The earliest known inhabitants of Palestine were the Canaanites. They gave the country its first name - "the land of Canaan" as in the bible. The Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land in 3000 BC, some 1800 years before the first Hebrew occupation. The Canaanites had an advanced civilisation for their time and lived in cities. They founded Jerusalem which was to become the capital of Palestine. Although they were of one race with a common civilisation and the same language, Arabic, the Canaanites did not possess a unified political structure. Canaan was divided into city states which were ruled by princes or kings.

In about 1730 BC Hebrew tribes from Chaldea (modern Southern Iraq) migrated to Canaan but they did not establish themselves. They passed through Canaan and ended up in Egypt where they lived under the rule of the Pharaohs for several centuries.

In about 1200 BC there were two penetrations of Canaan, one by the Hebrews, the other by the Philistines. The Hebrew penetration took place over about 200 years and did not lead to the displacement of the original inhabitants. The Hebrews (the Israelites to be) settled in mainly unoccupied regions. Throughout this lengthy settling in period they did not have a kingdom or a central government. They lived as tribes, 12, and were ruled by Judges.

Initially the Philistines occupied the southern cost of Canaan and the maritime plain to a point north of Jaffo (Jaffa). They were known as the "People of the Sea". It is believed they came from Illyria, having passed through Crete on their way to Canaan. (Illyria was the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula, which, from about the 10th century BC, was inhabited by an Indo-European people). The Philistines gave the land of Canaan its new name, "Philistia", from which Palestine was derived. The ambition of the Philistines was to conquer all of Palestine and they were constantly at war with the Hebrews.

By about 1020 BC the Hebrews realised that if they continued to operate on a tribal basis, they would not be able to withstand the mounting attacks of the Philistines. If they were not to be defeated the Hebrews needed to be co-ordinated. Out of that realization came the appointment of Saul as the first king of Israel. In reality Saul was a king more in the title than substance. His capital at Globeah was a simple, rustic fortress. (There was not a "dom" to put on the end king). Saul's main responsibility was to co-ordinate the military actions of the Israelite tribes.

Saul was a tragic hero. He was mentally unstable if not actually mad and, at a point, he openly declared his intention to slay David, the young harp player who would succeed him and establish the first real Jewish kingdom in Palestine. Under Saul's leadership the Israelites were never strong enough to deliver a knockout blow to the Philistines, but they did prevent the Philistines from dominating all of Palestine.

David became king in about 1000 BC when Saul was killed in battle with the Philistines at Mount Gilboa. David did much more than co-ordinate the military actions of the Israelite tribes. He united them under his rule. His first capital was at Hebron, to the south of Jerusalem. In probably 1006 BC he captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites, a Canaanite subgroup. David ruled from there until his death in 972 BC. His son. Solomon, ruled for forty years and built the Jewish Temple.

After Solomon's death in 932 BC the Israelite tribes revolted and the kingdom established by David, which never encompassed all of Palestine, split into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the South. The two Jewish kingdoms were continually at odds with each other and at war with their neighbors. Disaster was beckoning.

In 721 BC the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians and its people were carried into oblivion. The Kingdom of Israel was extinct and on the territory where it had been there were four Assyrian provinces.

The Kingdom of Judah survived for a while but it was a precarious existence. Its capital, Jerusalem, was frequently besieged, captured and sacked. For long periods Judah paid tribute to Assyria, Egypt and Babylon. It became a vassal state. In 705 BC, when it failed to pay the tribute, the Assyrians occupied Judah. They gave most of its territory to the Philistines, leaving the king of Judah only his capital, Jerusalem. In 587 BC the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, including the Jewish Temple, and carried the Jews into captivity.

A vivid impression of what that meant was given by Georges Friedmann in "The End of the Jewish People". The twelve tribes were deported to Babylonia, mainly, and also to the Caucasus and Armenia "and disappeared; and with them the Jewish people in the plenitude of their existence as a simultaneously ethnic, national and religious community also disappeared for ever"

The events of 587 BC marked the end of institutional Jewish rule in Palestine until Israel's second coming in 1948, more than twenty-five centuries later. But it was not the end of a Jewish presence in Palestine. In 538 BC the Babylonians lost Palestine to the Persians and they allowed the Jews to return.

Two centuries later, in 332 BC, Alexander the Great took Palestine from the Persians. The Greeks had the country for a century and a half but, before their time was up, they were confronted by a Jewish revolt led by the Maccabees. They were a priestly family of Jews which took the lead in challenging laws that made the practice of Judaism impossible. After the Selucid (Greek puppet) ruler desecrated the Temple and rededicated it to Zeus, the Jews resorted to guerrilla warfare, led by Mattathias Maccabee and then by his son, Judas. In 164 BC Judas liberated Jerusalem and had the Temple reconsecrated; an event which Jews celebrate in the festival of Hannukka.

But Meccabean independence in Jerusalem and some other parts of Palestine did not last long. In 124 BC Jerusalem was besieged by Antiochus Sidetes, the king of Syria. The siege was raised only after the payment of a tribute.

Then in 63 BC, the Romans captured Palestine and it became, as Judea, a province of the Roman Empire. The Romans put an end to the rule of the Maccabees.

It was during the Roman occupation that the carpenter's son who became the Christ of Christianity was born. From that time, Bethlehem where Mary was said to have delivered him, Nazareth and Galilee where he lived, and Jerusalem where he was crucified, became Christianity's holiest places, and Palestine became the Holy Land of Christendom.

The Jews revolted against the Romans in AD 66 to 70 and again in AD 132 to 135. During the first revolt Titus destroyed Jerusalem including the Temple. In the second (Bar Kochba) revolt most Jews still in Palestine were killed or dispersed to the far corners of the Roman Empire. In 135 AD Hadrian built a new city of Jerusalem, which he named Aelia Capitolina, and none of the very few Jews who remained in Palestine were allowed ot live in it.

From the above it can be seen that the life span of the one united Jewish nation of David and Solomon was not more than 70 years, and as Dr. Julian Morgenstern pointed out in "As a Mighty Stream", there were only two brief simultaneous periods of life in each of the two separate Jewish kingdoms, neither lasting more than fifty years, when there was any indication of Jewish national strength and glory.

There are two particular statements which put Zionist's claim to Palestine into its true historic context.

One was in the text of the report of the King-Crane Commission appointed in 1919 by President Wilson to consult the Arabs of Palestine: "The initial claim, often submitted by the Zionist representatives, that they have a right to Palestine based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.

The other was made by Lord Sydenham in the House of Lords during a debate on Palestine in 1922. He said: "Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine than the descendants of the ancient Romans have on this country."

Put another way, of the total number of Jews in the world outside Palestine, only a few were of Palestinian origin: the vast majority were the descendants of Jews who were Jews by conversion to Judaism in the many lands of which they were citizens, conversions which took place long after the first Jewish presence in Palestine was all but extinguished. In short few if any of incoming Zionist Jews on the land of Palestine that could be seriously considered as valid in terms of the "historical connection".

The great majority of Eastern European Jews were not Semitic Jews at all, and as most Western European Jews came from East Europe, most of them are also not Semitic Jews. This nullifies Zionism's strongest claim to Palestine/Israel.

The significance of the facts of Jewish history is impossible to exaggerate in the context of the wrong done to the indigenous Arabs of Palestine by Zionism. It explains among other things why critics of Zionism in the House of Lords and elsewhere used adjectives such as "extraneous" and "alien" to describe those Jews entering Palestine to serve Zionism's cause.

The Jews who were living in Palestine at the time of the first Zionist Congress were about 20,000. Some of them, probably about 10,000 were the descendants of the few who stayed in Palestine through everything, living as religious communities in Tiberias and Safad but also Hebron and Jerusalem: waiting for the Messiah to come. Their presence was continuous one and their connection to the land of Palestine was real. They were Palestinians. The rest of the 20,000 were the descendants of those Jews who entered Palestine over many centuries, mainly during the "Expulsions" of 1000 to 1500 AD. During this period the giant of anti-Semitism was wide awake and rampaging through many lands like England, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sicily, Lithuania and the Crimea. They sought sanctuary in three main areas - Poland, Italy and the Ottoman Turkish Empire. At the time of the first Zionist Congress the most recent arrivals in Palestine, then a part of the Turkish Empire, were those of the second half of the 19th century. They settled in communities founded by Sir Moses Montefiore and funded by Lord Rothschild. On his first visit in 1837 Montefiore put the total number of Jews in Palestine at 9,000.

The number of Palestine's Arabs at the time of the first Zionist Congress was about 500,000. In other words, at the time of Zionist's secret commitment to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of that land.

It is also a fact that the minority Jewish community of Palestine was strongly opposed to the Zionist enterprise. Prior to the birth of Zionism, the Jews in Palestine were there for religious reasons. Zionism was seen by the religious Jews of Palestine as a threat to their continued well-being. The religious Jews of Palestine also believed that what the Zionists were proposing was morally wrong.

In 1916 AD the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Arthur James Balfour prepared a letter which was issued in November 2nd, 1917 AD expressing government approval of Zionism with "The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". This letter is called Balfour Declaration "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The latter phrase has all but disappeared from the Western media and from the history of this problem.

The letter was addressed to Lord Rothschild, who was a member of the Jewish international BANKING family, and who generously offered loan after loan to the Bank of England. Nathan Rothschild was quoted: "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply." It has been said that "the wealth of Rothschild consists of the bankruptcy of nations". Edmond James Rothschild (1845 - 1934) helped to finance the establishment of Jewish communities in Palestine.

One of the things that made the Balfour Declaration such an astonishing document and commitment was that Britain had no right of any kind to give Palestine away, in whole or in part, to anybody.

The British government, as author of the Balfour Declaration, possessed no sovereighnty or domination in Palestine enabling it to make a valid promise of any rights, whatever their nature and extent, in favour of the Jews of the world. It is immaterial whether these rights were meant to be territorial, political or cultural. On the date that the Balfour Declaration was made, Palestine formed part of Turkey, and neither its territory nor its people were under the jurisdiction of the British Government. The Declaration was void on the basis of the principle that a donor cannot give away what does not belong to him. By itself the Balfour Declaration was legally impotent.

Those responsible for drafting the Balfour Declaration had been unable to bring themselves to acknowledge the existence of the Arabs of Palestine as a people. The term "Arab" or "Arabs" did not appear in the Balfour Declaration. It reduced the 93 per cent Arab majority to "existing non-Jewish communities". That was an expression, a formula, which could only have been invented to serve a hidden agenda.

On October 1914, six days before Britain declared war on Turkey, Hussein I of Arabia received a message from Lord Kitchner, British Secretary of State for War. He understood that victory over both the Germans and the Turks would be most unlikely unless the Arabs could be persuaded to join the war on the side of the Allies. The essence of Kitchner's message to Hussein was a pledge of British support for Arab independence if the Arabs revolted against the Turks and entered the war on the side of Britain and the Allies.

The Arabs honoured their part of the bargain. Their revolt against the Turks started on 5 June 1916. But it would not have happened if the Arabs had been aware of the secret discussions which were going on, even as they were committing themselves to fighting for the Allies, between the Allies (Britain, France, Italy and Russia) to determine how the spoils of the Turkish Empire were to be divided among themselves after victory.

Britain played the Arab card, promising them independence after they revolted against the Turks, and having played it, Britain then betrayed the Arabs, the Arabs of Palestine most of all, and the Arabs made the mistake of trusting the British.

For Britain the promise was to maintain an "Empire", and later on, for the Americans the case was to create one.

While the Arab nationalists were meeting in Damascus and proclaiming the independence they had been promised, Britain and France were conducting their secret discussions to carve up the old pre-war Greater Syria (Syria of today including the Golan Heights occupied and taken by Israel in the `967 war; plus Lebanon of today; plus Jordan of today including the West Bank occupied by Israel in the 1967 war; plus Israel as it was inside the borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war)for themselves!And they were determined to delay telling the truth about what they had decided until the time was strategically and politically right.

The way in which the spoils of the Ottoman Empire were to be shared among the European victors was made public on 5 May 1920 in San Remo. Syria was to be partitioned, divided into three spheres of big power influence. France was to have the Mandates for ruling a separate Lebanon and a separate Syria minus Palestine. Britain was to have the Mandate to rule Palestine. (Britain was also to have Iraq).