Settlement in the Land of Israel

There are issues that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all need to know which I will address in this essay. For Qu'ran quotes, I will take from the translation available here.

Regarding Muslim/Palestinian attitudes towards Jewish settlements in the Holy Land, there is not a single Qu'ranic source brought forward to prove that the land of Israel is not a place where the Jewish people are entitled to live. The Qu'ran tells us that the Lord specifically promised the land of Israel to the Jews:

Qu'ran 7:137 And We made a people, considered weak (and of no account), inheritors of lands in both east and west, - lands whereon We sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and We levelled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharaoh and his people erected (with such pride).

Qu'ran 17:4 And We gave (Clear) Warning to the Children of Israel in the Book, that twice would they do mischief on the earth and be elated with mighty arrogance (and twice would they be punished)!

Qu'ran 17:104 And We said thereafter to the Children of Israel, "Dwell securely in the land (of promise)": but when the second of the warnings came to pass, We gathered you together in a mingled crowd.

Qu'ran 40:53 We did aforetime give Moses the (Book of) Guidance, and We gave the book in inheritance to the Children of Israel, [54] A Guide and a Message to men of Understanding. [55] Patiently, then, persevere: for the Promise of Allah is true: and ask forgiveness for thy fault, and celebrate the Praises of thy Lord in the evening and in the morning.

The Qu'ran clearly states that the Lord made a promise to the Jews that the land belonged to them. No Qu'ranic source will tell you that the Jews have no right to the land of Israel, which only tells us the Palestinians are in a fifty-year long terroristic hissy-fit. Instead of spending all their money trying to exterminate the Jewish people, they could have spent all that money on the Palestinian people who were dislocated. There is plenty of uninhabited land in the Arab states outside of Israel which is just as usable as Israel, which was a desolate wasteland at the time of the beginning of Jewish resettlement. Furthermore, the Israeli government specifically told the Palestinians who abandoned their homes during the wars not to do so! It was the urging of the Arab states that told them to do so, and as a result, they became homeless.

Genesis 13:15 For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.

Genesis 15:18 In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:

Genesis 17:7 And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a G-d unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.(KJV)

The argument can be made that since Ishmael was Abraham's son, that they have a claim to the holy land. However, the Bible disagrees with this claim:

Genesis 17:15 And G-d said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. [16] And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her. [17] Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear? [18] And Abraham said unto G-d, O that Ishmael might live before thee! [19] And G-d said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him. [20] And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. [21] But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year. (KJV)

We see from this passage that the land was specifically given to the descendants of Abraham's son, Isaac.

Genesis 21:9 And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking. [10] Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac. [11] And the thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son. [12] And G-d said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called. [13] And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed. [14] And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. [15] And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. [16] And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bow shot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept. [17] And G-d heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of G-d called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for G-d hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. [18] Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation.

The Lord made the promise to Hagar that Ishmael would be made into a great nation. He was true to His promise. Now He's being true to His promise to the Jews.

Let's now examine the issue from a Christian perspective:

1. St. John Chrysostom, Sermon VI, 3 cited in Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews:

It was men, say the Jews, who brought these misfortunes upon us, not G-d. On the contrary it was in fact G-d Who brought them about. It was not by their own power that the Caesars did what they did to you: it was done by the wrath of G-d, and His absolute rejection of you. If you attribute them to men, reflect again that, even supposing men had dared, they would not have had the power to accomplish them, unless it had been G-d's will.

2. St. Augustine, Quoted in Friedrich Heer, G-d's First Love p. 44

A Roman emperor who had already embraced Christianity, issued a decree prohibiting the Jews from setting foot in Jerusalem. And so -- scattered across the globe -- they have become as it were the custodians of our books, like the slaves who carry their masters' law books to court -- and then wait outside.

3. James Parkes, The Conflict of Church and Synagogue p. 165

It is childish in the face of this absolute rejection to imagine that G-d will ever allow the Jews to rebuild their Temple or return to Jerusalem.

4. Rabbi Benjamin Blech, The Secret Of The Pope And Jerusalem, Viewpoint, Summer, 1996:31-32

But what is so very special about the prediction of the Church involving the Jew is that a doctrine of faith made clear that something-i.e. the return of the Jews to Israel from their decreed lands of dispersion-will never take place unless Jews embrace Jesus. If a religion stakes a claim on credibility by affirming that an event cannot ever happen-and it does-it would appear that the damage is irreparable. Only one way remained for Rome to deal with this unacceptable reality. Jerusalem could simply not be recognised as the capital city nor could the Jews be accepted as its master. Unspoken aloud is a powerful truth confirmed to me by a leading political figure in Israel. So sensitive is the subject, however, that he has not only forbidden me to quote him but warned me that if I did so he would deny ever having said so. Behind the scenes, he advised me, there is more pressure for the internationalisation of Jerusalem coming from the Christian world than from the Arab. It is not hard to understand. A Jewish Jerusalem does not deprive them of territory-it takes from them the validity of a Testament.

Below are excerpts from the Christian scholar, James William Parkes in his book, Whose Land?:

Page 31

To some readers it may seem inappropriate to have devoted so much time to 'a situation which passed away two thousand years ago'. But it is only politically that the defeat by Rome, and the scattering of the Jewish population, made a decisive change in the history of The Land. That which had been created by more than a thousand years of Jewish history remained, as did that which was beginning to be created in the thoughts of the young Christian Church. Both grew in significance as the centuries passed, because both led to continuous action, in the one case to settlement and in the other to pilgrimage, and for both, whatever were the difficulties, the action was regarded as a necessary part of their religion. That is what makes The Land unique.

Page 62

The Persians in 614 were the first foreign invaders to cross the frontiers of The Land for more than six hundred years. Twenty years later the victory of the Arabs over the Byzantines at the battle of Yarmuk in August 636 finally brought that long period of political peace to an end, and for nearly a thousand years The Land was to know once again the continual passage of armies in foreign and civil wars with many of which the inhabitants had no direct concern.

Page 74

The period during which the empire was ruled from Damascus, and can be called an 'Arab' empire, lasted less than a century, and even in that short time it had begun to decline.

Page 135

For Muslims the issue is not Palestine as a Holy Land, but Jerusalem as a Holy City. For, according to Muslim belief, the Temple of Solomon was miraculously built, and it was to and from Jerusalem that Muhammad was transported in order to make his ascent into heaven where his vocation was recognized by his prophetic predecessors. Jerusalem is therefore the third holiest shrine in Islam. For Christians, The Land as a whole is the Holy Land, as the scene of the earthly life of Jesus Christ. In this sense it is unique and pre-eminent, and has no rival. The Christian Church has never sought to make the land the religious centre of the Christian religion; neither, with small exceptions, have Christians desired to live in the country as a religious obligation. All through history Christian actions have been directed to securing access to the country for pilgrims, and control over the particular Holy Places associated with the Christian religion; and, apart from the crusades, if this access is secured they have been satisfied. For Jews The Land is a Holy Land in the sense of being a Promised Land, and the word indicates an intensity of relationship going beyond that of either of the other two religions. As it is for the Christians, The Land is unique; but the nature of its unique appeal goes further, and has throughout the centuries involved the idea of settlement and return, and an all pervading religious centrality possessed by no other land.

Page 136

The intimate connection of Judaism with the whole life of a people, with its domestic, commercial, social and public relations as much as with its religion and its relations with its G-d, has historically involved an emphasis on roots in physical existence and geographical actuality, such as is to be found in neither of the other religions. The Koran is not the history of the Arab people; the New Testament contains the history of no country; it passes freely from the landscape of the Gospels to the hellenistic and Roman landscape of the later books; and in both it records the story of a group of individuals within a larger environment. But the whole religious significance of the Jewish Bible -- the 'Old Testament' -- ties it to the history of a single people and the geographical actuality of a single land. The long religious development which it records, its law-givers and prophets, all emerge out of, and are merged into, the day-to-day life of an actual people with its political fortunes and its social environment. Its laws and customs are based on the land and climate of The Land; its agricultural festivals follow its seasons.

Page 137

It is correct to say 'the Jewish people' and not 'Jews'; for even when they were scattered in a thousand ghettoes in innumerable different Christian and Muslim countries, the Jews recognized themselves as, and were universally recognized by others to be, a single people. The conception of Englishmen, Poles or Americans of the Jewish persuasion is a wholly modern one, a product of emancipation, and has never been applicable to more than a minority of Jewry. During this period, from the second century to the eighteenth, nobody would have challenged the truth of the idea that it was just as accurate to compare Jews with Turks or Frenchmen, as to compare them with Christians or Muslims. They were recognized as both a religion and a nation, and it occurred to no one that there was anything inconsistent in the dual attribution. This recognition by themselves and others that they were still a single people reinforces the naturalness of their continued association with the landscape of their independent history and of their law-givers and prophets. Moreover their restoration to the land of Israel was an article of Christian as well as of Jewish belief, even though the Christian associated it with their acceptance of Jesus Christ as their Messiah. In following out the relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, we are involved in three separate aspects of the subject. First there is the place of The Land in the general religious life of Jews in dispersion; second there is the story of messianic expectation and the appearance of false messiahs; thirdly there is the story of the actual Jewish inhabitants and of Jewish immigration into The Land. An atheist may reject any claims arising out of the first two factors. The third remains valid from any point of view.

Page 166

The common phrase that Palestine is the Holy Land of three faiths is not strictly accurate. It is not appropriate to the Islamic relationship, for the land which corresponds to its position in the thought of Jews and Christians is for Muslims Arabia. Moreover no particular sanctity of any kind has ever been attributed to the country as a whole. Its Biblical frontiers had no significance, and were never used to define a separate Muslim administration.

Page 167

It was to emphasize this claim that he had been recognized by his two predecessors that he placed the scene of his ascent to Heaven on the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, even after he had moved the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca; and in their commemoration of this event, the Muslims have attempted to parallel not merely Jewith but Christian Holy Places. For as there was once the Jewish Holy of Holies on the spot whereon the ladder stood by which Muhammad climbed, so on leaving earth he left the imprint of his foot upon the rock, to equate the imprint of the foot of Christ shown on the Mount of Olives in the Church (now the Mosque) of the Ascension.

Page 168

The difficulty of the historian is still further emphasized by the fact that the nature of the ascension of Muhammad is such that it is entirely useless as historical evidence. The association of Jews with The Land is a historical fact, whether one believes that association to be the result of a divine decision or not. The association of the Founder of Christianity with Galilee and Judea is a historical fact, whether or not one accepts the Christian theological claim as to His nature, or even the ecclesiastical claim of authenticity for the Holy Places. But the association of Muhammad with the country rests on willingness to believe that in a single night, and on a winged horse, Muhammad flew to and from Arabia in order that he might then mount by a ladder for a personal view of the heavens; while his remarkable mount, al-Burak, remained tied near to that point in the whole area which stood above the only remaining Jewish Holy Place, the Wailing Wall. The event is not the poetical or theological dramatization of an incident which, stripped of the miraculous element, rests on solid historical foundations. It has to be accepted as it stands, or there remains no evidence whatever associating Muhammad with Jerusalem other than the early choice and quick rejection of that city as the direction towards which Muslims should pray; and this choice, in any case, rested on a veneration for Judaism and Christianity and not on a personal experience of Muhammad.

Page 169

Of the other shrines, we can sometimes trace the actual date and circumstances in which the Muslims seized them from either Jewish or Christian possessors, and all alike relate to Jewish or Christian and not to Islamic history.

Page 170

But from the point of view of a Muslim, the version of Muhammad rested on an independent divine revelation, and was ample authority for the appropriation of any shrines of the earlier religions if the Koran showed that the Prophet had venerated the personality with whom the shrine was associated. While this remains true of particular sites, it does not constitute the country as a whole an Islamic Holy Land. For Muhammad in the third Sura declared an associated between Abraham and Mecca. But even if the claims of Islam to a place alongside of Judaism and Christianity in their relationships to The Land be based on appropriations from those religions, rather than on any genuine historical association proper to itself, two things still remain true. The majority of the inhabitants of The Land have for many centuries been Muslims; and in such matters as religious veneration it is necessary to take into account the emotional as well as the historical aspect of the question.

Page 256

The Balfour Declaration for the first time established a unit called Palestine on the political map. But there were two essential elements in political realism which it could not create. In the first place the Jews, who had through all the centuries clung to their right to settle in their Holy Land, had been so reduced in numbers and importance that they were not a recognized and accepted presence to the rest of the population as were the Christians in the Lebanon. In the second place, though the word 'Arab' was rapidly coming to be accepted as covering the indigenous inhabitants who spoke Arabic, independently of their religious or ethnic affiliation, there was no such thing historically as a 'Palestinian Arab', and there was no feeling of unity among 'the Arabs' of this newly defined area. Hence the unfortunate phrase used to describe the majority of the population in the Declaration - 'the non-Jewish communities'.

Page 304

The most grievous suffering has been borne by Arab inhabitants of what became the State of Israel, together with those Arabs on the frontiers who were cut off from their lands by the armistice line. When the Arab world declared that it would meet by force any attempt to divide Palestine and establish a Jewish state, many military experts prophesied for them an easy victory. Quite apart from their Arab allies, the Palestine Arabs themselves outnumbered the Jews by two to one; they occupied all the hills, while the Jews were in the plains below them; they had copious supplies of arms available; they were surrounded east, south and north by their brethren who were actively supporting them. The Jews, on the other hand, were isolated except by sea - and they could receive help by sea only after the British had abandoned the country, for otherwise their supplies were stopped and confiscated by British patrolling ships. At the beginning they were very poorly armed, and had neither aeroplanes, artillery, nor armoured cars. It would be difficult to find a parallel to the pathetic flood of propaganda which has answered the question: Why, in these circumstances, was there a flight of some half million Arabs? The old cry of 'injustice to the Arabs' has, of course, been raised, not only by the Arabs themselves but even more clamantly by the European 'pro-Arabs', whether workers in the refugee camps or not. But the answer is again misfortune rather than deliberate injustice.

To a very large extent Palestinian Arab middle and professional classes 'emigrated' with most of their property as soon as it was proposed that a Jewish state should be established in the country. They found ample opportunities open to them in the rest of the Arab world. Consequently the rank and file in town and village fled because they had been deserted by those who should have been their leaders. Secondly they fled because they had had no training in defending their homes, fields and villages.

Page 309

It is more important to assure the future than to wrangle over the past. But the basic injustice done by the Arab states to the Palestinian refugees passes almost from the tragic to the absurd when it is realized that Israel might accept back every refugee, give him Israeli citizenship and restore him to exactly the property from which he fled twenty years ago, without in principle taking the slightest change in the proclaimed attitude of the Arab states to the state of Israel. Their misery and suffering has been an entirely wanton and inessential accretion to the Arab claim, made vociferously on every possible occasion, for the elimination of Israel itself.