The first proof Israel
has a right to the land they now occupy is because of all of the archeological
evidence. All the archeological evidence supports it. Every time there is a dig
in Israel,
it does nothing but support the fact that Israelis have had a presence there
for 3,000 years. The coins, the cities, the pottery, the culture -- there are
other people, groups that are there, but there is no mistaking the fact that
Israelis have been present in that land for 3,000 years. It predates any claims
that other peoples in the region may have.
The ancient Philistines are
extinct. Many other ancient peoples are extinct. They do not have the unbroken
line to this date that the Israelis have. Even the Egyptians of today are not
racial Egyptians of 2,000, 3,000 years ago. They are primarily an Arab people.
The land is called Egypt,
but they are not the same racial and ethnic stock as the old Egyptians of the
ancient world. The Israelis are in fact descended from the original Israelites.
The second proof of Israel's right
to the land is their historic right. History supports it totally and
completely. We know there has been an Israel
up until the time of the Roman Empire. The
Romans conquered the land. Israel
had no homeland, although Jews were allowed to live there. They were driven
from the land in two dispersions: One in 70 A.D. and the other in 135 A.D. But
there was always a Jewish presence in the land.
The Turks, who took over about
700 years ago and ruled the land up until about World War One, had control. Then
the land was conquered by the British. The Turks entered World War One on the
side of Germany.
The British knew they had to do something to punish Turkey,
and also to break up that empire that was going to be a part of the whole
effort of Germany
in World War One. So the British sent troops against the Turks in the Holy Land.
One of the generals who was
leading the British armies was a man named Allenby. Allenby was a
Bible-believing Christian. He carried a Bible with him everywhere he went and
he knew the significance of Jerusalem.
The night before the attack against Jerusalem
to drive out the Turks, Allenby prayed that God would allow him to capture the
city without doing damage to the holy places.
That day, Allenby sent World
War One biplanes over the city of Jerusalem
to do a reconnaissance mission. You have to understand that the Turks had at
that time never seen an airplane. So there they were, flying around. They
looked in the sky and saw these fascinating inventions and did not know what
they were, and they were terrified by them.
Then they were told they were
going to be opposed by a man named Allenby the next day, which means, in their
language, "man sent from God" or "prophet from God." They
dared not fight against a prophet from God, so the next morning, when Allenby
went to take Jerusalem,
he went in and captured it without firing a single shot.
The British government was
grateful to Jewish people around the world, particularly to one Jewish chemist
who helped them manufacture niter. Niter is an ingredient that was used in
nitroglycerin which was sent over from the New World.
But they did not have a way of getting it to England. The German U-boats were
shooting on the boats, so most of the niter they were trying to import to make
nitroglycerin was at the bottom of the ocean. But a man named Weitzman, a
Jewish chemist, discovered a way to make it from materials that existed in England. As a result,
they were able to continue that supply.
The British at that time said
they were going to give the Jewish people a homeland. That is all written down
in history. They were gratified that the Jewish people, the bankers, came
through and helped finance the war.
The homeland that Britain said it would set aside consisted of all
of what is now Israel and
all of what was then the nation of Jordan -- the whole thing. That was
what Britain
promised to give the Jews in 1917. In the beginning, there was some Arab
support for this action. There was not a huge Arab population in the land at
that time, and there is a reason for that. The land was not able to sustain a
large population of people. It just did not have the development it needed to
handle those people, and nobody really wanted this land. It was considered to
be worthless land.
Mark Twain -- Samuel Clemens
-- took a tour of Palestine
in 1867. This is how he described that land. We are talking about Israel now. He
said: "A desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over
wholly to weeds. A silent, mournful expanse. We never saw a human being on the
whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and
the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the
country."
Where was this great
Palestinian nation? It did not exist. It was not there. Palestinians were not
there. Palestine was a region named by the
Romans, but at that time it was under the control of Turkey, and there was no large mass
of people there because the land would not support them.
This is the report that the
Palestinian Royal Commission, created by the British, made. It quotes an
account of the conditions on the coastal plain along the Mediterranean
Sea in 1913. The Palestinian Royal Commission said:
"The road leading from Gaza to the north was
only a summer track, suitable for transport by camels or carts. No orange
groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached the Yavnev
village. Houses were mud. Schools did not exist. The western part toward the
sea was almost a desert. The villages in this area were few and thinly
populated. Many villages were deserted by their inhabitants."
That was 1913.
The French author Voltaire
described Palestine
as "a hopeless, dreary place." In short, under the Turks the land
suffered from neglect and low population. That is a historic fact. The nation
became populated by both Jews and Arabs because the land came to prosper when
Jews came back and began to reclaim it. If there had never been any
archaeological evidence to support the rights of the Israelis to the territory,
it is also important to recognize that other nations in the area have no
longstanding claim to the country either.
Did you know that Saudi Arabia was not created until 1913, Lebanon until
1920? Iraq did not exist as
a nation until 1932, Syria
until 1941. The borders of Jordan
were established in 1946 and Kuwait
in 1961. Any of these nations that would say Israel is only a recent arrival
would have to deny their own rights as recent arrivals as well. They did not
exist as countries. They were all under the control of the Turks.
Historically, Israel gained
its independence in 1948.
