There is a claim at the centre of contemporary Zionist politics that deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than simply accepted or rejected on political grounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The claim is this: God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people through an ancient covenant, and that covenant establishes an absolute and permanent territorial right that supersedes all subsequent history, all subsequent inhabitants, and all subsequent political arrangements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a serious claim. It comes from a serious tradition. It deserves a serious answer \u2014 from within that tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The covenant has conditions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a simple title deed. It is an agreement \u2014 and like all agreements it has terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leviticus 25 states the foundational principle without ambiguity: the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. God does not give the land in the sense of transferring permanent ownership. He grants conditional tenure \u2014 the right to live in and work the land according to specific obligations. The theological reasoning is explicit. The land belongs to God. The people are tenants. No human being or human community holds absolute title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conditions of that tenure are detailed and specific. They include the Sabbath year \u2014 the land must rest every seventh year, lie fallow, recover. They include the Jubilee \u2014 every fifty years land returns to its original allotment, debts are cancelled, those who have fallen into bondage are freed. They include the protection of the stranger and the sojourner \u2014 this obligation is repeated more than thirty times in the Torah, more than almost any other commandment in the entire tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That last condition is not incidental. It is foundational. The reason given for protecting the stranger is stated explicitly and repeatedly: you were strangers in Egypt. The people who received the covenant had themselves been enslaved, displaced, and dispossessed. The memory of that experience was written into the conditions of the covenant as the primary moral basis for how they were to treat others in the same position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The penalties for violation are explicit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Leviticus 26 follows the Jubilee law of Leviticus 25 with a detailed account of what happens when the covenant conditions are not met. The passage is remarkable in its specificity and its escalating severity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the people reject the statutes and break the covenant, the consequences accumulate in stages \u2014 crop failure, military defeat, plague, famine, exile. The land is laid waste. The cities are desolated. And then this \u2014 one of the most striking passages in the entire text: then shall the land make up its lost sabbaths, while you are in the land of your enemies; then shall the land have rest and make up for its sabbaths during all the time that it lies desolate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sabbath years that were not observed are enforced by the exile. If the people will not let the land rest voluntarily, the land enforces its own rest by lying waste while they are gone. The reset happens regardless of human compliance. It is built into the structure of the covenant itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exile, in other words, is not a suspension of the covenant. It is the covenant operating precisely as designed when its conditions are violated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prophets held the tradition to its own terms<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The prophetic tradition \u2014 Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah \u2014 is a sustained indictment of Israel for violating the covenant conditions. These were not voices from outside the tradition criticising it. They were voices from within the tradition holding it to its own stated terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amos condemns the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the poor. Isaiah indicts the leaders who grind the faces of the poor and take the houses of widows. Micah names the rulers who hate good and love evil, who tear the skin from the people and break their bones. These are not abstract theological criticisms. They are specific accusations about the treatment of the vulnerable \u2014 the very people the covenant conditions were designed to protect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prophets understood something that the contemporary territorial claim appears to have forgotten. The covenant was never simply about land. It was about what kind of community would inhabit the land and on what basis. The land was given to a people with specific obligations. When those obligations were violated the land itself \u2014 in the tradition’s own language \u2014 rejected them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the covenant actually demanded of the stranger<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The protection of the stranger and the sojourner is the condition that sits most uncomfortably alongside contemporary Israeli policy toward Palestinian inhabitants of the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The commandment is not merely to tolerate the stranger. The texts are specific, repeated, and consistent across the entire span of the Torah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Exodus 22:20 \u2014 you shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Exodus 23:9 \u2014 you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leviticus 19:33-34 \u2014 when a stranger resides with you in your land, do not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leviticus 24:22 \u2014 you shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Numbers 15:16 \u2014 there shall be one law and one rule for you and for the stranger who resides among you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deuteronomy 10:18-19 \u2014 God upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, providing food and clothing. You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deuteronomy 24:17-18 \u2014 you shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the orphan. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deuteronomy 26:11 \u2014 you shall rejoice together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst in all the bounty that God has given you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rabbi Jonathan Sacks \u2014 one of the most respected Orthodox Jewish scholars of the modern era \u2014 counted thirty-six such commands in the Torah, with the Talmud counting thirty-six or forty-six depending on how they are measured. He observed that the Torah commands love of the neighbour once, but commands love and protection of the stranger in thirty-six places. His interpretation was precise: God made the Jewish people into the world’s archetypal strangers so that they would fight for the rights of strangers \u2014 their own and those of others, wherever they are, whoever they are \u2014 because though the stranger is not in your image, they are nonetheless in God’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not one of these texts qualifies the obligation by the ethnicity, religion, or political status of the stranger. The stranger is the stranger. The reason given is always the same \u2014 you were strangers in Egypt. The experience of displacement and oppression is not to generate resentment. It is to generate empathy \u2014 the specific moral faculty required to protect those who are now in the same position you once occupied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Palestinian inhabitants of the land \u2014 whether in Gaza, the West Bank, or within Israel’s pre-1967 borders \u2014 are in the position of the stranger and the sojourner in the covenant’s own terms. The covenant that is claimed as the basis of the territorial right is the same covenant that demands their protection, their dignity, and their equal treatment under the law. One standard for citizen and stranger alike. One law for both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To claim the grant while discarding that condition is not honoring the covenant. It is breaking it. And the tradition itself \u2014 in Leviticus and Exodus and Deuteronomy and Numbers, in the prophets, in the Talmud, in the words of its most respected modern scholar \u2014 names the consequences of that with complete clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A covenant with spiritual descendants<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The covenant with Abraham was not made with one people in the modern ethnic or national sense. Paul states in Galatians that the promise was made to Abraham and his seed \u2014 understood not as an ethnic lineage but as all those who share the faith of Abraham. The Islamic tradition places Ibrahim at the foundation of submission to God \u2014 the original principle before the traditions diverged. The covenant was always larger than any single nation or ethnicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The spiritual descendants of Abraham \u2014 in all three traditions \u2014 are still living in and around that land. Jews, Christians, and Muslims each carry a portion of the covenant’s inheritance. None of them holds it exclusively. And all of them are bound by the same conditions \u2014 justice, protection of the stranger, the periodic reset of accumulated inequality, the memory of Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ancient land had a different nature<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Contemporary Zionism projects a modern concept of territorial sovereignty \u2014 absolute borders, military control, permanent national title \u2014 backward onto an ancient covenant that assumed an entirely different understanding of what land is and how it is held.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the ancient Near Eastern world where the covenant was made, land was a community resource held on conditions. The Mesopotamian debt cancellation decrees, the Jubilee, the commons traditions across cultures \u2014 all reflect a world in which no human being held absolute title to the ground beneath their feet. The land belonged to God, or to the gods, or to the community, and was worked by people who held conditional tenure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The modern territorial state \u2014 with its absolute sovereignty, its military force, its permanent private and national title \u2014 is a recent political invention. It cannot be read back into a covenant made three thousand years ago in a world that had no concept of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To claim an ancient divine right to the land while applying a modern concept of absolute territorial sovereignty to that claim is to combine two incompatible frameworks \u2014 and to take the grant from one while discarding the conditions from the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The covenant is indivisible<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a logical point that the contemporary territorial claim cannot escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The modern state of Israel grounds its right to exist \u2014 and its right of return for Jewish people after nearly two thousand years of exile \u2014 in the covenant. The covenant is the foundation. Without it the claim rests on nothing more than military conquest and political arrangement, which are the same grounds any state can claim and which carry no special moral weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But a covenant is an agreement. It has two sides. You cannot invoke one side while discarding the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the covenant gives the Jewish people a right to the land \u2014 if it is powerful enough to ground a territorial claim across two thousand years of exile and the displacement of the people who lived there in the interval \u2014 then it is powerful enough to impose the conditions under which that land is held. The grant and the conditions come from the same source. They are written in the same texts. They cannot be separated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those conditions are not obscure or ambiguous. They are stated with remarkable clarity across Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. One law for citizen and stranger alike. Love the stranger as yourself. Do not subvert the rights of the stranger or the orphan. You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike. God loves the stranger \u2014 you too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Leviticus 26 states the consequences of violating those conditions with equal clarity. The land vomits out its inhabitants. The exile follows the violation as the covenant operating precisely as designed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The argument is therefore simple and comes entirely from within the tradition making the territorial claim:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you invoke the covenant to establish the right, you must accept the covenant in its entirety \u2014 including its obligations toward the stranger, its requirement of equal law for all who dwell in the land, and its stated consequences for those who violate those conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You cannot claim the grant and discard the conditions. The covenant is indivisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not an argument from outside the Jewish tradition. It is the argument the prophets made to the people of Israel in their own time \u2014 holding the people to the covenant’s own terms. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah \u2014 each of them said precisely this, in different words, to the same audience. Holding a people to the conditions of their own covenant is not hostility toward that people. It is the oldest form of ethical reasoning the tradition contains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The covenant was given to a people who had been strangers and slaves. The memory of Egypt was written into it as the reason for everything it demanded. A people who remembered what it was to be the stranger, the dispossessed, the one with no power and no protection \u2014 that people was given the land on the condition that they would never become what Egypt was to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question the covenant puts to the modern state of Israel is not whether Jews have a right to live in the land. It is whether the conditions under which that right is held are being honoured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That question cannot be answered by invoking the covenant. It can only be answered by living it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leviticus 26<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is fair to say that the modern state of Israel is not living up to the conditions set by the covenant with God for tenure in the land of Israel\/Palestine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read in Leviticus 26<\/strong> the penalties that a failure to honour that covenant with God on how to live in the land will impose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 36 Those of you who survive in the lands of their enemies, I will make so fainthearted that the sound of a driven leaf will pursue them, and they shall run as if from the sword, and fall though no one pursues them;<\/p>\n\n\n\n 37 stumbling over one another as if to escape a sword, while no one is after them\u2014so helpless will you be to take a stand against your foes!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Sounds familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I just find this so odd. You make the claim on the land because of the covenant – fair enough – but then you need to play by the rules of the land that constitute the covenant. And there will be penalties for breaking the covenant. That is between God and yourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a claim at the centre of contemporary Zionist politics that deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than simply accepted or rejected on political grounds. The claim is this: God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people through an ancient covenant, and that covenant establishes an absolute and permanent … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2660"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2664,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2660\/revisions\/2664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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