“Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces that began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Its objective was to frighten and prevent Palestinian Arabs from returning to villages captured by the Yishuv and make conditions difficult for Arab armies attempting to retake territories. The operation resulted in severe illness among local Palestinian citizens. In the final months of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel gave orders to expand the biological warfare campaign into neighboring Arab states such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, but they were not carried out. Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF chief of general staff Yigael Yadin oversaw and approved the use of biological warfare.”
May I introduce you to the Amarna Letters? The battle of Qarqar? The Battle of Carchemesh? The Battle of Kadesh? So while you are correct in that there is no “Conquest of Canaan” as reported in the Bible, see David Illan, ancient Canaan has always been a battle ground. You could also talk about the wars between the selucides and the ptolemies too, but, I don’t know as much about them.
Several of those seem like (at least according to the Wikipedia articles) that they’re two armies from other regions just meeting in those locations.
23 of those battles only lasted a year. One of them lasted a month. I don’t really think you can say it’s any sort of “ancient conflict” over the region. It’s a region of earth just like all others and there have been battles there. If there’s a river or water access then there’s probably been a battle at it, no matter where it is.Those links amount to maximum
153(!) years of war. We’re over 70 years with the current conflict. Literally523x as much as your links for the past two thousand years.I don’t really know much about this subject, but I just wanted to jump in because I read your links and they literally just seem like a meeting place for two armies. Not that the land itself was being fought over.
Edit: I didn’t realize that the first battle you linked was only a single year, but the conflict lasted over ten. So I updated my post for that.
I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “Ancient Conflict”. But the Levant was historically a strategic piece of land that biodged Anatolia/Mesopotamia with Egypt. Control over this region has been a constant battle through out recorded history.
As I admitted in my first response if you mean something like control over a homeland/holy land, like the conquest of Canaan, yeah that’s a relatively recent thing. But as far as battle ground, I think you should think more about what those battles mean in context of history. Van de Mieroop has a great History of the Ancient Near East that I would highly recommend. Mostly because ancient near eastern history is really cool.