Jerusalem Watchman

And the Canaanites were then in the land. Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” And there he built an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. (Genesis 12:6-7)

One of the arguments against the Jews’ right to sovereignty over their historical homeland, or conversely for the Palestinian Arabs’ right to a national homeland in these biblically Jewish lands, is that even though the Jews had a virtually unbroken presence here through the last 2000 years, in the centuries before 1948 it was the Arabs who comprised the overwhelming majority of the overall inhabitants, with the number of Jews almost marginal at one time.

Today this argument is applied to the “West Bank,” with some demographers pointing out that there are 2.6 million Arabs (90%) as compared to just 255,600 Jews (9.4%) in Samaria and Judea.

And since the “Disengagement” in 2005, the Gaza Strip is said to have 1.1 million Arabs, and not a single Jew.

No serious authority disputes that there were many more Arabs than Jews in Ottoman Empire Palestine at the end of the 18th century. According to respected historians like American Howard M. Sachar, there were only 6,000 Jews in Palestine in 1800 out of what, by 1840, was a total of 400,000 inhabitants.

While tens of thousands of Jews did begin flooding into the land from 1882 onwards, the Arab majority remained strong, so that in 1914 there were 60,000 Jews and 730,000 Arabs resident here.

Of course, 76 percent of Palestine (with its people) was lopped off and turned into Trans-Jordan in 1922, its Palestinian Arabs eventually becoming Jordanian citizens. Even so, the ratio in what was left of Palestine by 1948 stood, according to pro-Arab sources, at 2:1, with Jews numbering about 600,000 to the Arabs’ 1.2 million. Other sources put the Arab population figures lower, at just under one million.

Whatever the case, there were a good deal more Arabs than Jews all the way along.

This, triumphantly crow Israel’s enemies, more than supports the Arab claim to all of the land, and means that it is the Arabs who are being asked to concede land, because the land is theirs.

And indeed this is the Arab position. Israel’s friends may assert that it is the Jews who are being asked to make the tangible territorial sacrifices in the land-for-peace process, the Arabs and their supporters insist the opposite is true.

Western nations, from the earliest years of the 20th Century, fully aware that the Arabs massively outnumbered the Jews and always will and, with the industrial revolution in full flight, discovering that the lands on which the Arab states were being established were saturated with oil, happily adopted this convenient Arab position and have gone along with it ever since.

Historically, the numbers may favor the Arabs, but from the point of view of national ownership, it is the Jews - with their forefathers’ history of founding the nation of Israel here 4000 years ago, and who have never repudiated or relinquished their claim to any of the land despite twice being exiled from it, once for 70 years, and most recently for 1813 years – who have the sole claim.

Nationally, the Arabs come from Arabia. And although they today have more than 20 states, the Arabs are still, ethnically, one nation, as they themselves aver.

The Arabs who settled in Ottoman Palestine had no distinguishing linguistic, cultural or historic characteristics setting them apart from the Arabs living elsewhere in the Middle East. Their nationalist awakening (in Palestine and elsewhere in the region) only began in the 20th Century after political Zionism was well underway.

Before the establishment of antisemitic terrorist Arab groups like the PLO, the Palestinian Arabs had never had a single symbol of nationhood: no flag, no passport, no anthem and, most importantly, no country.

Therefore, to talk about “giving land back” to the Palestinians as if they have had a homeland and a state at some point in history is pure fabrication and deception. The territory which the world today has dared to earmark for the creation of Palestine is land that was illegally occupied by Jordan (in the case of the “West Bank”) and militarily administered by Egypt (the Gaza Strip). Prior to that those areas, along with what is today Israel, were all part of the British Mandate, and before that, formed part of a province in the Ottoman Empire.

None of this territory can be given “back” to the Palestinians in the national sense simply because they never had it. (US President George W. Bush has acknowledged this by repeatedly spelling out his administration’s determination to “create a new state alongside Israel.”)

On the other hand, this land can absolutely be taken away or stolen from the Jews for who – in their four-millennia-long history, independent or occupied, whether they were in it or in exile – it has always been their national home.

These arguments rage back and forth and have for many, often bloody, decades. It is why the world generally sees the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict as unsolvable.

For the Bible-believer, however, there is no argument at all.

God is not intimidated or influenced by the numbers game. He never has been. In fact, according to the Bible, He quite deliberately awarded Abram (Abraham) the land as an everlasting inheritance when he was just one man with his household.

When we read the verse in Genesis 12:7 where God tells Israel’s first patriarch that He is to inherit the land, we see the almost “in your face” way that promise comes hard on the heels of the no-nonsense statement: “And the Canaanites were then in the land.”

It is as if God is saying quite clearly: ‘I am fully aware that there are other nations in that land but even so, I am giving it to you.’

And indeed, when God reaffirms His promise of the land to Abram, He spells out that not only are Abraham’s descendants to inherit the territory, but bound up with it God was also giving into their hands all the nations that then dwelt in that land.

On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates –”the  Kenites, the Kenezzites, and the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, and the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. (Genesis 15:18-21)

In summation then, for the purposes of this article, the promise of the land was made solely to those who would descend from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. It was to be an everlasting inheritance that would never be abrogated, not even by the unfaithful behavior of those descendants.

And God made it with Abraham despite (or arguably even because of) the fact that “the Canaanites were then in the land.”

That same Land belongs to this same nation, and exclusively to them, until today. It makes NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER that Arabs live here* or that they may have outnumbered the Jews. And it makes NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER if the entire world says otherwise, even if international laws are passed stipulating the division and sharing of the land.

From the River of Egypt to the Euphrates, (including territory today inside the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan), this land has been divinely bequeathed to Israel, and to Israel alone.

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* Yes, Israel does have certain biblical obligations towards “the stranger who dwells among them” (and regarding these there will be a follow-up article); but no other nation has the right to establish a sovereign homeland in any part of this land. The only “nation” that has done so in history, the Crusader Kingdom, was accursed and short-lived.