Oh please history in the Hebrew bible (has anyone read it) reads like some family tree so-and- so begat so-and- so. The stories are terrible, Joshua killing all the Canaanites when he entered the Holy Land in Jericho. Some Jews and Christians do not believe that Moses wrote the so called 5 books of the old testament. And rather than 10 commandments, the Jewish orthodox rabbis say there are over 600 for the Jewish faithful to follow. Rape and pillage. Jesus wasn't born in Bethlehem but Nazareth, but had to fit in with the Jewish myth, that a new David would be born in Bethlehem and lead the Jews into freedom etc. Well Jesus was no warrior. For people to follow the old testament as Christians know it, should take it like a metaphor and not realistically. But they do, and to me this is wrong, especially when some believe we walked with dinosaurs to support the creationist theory. And one is that Israel was occupied by the Jews for over 2,000 years. Just remember your text, Moses lead the Israelites, not the Jews that came much later. Moses is a shortened Thutmoses, an Egyptian name.

Just remember that Jerusalem was occupied by the Romans, but parts of modern day Israel were not, but under a Jewish control during Jesus's lifetime.

So bearing all this in mind, I think the present Israeli government has for security's sake taken over the West bank. When my parents went to the holy land, Jericho was an internment camp, for Palestinians. The Jordanians guarded the west bank and the weeping wall, the great mosque, and they had to show there passports to go through. If you visited Israel before Egypt, you where not allowed into Egypt. So they and I went to Egypt and the Lebanon first, before they went to Israel. That was in early 1960s before the six day war. Such a small country, nearly all desert, with so much history but the Holy Land is no more