How far back in history should one claim that territory is theirs? On what basis is the claim: religious, ancestral, modern territorial? Who owns any place or space on earth, for that matter?
The answer to Azly Rahman's interesting question may be complex but if we are all believers in the Abrahamic faiths, the answer has its roots in the profound history of the people and the region:
Political dynamics: That historical region, described as the Southern Levant by archaeologists, was inhabited by settlers from various places (probably Egypt). When Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt, they were led by God to the region called Canaan and it was there that they conquered the inhabitants and settled there for 4,000 years (1,900 BCE).
Subsequently, they were conquered and ruled by Babylonians, the Romans (who hated them for resisting imperial rule and rejecting their pagan gods), etc until the Ottomans (not Arab Muslims) occupied it for 400 years. Then after the Ottomans joined the Germans (under the prompting of the Turkish war minister Enver Pasha) to fight the Allied powers in WW1 and subsequently lost, Britain took over the administration of Israel under a mandate granted by the United Nations.
Spiritual dynamics: Here is the biblical perspective; God has granted a promise to Abraham (given his deep relationship with God) that He will bless all his descendants. But there is one condition on granting the Jews a home in Israel. They have to believe in the one true God of Abraham and live righteously before Him, or else the land will be conquered by foreign powers (which was what happened).
The apotheosis of misguided faith: When Jesus Christ, a Jew (during 33 years of his life from 4 B.C. to 30 A.D.), declared he was the Son of God who came on earth as a man to bring salvation to mankind, the Jews (by and large) rejected, mocked and condemned him to death even though their Scriptures prophesized that such a messiah will arise in future to save them (some Jews are still waiting today for a political, messianic saviour).
The consequences of rejecting God and their destiny: After AD 70, the Jews were dispersed by the Romans and were without a homeland for 1,877 years.
The most brutal and worst tragedy of the Jews was when the Roman emperor Hadrian, after a four-year war against the Jews (known as the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132AD-136), banished them and mocked their heritage by renaming the province of Judah as Syria Palaestina (after their ancient enemy the Grecian Philistines). The inhabitants of "Syria Palaestina" were diverse and included Jews, Christians and other ethnic groups. Only five centuries later in the 7th century did the Muslims appear in the region.
Thereafter, the Jews were an exiled people and after nearly two centuries of living in Europe and Russia, their persecution and oppression escalated (due to some kind of tribalistic hatred of God's chosen people) in the late 18th and the first half of of the 19th century. The 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Russia and the horrendous Holocaust (with six million Jews killed) gave momentum to the Zionist aspirations to seek a homeland and the United Nations decided to grant them statehood in 1947, along with a separate state for Palestine.
One day after the state of Israel was proclaimed by Ben Gurion on May 14th, 1948, five neighbouring Arab states launched the first Arab-Israel war, which ended with Israel taking over 77% of the UN-mandated Palestinian territory while Jordan and Egypt occupied the rest of Palestine.
In retrospect, from all legal, spiritual (Biblical and otherwise), Abrahamic and military perspectives, Israel is a sovereign nation that belongs to the Jews. (The territories of Gaza and the West Bank, which was granted self-autonomy, is being ring-fenced by Israel considering the ongoing national security threat of terrorist and missile attacks from the PLO and later the Hamas groups, whose goals are to eliminate Israel as a nation state).
Current political dynamics: The current political question of how to make a lasting peace with Palestine (pending the current Israel-Hamas war which started on October 7th 2023) is the focus of the Middle Eastern conundrum.
With Iran and Russia on the side of the Palestinians coupled with Western sympathies for the Palestinian cause (notwithstanding the noble goals of the 2-state solution), there is now a new battleground of geopolitics as well as public world opinion in play (often misinformed and disinformed by the press).
Biblically, the twice return of the Jews (the first was 70 years in Babylonian captivity and the second was over 2,000 years of exile) was prophesized many times in the Old Testament:
Isaiah 43:5-6 "Fear not, for I am with you; from the east I will bring back your offspring, from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north: Give them up!"
From a social perspective on why the Jews are so despised by not only certain religious groups but also by many secular quarters as well, I concur with the Christian view that there are demonic/primeval forces influencing people to hurt the God of Abraham by hurting His chosen race.
But God will never break his promise to Abraham and He has an eye on the salvation of the Jews in the end-times.
(In my view, the current Israel-Hamas war will be resolved - either by force or otherwise - in just another episode in Israel's struggle for sovereignty, security and peaceful relations with her neighbors. The endgame and its implications for a WW3 is still decades ahead).
