There is a question at the heart of the contemporary conflict over the land of Israel and Palestine that is rarely asked directly — because the answer is more complicated and more important than either side of the political debate usually acknowledges.
The question is this: in the tradition that grounds the territorial claim, is the covenant between God and a people defined by ethnicity — or between God and a people defined by how they live?
The answer the texts give is not simple. And the complexity matters enormously for how the claim is understood today.
Two kinds of writing in the Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible contains two distinct literary registers that treat the land promise differently, and reading them as a single uniform statement produces a distorted picture.
The narrative texts — Genesis above all — tell the story of a promise made to specific individuals and their descendants. God calls Abram from his homeland and shows him the land of Canaan. The promise is made at Shechem, reaffirmed at Bethel, formalised in the covenant ceremony of Genesis 15 where God specifies boundaries from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. It is repeated to Isaac, repeated again to Jacob. The language in these passages is sometimes unconditional — an everlasting possession, given to you and your offspring forever.
The legal and prophetic texts tell a different story. Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the prophets consistently present the tenure of the land as conditional on how the people live in it. The land belongs to God. The people are tenants. The conditions are specific and enforceable. Violation produces consequences — including exile. These texts do not contradict the narrative promise. They specify the terms under which it is held.
The tension between these two registers — unconditional gift and conditional tenure — is not a modern imposition on the text. It is a genuine tension within the tradition that Jewish scholarship has wrestled with for centuries.
The full range of the promise
The land promise appears across the entire span of the Hebrew Bible.
In Genesis 12 God calls Abram to a land he will be shown, and promises it to his offspring. In Genesis 15 the covenant is formalised with a boundary description and a specific list of peoples currently inhabiting the land. In Genesis 17 the land is described as an everlasting possession and circumcision is established as the sign of the covenant. The promise is reaffirmed to Isaac in Genesis 26 and to Jacob at Bethel in Genesis 28 and 35.
In Exodus, God identifies himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and names the land he is bringing the people to. In Exodus 6 the covenant with the patriarchs and the land promise are reaffirmed explicitly.
Deuteronomy — Moses’s extended address before the people enter the land — returns to the promise repeatedly across chapters 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 and beyond. But Deuteronomy also contains the most explicit statement of conditionality anywhere in the Torah. The land is given — and it can be lost. Obedience and disobedience have direct consequences for tenure.
Deuteronomy 30 contains the restoration promise — that even after exile, if the people return to God, they will be gathered from the nations and brought back to the land. This is one of the primary texts cited in contemporary Zionist theology as prophecy being fulfilled in the modern state of Israel.
Psalm 105 recounts the covenant with the patriarchs and the promise of the land as a central act of God’s faithfulness across history.
The promise is real. It is central to the tradition. It cannot be dismissed or explained away.
The restoration prophecy and its conditions
The most powerful text cited in contemporary Zionist theology is not Genesis but Ezekiel 36 and 37 — the dry bones vision and the promise of restoration to the land after exile. It is worth reading carefully because the restoration it describes is not what the political claim usually presents it as.
Ezekiel 36 begins with the promise of return — God will gather the scattered people from the nations and bring them back to their own land. This much is cited frequently. What is cited less frequently is what follows immediately.
Before the people can dwell in the land, something must happen first. God gives them a new heart and a new spirit. He removes the heart of stone and gives a heart of flesh. He puts his Spirit within them and causes them to walk in his statutes and be careful to obey his rules. And then — you shall dwell in the land.
The sequence is precise. The return to the land follows the interior transformation. The restoration is not simply a geographical event — a people returning to a territory. It is a moral and spiritual renewal that makes genuine covenant tenure possible. The new heart and the new spirit are not a reward for returning. They are the condition of dwelling.
Ezekiel 36:22 adds a further dimension rarely noted in political discussions of this prophecy — God acts not for the sake of the people but for the sake of his own name, which the people had profaned among the nations. The restoration is an act of God’s faithfulness, not a reward for the people’s righteousness. But the conditions that follow — the new heart, the walking in the statutes — are what make the dwelling permanent rather than temporary.
Ezekiel 37 closes with the vision of one people under one shepherd, walking in God’s rules and careful to obey his statutes. The everlasting covenant of peace is established. The sanctuary is set in the midst of the people. The dwelling is described as permanent.
But permanent under what conditions? The passage is explicit — the people walking in the rules, obeying the statutes, living the covenant. The everlasting character of the restoration is inseparable from the covenant being lived.
This is not a minor detail. It is the structure of the entire prophecy. The dry bones live — but they live under the Spirit that causes them to walk in the statutes. The restoration and the covenant conditions are not separate events. They are one movement.
Later in the same book, Ezekiel 47:21-23 completes the picture with striking precision — when the land is apportioned in the restored Israel, the stranger who sojourns among the people is to be allotted an inheritance alongside the native born, in whatever tribe they reside. The stranger is not a guest. They are a full inheritor of the land. This applies explicitly to Palestinians.
The contemporary reading that treats Ezekiel 36-37 as unconditional prophecy fulfilled in the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 selects the return and leaves behind the new heart, the new spirit, and the walking in the statutes that the text presents as inseparable from it.
But who was the covenant made with?
This is where the question becomes critical — and where the texts are more complex than the political claim usually acknowledges.
The covenant in Genesis is made with Abraham and his seed. On the surface this appears to be a straightforward ethnic or genealogical claim — the promise runs through a specific biological lineage.
But the tradition itself immediately complicates this reading.
Abraham was not born Jewish. He was called out of a polytheistic culture and entered the covenant through faith and obedience — not through birth. He was, in the language of later tradition, the first convert. The covenant did not find him as a member of a pre-existing people. It created a people through his response to a call.
Circumcision — established in Genesis 17 as the sign of the covenant — was applied not only to Abraham’s biological descendants but to every male in his household, including those bought with money from foreigners. The covenant community from the beginning included people who were not biological descendants of Abraham.
The mixed multitude who left Egypt with the Israelites in Exodus are included in the covenant community. The law given at Sinai — including the land tenure conditions — applies to them as well.
Ruth — a Moabite, explicitly excluded from the covenant community in Deuteronomy — chooses the tradition through her own declaration of loyalty and becomes the great-grandmother of David, the archetypal king of Israel. The covenant line runs through her.
The prophetic tradition consistently distinguishes between biological membership of Israel and genuine covenant relationship. Isaiah uses the term Israel for a community defined by faithfulness rather than ethnicity. Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant written on the heart rather than on stone. Ezekiel’s vision of restoration is conditioned on a new spirit and a new heart.
Paul in Galatians makes the argument explicit within the Christian tradition — the promise was made to Abraham and his seed, understood not as ethnic lineage but as all those who share the faith of Abraham. This was not Paul’s innovation. It drew on a strand of the tradition already present in the Hebrew Bible itself.
The Islamic tradition places Ibrahim at the foundation of submission to God — the original covenant relationship before the traditions diverged. The Quran presents Ibrahim not as the ethnic ancestor of one people but as the archetypal man of faith whose example all people are called to follow.
Faith or ethnicity — what the legal texts say
The legal texts of the Torah — Leviticus and Deuteronomy above all — consistently frame the covenant relationship in terms of behaviour rather than birth.
The conditions of covenant tenure are addressed to the community as a whole and are entirely behavioural. Observe the Sabbath year. Observe the Jubilee. Do not oppress the stranger. Maintain equal law for citizen and stranger alike. Love the stranger as yourself because you were strangers in Egypt.
Not one of these conditions is genealogical. Not one says: hold the land because of who you were born to. All of them say: hold the land because of how you live in it.
Deuteronomy 30 — the restoration promise — frames the return to the land explicitly as a consequence of returning to God and to the covenant conditions. Not return to the land because of ethnic right. Return to the land because of renewed covenant faithfulness.
The prophets hold the tradition to this consistently. The exile is not presented as a violation of the ethnic promise. It is presented as the covenant operating as designed when its behavioural conditions are violated. The land can be lost. It has been lost. The conditions are what matter.
The modern question
The modern state of Israel claims the covenant as the basis of its right to the land — specifically the narrative texts of Genesis that describe an unconditional eternal promise to Abraham and his descendants.
But the tradition does not support treating the narrative texts in isolation from the legal and prophetic texts that specify how the promise is held. The covenant is not a simple title deed transferable by ethnicity across three thousand years of history. It is an ongoing relationship between a community and a set of conditions — conditions that define what kind of community is entitled to hold the land and on what basis.
The question is not whether Jews have a right to live in the land of their ancestors. The tradition supports that. The question is whether the right is held unconditionally by virtue of ethnicity — or conditionally by virtue of how the community lives in the land and treats those who dwell alongside it.
The legal and prophetic texts answer that question with remarkable consistency. The right is conditional. The conditions are behavioural. And the primary behavioural condition — repeated more than thirty times, more than almost any other commandment — is the protection and equal treatment of the stranger.
What this means for the question of ethnicity
A covenant defined by how people live rather than who they were born to has profound implications for how Jewish identity is understood — and for the contemporary claim that criticism of Israeli state conduct is criticism of Jews as Jews.
If the covenant is behavioural rather than ethnic, then Jewish identity cannot be reduced to a political loyalty to the state of Israel. The tradition contains an enormous diversity of views on Zionism, on Israeli policy, on the treatment of Palestinians. Jewish scholars, rabbis, and communities have argued passionately on every side of these questions — precisely because the tradition gives them grounds to do so.
The Zionist lobby’s insistence that all Jews share a single political position — that criticism of Israel is criticism of Jews — reproduces the same essentialism that classical antisemitism applied to Jewish communities for centuries. It reduces Jewish identity to a single dimension and denies the diversity that the tradition itself contains.
A covenant community defined by faithfulness to specific conditions — justice, protection of the stranger, equal law for all — is a community capable of self-criticism, internal dissent, and prophetic challenge to its own leaders. The prophets are the proof of that. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah — they were all Jewish. They were all holding their own community to the covenant’s conditions.
That capacity for internal dissent and prophetic self-criticism is not a betrayal of Jewish identity. It is one of its most distinctive and honourable features.
A compatible framework
The covenant conditions — equal law for citizen and stranger, protection of the vulnerable, the periodic reset of accumulated inequality — are consistent with the foundational principles of the international human rights framework and the rule of law. They did not produce those frameworks alone — the Enlightenment, Greek political thought, Roman law, and many other traditions contributed independently. But they point in the same direction.
Nations that have developed liberal democratic systems with human rights protections and equal law for all inhabitants provide the framework within which people of all the Abrahamic traditions can live according to their own covenant commitments without imposing them on others.
This is not a secular imposition on a religious claim. It is a framework that the covenant’s own conditions are compatible with — and that the conflict over the land can be evaluated against. Not by establishing whose ethnic claim is older, but by asking what conditions allow all the people who dwell in that land to live with dignity, equal law, and the protection the covenant itself demands for the stranger.
A note on Israeli democracy
The argument in this post is directed at a specific political project — the territorial expansion pursued by the current far-right government of Israel and the theological framework used to justify it. It is not directed at Israeli democracy, at the Israeli people, or at the diversity of Israeli political life.
Israel will hold a general election later this year. The current government does not represent the full spectrum of Israeli political opinion. There are significant Israeli political parties and movements — including within the Jewish religious tradition — that oppose the settlement expansion, oppose the conduct of the Gaza war, and hold views on the covenant and the land that are closer to the conditional reading this post presents than to the maximalist territorial claim it critiques.
The covenant argument made here is available to those Israelis as much as to anyone else. It comes from their own tradition. The election — and what Israelis choose — matters. Democracy is itself one of the emergent levels of complexity this site has argued for. The outcome of a democratic process, however it goes, is more consistent with the covenant’s own logic than any claim grounded in military conquest or divine mandate alone.
Note: This post was developed with the assistance of AI. The biblical references and scholarly observations have been researched through that process. If you have specific questions about these texts I would encourage you to consult the sources directly — the Sefaria online library provides free access to the full Hebrew Bible with multiple translations and classical commentaries, and is the best starting point for anyone wanting to go deeper into these questions.