An aerial view of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, describes how anti-Zionists in academia have systematically challenged the moral basis of the Jewish/Zionist story. He exhorts us, the Jews of the world, to mount a credible defense of our story.

But do we Jews know our own story?

Edward Robinson, a prominent American archeologist of the 1800s, did not think so. Robinson was the first to identify the archeological ruins of Bar’am, a site in northern Galilee near the Lebanese border, as synagogues. The primary structure, built in the third century CE, was still in use in the 13th century.

While Robinson knew the truth 170 years ago, the common understanding, in both the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, even today, is that the Jews, driven from their home by the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 70 CE, were scattered to all points of the globe, only to truly return to their ancestral home after 2,000 years of wandering.

In that case, who wrote the Jerusalem Talmud? In fact, the writers (including several sages mentioned in the Passover Haggadah) were living in the Holy Land after the destruction of the Temple.

And what about the four additional Jewish revolts that took place after the destruction of the Temple, the last one against Emperor Heraclius in the seventh century CE? How can you have Jewish revolts without Jews?

Moreover, an autonomous Jewish Patriarchate existed until the year 425 CE, more than a century after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Rabbi Lee I. Levine, an American-Israeli archeologist and historian, notes that the Jewish Patriarch enjoyed extensive prestige and recognition, equivalent to that of a king.

The ruins of 100 synagogues built after 70 CE are witnesses to continuing Jewish life in the Holy Land. While a majority are in Galilee, they exist throughout the land. Several were imposing structures with elaborate mosaic floors. Huqoq, a recently excavated synagogue site with magnificent mosaics, dates to the fifth century CE. The mosaics survived because a 14th century synagogue was built over the ruins of the earlier one.

In later centuries, the Jewish population increased and decreased as a function of immigration, natural disasters, pogroms, and disease. While many Jews drifted from one exile to another, others stayed on, joined from time to time by returning exiles. In fact, the Jewish people never left the Middle East, and this brings up another part of the Jewish story often ignored — the story of the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews.

Seventy-seven years ago, North Africa and the Middle East, outside the British Mandate of Palestine, contained almost a million Jews. With the establishment of Israel, however, they were subject to violent persecution and expulsion. Most ended up in Israel, where today they and their descendants make up more than one-half of the 7.7 million Jews in the country.

Then there is the history of the Jews of Iran, who experienced forced conversion and violent pogroms throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. The 1903 Kishinev Pogrom in Russia received worldwide attention. Who knows about the 1910 pogrom in Shiraz, Iran (then Persia), during which 12 Jews were killed, 50 injured, and the entire community of 6,000 robbed and made homeless?

One more aspect of the Jewish story gets little attention — unlike other nationalisms, modern Zionism was, and still is, a rescue mission. Every Zionist leader from Herzl onwards was aware that millions of European Jews were in imminent physical danger. The fact that modern Zionism arose in the 1880s, with the onset of violent pogroms in Russia, is not a coincidence.

The Jewish story is one of an oppressed people that never stopped inhabiting its ancestral homeland.

Jews in Israel are not colonizers. They are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and to the Middle East. Israel is not a European colonial entity. It is a diverse society and less than 50% of Israeli Jews are European in origin.

Finally, the development of modern Zionism was not an “option.” It was a necessity, a survivalist imperative, progressively compulsory due to increasingly incendiary antisemitism. In some ways, things haven’t really changed since then.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.

The post Do the Jewish People Know That Our People Never Actually Left the Land of Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Nearly eight years ago, in May 2017, the BBC News website published a report on the topic of a policy document published by Hamas. At the time, the BBC accurately reported that:

The new document, which Hamas says does not replace the charter, accepts the establishment of a Palestinian state within territories occupied by Israel in 1967 as a stage towards the “liberation” of all of historic Palestine west of the River Jordan.

This is an apparent shift in Hamas’s stated position, which previously rejected any territorial compromise.

The document says this does not, however, mean Hamas recognises Israel’s right to exist in any part of the land or that it no longer advocates violence against Israel. [emphasis added]

However, as CAMERA UK documented at the time, additional BBC reporting — including from the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell — promoted a false portrayal of the document as a “new charter,” and the inaccurate claim that “it really drops its long-standing call for an outright destruction of Israel.”

Months later, the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, was still promoting the inaccurate claim that Hamas had “made some changes” to its charter.

Notably, the BBC refused to correct that misinformation.

In January 2018, a Hamas leader clarified directly to the BBC that “we are not going to denounce a square meter of our land which is Palestine,” and in 2020, another Hamas leader told a different media outlet that “Palestine must stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

Nevertheless, viewers watching BBC News channel coverage of the fifth phase of the release of Israeli hostages on the morning of February 8 heard the following from contributor Oliver McTernan of the British charity ‘Forward Thinking’. [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

BBC anchor: “You talk about Hamas’ political will for a solution but they do still have in their charter — don’t they — the destruction of the State of Israel. They did launch those attacks, murdering 1,200 people on October 7th.”

McTernan: “Well I think there are two things there. On the one hand, the 2017 document was to replace the charter and as I say, that was the acceptance of a two-state solution on ’67 borders. But the horror of what happened on October 7^th – and, let’s face it, it was reprehensible – the level of violence, the nature of the violence, the taking of innocent families and so forth into Gaza, that, I think, it…you cannot justify it on any level whatsoever. But you have to try and understand it – that you get an inevitable explosion of violence if there is no political track which people can follow and horizon where they can see some sort of future.”

The BBC should have been able to anticipate that disinformation concerning the 2017 document and Hamas’ purported “acceptance of a two-state solution” — as well as “conflict resolution expert”’ McTernan’s “contextualisation”of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas and others on October 7, 2023. On the morning of that very day,

McTernan was in a BBC studio describing the then ongoing invasion of Israel and slaughter of civilians as an “expression of frustration” and telling audiences about his then recent trip to South Africa, where he met with Palestinian representatives.

In July 2024, the BBC television and radio program Hardtalk interviewed McTernan:

Sarah Montague speaks to former Catholic priest Oliver McTernan who has spent more than two decades working in conflict resolution in the Middle East. He is the director of the organisation Forward Thinking and was involved in negotiations that led to the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. While he has no formal role in the current talks over the war in Gaza, he regularly speaks to senior figures in both Hamas and the Israeli government. Given the history of this protracted conflict, does he hold any hope that it will ever be resolved?

In addition to repeatedly promoting the false Hamas narrative of a siege on the Gaza Strip and providing a decidedly bizarre explanation for the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in 2006, McTernan responded to Sarah Montague’s observation that one of the terrorists released in exchange for Shalit was Yahya Sinwar who “masterminded October 7” with the claim that “if there had been the lifting of the siege of Gaza, circumstances would have changed and you would not have got, I think, the level of violence that we witnessed on October 7. […] It was the lack of political progress that actually empowered the militant side of Hamas.”

Towards the end of that interview, throughout which he tried to promote the redundant notion of separate ‘wings’ to Hamas, McTernan made the following statement: “We forget that in 2017 Hamas issued a political statement […] where they recognised a two-state solution on ’67 borders.”

In other words — despite the existence of BBC procedures concerning risk assessment, including of “factual errors”, in live content —  when the BBC News channel invited McTernan to participate in its coverage of the release of three Israeli hostages on February 8, 2025, it already knew that he is a promoter of the false notion of “’67 borders”; that he spreads disinformation concerning non-existent Hamas acceptance of a two-state solution; that he wrongly claims that the 2017 document “replaced” the Hamas charter; that he advances the redundant claim of separate “wings” to that terrorist organization; and that he makes excuses for the worst massacre in Israel’s history.

Where is the outrage?

Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK — an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.

The post The BBC Spreads Hamas Propaganda, Despite Telling the Truth in 2017 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Trucks carrying aid move, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri

The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas signaled on Thursday that a crisis threatening to unravel the Gaza ceasefire deal could be avoided despite uncertainty over the number of hostages due to be released on Saturday and disagreements over aid supplies.

The 42-day ceasefire has appeared close to failure this week amid accusations on both sides of violations to the agreement sealed last month with the help of Egyptian and Qatari mediators and US support.

Hamas said it did not want the deal to collapse, though it rejected what it called the “language of threats and intimidation” from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. They have said the ceasefire should be canceled if the hostages are not released.

“Accordingly, Hamas reaffirms its commitment to implementing the agreement as signed, including the exchange of prisoners according to the specified timeline,” Hamas said in a statement.

Hamas, whose Gaza chief leader Khalil Al-Hayya is visiting Cairo for talks with Egyptian security officials, also said both Egyptian and Qatari mediators would press on with efforts “to remove obstacles and close gaps.”

This week Hamas accused Israel of failing to respect stipulations calling for a massive increase in aid deliveries and said it would not hand over three hostages due to be released on Saturday until the issue was resolved.

In response, Netanyahu ordered reserves to be called up and threatened to resume combat operations that have been paused for almost a month unless the hostages were returned.

Israeli minister Avi Dichter, a member of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, told Israeli public radio on Thursday that he did not believe Hamas would be able to get out of the agreement.

“There’s a deal, they won’t be able to give anything less than what is in the deal,” he said. “I don’t believe that Hamas can behave otherwise.”

Egyptian security sources told Reuters they expected heavy construction equipment to enter on Thursday and if that happened then Hamas would release hostages on Saturday.

The standoff between Israel and Hamas has threatened to reignite their conflict, which has devastated Gaza and taken the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.

Egyptian and Qatari officials have been working to avoid a breakdown and a Palestinian official close to the mediation effort said both sides had agreed to go ahead with the ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

TENTS

The talks in Cairo have focused on issues such as Israel‘s allowing the entry of mobile homes, tents, medical and fuel supplies, and heavy machinery needed for the removal of rubble, Hamas said.

Salama Marouf, head of the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza, told Reuters only 73,000 of the required 200,000 tents had arrived in the enclave, while no mobile homes had been permitted so far.

COGAT, the Israeli military agency overseeing aid deliveries into Gaza, said 400,000 tents had so far been allowed in, while countries meant to supply mobile homes had not yet sent them.

International aid officials confirmed that aid was coming in despite considerable logistical problems, though they cautioned that far more was needed.

“We have seen improvement in some ways, but certainly, the response is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of so many people who face so much destruction and loss,” said Shaina Low, an official from the Norwegian Refugee Council based in the Jordanian capital Amman.

She said shelter materials were going in, despite Israeli restrictions on so-called “dual use” materials, which could also be used for military purposes.

DOUBTS

Adding to doubts this week about the ceasefire deal has been hostile reaction in the Arab world to Trump’s comments that Palestinians should be moved from Gaza to allow it to be developed as a regional economic hub under US control.

Under the ceasefire, Hamas has so far released 16 Israeli hostages from an initial group of 33 children, women, and older men agreed to be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, who were largely imprisoned for involvement in terrorist activity, in the first stage of a multi-phase deal.

Hamas also freed five Thai hostages in an unscheduled release.

Negotiations on a second phase of the agreement, which mediators had hoped would agree the release of the remaining hostages as well as the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, were supposed to be already underway in Doha but an Israeli team returned home on Monday, two days after arriving.

The threat to cancel the 42-day ceasefire that formed the basis of the agreement has drawn thousands of Israeli protesters onto the streets this week, calling on the government to stick with the deal in order to bring the remaining hostages home.

The war in Gaza erupted after a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed at least 1,200 people and saw more than 250 taken as hostages.

Israel responded with a military campaign in Gaza aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in the neighboring coastal enclave.

The post Hamas Says It Is Willing to Move Ahead With Gaza Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.