“As if the lies routinely spewed by Muslim jihadists are not obscene enough, we have the leftwing mainstream media in America, in Britain and in too many Western countries ganging up on embattled Israel to denigrate, demonize and delegitimize the Jewish nation’s very history, both Biblical and post-Biblical. A typical example is the dishonest and fabricated use of the deceitful phrase, ‘Israeli occupied Golan.’”

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s ayatollahs and mullahs are awash with the blood of their own hapless and long-suffering citizens, with the blood of 241 American soldiers who perished at the hands of Hizballah in the 1983 Marine Corps barracks bombing attack in Beirut, Lebanon, with the blood of many Jewish victims in the Jewish Center in Argentina 30 years ago by the same Hizballah, and now with the blood of Druze children on Israel’s Golan Heights – again by Hizballah.

Through Iran’s barbaric terror proxies, be they Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and so many others, it’s clear that our non-Muslim world, and in particular embattled Israel, is now facing a 7th century horror of Islamic violence. Don’t think it is only the Jewish state they wage genocide against. No, it is the entire Christian world and beyond. And in our beloved America, which is the one remaining hope for an imperiled world, an Israel hating Marxist woman is poised to become our next President, she who may well extinguish the last chance of saving Judeo-Christian civilization.

The brilliant Israeli writer, Naomi Ragen, pointed out in a recent column the following regarding the Hizballah massacre of Druze children:

“The Syrian Foreign Minister called the disaster the result of shrapnel from the Iron Dome. This, you will not be surprised to learn, is an outright lie, easily verifiable by the evidence left behind, which can be shown clearly to be an Iranian missile. Israel has even published the name of the Hizballah thug responsible for aiming this rocket at the children: Mohammed Yahya, commander of the launch complex in the Sheba area of Lebanon.”

As if the lies spewed by Muslim jihadists are not obscene enough, we have the leftwing media in America, in Britain and in too many Western countries ganging up on embattled Israel to denigrate, demonize and delegitimize the Jewish nation’s very history, both Biblical and post-Biblical. A typical example is the dishonest and fabricated use of the deceitful phrase, ‘Israeli occupied Golan.’ So, some relevant history will hopefully suffice.

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Let us go back some 3,500 years to before the 12 Tribes of Israel would cross the River Jordan and enter the God given Promised Land. The first among them had taken possession of territory east of the River Jordan. These were the tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben who received the Bashan, and Gilead. Biblical Bashan incorporates today’s Golan Heights. Gilead is the fertile land, which lies in what is today the northwestern area of the present-day Kingdom of Jordan: “ … a little balm, and a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts and almonds” (Gen 43:11).

It was the pagan land of Canaan, west of the Jordan, (including today’s Jewish Judea and Samaria, the so-called West Bank) which would pose the formidable challenge to Joshua bin Nun, the general leading the Israelite tribes. So it was that Moses, the Lawgiver, spoke to the children of Gad, Reuben and Manasseh thus:

“Shall your brethren go to war, and shall you sit here?” (Numbers 32:6) The leaders of the tribes replied that they would indeed send their warriors west into Canaan and fight alongside their brethren while their families would remain behind.

“We will build sheepfolds here for our cattle and cities for our little ones. But we ourselves will go ready armed before the children of Israel until we have brought them unto their place: and our little ones shall dwell in fenced cities because of the inhabitants of the land. We will not return unto our houses until the children of Israel have inherited everyone its inheritance.” (Numbers 32: 16-18)

The story of reconstituted modern Israel and its people is mirrored in the Biblical story of their ancient ancestors. The young men and women of today’s Israel have gone again and again from their homes, be they villages, towns, or cities, to the borders in times of danger and peril, just like those young men did from the Biblical tribes, including those of Gad, Reuben and Manasseh.

The Jewish pioneers of today in Judea and Samaria – the Biblical heartland, (falsely called the West Bank) – are no different. But much of the world and its leftwing media has chosen to demonize them as “obstacles to peace” and an impediment to the creation of a fraudulent Arab state to be called Palestine; a state that has never existed in all of recorded history; certainly not as a sovereign independent Arab state.

Israelis are now called in much of the hostile mainstream media (MSM) by pejorative terms. “Settlers,” not villagers, and their homes derisively called “settlements,” not villages. It matters not to the infernal chorus that sings the international siren song of hate and ignorance that Israeli men, women and children are living again in their ancestral and ancient homeland.

But the purpose of this article is to learn about the Biblical and post Biblical history of the Jewish descendants of all the twelve tribes, including Gad, Reuben and Manasseh, and especially of their inheritance of the Golan Heights.

The Bashan region, now known as the Golan Heights, is a part of the Biblical territory promised to the Patriarch Abraham and the people of Israel for an everlasting covenant – the Covenant of the Parts – recounted in Genesis 15. The city of Bashan was a refuge city (Deuteronomy, 4:43).

During the Biblical period of the Jewish Kings, a battle high on the Golan occurred between King Ahab and the army of Aram. A Jewish victory took place at the present site of Kibbutz Afik, which lies a few miles east of Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee.

After the end of the Babylonian Exile, and during the Second Temple Period, Jews returned to their homes, including on the Golan. Subsequently they were attacked by Samaritans, and Judah Maccabee brought his forces up to the Heights to defend the Jews, including defending those further south in Judea who were rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.

At the conclusion of the later Hasmonean Period, King Alexander Yannai re-conquered the Golan and Jews rebuilt their communities including in the major cities of Banias and Susita, which formed part of the defense of the Golan.

Their residents later fought heroically against the Roman legions during the Great Revolt of 135 AD, known also as the Second Uprising. It was led by the charismatic Shimeon Bar Kokhba, known as the “Son of a Star” and a great folk hero. Some 10,000 Jewish residents of Gamla alone perished fighting against Rome’s legions on the mountainous heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

Second century Jewish coins were found on the Golan after its liberation during the last days of the June 1967 Six Day War. These ancient coins were inscribed with the words, “For the Redemption of Holy Jerusalem.”

In the succeeding Talmudic Period, Jewish communities flourished and expanded. Archaeologists have found the remains of 34 synagogues on the Golan. Jewish life on the Golan largely ended as the region descended into a long period of neglect under centuries of occupation by successive alien invaders.

But Jewish life returned yet again in the latter years of the 19th century when members of the Bnei Yehuda society from the Galilean town of Safed purchased land on the Golan. The Jewish pioneers of the First Aliyah (immigration) began to farm the land that they had purchased in the Golan until the Turkish Ottoman occupiers evicted them in 1898. Their land was then stolen and in 1923 the entire Golan was given away by Britain’s Mandatory and Colonial Office to the French who had created their own Mandate over Syria and Lebanon.

Syria attacked Israel in 1967 during the Six Day War, was defeated and lost its military control on the Golan. Syria had occupied it for 44 years. Israel's liberation of the Golan has lasted 57 years plus.

Jewish leaders had decades earlier requested the Golan be included within the new Jewish National Home because of its immense historical roots in Biblical and post-Biblical Jewish history. But Jewish liberation of the ancestral land was not possible until Israel was forced to fight for its very survival during the Six Day War.

Those of us who have visited Upper Galilee, and the Golan, cannot but be struck by the strategic value to Israel of control of the Heights. The Golan’s steep escarpment rises some 1,700 feet and overlooks Israel’s fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp shaped lake called in Hebrew, Kinneret, (the Sea of Galilee.)

Before the June 1967 Six Day War, the Golan was used exclusively by the hostile occupying Syrian forces as an artillery site from which to bombard Israeli farmers in the Hula Valley below and the fishermen on Lake Kinneret. The Golan Heights was officially annexed to Israel in 1980 and the slopes of snow-capped Mount Hermon, the highest point in the region, are the eyes and ears of Israel.

Victor Sharpe writes about Jewish history and the Islamist-Israel conflict. He is the author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.