Well that sure is interesting. I hope you can stick around this thread because a little historical perspective could be helpful to the discussion. Also your avatar cracks me up every time I see it.
Well, if I were going to recommend a book that puts Jewish history and secular history side-by-side, it would be Max I. Dimont's "Jews, God and History."
I would also recommend reading Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" (1869) wherein he describes traveling through the area. This is one telling paragraph:
"Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent--not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings."
About Jerusalem, he wrote:
"
The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention.
It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently--the eternal "bucksheesh." To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda.
Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here." (Emphasis added.)
Fourteen thousand people. Not very many - even for 1869.
And the land lay fallow and unproductive.
I believe land belongs to those who purchase or win it and make it productive. Solar water heaters, cherry tomatoes, drip irrigation systems, USB flash drives, and the pillcam endoscope (a camera which is swallowed, making colon examinations far less painful and intrusive) - all invented by Israelis. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
