Heart for Israel

Lies About Israel- Part 2

Lie #3 The Jews are not the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

This lie is easy to refute if anyone has a basic knowledge of history. The Jewish people came into the land in about 1400 BC under Joshua. That land was occupied by the Canaanites for hundreds of years. Abraham was told that God would give them 430 years to repent. The Canaanites were not indigenous to that land. They were sons of Cush, son of Ham. They settled in parts of Africa, and descendants of Shem had a claim to the region of Israel. Joshua and Israel came into the covenant promise of God, and by the command and direction of God.

          Joshua and Israel defeated the Canaanites and won the war, claiming the land. They had possession of the land until 586 BC when Babylon took control. Many Jews were taken captive to Babylon. Many Jews still remained in the land. In about 539, the Medo-Persian Empire conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return. About 42,000 returned and rebuilt the Second Temple. The Greeks took over but the Jews remained in the land. The Jews won independence in about 168 BC for about 100 years until Rome conquered in about 66 BC.

          In 70 AD, in the First Jewish War with Rome, the Temple was destroyed, and many Jews were expelled. In 132 AD, the Second Jewish War happened, and Rome won again. Many more Jews were expelled from the land. Many still remained in the land and were forbidden from entering Jerusalem. The land of Israel was renamed Palestine.

          In about 630 AD, the Arabs invaded, killed, and conquered. They killed Jews and Christians, all in the name of Islam. In fact, Islam conquered Egypt, Syria, and many more lands, which were mostly Christian. There has always been a Jewish presence in the land, even during the Islamic reign and lastly under the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks sold land to Jews wanting to immigrate back into the land from Europe. Very few Arabs were in the land at that time. But the more that the Jews returned, the more Arabs immigrated. The Turks lost to the British in World War I, and the British took control of Palestine for several decades.

          In 1949, the United Nations came up with a Two-state solution for the land to be divided between the Jews and Arabs. The Arabs rejected the deal; the Jews accepted it. The five Arab nations declared war on Israel. They reached out to Arabs living among the Jews to leave their homes and join them to defeat the Jews. After they defeated them, they were told that they would get the land back and more. The sad news was that the Arabs lost; the ones who left were not allowed to come back because they became enemy combatants. No Arab nation would take them in and help them. The Arabs that stayed in Israel kept their land and became citizens of Israel, and their descendants are still there today- about two million Arabs.

          To address the original question, who are the indigenous people of the land? The Arabs are indigenous to Saudi Arabia, but they blended into many other nations. The Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel since 1400 BC. Prior to that, the land was occupied by the Canaanites. But the Canaanites no longer exist. Of all the ancient people groups, Israel/the Jewish people are the only ones who have a claim on the land.