Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor, addressing the UN Security Council on October 15, 2012, on the Palestinian denial of history regarding Jerusalem:
The truth is plain and simple. Jerusalem had a Jewish character long before most cities in the world had any character. It was the capital of the Jewish people long before Homer composed the Iliad, before Romulus and Remus founded Rome, and before the armies of Alexander the Great swept across the Middle East. Jews have lived continuously in Jerusalem for three thousand years — from the time that King David built his great palace in the City’s rolling hills.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, in “The Orient,” Razsviet (Dawn), September 26, 1926, quoted in Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit, Glorious, Accursed Europe: An Essay on Jewish Ambivalence, Brandeis University Press, 2010:
[W]e are among those most responsible for [Europe’s creation. Over the course of eighteen hundred years, we have, relatively speaking, contributed no less to it than any of the great “Western” nations.
However, beyond that, we began creating Europe long before its common beginning — long before even the Athenians began to create it. For the chief characteristics of European civilization — discontent, the “struggle with God,” the concept of progress; that very gulf between the two conceptions of the world manifested in the antithesis of two beliefs — in the “Golden Age” and in the “Messiah,” an ideal of the past and an ideal of the future – these characteristics are ones that we bestowed upon Europe long before our forefathers arrived there.
As for the Bible, we brought it with us fully formed.