The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has pervaded Zionism since its very first days. Although early Zionists would have preferred to have their dreams of establishing a Jewish state on the Land of Israel exist in a bubble, that isn’t how the reality on the ground allowed for events to transpire. Arabs, later to identify as Palestinians, had been living on the land Jews aimed to create their state on, and Zionists had to shape their dream around the Arabs living in Ottoman rule and then British Mandatory Palestine.
Although Arabs lived on British Mandatory Palestine soil, the Jewish people still maintained the land was exclusively Jewish. Early Zionists said that Jews had full rights to settle, develop and govern the Land of Israel. As founding Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said in a conversation with Ariel Sharon, then a general in the Israel Defense Forces, in the early 1950s, “Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn’t matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn’t matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. …. In the Land of Israel was born the Jewish nation. There came an order to kill the religious and social spirit of the people. … [A]nd after the nation turned back to its land with strength, it protected it steadfastly. We do not recognize the right of the Palestinian Arabs to rule the country.”
Jewish claims to the land of Israel are multifaceted, as are the arguments against Jewish ownership of the land. The foundation of the debate about who has the rights to the land and who gets to govern the land centers around what factors qualify for national ownership of the land. Unquestionably, there are both private Jewish and Palestinian owners of land in Israel. The debate, however, isn’t about individual ownership but about which nation has the right to control the land.
There are three central arguments for Jewish ownership of the land. The first is primarily a religious argument that uses the text from the Bible to demonstrate Jewish rights to the land. As King David wrote in Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein.” God decides who governs the land, and the Jews maintain God gave it to them to govern.
The Jews also point to their continuous presence in the Land of Israel since the times of Joshua, some 3,000 years ago. While the Jews were conquered and exiled off the land by the Romans around 2,000 years ago, the Jews weren’t all exiled and a small community remained in the land. In fact, the Jewish community there was a strong one until the Arab conquest of the land in the 700s. The Jewish argument for Israel isn’t just that Jews lived here many centuries ago; it’s that the Jews have lived in the land for thousands of years and never left. The uninterrupted historical connection to the Land of Israel is another qualifying factor for the Jewish people to govern the Land of Israel.
Thirdly, the international community has come to a collective understanding that they’ve codified into “international law.” Under international law, the Jewish people have the right to govern the Land of Israel. The Balfour Declaration declared England’s intention to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan that divided British Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and the acceptance of the Jewish state into the United Nations were all factors that contributed to the Jewish people’s rights to the Land of Israel.
Mostafa Hussein, an assistant professor at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, said: “The British took over Palestine, and they doubly promised the land to two nationalist movements. They promised Arab nationalists to take Palestine as part of a larger Arab state. And they promised Zionists—at the same time—a part of Palestine to establish a national home for Jews. The French and the British divided the spoils of the Ottoman Empire among themselves, and they promised their allies, Arab nationalists and Zionists, territorial compensations if they were to support them during World War I.”
Not everyone agrees that Jews have an exclusive right to the land. Many people consider that both Jews and Palestinians have equal rights to the land. Mark I. Pinsky, a journalist and author, wrote: “At the risk of being unduly reductive, this struggle is one of territory; literally, the soil—the soil of homeland, not just dirt. From the perspective of 30,000 feet and 3,000 years of history, no one has an exclusive claim to the Holy Land.”
There are even Jews who don’t consider the Jewish people as having exclusive rights to Israel. So-called “anti-Zionist Jews,” they have stated that Palestinians have a historical claim to Israeli land, and some do not even support the idea of a two-state solution claiming that would create other problems. The Museum of the Palestinian People wrote, “Palestinians have farmed the land for centuries, and their connection to the land is a powerful symbol of rootedness.”
Some people—Jews, Zionists and Israelis included—point to the Palestinian narrative of “rootedness” to the land as a counterweight to all of the Jewish claims to the land. Yet, even this group would have to agree that the Palestinians have had every opportunity for an independent state and repeatedly turned it down. From the U.N. Partition Plan to the Oslo Accords to offers to end the conflict through a two-state solution, Palestinians have consistently chosen violence and terrorism over a peaceful resolution with Israel. For all their claims to the land, Palestinians don’t take the actions necessary to accept it.
There is no reason for Jews to qualify their claim to the Land of Israel simply to be politically correct. Zionism stands, first and foremost, for the rights of the Jewish people to govern and control the Land of Israel. Once Zionists qualify their claims to the Land of Israel, its axioms become obscured and difficult to articulate.
