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, the Euphrates -- the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites"(Genesis 15:18-21).
Note the territory, according to Scripture.
There is a common misperception, that the Jews were forced into the diaspora by the Roman after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and then, 1,8000 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back.
In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years. A national language and a distinct civilization have been maintained. The Jewish people base their claim to the land of Israel on at least four premises:
- God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham;
- The Jewish people settled and developed the land;
- The international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people and
- The territory was captured in defensive wars.
The term "Palestine" is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word "Filastin" is derived from this Latin name.
When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not." In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called "the holy land" (al-Arad al-Muqaddash).
Today there are many misconcepts; many that have been developed by those who have not right to claims any land that belows to Israel. Israel's international "birth certificate" was validated by the promise of the Bible; uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Abram onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of Israel by most other states; and, most of all, the society created by Israel's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence.
