“Those delusional Palestinians,” I remember my father telling me as a child. “It’s been 60 years since they declared a war, and lost. Now, they stick to themselves in refugee camps, carry the keys to their lost homes, and keep dreaming of coming back. The should shut up, get over it, and move on. It’s over.”
In the year 132 CE the Jews living in Israel, led by Shimon Bar Kochba, led a valiant but futile revolt against the colonizing Roman forces1. They briefly managed to establish independence before the Romans returned in force, killed over half a million of them and exiled the rest. The refugees often carried the keys to their homes. This effectively ended the Jewish presence in Israel, and is referred to historically as a “disaster” for the Jews.
For the last 1,900 years, Jews haven’t shut up about it and have dreamed of coming back. Thousands of years later, they invoked their right to return to their “homeland”, even though the reason they had left in the first place was because they had declared a war against their oppressors, and lost.
Bar Kochba, who led this devastation, effectively transforming Jews from a major population in the Middle East to a “dispersed and persecuted minority“, is celebrated by Zionists as a hero, exemplifying the Jewish right to self-determination.
- This was the third, and best planned, of the Jewish revolts. The second had occurred about 20 years earlier and was perpetrated by Jews living outside of Israel, in the “diaspora”. As part of the rebellion, Jews killed almost half a million Roman civilians. ↩︎
