Who Has the Historic Right to the Holy Land?

One question has been heatedly argued back and forth in recent decades, drawing the attention of the whole world: To whom does Jerusalem and the surrounding lands rightfully belong?

Even the framing of such a question is vociferously debated. Should these lands be referred to as “Israel,” “Palestine” or by some other name? Who exactly should be considered an “Israeli” or a “Palestinian”? What merit do claims arising during the past century have? What of ancient and scriptural history? Does archaeology have anything to say? Is it even possible to come to a satisfactory answer?

‘Reductive’

When Israelis and Palestinians clash, maps such as the above are almost religiously produced on social media, showing the drastic expansion of “Israel” and shrinking of “Palestine” since World War ii.

But for anyone with a basic understanding of the subject, this viral portrayal is absurd.

Why? The first map (1946) shows the territory of the Mandate for Palestine, controlled not by “Palestinians” but by the British Empire. The second map (1947) shows not the reality on the ground but rather a partition proposed by the United Nations. The third map (1949–1967), accurately depicts the territory of Israel yet omits the fact that the West Bank belonged to Jordan and Gaza belonged to Egypt. The Palestinian peoples never even claimed to have their own sovereign state until 1988 (thus negating the first three maps entirely).

The visualization of a united Palestinian people losing their sovereign or even semi-sovereign territory to Israel over the past 77 years or so is a myth—and an intentional one.

If anything, it is Israel that has lost territory. From the early 1500s, the Ottoman Empire controlled much of the Middle East, including Palestine/Israel. The Ottomans allied with the German Empire in World War i and were defeated by the British Empire and its allies in 1918. Toward the end of the war, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, which was later endorsed by the United States and others. Jews were promised a “national home of the Jewish people” that included all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, plus the country that is now Jordan. Jordan was chopped off in 1921 as a separate British protectorate as a land for Arabs in the region. Then the 1947 plan chopped off yet more land for Arabs.

The common lie is that the State of Israel emerged in 1948 out of thin air, with hordes of alien European Jews brusquely crowding out Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral homes. For one thing, the State of Israel materialized in 1948 as an originally native population emerging out of British territory.

The British called the territory west of the Jordan River “Palestine.” The population was primarily Arab, but a significant Jewish minority had also lived there for centuries. The British Mandate government recognized three official languages—English, Arabic and Hebrew—and its documentation and coinage refer dually to the territory as Palestine and as י״א (the Hebrew abbreviation for Eretz Yisrael, or “Land of Israel”).

When Britain withdrew in 1947 it turned to the newly formed United Nations to divide the land between Arabs and Jews and to make a homeland for those emigrating after World War ii and the Holocaust. The city of Jerusalem would be controlled by the United Nations. The UN General Assembly agreed to the following division of land, passing the measure by a vote of 33 to 13 in 1947, and Britain agreed to withdraw by the end of 1948.

The Jewish representatives agreed to the plan. The Arabs didn’t.

‘Nakba’

The “Arab League” governments in the surrounding nations forcefully rejected this plan and any other plan for partitioning the land. The day after the UN vote, Palestine erupted in civil war. Then, on Friday, May 14, 1948, British troops preemptively withdrew, the State of Israel officially declared its independence within its allotted territories—and as the sun set on the Sabbath, Egyptian warplanes began bombing Tel Aviv.

The following day, the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel. They ordered the local Arabs to evacuate until Israel was destroyed. Many obeyed and many more stayed put and continued warring against Israel.

Somehow, the fledgling State of Israel managed to fend off the local Arab militias and the combined might of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Even more, in doing so, it was able to gain a significant amount of territory.

Many Arabs still refer to this stunning defeat as the Nakba (Catastrophe). Israel’s victorious defense essentially produced borders close to what it maintains today: a territory extending from the Golan in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. Egyptian forces controlled Gaza, and Jordanian forces took the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The Palestinians that fled remain “refugees” three generations later. Israel played no role in expelling them—instead they left to make the conquest of Israel easier. The nations that encouraged them to flee will not give them citizenship. The “right of return” for these citizens is one of the most contentious parts of peace negotiations.

A Much Bigger Israel

By 1967, tensions and enmity had only grown worse, and Egyptian forces were again massing at the southern Israeli border. They expelled UN forces from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza, took up UN positions overlooking the vital Straits of Tiran, and straightaway closed them.

Egypt, Jordan and Syria signed pacts with one another, and Iraqi forces began mobilizing forces inside Jordan. With invasion inevitable, Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt’s airfields, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war began.

The results of 1967 were much the same as those of 1948, only far more dramatic. Within six days, Israel quadrupled in size. It conquered from Egypt not only Gaza but the entire Sinai Peninsula. From Syria it conquered the Golan Heights. From Jordan, it captured the West Bank, including Jerusalem.

Many Israelis began settling into their newly acquired territory, particularly in the West Bank. Ignoring the facts that sparked the conflict, Arab and international powers decried the settlements as “illegal occupation.”

The UN passed a resolution calling on Israel to withdraw from “territories” conquered during this defensive war. Crucially, it did not say “all territories”—the U.S. would have vetoed it if it did. Yet some today will site this resolution as proof that Israel is illegally occupying the West Bank.

Days after the war ended, the Israelis handed jurisdiction of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount back over to Jordanian authorities on the condition that Jews could freely visit but not pray there. To this day, this holiest site in Judaism (and third-holiest in Islam) is controlled by the Islamic Waqf, and Jewish visitors are monitored and guarded by Israeli police.

Beginnings of Peace (or Not)

In 1973, Egypt and Syria again mobilized and attacked Israel, this time on the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur. Fierce fighting took place in the Sinai and in the Golan Heights, but the borders of Israel did not change substantively.

Later in the 1970s, however, a substantial change did occur. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat broke from the “three nos” of the Arab League’s 1967 Khartoum Resolution: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” Sadat offered Israel peace.

Peace agreements between Egypt and Israel were confirmed in the 1978 Camp David Accords, monitored by the United States. Israel agreed to return the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace and normalizing relations between the two countries—withdrawing from some of the territories they’d conquered in the Six-Day War and fulfilling the UN’s demands. Sadly, Sadat would not live to see the fruits of his efforts: Despite having reacquired the massive Sinai landmass for Egypt without a bullet fired or a life lost, he was assassinated by Islamic jihadists in the Egyptian military in 1981, the year before Israel ceded full control.

Neither the Yom Kippur War nor the Camp David Accords really touched on the Palestinian question. Israel had also been conducting secret negotiations with Jordan for peace, yet when word of these negotiations leaked to the public, Jordan immediately distanced itself. This left Israel to deal directly with the Palestinians and the movement that the Arab League recognized as representing them: the Palestinian Liberation Organization (plo), led by Yasser Arafat.

Terrorist State

The “insoluble” question of Palestine, and the idea of a “Palestinian nation,” then, is actually a very recent one. Only in 1988 did Arafat’s plo wave its newly adopted black, white and red flag with the declaration of a “State of Palestine.” This declaration—from an entity designated by the U.S. the year prior as a terrorist organization—had some problems with legitimacy: The plo had no control over territory, much less what it declared to be its capital—Jerusalem. Rather, it intended to conquer Palestine through armed struggle.

Still, the UN invited Arafat to speak to the General Assembly, and 75 UN nations officially recognized this “Palestine” and the landless plo as a “government in exile.”

Pressure to recognize this entity grew over the years, and in 1993, the U.S.-endorsed Oslo Accords were signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, recognizing Arafat’s new Palestinian Authority (PA) as officially representing the Palestinian people. Further negotiations resulted in Israel withdrawing populations from Jericho, most of Hebron and most of Gaza, and the PA assuming semiautonomous jurisdiction over those and other West Bank areas.

In the words of Israeli historian Efraim Karsh, Oslo represented the “starkest strategic blunder in [Israel’s] history. All in all, more than 1,600 Israelis were murdered and another 9,000 wounded from the signing of the [Declaration of Principles] to date—nearly four times the average death toll of the preceding 26 years” (“Why the Oslo Peace Process Doomed Peace,” 2016). Those numbers are now tragically out of date.

In 2005, Israel’s government, helmed by Ariel Sharon, forcibly evicted some 8,000 Jews from Gaza, handing it over to Palestinian rule. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed the “remarkable process” of disengagement from Gaza, famously declaring at a press dinner: “We are tired of fighting. We are tired of being courageous. We are tired of winning. We are tired of defeating our enemies.”

How haunting those words are now.

Claims, Scriptural and Historical

How far, though, does Israel’s historic claim to the land go? 1988? 1948? 1885—the year in which the Star of David flag first flew in Ottoman Rishon LeZion (south of Tel Aviv)?

Israel’s connections to this land go back thousands of years, as far as the second millennium b.c. The Old Testament shows a Jewish presence that goes all the way back to Abraham. Secular artifacts, such as the Egyptian Merneptah Stele, describe an Israelite nation over 3,000 years ago. The New Testament and Roman history clearly show a Jewish state at the time of Jesus Christ.

Even the Koran confirms Israel’s historic existence here. The most mentioned figure in the Koran is Moses. The book largely follows an interpretation of many of the events of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

It says that Allah “ordained” the “holy land” for them (Al-Ma’idah 5:20-21). He gave them a “fixed abode” (Yunus 10:93). It describes the Exodus and God giving Israel the land of Canaan (Al-Isra 17:103-104).

This truth is regularly acknowledged by Muslim scholars. Last November, a video addressed to Palestinians from famous Saudi author and media personality Rawaf al-Saeen went viral (viewed more than 6 million times). Addressing this subject of rightful historical and scriptural ownership of the Holy Land, he vented: “None of you want a Palestinian state, since you have no case, no country and no land. This land belongs to Israel—according to the Koran. And you are a displaced people, scattered from all over. Mongols, Turkmen, Circassians, Armenians, gypsies. You have nothing in Palestine. Palestine is the State of Israel, for the people of Israel.”

Great empires have repeatedly conquered the area. In a.d. 135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian tried to literally wipe it off the map, renaming it Palestina—land of the Philistines—to try to disconnect it from its association with the Jews. Nonetheless, right on up through the Ottoman and British Mandate periods, the native Jewish people continued to live in the land that was historically, archaeologically and scripturally—according to the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran—theirs.

And in more recent history, it was the enemies of Israel that rejected a state handed to them on a platter, that launched invasions and attempted to enlarge their borders, that lost additional land due to their own aggression and intransigence. It is Israel that was given its territory by the controlling power, only gaining territory in defensive wars. And it is Israel that has given back immense tracts of land—up to and including Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount—all in the interests of peace.

Compare Israel’s history of land acquisition and entitlement to almost any other nation, and you have to acknowledge that Israel has one of the greatest legitimate claims to its land of any country on Earth.

To Whom Does the Land Belong?

Who should own what land? is a question man has struggled with for centuries. He still hasn’t come up with a good answer, as current wars in the Balkans, Ethiopia and Sudan demonstrate. But for those who believe the Bible, there is a clear answer.

“Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord’s thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is” (Deuteronomy 10:14). In reality, surpassing all claims to the Holy Land or any other territory is the right of the Creator who made it.

The Creator determines land ownership, and it is He who decided to punish the Canaanites for their sins—not in favoritism toward the Israelites but in spite of the Israelites. And this is not unlike how He has punished Israel, ancient and modern, for its sins (see Leviticus 18:25). “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34), so when ancient Israel also failed to obey God, He also drove them from the land in punishment for their sins (e.g. Deuteronomy 9:4; 29:1-29; 2 Kings 17).

He also prophesied that in modern times, the Jews would return to it. When the British conquered the Holy Land in 1917, they were fulfilling Bible prophecy with incredible precision (sidebar, “A Dramatic Fulfillment of Prophecy”).

Bible prophecy shows it is God’s will that the modern descendants of Israel have this land at this time. Other prophecies confirm it. Zechariah 14 describes the Jews losing half the city of Jerusalem shortly before the return of the Messiah. For them to lose half of it would require that before that they hold the entire city. Thus, thousands of years ago, Zechariah 14 prophesied the outcome of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Apostle Paul told the Athenians that “From one man he [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands” (Acts 17:26; New International Version). Ultimately it is God who determines what peoples own what land and when.

Through the Prophet Daniel, God revealed that “the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men” (Daniel 4:17). The book of Daniel shows that God shapes and molds history. “God has given man 6,000 years to rule his own way, but He still makes certain that all events are shaped by His master plan,” writes Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry. “… He rules in the kingdom of men today” (Daniel Unlocks Revelation).

The effort to blot out Israel and to deny the Jews’ claim to this land springs from a rebellion against this plan. The real target is not the Jews—it is an attack on God and an effort to undermine His plan that is for the benefit and salvation of all mankind.

True history points us to the God who prophesied and shaped it. Ancient history, the Scriptures, the archaeological record, modern events and the immediate future all attest to a dazzling reality: The Bible is true, the God of the Bible is real, and He is the God not just of the Jews or the rest of the Israelites but of all mankind.