Debunking the Israeli Biblical Narrative

 

Debunking The Israeli Biblical Narrative 

This was a speech given by the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Dani Danon, in 2019.

“Today I will present to you the four pillars that prove the case for Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel.  The first pillar is the Bible; the Jewish people’s rightful ownership of the land of Israel is well documented throughout the Old Testament and beyond. The second pillar is history. The Jewish claim to the land of Israel is confirmed time and again, not just with Jewish history but through the history of the world. The third pillar is a legal claim; our rights to the land are codified in international law including in the document that founded this very body. And the fourth pillar is the pursuit of international peace and security, a stronger and safer Israel means a stronger and safer world.

Let us discuss our first pillar of proof, the Bible. The Jewish people’s right to the land of Israel is mentioned over a dozen times in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible which includes the Torah, the Old Testament, the prophets, and the writings. In the book of Genesis, the very first book of the Old Testament, God says to Abraham: “I will give to you and to your offspring after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” Genesis 17:8. This is the deed to our land.

From the book of Genesis to the Jewish Exodus from Egypt to receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai and to the realization of God’s Covenant in the Holy Land of Israel, the Bible paints a consistent picture. The entire history of our people and our connection to the Land of Israel begins right here. It is not just the Hebrew Bible or the fifteen million Jews worldwide that accept this right; it is accepted across all three monolithic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Koran itself accepts the divine deed of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel.

Mr. President, the second pillar is the history of the Land of Israel and the Jewish people over the past two millennia. The Jewish Kingdom in the Land of Israel comprises twelve tribes; the largest of those tribes, the tribe of Juda, lived in the area now known as Judea.  You all know the words Jew and Jewish. Jew and Jewish come from Judea. This was a kingdom over which kind David and king Solomon ruled, it was a kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital. It was home to the first temple destroyed by the Babylonians in the year 587 BC and the second temple destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE. The Romans destroyed the Jewish Kingdom, they sent our people into a two-thousand-year exile that kept most of us, not all of us from our land. Even the Romans themselves admitted the land was ours. Those of you who visited Rome may recall that Emperor Titus famously commemorated his victory and the Jewish expulsion by building an enormous arch the Via Sacra in Rome. 

Arch of Titus

If you look to the Arch, it includes an illustration of his men carrying away the Menorah from the Jewish temple. But even though the Romans knew that the land was ours and we belonged in it, they attempted to erase our age-long connection to the land by renaming it Syria-Palestina. Why Palestina? They attributed it as a southern province of the Syrian Empire. This is how the narrow strip of land in the Land of Israel nestled between Egypt in the South and Lebanon in the North came to be called Palestine.

For the next two thousand years, the land of Israel was conquered by the crusaders followed by the Ottoman Empire. But despite centuries of wars and conquest, the Jewish People never left. A Jewish community remained in the Land of Israel throughout this entire time. Although most of our community was forced into exile by the Roman Empire, we knew that someday we would return to our ancient homeland. For two millennia, Jews across the world continue to pray three times every day for our long-awaited long return home to Zion, to Jerusalem.

Mr. President, if the Jewish people’s deep and ancient roots in the Land of Israel are not sufficient proof, let us consider International Law, the third pillar. In 1917, Lord Belfour, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, issued a statement of British support for the establishment of and I quote “a national home for the Jewish people”. The Belfour Declaration designated this national homeland in the Land of Israel. 1922, the mandate of the League of Nations not only states its support for the establishment of a Jewish National Home, it encouraged and facilitated the return of Jews in the diaspora to our homeland. It confirms and I quote, “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.

The UN Partition Plan called for the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state in the Land of Israel. What we did, we accepted it. But the Palestinians did not. Instead of peace they chose war and opened fire on the Jews, our small tiny newly declared nation was suddenly under attack in 1948. On the last day of the British Mandate, Israel declared independence and was immediately attacked by five Arab armies that joined the Palestinians open to destroy it. Israel won that war in the hope that the future of the Jewish people was saved. The Arabs rejected opportunities for peace time and again. The 1937 commission report, the Arabs rejected it. The 1947 UN partition plan, rejected. The 1948 Israeli offer for a truce rejected; the 2000 Camp David Summit rejected, the 2001 Taba Summit rejected, the 2007 Annapolis Conference rejected. The 2008 offer of the Israeli President Ihud Ulmert, we are still waiting for an answer on that, the 2014, Secretary of State Kerry’s peace initiative, Abas chose Hamas, and today, in the upcoming US peace plan, the Palestinians say, it is dead on arrival.

First, the Palestinians must accept and recognize the Jewish State of Israel. No Palestinian leader ever said those words. Second, the Palestinians must end the campaign of incitement. Enough is Enough. How can we the international community expect us to make any concessions to a leader who pays his people to kill ours?

[The famous Palestinian poet Tamim Al Bargouti made a compelling argument deconstructing the biblical and historical claims in the speech above. Below is my translation of his argument:]  

The European Zionist movement’s allegation that they have priority of ownership over Palestine is a false one in every measure. In essence, the allegation is Biblical, and with my respect to all religions, such an allegation is not considered a historical reference nor does it constitute an international legal basis among Nations that differ in and about this biblical reference.

But even if we, for the sake of the argument, give in to the biblical narrative as a historical basis, then there were in Palestine, people other than the Jews, that existed before them, with them, and after their reign had ended. Half of the Torah is about the wars between these people and the Jews, and the other half is about the intermingling between them and the Jews to the extent that some Jews worshiped the Gods of these other people, and some of these other people worshiped the Jewish God. So what gives exclusive priority of ownership to the grandchildren of the Jews of today, that is, if we give in to the argument that they are their grandchildren, without the grandchildren of the other residents over historical Palestine?

Even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, the priority of ownership to the Jews, then [according to the biblical narrative], some Jews kept their faith and were expelled by the Romans after the Bar KoKhbah revolt in the year 132 and some remained in Palestine and became Christian, then Muslim and Arab. So what gives the exclusive right of ownership of the country to the Jew that left, more than those who did not leave and became Christian and then Muslim, for example?

Moses Maimonides: Jewish Philosopher in Spain  

All that I previously mentioned is based on the allegation that the two thousand years of history are totally free from non-Jews outside Palestine converting to Judaism, which [according to the allegation] makes their grandchildren totally disconnected from old Palestine, but naturally, this is totally incorrect. History is loaded with non-Hebrew people converting to Judaism. It is true that embracing Judaism is more difficult than embracing Christianity or Islam, but still, other people did convert to Judaism, and it is still happening today.  Evidence in history is prolific from Jonathan the ethnarch of Judea, also known as the high priest Hyrcanus who imposed Judaism on the Edomites people in the second century BC to the writings of Moses Maimonides in the Middle Ages about the conditions to convert to Judaism, to the conversion of the daughter of the forty-fifth president of the United States to Judaism in our times while the roots of her father come from Germany and Scotland, and her mother’s roots come from Czech and Austria. This was about geography.

As for history, what makes the Jew that left, or the foreigner who converted to Judaism recently, have the right to own the land more than the Palestinian regarding the Jewish history of this land? The European Zionist national movement in this modern age has stolen even its Jewish History, for the Jewish history of Palestine is part of our history. Palestinians are the people of this land who stayed in it, whether some were Jewish, then became Christian, then Muslim. Or whether some weren’t Jewish in the first place and their parents were in Palestine before the Jews and later lived with them and after them or those who came to Palestine after this period and converted to the religion dominant in Palestine and spoke their language and got married and lived here for thousands of years. 

Land Of Canaan

Or an Arab Palestinian whose parents are from the tribe of Quraish, for example, whose mother may be Jebusite [or Yabusite], Syrian, Greek, Sumerian, Egyptian Coptic, Persian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Moabite, Edomite, Nabataean, or a Hebrew who became Christian or Muslim or maybe she didn’t. All are from Palestine, so why ‘Ye the worshippers of God’, does Theodor Hertzel, who was born in Budapest in Hungary, or David Ben-Gurion, who was born in Pꬷionsk in Poland, or the daughter of the American President who embraced Judaism almost ‘two hours ago’ has priority of ownership over a Palestinian Arab with all the history that their mothers and fathers have.

What I am saying is that the people speaking Arabic today have priority to own all the history of Palestine, embracing its paganism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam over the European Zionist Movement, exactly as the Roman history is part of the Greek heritage even if religion and language have changed and even if the Italian ancestry has been mixed with the Germanic, the Normans, the Greek, and the Arabs. If not, then the Italian who is Catholic today would be considered a stranger from the history of Rome because Caesar was not a Christian and did not speak Italian.

The claim of the founder of the Zionist movement or the First Israeli Prime Minister or the daughter of the American President that they have exclusive priority to own any part of the old history of Palestine more than I do is like having a foreigner who, because he believes in the old Egyptian religion, the religion of Amon and Osiris, claims that he has exclusive priority to own Egypt’s old history today over Egyptians because their religion and language have changed. Then that foreigner goes to build a state in Egypt and throws out its Christian and Muslim people and forbids them from coming back.

In addition, the Zionist narrative is contradictory: On the one side, it is purely religious because it gives exclusive ownership of land to those who are Jews, excluding others who were here before them or with them or after them or of them, meaning were Jews and later changed their religion. On the other side, it claims to be secular and national, as if saying that Judaism is an ethnicity or a race rather than a religion whether its constituents believe in it or not.

The words of Tamim below express his personal views, not mine, and address the final part of the speech, specifically the more recent history. Personally, my political vision and views differ from his.

I am not speaking about politics in this episode. Still, because we live in times where the strong want to impose on us a concession after the other regarding our land, I hereby declare that the right of each of us in this land is a personal right for him and his children. I am one of those people who have never delegated anyone to give up my right or negotiate my right or the right of my children in this land. Any signed agreement or any that will be signed in my name does not oblige me or my offspring in anything, and those who sign it do not represent me. We never threw anyone out of their land and do not want to throw anyone out, but we do not accept being thrown out and then asked to accept this fact. This is a fixed right of ours as long as there is day and night, and it is the same history that teaches us that power inevitably diminishes, no matter how grandiose its owners are or how hard they try to scare their victims.