A 10,000 year old town in Israel/Palestine/Roman Levant etc.

This town, Tzippori as it's now known, was settled at least as far back as 7500 BCE and probably well earlier. It's in an ideal spot -- on high ground above the beautiful sea of Galilee, just a few miles from Nazareth. The Virgin Mary's parents were supposed to have come from here, back in Roman times when it was known by Sepphoris (that's Greek, not Latin. The Romans spoke Greek most of the time, as did others like the Jews from the city -- it was the cultured thing to do. Mel Gibson, in striving to be more authentic than anyone by making people speak Aramaic and Latin, got it wrong as they would have been speaking Aramaic and Greek).

Before the Jews were there you had Assyrians and pagans of the like that the Jews slaughtered when they first came onto the scene, not being very kind to worshippers of idols (check out the Old Testament if you haven't already, its a blood soaked thing). Muslims came in around the 8th century killing and converting Jews, Crusaders came by around the 10th century slaughtering Jews and Muslims, and eventually the Jews came back and killed or made lots of the Arab inhabitants flee in 1948. This was part of Operation Dekel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dekel). Whether this was legitimate is entirely beside the point, it couldn't be legitimate, but the whole business of Zionism is a messy and complicated one and anyone who thinks its simple should read more before looking away from the abyss again. Resisting fascists could also mean resisting the Palestinian fascists, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawzi_al-Qawuqji, yet folks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Laskov pursued a policy of ethinic cleansing to get rid of Palestinians. That's just a couple of peels off the onion. When you get down to it, the history of man is a violent and cruel one, not to excuse that behavior, just to point out the obvious.

But check out the amazing Archeological heritage of Tzippori, and maybe you can forgive humans because they can make mosaics as beautiful as the one pictured, from a Roman villa built around the year 200 CE.