Why does the modern nation-state of Israel have a “right” to its land in the present day?
Israel has a right to its land because the people who ruled it before them gave it to them. That’s it. That’s the sole rationale. And that’s just fine. All nations have their land based on gift, purchase, or conquest. That’s the way the world works. We can debate the wisdom of what happened in 1948, but what happened happened.
Christian Zionists want to go one step further and claim that the Jews have a unique divine right to the land because of God’s promise to Abraham. But this is a misguided rationale for several reasons:
*The land God promised to Israel has much larger borders than the present nation-state of Israel, but this does not give Israel a right to take those lands from those presently living in them. God authorized the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites in Joshua’s day; he has not authorized modern Jews to drive out the present inhabitants living in those lands around modern Israel. Israel, like any other nation, has a right to wage defensive and just wars to defend itself; it has to no right wage offensive wars to claim land belonging to others. Taking the land of others is theft – something Jews should recognize (cf. the story of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21).
*Further, even in the old covenant, Israel’s right to possess the land pivoted on their faithfulness to God and the covenant he made with them. When they were unfaithful, he eventually exiled them, as he threatened in Deuteronomy. Possession was never an unconditional right. And when they returned to occupy the land in the restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, they did so under the oversight and rule of Gentile empires (cf. Nehemiah 9:36), analogous to the way a Gentile empire granted them the land in 1948. Even if Zionists were right about the divine promise of the land to Israel, it would not apply to the modern nation-state of Israel, which, from a biblical perspective, is not a nation keeping covenant with God.
*Most importantly, the restoration of the Jewish people in the Bible requires them to return to the Lord and the Messiah he sent them. There is no true restoration of Israel apart from repentance and conversion to faith in Christ. Modern Israel is a secular, Christ-rejecting people and nation. There are a few Christians there, to be sure, but it is decidedly not a Christian nation. The return of ethnic Jews to the land in 1948 did not fulfill biblical prophecy. It was not the restoration of Israel promised in Romans 11. Most Jews are still hardened to the gospel. The Bible does promise ethnic Jews will eventually be converted to faith in Christ (see Romans 11), but that hasn’t happened yet.
*The land promise to Israel did not expire in 70AD, but it was transformed in the new covenant. The land was typological of the whole world (Romans 4:13). The true Israel of God — the church — will ultimately possess everything (1 Corinthians 3:21-23) because Christ possesses everything. This obviously does not mean individual Christians can take what they want from others – that would be absurd and wicked – but it does establish an eschatological trajectory. Everything belongs to Christ right now and ultimately everything will belong to his bride, the church. The current land squabble in the Middle East is mostly between unbelievers and it is not going to last forever. The church can wait it out. The Arabs will someday be converted to Christ. The Jews will be too. The Middle East will have its own Christendom in due time (indeed, it had a kind of Christendom briefly in the past, though very imperfect and immature). Peace will come to the Middle East when those residing there turn to the Prince of Peace.
*There is a tradition of Protestant theologians who believed the Jewish people would eventually return to their ancestral land — John Milton, William Gouge, David Brown, and an assortment of other mostly British Christians. For example, Brown wrote in 1882, “As their sins were the cause, and their dispersion the effect, so their conversion, removing the cause of their present dispersion, shall be accompanied by their return, under the divine favor, to their father-land. The covenant-favor and the covenant-land go hand in hand.” Brown and others argued a Jewish claim to the land could never be separated from faith in the God who promised it to them. In other words, their return to the land was never contemplated apart from the conversion of the Jews to Christ and entrance into the church. They envisioned the Jews as a Christian people dwelling in a Christianized Canaan. That’s obviously not the case at present. The conversion of the Jews, after the fullness of the Gentiles have come into Christ’s kingdom, will be the capstone of the Great Commission. Modern Christian Zionists believe Israel can lay claim to a promised land without trusting in the God who made the promise.
*Of historical interest, it’s worth noting that Jews debated amongst themselves in the 1940s what their new nation should be called. Some wanted to name it after Theodore Herzl because of his role in championing a Jewish homeland. Others wanted to call it Judea or Zion or The Jewish State or Ever/Ivri, which means “Hebrew.” For various reasons, “Israel” won out, but that decision created a lot of confusion. Now we have to ask a question that pre-1948 Christians did not have to wrestle with, at least not in the same way, namely, “who is the true Israel?” If they had named it Herzl-land, we are probably not having these debates.
*In his providence, God establishes the borders of all nations (Acts 17:26). Israel came into existence in 1948 not as a result of a divine promise spelled out in the OT, but as a providential work of God — like any other nation. The British winter of 1947 was brutal. The British government needed to save money, to help a flagging economy, so they gave up their Palestinian territory to the UN because it was too expensive to maintain. The rest is, as they say, history. Obviously, momentum had building for a long time to find a homeland for the Jewish people, and discovering the horrors of Jewish persecution under the Nazi regime sealed the commitment of Western nations to making it happen. I believe it was good to give the Jews a nation of their own, though we can question whether or not putting them in a tightly constricted space amongst people with whom they were sure to have racial/ethnic and religious tensions was wise. Just as there were there were at least 5 other names considered for the modern nation-state of Israel, at least 5 other locations as a Jewish homeland were considered: Ararat City in upstate New York, Uganda, the island of Madagascar, the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union, and Suriname in South America.
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