Israel’s Holy Land Claim—Both Biblical and Historical

ISRAEL’S HOLY LAND CLAIM. Today marks one year since the atrocious Oct. 7 massacres of Israeli civilians by Hamas. They included beheadings even of infants, mutilation of women’s sexual parts and even broken pelvises. Hamas terrorists kept raping women even after they died.

Some civilians got dismembered or disemboweled. Fires devoured families in their homes. In all 1,200+ brutal killings occurred, often before cheering Palestinian spectators. And they took 200+ hostages. This is what happens when Israel lets down its guard for one day, a holy day—Yom Kippur.

All because Palestinians in Gaza learn from an early age to despise Jews as unjust colonizers of their land. So they must drive all Jews out of Israel—“from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” But who holds the true right to that land? Both the Bible and history tell us—the Jews, God’s chosen people.

To Jacob, later called Israel, God repeated the promise He made to his grandfather Abraham: “I will give to you and to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God” (Gen. 17:8). God said to Israel of this land, “I will give it to you and to your descendants… And in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 28:13-14).

Then God repeated this promise of the land to Moses and to Joshua (Lev. 14:13; Josh. 14:9). And He told the prophet Joel He would judge the nations who “have divided up My land” (Joel 3:3).

Who colonized whom?

We know from the gospels that the Roman empire colonized Israel in Jesus’ time. He said, “Jerusalem will be trampled under foot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Lk. 21:24). The Roman empire fell, but a small remnant of Jews remained in the land.

In fact, the 1984 bestseller From Time Immemorial chronicles how Jews have always survived in the land. Yet the Jews never colonized the Arabs. On the contrary, Muslim Arabs colonized the Jews after brutally conquering Israel in the 7^th century. They oppressed the Jews yet did not succeed in completely driving them out “from the River to the Sea.”

But being mostly nomadic, the Arabs gradually abandoned the land. It had turned into a desert by the time Mark Twain and other travelers visited in the late 1860s. Only a very few Jews and a very few Arab nomads lived there.

Favor of God and man on the Jews’ return

Yet Jews who had dispersed worldwide had always clung to the slogan, “Next year in Jerusalem.” At the turn of the 20^th century, the Zionist movement inspired Jews to flee persecution and move there. The people called Palestinians only began to settle there after the Jews had made the land prosper again.

In 1947, after six million Jews had died in Hitler’s concentration camps, world opinion favored allowing millions of Jewish WWII survivors to make Israel their homeland. And the UN set aside part of the Holy Land for the Arabs, and part for the Jews. Though the Arabs never agreed to that plan, the Jews did and declared Israel to be a nation in 1948.

Israel had suffered attacks from Arabs ever since then. Especially from terrorist Arabs like Hamas and Hezbollah, with heavy support from Iranian mullahs. These terrorist groups have always vowed to destroy Israel and drive all Jews out of the Holy Land.

But God says of His chosen people, “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Bless Israel then, as it seeks to defeat those who curse it. And God will bless you and all families and nations who bless it too.

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Image: Promised_Land_Divided_into_Its_Tribes_and_Regions_WDL2885 Wikimedia Commons