As part of the propaganda juggernaut designed to panic Israelis into withdrawing from the Gaza Strip with their tails between their legs, as a reward for Palestinian barbarism and as part of the campaign to make Gaza Judenrein and expel its settlers, the Left - and by that, these days, I also mean the Likud - has been blustering about how Gaza was "never Jewish land"; about how it never had Jews living in it, is not part of the Jews' national heritage, and so on.

For example, the Israeli Minister of Defense Sha'ul Mofaz recently declared that "Gaza is not at all Jewish heritage."

Oh really?

Well, let's put aside for the moment all those stories about Jews spending time in Gaza in the Bible, from King David to Samson. Let's talk about historically unassailable evidence of Gaza being actual, documented Jewish land, long before the Gush Katif settlements were set up.

It turns out that Gaza had a thriving Jewish community - until the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Gaza in the 1948-9 War of Independence. From now on, when you hear the mindless Left blabbing about how "ethnic cleansing" took place in the 1948, you will understand that the only ethnic cleansing that took place was of Jews expelled from Gaza (and the West Bank), and later, of Jews from all the Arab countries. For strange reasons, the Left has never heard about any of those ethnic cleansings.

The Gaza Jewish community had as its rabbi, starting in 1906, one Rabbi Nissim Ohana, born in Algeria and trained as a rabbi in Jerusalem. He also served later as an important rabbinical leader in Alexandria, Egypt, in Malta, in New York, in Cairo (where he was Chief Rabbi of Egypt), and in Haifa (where he was Sephardic Chief Rabbi in the 1950s).

This past weekend, the Israeli religious newspaper Hatzofeh devoted an article to Rabbi Ohana and to the Jews living in Gaza in the first half of the 20th century. Rabbi Ohana was on warm cordial terms with the Moslem Mufti of Gaza, the article reports, and the two even wrote a book together.

There is one other curious detail worth knowing about this famous rabbi of Gaza. I am married to his granddaughter. The rabbi is one of the figures discussed in my book, The Scout.

So, when Mofaz states that Jews have no heritage to preserve in Gaza, let him speak for himself. Unlike so many of the fascist terrorists currently filling the Gaza Strip, my family can legitimately claim Gaza as our homeland.

Notes and Further Reading:

1. The Hatzofeh (Hebrew only) article on Jews in Gaza is at http://www.hazofe.co.il/.

2. Someone else who notes that Jews long lived in Gaza - Eli Pollak, "Disengagement or Zionism" in the Jerusalem Post.

3. For a broad religious-historical perspective, see also "Gaza Israel: Our Halacha, Our History, Our Security are Tied to Gush Katif" by Dr. Menachem Kovacs.