Declaration of Jerusalem Being Israel's Capital-Backing Jewish Claim to King David's City and Here's the Claim

Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Palestinians are in a rage since President Trump did what two previous presidents could not figure out how to do; announce to the world that Jerusalem was indeed the ancient and present capital of Israel.  He was like the child telling the egotistical king that the king was wearing no clothes when everyone else went along with the king's story that he was wearing marvelous ones.  Hey, king, he had said, you're naked!  Why are you trying to fool us?  Trump told it like it is.  Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel in the past and is in the present.  He told the truth that everyone else has been afraid of saying for fear of angering the Palestinians.  I give a Kol a ka vod to Trump!  He had the energy and the mind to say it because it was a promise he made.  He only said the truth.  All the rest of the argument Israel and the Palestinians have over Jerusalem is between them to settle.   The Palestinians are in a rage because they say that Trump just stole their claim to Jerusalem!
What they are after is the whole city, not just the eastern section, and then the whole state of Israel.
                                                                     

Mahmoud Abbas b: March 26, 1935
Leader of Palestinians since Arafat's death
President of Palestine when a 2 state solution is agreed upon
a Palestine not in agreement with Hamas terrorists occupying Gaza

     As far as I'm concerned, the Palestinians have never had a claim on Jerusalem.  I've read the book, FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL, by Joan Peters, a newspaper reporter before the time of Fake News, who started with the bias of being on the Palestinian's side of the claim but after doing a ton of research, was convinced of the Jewish claim.  She found out about the origins of the Palestinian Arabs, too, something they are in the dark about themselves.  This is a book that Jewish self haters hate, as she exposes how to do research, something these PhDs evidently were too lazy or in too much denial to bother with.  Maybe she had a more imaginative mind, for she really got to the heart of the facts, and they hate her for doing so.  My hat goes off to Joan Peters for her extensive work, where her pocket book version that I have lists her notes (references) that goes from page 443 to 563.  Her appendix which is full of more interesting facts, goes from pages 413 to 442.   Boiled down, she proves that the Palestinian Arabs are not a separate people but a hodgepodge from the whole area as well as from the outside, and that there never has been a state or country of Palestine.  It was the Roman name for the land where Israel once stood.  They gave it the name of Israel's enemy, the Philistines.  The Romans were not happy with the Jews who had held out against them for 3 years, longer than their other enemies had.  Thus, the enemy's name was given to their land as another form of punishment.

Palestinians are planning to rage for 3 days, claiming that Trump stole their claim to Jerusalem.  This is amazing to me as they had no claim.  It has been in their dreams, their own worked over history.
                                                                       

Moses, who first gave us the 10 Commandments

            The Israeli's claim is found in the Tanakh, or as Christians say, the Old Testament.  Rabbis explain that the first 5 books,  are called the Five Books of Moses, because Moses wrote them.  They are:  Genesis, Exodus which occurred about from 1579 BCE, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  Moses wrote these over his 40 year period of freeing the Jews from Egypt and finally reaching Canaan, where Abraham and Sarah had lived and their family of Isaac and son Jacob had been brought up.  Jacob was the one who took his tribe of 70 and migrated to Egypt to escape a drought and find food for their sheep and themselves.  At this point in the book, Moses dies before entering the land at age 120.
                                                                         

Our Torah - or Five Books of Moses
There are about 14 million people in the world that are Jewish.  Many of the men go through
a bar mitzvah where they can read the Torah in Hebrew from the scroll.
They do this first at age 13 in a special ceremony on the Sabbath.
There are about 6 million in Israel and 6 million in the USA.  The rest are scattered.
They make up .02% of the world population.  

From then on, the documentation continues to be explicit.  Prophets continue the history of their people, probably encouraged by Moses's accomplishment.  We have Joshua, the Judges of Israel, Samuel, the Kings of Israel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then 12 minor prophets.  They were Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakuk,  Zephaiah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.

Besides these historians, there are writings that also tell the story of the history of the Jewish people in Israel and their beloved city of Jerusalem which King David had built for his capital.  There are the Psalms written by David, Proverbs, and the writings of Job.  There is the Songs of Songs, the book of Ruth, Lamentations and Ecclesiastes.  There is the marvelous book of Esther and the book of Daniel.  Ezra and Nehemiah have their book next and the final one that I love being I'm an amateur genealogist is Chronicles, which is a book of genealogy of our ancestors.
                                                                           

As if the written histories are not enough proof that Jerusalem has been Israel's capital since King David who ruled from 1010 BCE to 970 BCE, we have history from the Oral tradition which was finally written down as well.  It reminds me of tribes in Africa who also had their history memorized by members of their tribe, because they lacked writing skills, and so developed these fantastic memories.
                                                                             

Archaeologists have been exploring the area for ages and have found many proofs that back the Tanakh that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel and that the Jewish people lived there.  Incidentally, Jews took on this name being they were mainly of the tribe of Judah.  Their  well known history is that there had been 12 sons of Jacob who were the origins of the 12 tribes of Israel.  Jacob's name had been changed to Israel at a point in life when certain events had occurred that were life-changing.  The Assyrians had attacked Israel in 721 BCE and took many of the best of their people away as slaves back to Assyria and its provinces.  They had taken 10 of the 12 tribes.  We refer to them as the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.  Today their remnants are being found and some have already relocated in Israel. 

Babylonians attacked in 597 to 586, led by Nebuchadnezzar, taking the choice people again for slavery.  They had destroyed our Temple.  Finally, the king of Persia allowed Israelites to return in 538 BCE and rebuild it.  It's rumored that the King was married to a Jewish woman or that he had some Jewish genes since he made this grand gesture.
                                                                     

Temple that King Solomon had built who ruled from 961-920 BCE on Temple Mount in Jerusalem
It was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE

       The Exodus from Egypt happened 480 years before King Solomon built the First Temple in about 1,500-1,445  BCE for our one G-d that we believe in.  This is what separated the Israelites from the rest of the world, as the thought was that there were many gods controlling their life.   Though the Egyptians had had one Pharaoh who also believed in one G-d, that god was the Sun, and as soon as he died, his people went back to their old beliefs.

Moses was a prince of Egypt, and had the opportunity of being educated in reading and writing.  Only the elite had this opportunity.  The Israelite slaves had no such luck, working 7 days a week without a break.  He had returned to Egypt at age 80 in order to free his fellow kinfolk, and wound up traveling 40 more years with his freed kinfolk and other slaves of Egypt as well of 600,000 souls.
                                                                 

Documentation found in Egypt, now in British Museum
Israelite slaves building storage cities in Egypt

The Israelite slaves were not around at the time of building the pyramids.  That must have been a previous work force.  Israelites were put to work building storage cities.  So much of our past is found in these pages of the Tanakh, and yet the Palestinians have not dared to read any of them in their non-existent research as to their own history or that of the Jews and the history of Jerusalem.
                                                                         

Along came the Romans and occupied Jerusalem.  Then by 70 CE, they burned the city and took it over when the ashes cooled down, forcing Jews out.  However, Jews managed to live in other parts of Israel and Judah, for Israel had divided itself after King Solomon had died and the southern part became Judah and kept Jerusalem as its capital.

They were the ones most faithful to Moses's teachings, no doubt because the best and brightest of the other 10 tribes had been kidnapped and taken away hundreds of years before.  The tribe of Judah at the time of Moses's census was the largest with 76,500 people.  They had increased over the 40 years by 1,900.  The smallest tribe had been Manaseh with 32,200 at the first census and 40 years later had 52,700.  They had increased by 20,500. However, the tribe of Gad at the end was the very smallest with only 40,500.  They had lost 5,150 out of their population.  The total population of all the 12 tribes at the conclusion of their journey to Canaan was exactly 601.730 according to the last census.  And people today think the Tanakh is just a bunch of rubbish?  Folk tales?  Hog-wash?  It's a book of history, geography, literature, population genetics, genealogy, a way of living with 613 laws to follow for success and hope and predictions of the future.

 It wasn't until 1,000 years later that many Jews were settling in France and Germany.  Our RASHI, biblical commentator, was born in France in 1040 CE.
                                                                             

I have gone to my library and checked out the Koran of the Islamic faith.  I have read much of it.  I ask, "How many Muslims have read our Tanakh (Bible) ?  Well, I know that in many Muslim countries, such a book will not be found or encouraged to read.  How many Christians have read our Tanakh?  I took a course at Lewis and Clark College, a college of the Presbyterian faith,  in the Old and New Testament.  I was 17 and shy, but it was offered as one of the history classes, and I received a history credit for it.  Do Muslims know that Mohammad lived in Medina, where many Jews lived?  Do they know that Mohammad could not read or write, but that he had listened to the Jewish stories told by street story-tellers?  He was exposed to our beliefs.  Islam become the 2nd mono-theistic religion of not involving any concept including another deity.  However, the teachings were of Mohammad's, and differ very much from Moses.  Islam has grown.  According to a 2010 study and released January 2011, Islam has 1.5 billion adherents, making up over 22% of the world population. According to the Pew Research Center in 2015 there were 50 Muslim-majority countries.                                               

Christianity, also a mono-theistic religion includes Jesus with extra powers being the son of the only G-d in their belief system, and has 7.3 billion adherents.   "Christians remained the largest religious group in the world in 2015, making up nearly a third (31%) of Earth’s 7.3 billion people, according to a new Pew Research Center demographic analysis. But the report also shows that the number of Christians in what many consider the religion’s heartland, the continent of Europe, is in decline." 

The League of Nations passed the ruling that a Jewish state would come out of Palestine.  This was when the Ottoman Empire lost  WWI to the Allies. Then the later group of the UN continued the plan by giving a mandate to Great Britain to oversee Palestine for 30 years and then it would be a Jewish state, which the Jews decided to call Israel.  So in religious commentary and in official world politics, Israel was created, including Jerusalem in the process.  

Being an educator, I believe much of the world's ills come from the lack of education of the populations.  People are not expanding their minds and that's why we have a lot of narrow-minded people in this world.  People need to learn of the history of others and learn tolerance.  They all seem to need to go through temper control lessons and decision making logic.  Religions should be the source of how to get along in the world, shouldn't they?  Where else are people learning about morality?

Resource: https://www.yahoo.com/news/mideast-braces-fallout-trumps-move-jerusalem-064622551.html?soc_trk=gcm&soc_src=be6a9362-6c65-11e5-a0c8-fa163e2c24a6&.tsrc=notification-brknews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Abbas
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/05/christians-remain-worlds-largest-religious-group-but-they-are-declining-in-europe/
Tanakh, The Stone Edition, ArtScroll Series of Mesorah Heritage Foundation
Roots by Alex Haley