By Kevin O'Neil
The Report pompously entitled "The Inheritance of
Abraham? A Report on the Promised Land" by the Church of Scotland, in
which the committee states their opinion that the Jews have no inherent
right to the Holy Land, is hopelessly flawed with faulty theology and
bitter prejudice. The authors must be either ignorant or deceived or
both.
I offer the following thoughts in response.
The
authors' method in approaching the noble study of Biblical hermeneutics,
if adopted, would make nonsense of huge swathes of both the Old and New
Testaments and render the surviving texts vague and unreliable for any
practical purpose. With them, words don't really mean what they say,
they may even mean the opposite, we just can't be sure. The rock becomes
a swamp, a shifting and untrustworthy sand. These so-called
scholars appear mortified at the suggestion that some poor souls may
actually believe these things to be understood literally. They have
passed on from that primitive stage, and besides, everything
is subjective, the text means whatever you decide it means, if it works
for you, then fine, go for it. A far cry from the Covenanter days of
17c Scotland.
I pity a church
and, particularly, the ordinary people who compose such a church, that
would so irresponsibly misuse God's Word and fill peoples' minds with
doubts and uncertainties instead of faith and confidence. This is very
serious. When God says that the Land, Haaretz, will be
given to Abraham's descendants, as He does in all the verses on which
the authors try to cast doubt, He safeguards against the danger of
spiritualising this Land by instructing Abraham to physically
look
north, south, east and west, and that everything he could see was
included in what God meant by the Land. At another time God said, get up
and walk on it, that's the Land, the place you can feel under your
feet! And yet another time God gives actual geographical reference
points, a sort of GPS. The Land is modern day Israel, including Judea and Samaria (the misnamed West Bank), and a whole lot more besides. When
God says, as He does in most of the references given, that the Land
would be given forever, it seems to elude the minds of the sophisticated
ones that the Almighty meant exactly what He said and that forever
means forever. It's a sad fact that human beings may not always mean
what they say but we may rest assured that God has more integrity than
do His creatures. The Hebrew word translated forever is olam and is defined in Strong's Dictionary as follows: Long duration, antiquity, futurity, for ever, everlasting, evermore, perpetual, and so on. What is it that the authors of the Report don't understand here? If they doubt that olam
is forever then they must doubt the eternality of God's Kingship and
the Messiah's Kingdom, for the very same word is used with respect to
these also, Jer.10:10, Isa.9:7, etc. Or are we to think that their
reasoning only applies to God's promise of the Land to the Jews? The
authors' speak derisively of a literalistic interpretation of the Word
of God as though we are now too sophisticated to believe it for what it
says, we must treat it, as it were, with a pinch of salt. Contemptible
arrogance we call it and lacking in the true fear of God, which is the
very beginning of any wisdom. Regarding the attitude of the
Report to the people who have cleverly adopted the name of Palestinians I
hardly know where to begin, the authors' ignorance beggars belief. The
following brief points are all I can manage, others have done sterling
work in refuting these things from a practical and logistical point of
view, their work is readily available online.

A
little definition of just who the Palestinians are will be useful being
as they appear to be such objects of admiration to the authors. The
Palestinians were regarding themselves as Syrians as recently as 1939
and it is well-documented that they are the descendants of any number of
nations including Afghani, Algerian, Arab, Bosnian, Copt, Egyptian, and
so on, almost ad infinitum. The term Palestinian was first
used in 1964 in Moscow when the PLO was established and its founding
document was drafted. In fact, ironically, the name is derived from a
root meaning Dividers, Penetrators or Invaders. This is all
fairly elementary history. But the major point is this: the name was an
invention which was made with the purpose of lending these
non-indigenous people a false history and a supposed link with the land
once known as Palestine. And the plan has largely worked, the UN, most
of the media, and these authors have swallowed it hook line and sinker.
I
would hope that the authors are at least aware that the land known for
1400 years as Israel suddenly became known as Palestine because the
Roman Emperor, Hadrian, sought to erase all Jewish/Israeli connection to
the area after their revolt in 135AD. The actual name chosen was Syria Palaestina,
and was a vindictive reference to that inveterate enemy of Israel, the
Philistines, a sea-faring people who were of Hellenistic origin, not
Arab. So, perhaps the authors are confusing these
ancient
sea-peoples with the modern day Arab Palestinians and therefore
attributing to them an ancient link with the land. But this is an
inexcusable error from so-called scholars. Let it be stated once and
for all (if only) that today's Philistia, otherwise known as Gaza, is
illegally occupied by a hybrid people who chose to call themselves
Palestinian in 1964. In short, the invention of the indigenous
Palestinian, constantly referred to by the authors, is pure
myth and is nothing but a weapon devised by the Arab world in the hope
of destroying the Jewish State of Israel.
The
briefest research would have alerted the authors' suspicions regarding
the authenticity of these people because they would soon have stumbled
over the fact that not only is there no specific Palestinian history or
culture but neither have there been any concrete archeological finds to
validate their claim to the land. The binding agent between these
recently-invented people is their zeal in implementing the Koranic
injunction to dominate every culture in which they come into contact and
soon thereafter to re-write history to suit their
purposes. This manifesto, posing as a great world religion, begins and
ends with Israel, the despised Jews whom their so-called sacred
literature describe as 'apes and pigs'. The 4,000 year struggle between
Jacob and Esau goes on.
The
following fact may also be unknown to the authors: Israel is about the
size of Wales, much less than a third of the authors' homeland of
Scotland. But unlike Scotland, Israel is not surrounded by tempestuous
but otherwise indifferent seas, but by an Islamic-dominated landmass a
thousand times its size, containing some 422 million people the vast
majority of whom long for the day when the Jews are no more. Yet we are
expected to sympathise with supposedly dispossessed Arabs.
And what of the origin of the Arab Naqba, the Day of the Catastrophe to which the authors refer?
Five Arab
nations declared a war of annihilation in 1948 on the fledgling State
of Israel promising the Arab inhabitants of the land, who were not at
that time even called Palestinians, certain victory and advising them to
vacate their homes until the Jews were exterminated. The Jews invited
the Arabs to stay and to continue living alongside them until the war
was settled, and those that did stay have children and grandchildren in
the land to this very day. However, an estimated 700,000 took the
advice of their Arab 'deliverers' and vacated their homes to await the
destruction of the Jews, a destruction that never came. Their
descendants can be found intermarried with the other races that go to
make up the inhabitants of Gaza and the so-called West Bank. The true
catastrophe for them was in preferring Arab promises over that of Jewish
guidance.
An interesting fact
is that practically exactly the same amount of Jews, 700,000, were made
refugees by the Arab nations at this time and yet we don't have a
Jewish refugee problem, only a Palestinian refugee problem. The reason
is that the Jewish State, dirt-poor at the time and struggling for
survival, nonetheless welcomed their fellow Jews with open arms. It was a
shame that the Arab nations didn't do the same for their brothers
who had fled the land on their advice, preferring to use them as pawns
in a bigger game.
Space forbids
us to address fully the subject of ethnic cleansing that the authors
sneeringly suggest God 'apparently' instructed the Jews to carry out
during Biblical times. Suffice it to say that, if any of the Canaanite
child-sacrificing tribes present in the land forsook the
depressingly-named Roasting Place, Tophet, and behaved
themselves like civilised people, they were permitted to remain. Modern
day Israel is a testimony to this in that Christians, Copts, Muslims,
Zoroastrians, Bahaists, et al, live together with the Jewish
majority, untroubled by authorities. Do the authors think for one wild
second that, if the land was turned over to the Arabs, all these groups
would be permitted to live together? Can pigs fly? The notion is
laughable and the Muslim-only lands of the Middle East and
Africa illustrate clearly who are the ones guilty of ethnic cleansing.
In southern Sudan alone I understand that an unbelievable 7 million
souls have perished by the sword of Islam in recent decades.
Enough said on this desolate subject.
One
final observation, our advice to anyone who is a member of the Church
of Scotland: If the overall premise of this Report is
officially accepted, namely, that the Jews have no right to the Land of
Israel, then we would advise you to put your trust in the God of Israel
and leave the establishment. This Report is a form of curse on
the descendants of Abraham and will inevitably bring a curse on those
who are associated with it.
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