October 1, 2005

ISRAEL, the new Jewish state, created in 1948, is regarded by the Zionists as re-occupation of their historic ‘ancestral’ home. It was occupied by dislodging the Arab inhabitants and through military operations during 1948-67 period. At present, its location is almost the same as of Biblical Canaan, the Palestinian plains, up to 200 kms in width east of the Mediterranean coast and 300 to 500 kms north of Mount Sinai, irrigated by the River Jordan.

This was the territory which the Israelites had conquered during Prophet Moses’ ministry in about 1210 BC, where they had taken refuge after the ‘exodus’ from Egypt in and around 1250 BC. Prior to this, they wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert where they had to live on food provided, providentially, in the shape of “large flocks of quails and evaporated dew”, or ‘manna’.

The Jews “became weary of one kind of food”, as the Holy Quran describes it, “and asked Moses to call upon his God to bring forth for them earthly produce like herbs, cucumbers, corn, lentils and onions” (Surah Al-Baqra: Ayat 61). It was then, according to the Bible’s ‘exodus’ account, corroborated by the Quran’s Ayat 21 of Surah Al-Maidah, that Prophet Moses told them “to go into the holy land as ordained for them by Allah, but not to turn back in flight.”

The Old Testament tells us that the Israelites were encouraged by God to enter ‘the holy land’ in these words: “I will send an angel ahead of you to protect you as you travel and to bring you to the plains which I have prepared .... the land of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I will destroy them .... I will make the people who oppose you afraid of me. I will drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites and the Hittites as you advance. I will not drive them out within one year, if I did, the land will become deserted.... Instead, I will drive them out little by little until there are enough of you to take possession of the land,” (Exodus 24:20-31).

The divine promise, according to Exodus 24:32, was that: “I will make the borders of your land extend from the Gulf of Aqaba to the River Euphrates and from the Mediterranean Sea to the desert.”

The way the Zionists and the modern Jewish diaspora have set up their present state of Israel by gradual incursion, advancing and occupying Arab lands “little by little” — the term used in the text excerpted from the Bible’s Book of Exodus — gives an impression that the creation of today’s state of Israel is a replay of the establishment of the original habitat of Israelites by slow and steady conquest of the coastal plains of Biblical Palestine 12 centuries before the Christian era.

What is worrying, therefore, is the probable threat of Israel’s horizontal expansion of its borders from the Gulf of Aqaba to the River Euphrates and beyond, as is deemed to have been promised by the Almighty to the Israelite refugees from Egypt three thousand years ago, a promise that was not fulfilled then.

Why the so-called divine promise remained unfulfilled and, instead, why the Israelites had to face the humiliation and hardship of their homes being occupied by foreign forces and they had to contend with evictions and exiles has been explained at length in the Holy Quran, which is corroborated by recorded facts of history, as we will see later. These facts belie their claim of being “a chosen race” and permanent inheritors of the Holy Land (or Baitul Maqdis according to Muslims).

The misdeeds of the Israelites, right from the time they were delivered from Pharaoh’s tyrannical rule, have been catalogued by the Quran — their violation of Sabbath restriction (2:65), their race consciousness being the cause of their refusal to believe in non-Hebrew Prophets and slaying of Prophets (2:91), their indulging in witchcraft and sorcery in Solomon’s kingdom (2:102) and so on.

For such failings and faults, they were scourged twice by God’s will, and the Quran refers to these events thus: “God decreed for the Israelites that they will work corruption (fitna) in the earth twice and they will become great tyrants. So, when the time for the first of the two decrees came, God roused against them a mighty people who ravaged their country and fulfilled the Divine threat. Then God gave them once again an opportunity to recover aiding them with wealth, children and soldiery... But when the time for the second decree came God roused against them other people to ravage them and enter their Temple, exactly as previously and to lay waste all that they had conquered” (17:4-8).

The first scourge that visited them in their two kingdoms, one each in northern and southern Palestine, was between 722 BC (when the Assyrians ransacked Israel, the ‘northern state’) expelling them from there and sending them in forced exile to Babylon (modern Iraq), and 587 B.C. (when Nebuchadnezzar overran the ‘southern state’, Judea) pillaging its capital at Jerusalem destroying Solomon’s Temple. Then, as the Quran says, they were allowed to recover. The respite they got was through the benevolence of Cyrus, the great and just Persian ruler, (regarded by many Muslim scholars as Zulqarnain) who conquered Babylon and Palestine in 539 B.C., or 60 years after Nebuchadnezzar’s onslaught who had sent them in forced exile to Babylon. It was Cyrus, who is mentioned in the Old Testament as a kind and benevolent ruler, who ended their exile and allowed them to return to Palestine and rebuild Solomon’s Temple.

The Jewish claim that the whole of Palestine is their ‘promised homeland’ is a myth. Had it been so, they would not have suffered ignominy in their own kingdom of Israel and eviction from the whole of Palestine till their complete dispersal from there in 70 AD, when the Roman generals, perhaps, as a reaction to the Jewish role in persecuting Christ and then his followers, took over Jerusalem from Jewish King Herod’s successors, demolished Solomon’s Temple, the pride of all the Israelites, and drove them out of Palestine, ridding the Holy Land of Jewish presence for about two millennia. It is only now, after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and rise of Christian European powers that the Israelites have succeeded in re-establishing themselves on a part of Biblical Palestine.

The Jewish claim on Palestine as their ancestral home is also wrong. Hazrat Ibrahim (Abraham), the common ancestor of semitic Jews and semitic Arabs was not a native of Palestine. He was born in about 2,100 B.C. in the prosperous city of Ur in Nimrod’s Babylon. Its ruins exist at some distance from the conflict-ridden Baghdad. Abraham was the first Prophet after Noah (according to the Quran and the Bible) to have been assigned the task of spreading the entirely new concept of the Divine Being — the One and Only God Who has no physical form and appearance and is yet Omnipresent, Omniscient and Omnipotent — the concept common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

At that time, about 4,000 years ago, the Middle East, as it is called now, comprised the valleys of the rivers Tigris, Euphrates and Nile, and was the centre of human population, culture and learning. Prophet Abraham, in the course of proselytizing (tableeghi) work, journeyed from his birth place (present Iraq) to Syria, Palestine, Egypt and peninsular Arabia and appointed his own hand-picked persons in various areas as his representatives — Hazrat Loot (Lot) in modern Jordan, Isaia in Syria, which included Palestine, and his eldest son Hazrat Ismail (Ismael) in Arabia proper.

Hazrat Ibrahim’s progeny from his other son, Hazrat Ishaque (Isaac) whose son Hazrat Yaqub (Jacob), better known as Israel, lived in Greater Syria from 1900 to 1700 B.C. (the dates are approximate as given in Jewish Scripture). His entire family comprising 12 tribes, migrated to Egypt in 1700 BC where he died. But his body was got embalmed by his son Hazrat Yusuf (Joseph son of Jacob), who was “adviser to the King of Egypt” and was brought to Palestine for burial in Hebron called Al-Khalil by the Palestinian Arabs as Hazrat Ibrahim, Khalilullah or Biblical Abraham is buried there.

But the Israelites, who were enslaved by Egyptians continued to live in servitude in Egypt till 1250 BC when they were rescued by Hazrat Musa (Moses) and brought to Palestine from where they were dispersed by the Romans in 70 A.D. for nearly 2000 years.

They have set up a new state of Israel, reviving the old ‘northern kingdom’, and appear to be in the process of reviving the old ‘southern kingdom’ of Judea on the Western bank of river Jordan with Jerusalem (Al-Quds of Muslims) as its capital.

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