was destined to control the Holy Land at one point or another during history.

Throughout these periods of foreign invasion, the Jewish people never stopped travelling to Israel and settling in the land. By the fourteenth century large Jewish and Arab populations existed there. The first wave of modern Jewish immigrants settled in Israel in 1881, during what is known as the “First Aliyah.”  The Zionist movement, propagating a return of Jews to their land, became a formal organization in 1897 with the first Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland, organized by Theodor Herzl.  The principal goal of the Zionists was to establish a Jewish homeland in the Palestine area, populated by Jews from all over the world. Then the Second Aliyah began 20 years later with the immigration of over 40, 000 Jews from Eastern Europe in 1904. By 1914 there were at least 100, 000 Jews in Israel.  

In 1917, the British expressed their support of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Israel with the Balfour Declaration, which stated, “His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a  national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object…” Also in 1917, the new Jewish Legion, a group of volunteers, aided the British in their conquest of Israel. From this Jewish Legion and the violence sparked by Arab riots in the 1920s sprung the Haganah, Israel’s future army of the early twentieth century.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth Aliyahs were initiated by the growing anti-Semitism and rise of Nazism in Europe – together these waves of immigration brought 350, 000 more Jews to the Holy Land. However the Arab revolt during 1936-1939 caused the British to tighten restrictions on Jewish immigration and the Jews to form a clandestine movement called the Aliyah Bet, which smuggled Jews into Israel under the noses of the British. Many Jewish immigrants, however, were turned away or rounded up by English soldiers and detained in camps such as the one on the island of Cyprus. The cessation of British support of a Jewish state in Israel had the unintended effect of placing the Jews on the offensive and in open opposition of Britain.

Finally in 1947 the British officially announced their decision to end their Mandate in Israel.  The newly created United Nations approved the “Partition Plan for Palestine”, (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181,) on November 29, 1947, which sought to divide the country into two states—one Arab and one Jewish. Jerusalem was designated a corpus separatum—an international city—to be administered by the UN. A United Nations Special Committee was created to draft proposals for a Jewish state in Palestine and the State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14^th, 1948.

            “[The Jews’ claim to their land] was not a new claim, but rather a reassertion of a historic right that had never been conceded or forgotten. Even after the destruction of the last Jewish commonwealth in the first century, the Jewish people maintained their own autonomous political and legal institutions: the Davidic dynasty was preserved in Baghdad until the thirteenth century through the rule of the Exilarch Resh Galuta, while the return to Zion was incorporated into the most widely practiced Jewish traditions, including the…Yom Kippur service and the Passover Seder, as well as in everyday prayers. Thus, Jewish historic rights were kept alive in Jewish historical consciousness.” (An Answer to the New Anti-Zionists: the Rights of the Jewish People to a Sovereign State in Their Historic Homeland by Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints, November 16^th, 2003.) The Jews were merely retracting their own possession in establishing their own state. Throughout history they had maintained a strong presence in the land despite the oppression of their various subjugators.