Now that I’ve stuck my hand in the boiling oil, listen up.

We’ll start with the principle I’m building off of, then do a short analysis of Israel’s status in light of that principle.

The Principle

The national right-to-inhabit (and the concurrent right to self-govern) is founded on continued inhabitance and stewardship. In other words, this property right is gained like all property rights: by exercise of stewardship in a particular fashion. National property rights, of course, require national stewardship (whereas individual property rights require individual stewardship). The requirement of inhabitancy to create a right of inhabiting, despite what it may seem, does not make colonization or similar efforts unavoidably immoral; in the absence of a better claim or by the agreement of the people with the better claim, a nation can gain a sufficient right to inhabit simply by setting down stakes in an area.

Thus far for foundational principles.

Israel

1. Israel’s property right, asserted, has two components: ancient right (founded on occupancy and Divine mandate), interrupted; and current occupancy, of limited extent.
   1. The Divine mandate has lapsed; the whole world was given to the people of God as their fief (Is. 66:18-21; Matt. 28:18-20), a promise expanding and superseding the Jewish claim in part.
      1. The great supersession was in their expulsion at A.D. 70, which vitiates not only their theological but their customary by-stewardship claim, as God stripped the peculiar stewardship of the Israelite land from Israel. If there is a possibility of reversal, it is not within the current Israeli nation, as the possibility requires repentance and salvation (Rom. 9,11).
      2. Even if you deny my partial preterism, the Divine mandate of the land to Israel historically rests on their righteousness (Deut. 27-28), a trait manifestly not present in the mixture of secularism and heresy which is the Jewish state. Messianic Jews have a much better claim to the land than the current claimants.
      3. The mandate vis a vis Canaan included a right to expel Canaanites, but the mandate did not include a right to expel the current inhabitants of Palestine/ Israel.
2. The non-Israelite inhabitants of Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding areas have a property right to it of significant ancienty, tradition, and strength. In other words, they have been stewarding this land as a nation for generations, which counts for a lot.
   1. This claim is not vitiated by the sentence of execution passed against Canaan. The people groups currently in the land are religiously, ethnically, genetically, and culturally different. They are different nations.
      1. Further, they have not reached the intolerable level of sin Canaan did; Christians can and do live in these countries, if often at some risk.
3. Claims vary in strength, but a complete claim may be termed ‘perfect’
4. The current occupants of the land have a perfect claim, by virtue of the long inhabitance mentioned above, which only clear Divine dispossession can dislodge and which no Divine dispossession has dislodged (see inapplicability of the anti-Canaan mandate).
   1. The Divine mandate is not exclusively in favor of the Jews insofar as it applies.
      1. It is certain that some Jewish heritage is among these people.
      2. It is an established fact that many of these people are Christians, and therefore more closely heirs of the land-covenant with Israel than the secular Israeli state.
5. The Israeli claim to land not currently Israeli is at best equal to the perfect claim of the current occupants. Perfection cannot be exceeded.
   1. Their claim is certainly worse, as the perfect claim has long occupancy, while Israel’s ‘occupancy’ is long-lapsed and relies on an occasionally tenuous connection between those Jews and these Jews, between the Jews who at least ostensibly worshiped God and these which, as a rule and as a people, have rejected Him. The two people are significantly different, and the current people has long been no steward of the land.
      1. If you deny the possibility that long absence vitiates a people’s property right (without destroying it), you need to recognize that significant parts of the United States ought to be given over to various tribes, insofar as they are still culturally distinct. Or you can argue that the descendants currently alive are materially distinct from their ancestors, but I just used that argument also in the Jewish context, so it saves Israel not.
   2. Their claim by Divine mandate, as stated above, is also weak at best.
6. The strongest claim entitles a people to run their own land; two equal claims cannot coexist but are not perfectly exclusive
   1. Claims are not immediately exclusive, in the sense that two peoples can coexist, the matter of fact is that (I’m repeating myself) two peoples who coexist will in some way merge, even if only by developing a strict caste relationship. Nevertheless, while two peoples coexist and to the extent their merge remains mechanical rather than chemical (not to say genetic, because that’s imperfectly relevant), one people has the stronger claim, a claim which ought to be respected.
   2. The matter of fact, however, is that perfect equality of claims is impossible, and two simultaneous perfect claims are impossible without the two peoples having synthesized into something of a union, however uneasy, which new union possesses the claim.
7. Israel having the weaker claim on land not long occupied by it, it has no right to press that claim by any means except petition and trade. Coercion is entirely outside its right and must be regarded as aggression rather than reclamation.
   1. The nation has a right to land it has occupied for some time, even if that right was obtained by conquest in the distant past. Land recently obtained, however, likely belongs more to the people from whom it was obtained (by conquest).

God bless.