Ebook
Republished in an English edition as the modern state of Israel prepares to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2023, this book presents a history of Israel and Palestine up to the foundation of that modern state. Stretching from the thirteenth century BCE until the First World War, it is a concealed history of a mixed multitude of winners and losers living in the same land. It can be read as a regional history of the Southern Levant, written in light of modern historical and archaeological research. But it can also help shed light on the Israeli-Palestinian question. It contributes to a better understanding of why the Palestinians--regardless of where they live--have remained rooted in their patrimony, Palestine, and why they as a people, now as ever, are entitled to a land and state of their own.
“In this welcome book, Meindert Dijkstra has painstakingly traced the long complex demography of the land of promise. By an appeal to historical and archaeological evidence, Dijkstra shows the continued existence of other non-Jewish peoples in the land of promise, including Palestinians. Long habitation in the land is sufficient, in the judgment of this author, to justify a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state of Israel. This important study requires that we fully face the reality and demand of a people too long neglected in their right to a land of promise.”
—Walter Brueggemann, author of Chosen? Reading the Bible amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
“Historical Palestine was and continues to be a land filled with diversity and beauty, similar to many places around the world. Archeological findings confirm the country as a mixture of cultures, religions, and languages. This book helps the land to share its untold and sometimes unpopular story.”
—Naim Stifan Ateek, author of A Palestinian Theology of Liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the Palestine-Israel Conflict
Meindert Dijkstra (1946–2020) served as a minister in Reformed churches in the Netherlands before he was appointed as a lecturer in Old Testament Studies at the Seminary of the Coptic Evangelical Church in Cairo, for nine years. Returning to the Netherlands, he was appointed at Utrecht University as a lecturer in Old Testament and in ancient Near Eastern epigraphy.