Religious, Historic, and Legal Rights to Israel

The deed to Jewish land was written some 3,000 years ago in the book of Genesis, where G-d had promised Abraham an everlasting covenant and the land of Canaan as Jewish inheritance. From the Exodus to the realization of G-d’s presence in the Holy Land, the entire Tanakh paints a consistent picture of the history of the Jewish people in Israel. Well mentioned that it is not just the Jewish Bible or Judaism that accepts the right of Jews to live in the land of Israel, but all three Abrahamic religions. Jews and Christians share the same Tanakh, while the Qu’ran itself accepts the Jewish claim to Israel in 5:21.

Biblical Israel before the move of Dan to the North (Wikimedia Commons)

The history of Jews in Israel began over 2,000 years ago. The kingdom of Israel was comprised of twelve Jewish tribes, the largest being Judah who settled in Judea, from where Jews get their name. The Hebrew word Yehudi comes from the name Yehuda, meaning Judah or Jew. This is the kingdom that David and Saul ruled with Jerusalem as its capital. After the Babylonians came the Romans, who also persecuted Jews. In an attempt to erase Jewish history they destroyed the second temple, sent a portion of Jews into exile, and renamed the land Syria Palaestina. For the next 2,000 years the land of Israel would be conquered by the Crusaders, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire and many others, and despite the many conquests, the Jewish people as a whole have never left but instead remained in Israel throughout this entire time.

Letter from Mr. Balfour asking Lord Rothschild to present a plan for a Jewish state in Mandate Palestine. (WIKIPEDIA)

International Law states in the UN Partition Plan of November 29th, 1947 that the British Mandate for Palestine would be split into two to create neighboring Jewish and Arab states– Israel and Jordan. Previously in 1917 Britain’s foreign secretary issued a public statement with British support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. This is when the Balfour Declaration was created. After the Ottoman Empire surrendered in World War I, the British took legal ownership over the land of Israel and with that they put the Balfour Declaration into effect and helped Jews establish a state in their historic homeland. Notably that upon Israel’s founding in ’48, the Palestinian army never attacked, simply because there has never been a Palestinian Arab state in the land of Israel. Instead Arabs living in Israel joined the surrounding Arab armies in a genocidal war to push the Jews into the sea. This truth also disproves the Nakba lie.

It is not Israel who rejects peace with its neighbors. It is Palestinian leaders who gladly take autonomy and demand more as they give a false narrative to the world about the “Zionist entity.” The continuous war between Jews and Arabs in Israel will never end until they can accept the truth, that Israel is a legitimate Jewish state, and that the legitimacy is not just religious, not just historic, and not just legal. Israel is Jewish land. This truth does not mean that the Arabs cannot live there, but it does mean that they will live in a Jewish state under Jewish law where the predominant religious and ethnic majority is Jewish, and the official language is Hebrew. Just like Jews have lived in the Arab and Muslim majority countries of Syria or Iraq where they speak Arabic and have Sharia Law.