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1/ Hi. My twitter name is Gilead Ini, and my real name is Gilead Ini. My ethnicity is Jewish. My connection began at least around 1200 BC, when a Hebrew-speaking Israelite civilization emerged in the hills of the land of Israel. It continues unbroken until today. Here's how:
2/ That early civilization developed into Israelite, Hebrew, Jewish kingdoms. A bunch of foreign invaders came and went. But whenever they could, my ancestors stayed on their indigenous homeland—like when Babylonians exiled many Jews in 586 BC… and most actually stayed put!
3/ Just 50 years later, many of the exiles came back, when a Persian army took over and Cyrus allowed a Jewish return. The Persians ruled over a province named Yehud. (Note the name.)
4/ That story repeated throughout history. Alexander the Great came around 300 BC. He died, and we eventually fought off the Greek invaders—and won! To this very day, we still celebrate that holiday. To this day, we call it by a Hebrew word, Hannukah. Unbroken connection.
5/ In the process, we picked up some styles and ideas from the Greeks. But that's always how it is with foreign empires. So yes, today's Jews, the descendants of those I'm describing, don't wear the same clothes as their ancestor, a Hasmonean named Judah. (Note the name.)
6/ There were again Jewish independent kingdoms. One was led by a Jewish queen—my genetic, ethnic, and religious ancestor. Josephus wrote about her, but apparently he was kind of a misogynist, and blamed her, including her femaleness, for the next successful invasion, from Rome.
7/ Seems like it might have actually been the fault of her two sons, who couldn't get along. You know what they say: Two Jews, three opinions. Anyway, the Romans took over. This is a pretty well-known part of Jewish history on the land, with Jews named Jesus, Herod, and so on.
8/ Josephus, mentioned earlier, was among the indigenous Jews to revolt against the guys from Rome. He failed. Hey, we're hardly the only ones to lose to them. But we put up a pretty incredible fight. That's because our connection to the land, and its connection to our religion.
9/ The Romans carved a picture of our plundered artifacts, including the Jewish menorah, on an arch back in Rome. We, the Jews, also continued to carve and draw and craft images of the menorah throughout our history, in our homeland and in exile. An unbroken link.
10/ Here's one from around 2000 years ago in Israel's Galilee. Hundreds of years later, another on a mosaic in Jericho, now ruled by the Palestinian Authority. The Hebrew text says "Peace unto Israel." And we kept it with us abroad: See this ketubah from ≈1000 CE Mastaura. Etc. 
11/ Some more menorahs. Pretty incredible. Unbroken link. menorah-bible.jimdo.com/english/ancien…
12/ But I digress. Josephus went on to work for the Romans in Rome. But most stayed put in and around Judea—note the name. Jews also lived other places, and led a revolt from elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. When things turned bad, a leader of the revolt fled back to Judea
13/ Then the indigenous Jews revolted *against* Rome again. We put up a hard fight, but lost. The colonial Roman army slaughtered us wholesale, and exiled and banned us from Jerusalem, and tried to erase Jewish history on the land (sound familiar?) by changing names.
14/ This period might have opened the book on our vibrant history in Europe. But it certainly didn't close the book on Jewish history in the land of Israel. Despite the slaughter and exile, we stayed on the land during and well after the remainder of Roman rule.
15/ After the revolt was crushed, my ancient relatives who remained in northern Israel wrote one of our Talmuds. Anther was written by my ancestors in Iraq, from where the Jewish sages wrote about Jerusalem. A lot.
16/ We were still there in around 600, when Jews in and near the land of Israel helped the Persians expel the Byzantines. That was good for the Jews. But then the Byzantines struck back and won. That was bad for the Jews. They massacred and expelled us. Somehow, many stayed.
17/ We were still there when and after a foreign army invaded from Arabia. An Arab geographer in Jerusalem wrote in the 900s that, in the city, “everywhere the Christians and the Jews have the upper hand.”
18/ On the other hand, the geographer said, Jews in the land tended to work unglamorous jobs as tanners, dyers and moneychangers. (Not many Jewish doctors back then. The profession was dominated by Christians.)
19/ It goes on and on like this. The Crusaders came to the land around 1000. We know from letters written by the Jewish community in Cairo that at the time the land was dotted with Jewish towns. Jews helped fight against the Crusaders. They lost, and were massacred.
20/ Even then, small numbers of Jews remained. Saladin came from Egypt, and things got better. Then things got worse. Then better. Then worse. And that’s the story as the Jewish population became a smaller and smaller percentage of the land, but still endured.
21/ Arabs who resettled one of the old Jewish towns in the Golan Heights named their new village "Yehudia," a reference to the Jews that they knew had previously lived there. Kind of like today we refer to a state in middle America "Kansas," a reference to the Kansa tribe.
22/ We returned from abroad when we could. like the Jewish who sailed from Spain to northern Israel to develop the Kabalah.
23/ Why sail the dangerous seas all the way to Israel? That unbroken link. They had always faced east toward Jerusalem as they prayed, about Jerusalem Hebrew, in Hebrew, the language of ancient Jerusalem.
24/ The most famous Jewish poet in medieval Spain, Yehuda Halevi, wrote, in Hebrew, about the land of Israel: "My heart is in the east, and I am at the edge of the West. So how can I taste what I eat, how can it give me any pleasure?"
25/ In the modern era, President Truman's envoy to displaced persons camps full of Jewish Holocaust survivors wrote back to the president that the Jews, the survivors, “want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes.”
26/ In current polls, most Jews say their Judaism is related to "ancestry" and culture even than religion. Most American Jews feel that a thriving state of Israel is vital to the future of the Jewish people. Most British Jews say that Israel plays a role in their Jewish identity.
27/ It's where we're from. Arab Muslims would sometime refer to the Negev desert as Tih Bani Isra'il, after the wanderings of the children of Israel. The guy in the first post linked to above would deny our unbroken history, and say Jews today aren't related to Israelites. But…
28/ As geneticist Harry Osterer found, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrachi Jews form a distinct genetic cluster, and their genes all show Middle-Eastern ancestry.
29/ Marcus Feldman, a leading geneticist at Stanford, noted that “If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years… there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin.”
