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.

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.