Standing with Israel - by what right?

An article by Clarence H. Wagner, Jr.


Today, not a day goes by that the nations of the world debate the legitimacy of the modern State of Israel. Ironically, no other nation or people in the world have a comparable pedigree to validate their legitimacy to live in their homeland than Israel. Fortunately, not only does world Jewry support Israel, but so do tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians around the world.

On what basis do we stand? Let me answer my own question on the basis of the biblical, historical, moral, strategic, and prophetic right. Let's look at them one by one.

The Biblical-Historical Right

Four-thousand years ago, God created for Himself a nation and a people... the Land of Israel and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In Genesis 12: 1-3, God said to Abraham, "Go forth the from your country, from your relatives, and from your father's house, and GO to the land which I will show you. And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, make your name great and you will be a blessing. And 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. 12:1-3).

Of the land He said in Lev. 25:23, "The Land, moreover, is Mine." In other words, God owns the Land of Israel and He has given it to the Jewish people in an everlasting covenant.

What land did God choose?

"Abram lived in the land of Canaan...The LORD said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, 'Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your descendants forever. I will make your descendants like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your descendants could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you'" (Gen. 13:12a,14-17).

"On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, 'To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates- the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites'" (Gen. 15:18-20).

In the Book of Joshua, chapters 18-21, the borders of the tribal areas described for each of the Tribes of Israel are so accurate and detailed that you can easily draw them on a modern map of Israel and Jordan. Make no mistake, the land God chose for His people, the Jewish people, was a well-defined, real territory right where Israel is today...plus some of the surrounding modern nations.

The land of Israel is in the strategic center of the world. In the days of the Bible, Israel was the hinge of all the known continents where Africa, Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean Basin overlap. Everyone came into contact with this land and people because they were located on the narrowest place along the Great Fertile Crescent. Whether it was a trader, warrior, merchant or traveler, everyone had to travel through the Land of Israel and there, they would see the works and hear about the Lord God of Israel.

To whom did God give the Land and for how long?

God said to Abraham, "I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God" (Gen. 17:7,8). Three times in two verses, God stated that His everlasting covenant was with Abraham and his descendants.

Thinking that Ishmael was the son of promise, "Abraham said to God, 'If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!'" But that was not God's plan. "Then God said, "Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard you: I will surely bless him; I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year'" (Gen. 17:18-21).

God spoke directly to Isaac to confirm to him the promises He made with his father Abraham: "Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you. For to you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed." (Gen. 26:3-4).

Then, to Isaac's son, Jacob, God said: "...I am the LORD , the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring" (Gen. 28:13-14).

This covenant was confirmed over and over with Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, etc. The Land of Israel was given to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for all time and is still valid today.

Why were the Israelites/Jews called a chosen people and nation?

The Jewish people and land were called for three purposes:To demonstrate the miraculous power of the God of Israel to those serving the false gods of this world.To receive, record, and transmit the Word of God. The whole Bible was written and communicated by the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.Finally, they were called to be the human channel for the Messiah.

As Christians, we owe a great debt to Israel and the Jewish people because without them we would not have received the greatest gift known to man...our salvation and the Word of God.

The land and people of Israel were chosen for the purpose of bringing God's blessing to the world, and they have fulfilled their calling to bring Gods' message of redemption to the whole world.

The Moral Right

For religious reasons, the Islamic nations have attempted to undermine the legitimate rights of the Jewish people to live in their covenantal homeland because they have claimed it for Islam. However, both ancient and modern history is on the side of the Jews, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Jewish people have lived in this land for over 4,000 years. While their numbers have ebbed and flowed, they have still remained here in enough numbers to draw a thread from Abraham to the latest Jewish child born today in Jerusalem.

Starting in the 1880s, when the Jews began to return to this region in great numbers to join those Jews already living in Palestine (Israel), the entire Middle East was part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. There were no borders, so Arabs from across the crumbling Ottoman Empire (that offered little work or opportunity) also flocked to Palestine (Israel) to get jobs. Joan Peter's book, From Time Immemorial documents this migration in great detail. The populations of both Jews and Arabs grew at this time in Palestine.

At the end of WWI, the British and the French carved up the Ottoman Empire, drawing new borders on the map of the Middle East, which became the modern states we see today. Many of the new nations ultimately received their independence in the decades to follow, e.g., Algeria (1962), Bahrain (1971), Egypt (1953), Iraq (1938), Jordan (1946), Kuwait (1961), Lebanon (1920), Libya (1952), Morocco (1956), Oman (1940), Qatar (1971), Saudi Arabia (1932), Sudan (1956), Syria (1941), Tunisia (1956), United Arab Emirates (1971), and S. Yemen (1971).

What's the point? Israel became an independent sovereign nation in 1948, during the same period as these other familiar Middle Eastern countries. However, no one ever debates the legitimacy of these Arab, Moslem nations. Yet they decry the legitimacy of Israel at every opportunity. Sadly, the media and even political leaders are ignorant of history and often join the chorus claiming Israel is an artificial state foisted on the Middle East by a guilty post-Holocaust Western world. In fact, all of these nations were defined, protected and later granted independence by the same post WWI and WWII Western world. There is no difference. Either all of them, including Israel, are legitimate sovereign nations, or none of them are.

In the early 20th century, the Arabs who stayed in the regional area called Palestine viewed the area as the Land of the Jews. It was only after the Jews fully re-inhabited and gained sovereignty of their historic homeland of Galilee, Judea, Samaria, the Shephelah, the Sharon Plain, the Negev and the Aravah that the myth of a distinct Palestinian Arab nation was created and marketed worldwide. Jews come from Judea, not Palestinians. There is no language known as Palestinian, or any Palestinian culture, food, tradition, religion or ethos distinct from that of all the Arabs in the area. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinian Arabs at any time in history.

Palestinians are Arabs indistinguishable from Arabs throughout the Middle East. The Palestinian National Charter adopted by the PLO states this fact in Article 1, where it says: "Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation." The noted Arab leader, Bey Abdul Hadi, testified to the British Peel Commission in 1936, saying, "There is no such country as Palestine! Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Palestine is alien to us; it is the Zionists who introduced it. Even Bibles that have labeled the land of Israel as Palestine are in error." In 2001, the Italian Muslim cleric, Sheik Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi wrote, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian; there never was. It is a PR fiction, a Madison Avenue fantasy."

And what is the case for the Palestine/Jewish/Israel connection?

The Jews have always had a presence here since the days of Abraham. The Jews do possess a distinct language, culture, food, traditions and ethos different from every other people on earth. The large influx of Jews coming from the "four corners of the earth" (Isa. 11:11,12) by the millions since the 1880s are coming to a homeland from which they were exiled by foreign governments. Jews have governed the sovereign nation of Israel from time immemorial, and its legitimacy is recorded in the pages of history, even chiseled in stone.

Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998, "Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

After 400 years of Ottoman Turkish occupation, on October 31, 1917, the British War Cabinet accepted the Balfour Declaration, which was issued on November 2, 1917 as government policy. It stated: "His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

The Balfour Declaration won the approval of the United States and other Western powers. At first, there was hope that the Arabs would also accept it, as both the Arabs and the Jews were just breaking free from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire.

Emir Faisal, son of the acknowledged leader of the Arabs, Sherif Hussein, met with Dr. Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist leaders during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. They signed an agreement by which the Arabs stated that "mindful of the racial kinship and racial bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people," they declared that "the surest means of working out the consummation of their [Jewish] national aspiration is through the closest possible collaboration of the development of the Arab state and Palestine." (In 1919, Palestine was considered that portion of the Middle East designated for the Jewish people, not the Arabs!)

Due to growing Arab and Islamic nationalism in the shadow of Nazi anti-Semitism that spread throughout the world, life for the Jews of Palestine became more and more difficult, while their brethren were being executed by the millions in the Holocaust in Europe.

Nevertheless, against all odds, this bedraggled people holding onto a hope and a prayer, established a the modern, sovereign State of Israel on May 14, 1948.

When Israel was established as a modern state, its Declaration of Independence extended its hand of friendship to its Moslem neighbors. This was answered by 7 Arab armies marching into this land to "push the Jews into the sea" only hours after the State of Israel was declared.

When the war broke out, Palestinian Arabs were asked to leave by the Arab High Command to make it easier to "push the Jews into the sea." They did not succeed.

Those who remained were made citizens of Israel. Today, 20% of Israel's population is Arab, and they receive the same rights and privileges as do Israeli Jews. In Arab lands, however, Jewish citizens do not have equal rights, and in some Moslem countries where Jews no longer exist - even moderate ones like Jordan - it is illegal to be a citizen if you are Jewish.

The number of Arabs who left Israel because of the War of Independence thrust upon Israel by the Arab nation were equal to the number of Jews who were expelled from Arab lands into Israel. The Jews were forced to leave homes, land, businesses and wealth behind. It has been calculated that the combined area of land Jews left behind in Arab lands is greater in area than the State of Israel today. Remember, some lived in these Middle Eastern lands since the Babylonian and Assyrian captivities. Bank accounts, safety deposit boxes and other material wealth was also left behind when the Jews had to flee their homes in the face of Moslem wrath, losing everything and arriving only with the clothes on their back.

Not only has Israel treated its Arab citizens with respect, until the 1990s and the Oslo Accords, Israel was the largest donor nation to Palestinian refugee assistance in the world - more than even the wealthy Moslem Arab nations had contributed.

(Photo: Architects of the Oslo Accord: Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Pres. Clinton and Yasser Arafat.)

Israel initiated the Oslo Peace Process to create a two-state solution along the idea of Shimon Peres' New Middle East. He envisioned a two-state solution, open borders, cooperative solutions to water, economics, government, security, tourism and commerce. It did not work because there was no real peace partner in the Palestinian Camp.

Israel brought in Yasser Arafat and his 50,000 terrorist fighters and armed them in hopes they would be a police force to promote peace in the region. What Israel got was a fifth column army in her borders seeking to trigger a pan-Arab/Islamic war to destroy the Jews. This was the original Phased Program of Yasser Arafat as outlined to the Arab League in 1974 after their defeat in the failed Yom Kippur War against Israel. Israel walked right into his trap.

This was confirmed by Sakhr Habash who said, "When we declare the establishment of a state and independence, we will have the right to liberate the rest of the occupied land...." The leading Palestinian dove Faisal Husseini told the Egyptian daily Al-Arabi in July 2001, ten months before his death, that the Oslo Peace Process was a "Trojan horse" and that the long-term goal was "the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea."

The reason Oslo did not work is because Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) chose war, not peace. From the beginning of Oslo, there was little reciprocity...Israel gave and the PA took. The most bizarre episode was in July 2000, when then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, made an incredible offer to Arafat and the PA. He decided to jump over the stages to a two-state solution and at Camp David II, Barak offered Arafat 95% of the territories (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) plus 5% of Israel proper to make up for land Israel could not relinquish; 3/4 of the Old City of Jerusalem; five neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem; the Palestinian flag over the Al Aksa Mosque; and a Palestinian Parliament building in Abu Dis within eyesight of the Old City.

Arafat's response was to walk away from the meeting and two months later he ordered the Palestinian Uprising (the Intifada), which still rages on today. However, no Arab or Islamic nation came to his aid and his envisioned Phased Program to destroy Israel failed. The intifada gained nothing for the Palestinians and Israelis except death, maiming and mistrust. Sadly, Arafat's blind determination to see his Phased Program come to pass to destroy Israel once and for all only destroyed the opportunity for peaceful coexistence. Arafat is a born terrorist who cannot change his stripes and become a diplomat. As long as Arafat is at the helm of the PA, there will be no peace.

In this Israel Teaching Letter, we have looked at the biblical/historical and moral right of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland, Israel. In our next issue, we will look at the strategic and prophetic right of Israel and ask ourselves the question, "What can we do in our nations?" to rightly align with the truth. The propaganda machine of the enemy daily churns out false information and a rewritten history that gets accepted as truth because of a lack of knowledge of what are the real facts. May we stand on the truth of the Word of God and the real facts of history as we stand with God for His covenant nation and people, Israel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998.
The Nelson Study Bible, New King James Version, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1997).
The New International Study Bible, (Grand Rapids, MI: The Zondervan Corporation, 1985).
James Strong, Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1979).
Eds. C. Roth and G. Wigoder, Encyclopedia Judaica, (Jerusalem, Israel: Keter Publishing House, Ltd., 1972).
Dr. G. Douglas Young, Young's Compact Bible Dictionary, (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1989).
The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1976).