Beersheba (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – After his address to an almost empty hall at the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu found a warmer reception at a Shabbat gathering in the Israeli Consulate in New York. There, the Prime Minister chose to “reveal” what he presented as a forgotten historical truth. “The Arabs expelled us from our land after thousands of years,” he declared, adding: “We were the majority in our land, and when the Arabs invaded the Land of Israel, they simply took our lands, and the Jews became a minority in our own country.” Versions of this claim already appear in his 1993 book A Place Among the Nations.
The problem is that history simply does not support Netanyahu’s narrative. Modern scholarship — historical, archaeological, and philological– shows that these assertions lack any factual foundation. The Jewish population of the land had already dwindled centuries before the Muslim conquest. The devastating impact of the Great Revolt (67–73 CE) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 CE) reduced Jewish presence dramatically. Roman and later Byzantine authorities imposed severe restrictions on Jews, while many sought more attractive centers of Jewish life across the broader Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds. By the time Muslim armies entered the region in the 7th century, Jews were already a minority in the holy land.
Even more strikingly, the early centuries of Muslim rule were not an era of dispossession but one of relative recovery. Jewish communities experienced renewed stability and cultural vibrancy. Rabbanite and Karaite Jews alike produced a rich corpus of halakhic literature, developed Hebrew grammar and Masoretic writing, and fostered a flourishing of liturgical poetry. This is hardly the picture of a people prosecuted and expelled en masse by invading Arabs.
Later history also contradicts Netanyahu’s claims. Following the First Crusade (1096–1099), Jews and Muslims were barred from residing in Jerusalem. Only after the city’s reconquest by Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (“Saladin”) in 1187 were Jews permitted to return and settle there. Far from being systematically driven out by Arabs, Jews were, in fact, welcomed back to the city under Muslim rule.
Of course, no historical period was idyllic. Jews, like other minority groups, lived with vulnerability, subject at times to taxation, social restrictions, and political whims. But to recast this long and complex history as a one-dimensional tale of expulsion at Arab hands is a distortion. It replaces nuance with propaganda.
Recent scholarship provides ample correctives. The comprehensive historical survey by Daniela Talmon-Heller, Dotan Arad, and Moshe Yagur, titled “On the Life of Jews under Muslim Rule in the Land of Israel – A Response to Benjamin Netanyahu” (Haaretz, March 26, 2023), written in direct response to an earlier attempt by the Prime Minister to rewrite the past, offers a balanced, evidence-based account. The authoritative studies of historians Avraham Grossman (who speaks of a Jewish “golden age” in early Islamic times) and B. Z. Kedar likewise highlight the resilience and creativity of Jewish communities over the centuries. Together, they make clear that Jewish history in Palestine/Eretz Israel cannot be reduced to Netanyahu’s simplistic and politically expedient formula.
Which brings us to the critical point: Netanyahu’s statements, past and present, are not slips of the tongue but part of a calculated effort to reshape the historical record. His narrative is not about the past at all; it is about the present. By portraying Jews as eternal victims expelled by Arabs, he seeks to justify his government’s openly declared intention to displace the Palestinian population of Gaza—and potentially of the West Bank—today.
Abuhav Synagogue, Safed, Israel. Public Domain. H/t Wikimedia . [Wikipedia: “The synagogue was completed in the 15th-century century and named in honor of the Spanish kabbalist of the era, Rabbi Isaac Abuhav. Its design is said to be based upon Kabbalah teachings. According to tradition Rabbi Abuhav designed the synagogue and his disciples erected the building in Safed when they arrived [in Muslim-ruled Ottoman Palestine] in the 1490s after the expulsion from Spain.”]
This is where misuse of history becomes dangerous. Leaders often invoke the past to give legitimacy to their policies, but the stakes are especially high when historical myths are mobilized to rationalize forced displacement. Netanyahu’s rhetoric is not simply inaccurate; it is instrumental. It reimagines centuries of Jewish and Muslim coexistence in order to provide cover for a political agenda rooted in exclusion and expulsion.
History is messy, layered, and often contradictory. It resists the neat storylines politicians crave. But scholarship exists precisely to confront myths with evidence, to complicate rather than to simplify, and to situate events and statements in their historical contexts. The Jewish experience in the holy land, marked by struggle, resilience, adaptation, and renewal, deserves better than to be bent to the service of contemporary power.
Netanyahu wants to cast today’s conflict as a continuation of an ancient pattern of Arab hostility and Jewish victimhood. But the record tells a different story: one of decline long before Muslim conquest, of gradual recovery during the Middle Ages (mostly under Islamic rule), and of cultural creativity in the very land where he claims Jews were reduced to helpless exiles. A leader who trades in such distortions does not honor Jewish history; he weaponizes it.
History cannot be reduced to a soundbite of a Shabbat speech. And when it is misused to justify dispossession in the present, it must be called out.
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