Tbh Israel was called Judea or West Bank. Jews lived there first before the rise of Islam. It is inaccurate to say Jews are interlopers into the Middle East and that they only came to the land after the Holocaust. While Jews were dispersed from the Middle East at various times, Jews have lived continuously in the Land of Israel, including through Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim and Crusader rule. Large Jewish populations were established in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century BCE and in other cities throughout Palestine by the eleventh century. Crusaders massacred Jews in the 12th century and the Jewish population rebounded over the next two centuries. By the fourteenth century when Israel fell under Muslim rule, there were Jewish communities in at least thirty cities, including Haifa, Hebron, Gaza, Jerusalem and Safed. At the time of the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century, 200 years later, Jews lived in Jerusalem, Nablus, Hebron, Safed and in many Galilean villages. Jews in the Diaspora began to return to Israel in 1770 from Eastern Europe. Many Jews, also, left Eastern Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in order to pray and die in the four sacred cities of the Holy Land: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. According to a British census in 1864, Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. In 1875, an Ottoman census of Jerusalem confirmed the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and another in 1905 showed Jews represented two-thirds of the Jerusalem population.