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The Jews are a semitic tribe originally occupying land on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. In the centuries preceding the BC/AD divide, they sometimes had their own petty kingdom, sometimes not. Ethnically, they were no different than any of the other tribes living in the area. Religiously, they were fairly unique. In the century preceding the year 0 in our calendar the Jews had a petty kingdom and the Roman Empire came in and kicked their ass as they did with so many petty kingdoms in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. That is the last time that the Jews had their own little theocracy until now. So when I hear people talk about the Jews returning to "their traditional home", the first thing I say is Bullshit. You might as well talk about resurrecting the petty kingdoms of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, and others. Jewish writ hasn't run in the lands of the Levant for 2,000 years. After the incorporation of the Jewish kingdom into the Roman Empire, the Jews dispersed. Some stayed in Palestine (in a flash of insight, I was talking to an Iranian friend of mine when I lived in Iran and he used the Farsi word for Palestinian - Philistine. You biblical scholars may have heard of them), others moved on to Europe, Russia, and Africa.
So suddenly in the 20th century, a boatload of Jews from Europe, Russia, Africa and beyond whose ancestors haven't lived in Palestine for time out of mind suddenly want to reclaim their "traditional homeland". Like I said, Bullshit. Israel today is much the same as the petty kingdoms set up by Christian crusaders a thousand years ago - a grafting of foreign people into somebody else's land. It's not going to last any longer than those Christian kingdoms did. The only question is: will the United States be destroyed in the process.
