I'm having trouble finding information about this time period. Would somebody mind explaining what happened in Palestine during this time? Here are the main things I don't understand:
Didn't the Jews conquer most of the area at their peak in 1000 or so BC? Did the Jews ever completely wipe out the people living there?
At the time the Roman empire caused the Jews to scatter, were there Palestinian Arabs living in the area?
I know the area was often conquered by various empires. Could one of you put a timeline together of who ruled over the area?
The Israelites controlled the region - called Canaan, then later Israel, Judea and Samaria, starting from around 1300 BCE until the Babylonians destroyed the kingdom in 586 BCE, then the Israelites returned 70 years later and controlled the region until the Romans destroyed the kingdom again, in 70 CE. At that point, the Romans renamed the region "Palestine," after the Philistines, an enemy nation of the Israelites that had been gone for a couple of hundred years.
The Romans ruled the region for a while; the next major conquest of the region was by the Arabs in the 7th Century. It went back and forth between the Muslims and the Christian Crusaders for a while. It became a province of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th Century, until it was captured by the British in World War One.
That's a bit of a simplification, but basically accurate.