On December 8, 2024, Arutz 7 reported "The rebel forces in Syria announced on Sunday morning that "the free Syrian people have toppled the regime of Bashar Al-Assad."
"The rebels reached beyond enemy lines in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and had begun searching for President Bashar Al-Assad. The rebels stated that they had freed prisoners from the horrendous Saydnaya military prison on the outskirts of the Syrian...
"Earlier, the commander of the Syrian jihadist rebel organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, announced that his forces 'have completely liberated the city of Homs, the third largest city in Syria, from the Assad regime...'"
Abu Mohammad al-Julani and his Jihadists did not actually "liberate" Syria, it is good to remember that Syria was mostly Christian before the Arabs invaded and ethnically cleansed most non-Muslims from the region.
Jihadists may have celebrated "liberating" Northern Syria from the Alawites, but now they want to "liberate Southern Syria" (the area of today's Israel) from the Jews.
Syria was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire when it was invaded by early Jihadists. "Southern Syria", including Jerusalem, was also invaded at the same time. The Arabs conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) in 636 CE.
Simon Sebag Montefiore describes, in his book Jerusalem, the Arab Conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire (Chapter 16, page 166) that Arabs built the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount to make Muslims seem the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity:
“In 518, aged thirty-five, Justinian found himself the real ruler of the Eastern empire when his uncle Justin was raised to the throne…"
"Justinian demoted Judaism from a permited religion and banned Passover if it fell before Easter, converted synagogues into churches, forcibly baptized Jews, and commandeered Jewish History: in 537, when Justinian dedicated his breathtaking Church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom” in Constantinople, he is said to have reflected 'Solomon, I have surpassed thee.'
"Then he turned to Jerusalem to trump Solomon’s Temple. In 543 Justinian and Theodora started to build a basilica, the Nea Church of St.Mary Mother of God, almost 400 feet long and 187 feet high, with walls 16 feet thick, facing away from the Temple Mount and designed to overpower Solomon’s site…
"The Holy City was ruled by the rituals of Orthodox Christianity… The city was set up to host thousands of pilgrims: the grandees stayed with the patriarch; the poor pilgrims in the dormitories of Justinian’s hospices which had beds for 3,000; and ascetics in caves, often old Jewish tombs, in the surrounding hills…
"…Heraclitus seized power (of the Bizantine Empire) in 610…Constantinople was besieged by the Persians (then Zoroastrians)...Heraclitus outmanoeuvred the Persian forces …then defeated their main army…
"… In 632 Muhammad, aged about sixty-two, died (in Saudi Arabia) and was succeeded by his father in law, Abu Bakr…
"Abu Bakr managed to pacify Arabia. Then he turned to the Byzantine and Persian empires, which Muslims regarded as evanescent, sinful and corrupt. The Commander dispatched a contingent of warriors on camels to raid Iraq and Palestine…in Mecca, Abu Bakr died and was succeeded by Omar…
" …Heraclitus dispatched an army to stop the Arabs…After months of skirmishing, the Arabs finally lured the Byzantines to battle amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk river between today’s Jordan, Syria and Israeli Golan…and on August 636…
"Khalid cut of their retreat and by the end of the battle, the Christians were so exhausted that the Arabs found them lying down in their cloaks, ripe for the slaughter. Even the emperor’s brother was killed and Heraclitus himself never recovered from this defeat, one of the decisive battles in history, that lost Syria and Palestine. Byzantine rule, weakened by the Persian war, seems to have collapsed like a house of cards…
"The Arabs converged on the city which they called Ilya (Aelia Capitolina, the Roman name (for Jerusalem)… Omar offered Jerusalem a Covenant – dhimma- of Surrender that promised religious tolerance to the Christians in return for payment of jizya tax of submission. Once this was agreed, Omar set out for Jerusalem…
"Omar knew that Muhammad had revered David and Solomon. 'Take me to the sanctuary of David,' he ordered Sophronius (Jerusalem’s Christian Patriarch). He and his warriors entered Temple Mount, probably through the Prophet’s Gate in the south, and found it contaminated by 'a dungheap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.
"Omar asked to be shown the Holy of Holies. A Jewish convert, Kaab al Ahbar, known as the Rabbi, replied that if the Commander preserved 'the wall' (perhaps referring to the last Herodian remains, including the Western Wall), 'I will reveal to him where are the ruins of the Temple.'
"Kaab showed Omar the foundation stone of the Temple, the rock which the Arabs called the Sakhra. Aided by his troops, Omar began to clear the debris to create somewhere to pray.
"Kaab sugested he place this north of the foundation stone 'so you will face make two qiblas, that of Moses and that of Muhammad.'
“'You still lean towards the Jews,' Omar supposedly told Kaab, placing his first prayer house south of the rock, roughly where the al-Aqsa Mosque stands today, so that it clearly faced Mecca.
"Omar had followed Muhammad’s wish to reach past Christianity to restore and co-opt this place of ancient holiness, to make Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity and outflank the Christians.” (Simon Sebag Montefiore “Jerusalem” page 166-184)
Al Aqsa is a symbol of the Islamic wish for supremacy over Judaism and Christianity.
Jihadists forced Jews to pay Jizya, a discriminatory tax, forcing them to leave the land while giving incentives for Muslims to colonize the land.
On August 15, 2014 I wrote in the Gatestone Institute "The current Palestinian [Arab] narrative is that all Muslims in Palestine are natives and all Jews are settlers. This narrative is false. There has been a small but almost continuous Jewish presence in Palestine [a name unconnected to Arabs or Muslims, given by the ancient Romans to the area hundreds of years before Mohammed and Islam arose] since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome two thousand years ago, and, as we will see, most of the Muslims living in Palestine when the state of Israel was declared in 1948 were Muslim colonists from other parts of the Ottoman Empire who had been resettled and living in Palestine for fewer than 60 years.
"There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to "protect" them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922. The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.
"Until the late 1800s entire ancient Jewish communities had to flee Palestine to escape the brutality of Muslim authorities.
"The Muslim rulers not only kept the number of Jews low through discriminatory taxes, they also increased the Muslim population by providing incentives for Muslim colonists to settle in the area. Incentives included free land, 12 years exemption from taxes and exemption from military service.
"Bat Ye'or writes:
"By the early 1800s the Arab population in Palestine was very little (just 246,000) it was in the late 1800s and early 1900s that most Muslim Colonists settled in Palestine because of incentives by the Ottoman Government to resettle displaced Muslim populations because of events such as the Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Crimean War and World War 1. Those events created a great quantity of Muslim Refugees that were resettled somewhere else in the Ottoman Empire... In 1878 an Ottoman law granted lands in Palestine to Muslim colonists. Muslim colonists from Crimea and the Balkans settled in Anatolia, Armenia, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine."
"Justin McCarthy, a professor of history at the University of Louisville, writing in his Annotated Map, "Forced Migration and Mortality in the Ottoman Empire," also notes that there were about five million Muslims displaced due to the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Crimean War, Balkan wars, the Turkish war of independence and World War I.
"Sergio DellaPergola, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in his paper "Demography in Israel/Palestine: Trends, Prospects and Policy Implications," provides estimates of the population of Palestine in different periods. As the demographic data below shows, most Muslims living in Palestine in 1948 when the State of Israel was created had been living there for less than 60 years:
"1890: Arab Population 432,000
"1947: Arab Population 1,181,000
"Growth in Arab population from 1890 to 1947: 800,000"Douglas Feith wrote in the Hudson Institute "...Palestine was also referred to as Surya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria)...""...few people—including Middle East policy makers, journalists, historians and even lexicographers—know much about the history of the name “Palestine,” or what territory it has at one time or another encompassed.
"The ancient Romans pinned the name on the Land of Israel. In 135 CE, after stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, “Palestinian Syria.” They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link between the Jews (in Hebrew, Y’hudim and in Latin Judaei) and the province (the Hebrew name of which was Y’hudah). “Palaestina” referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast.
"It is widely thought, as reflected in my 1976 New College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, that the term Palestine refers only to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Countless books and maps say that Israel, in conquering the 'West Bank' and Gaza in the 1967 Six-Day War, took control of “all of Palestine.” But that is not correct. The term “Palestine” was used for millennia without a precise geographic definition. That’s not uncommon—think of “Transcaucasus” or “Midwest.”
"No precise definition existed for Palestine because none was required. Since the Roman era, the name lacked political significance. No nation ever had that name. The term was meaningful to Christians as synonymous with the Holy Land. It was meaningful to Jews as synonymous with Eretz Yisrael, which is Hebrew for the Land of Israel.
"As noted by the Palestinian scholar Muhammad Y. Muslih in The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, Arabic speakers sometimes used the Arabic words for “Holy Land,” but never coined a uniquely Arabic name for the territory; Filastin is the Arabic pronunciation of the Roman terminology. “Palestine was also referred to as Surya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria), because it was part of geographical Syria,” wrote Muslih. In the pre-World War I-era, scholars also sometimes said Palestine was the region just south of Syria.
"Since biblical times, Palestine was understood to span the Jordan River. It was common to call the one bank Western Palestine and the other Eastern Palestine, as evidenced by such works as Edward Robinson, et al., Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions (1856); Charles Warren, Underground Jerusalem (1876); Frederick Jones Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration (1906); and Ellsworth Huntington, Palestine and Its Transformation (1911). The Israelite tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Menasseh, the Bible said, all held land east of the Jordan River.
"Before World War I, no books described that river as Palestine’s eastern boundary. Eastern Palestine was also known as Transjordan, meaning “across the Jordan.” In other words, the Jordan River did not bound Palestine; it bisected it. Referring to the Jordan Valley in his book Sinai and Palestine (1863), the Oxford University scholar Arthur Penrhyn Stanley said, “It is around and along this deep fissure that the hills of western and eastern Palestine spring up.”
"The terminology of Western and Eastern Palestine appeared universally in 19th- and early 20th-century literature. In George Adam Smith’s influential study, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, Book II is entitled “Western Palestine” and Book III “Eastern Palestine.” The famous works of Britain’s Palestine Exploration Fund—the first coauthored by H.H. Kitchener, later Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener, when he was but a lieutenant—were titled The Survey of Western Palestine and The Survey of Eastern Palestine. No one in the pre-World War I period ever needed to specify how far eastward Eastern Palestine extended. As the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica stated, “The River Jordan, it is true, marks a line of delimitation between Western and Eastern Palestine; but it is practically im¬pos¬sible to say where the latter ends and the Arabian desert begins.”
“Palestine” applied vaguely to a region that for the 400 years before World War I was part of the Ottoman empire. In that empire, it was divided among several provinces and governates and never composed an administrative unit. During the Great War of 1914-1918, the Ottoman empire, which included Palestine, fought alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Allies. That made the Holy Land enemy territory from the British perspective, and Britain took the lead in conquering it. When the war ended, the victorious Allies divided the formerly Ottoman Near East into new political units. In April 1920, they assigned to France the mandate to govern Syria, including Lebanon. They assigned two mandates to Britain, one for Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and one for Palestine. Borders for the three territories were not yet defined.
"How did British Mandate Palestine get its borders? The line in the north emerged from Anglo-French negotiations in 1923. The one in the south was fixed by treaties in the mid-1920s between Britain and the new nation of Saudi Arabia.
"The border between Mandate Palestine and Mandate Mesopotamia was of little immediate importance, given that it was in the middle of an uninhabited desert and Britain controlled both sides. That line was finally fixed through an exchange of letters in 1932.
"What particularly interests us here is how Britain handled Eastern Palestine. The short answer is that it remained under the British Mandate for Palestine until 1946, when it became the independent kingdom of Transjordan, later renamed Jordan. Western Palestine remained under the Mandate until May 1948...
To sum up: “Palestine” was long universally understood to include the land on both sides of the Jordan River. Eastern Palestine is now the kingdom of Jordan. Its eastern border was not finalized until after the League of Nations approved the Palestine Mandate. Maps of Mandate Palestine that include only Western Palestine are misleading because the emirate of Transjordan was part of Mandate Palestine, governed under Britain’s Jerusalem-based high commissioner for Palestine from 1921 until the emirate became an independent kingdom in 1946. Amery had a firm basis for saying that taking Transjordan out of the Jewish national home in 1921-1922 can properly be called Palestine’s “first partition...”