Israel belongs to the Jew

The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people

Israel belongs to the Jew


Well, you obviously know nothing about the history of Israel or the Jews. Should you really wish to know, I suggest that you read these books; From Time Immemorial, Joan Peters, The History of Israel, Howard Sachar and The Middle East, Bernard Lewis.
And yes, Israel belongs to the Jews.

The facts are that the Jews have occupied the land referred to as either Palestine or Israel for over 3 thousand years of recorded history. Sure they have been invaded and ruled over by many different people and empires. In 625 BC, they were invaded and ruled by the Babylonians, then the Medo-Persians in 586 BC, followed by the Greco-Macedonians in 333 BC, the Roman's in 31 BC and in 638 AD they were invaded and occupied by the Muslims.

The Jews did not invade Israel or Palestine, as their forefathers have lived there continuously from time immemorial. Beginning in 1890 AD, many Jews began returning to Israel, based on a promise that they could have their own home land, but they never displaced anyone. In fact the Muslims followed them because Jews began settling in barren unpopulated Israel, on land purchased from absent Arab land owners, and began creating industry, agriculture and economic opportunities. In 1917 the League of Nations decided to create a homeland for the Jews. This intention was confirmed by the Balfour Declaration in November 1917.

The land set aside by the League of Nations and transferred to the administration of Britain included the present land of Israel and the land now known as Jordan. The League of Nations and Britain did not confiscate land inhabited by Arabs and designate it for the Jews. Furthermore Britain mishandled their mandate and allocated the area of Jordan to the Arabs contrary to the intent of the League of Nations. Today, the Jews occupy less than 10% of the land that was originally set aside for them by the League of Nations. Israel was attacked by the Arabs in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and Muslim violence against the Jews continues to this day. The reason for this aggression is quite simple. Muslims believe that the earth belongs to Muhammad and Allah and any land ever occupied and inhabited by Muslims belongs to them forever.


What the Koran says about the land of Israel
Islamic scripture actually recognizes the Jewish link to Israel, tells a British imam



By Simon Rocker, March 19, 2009

Classical Islam accepts there is a divinely ordained bond between the Jewish People and ‘the Holy Land’, say some scholars

According to the Hamas charter, Palestine is an Islamic endowment “for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection” which no one may renounce. The Arab-Israeli conflict is seen as not just a political dispute but an implacably religious one.

But there are Muslim scholars who will tell you that this claim has no basis in the Koran: not only that, but the foundation text of Islam, in fact, recognises the special link between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. “You will find very clearly,” says Sheikh Dr Muhammad Al-Husseini, “that the traditional commentators from the eighth and ninth century onwards have uniformly interpreted the Koran to say explicitly that Eretz Yisrael has been given by God to the Jewish people as a perpetual covenant. There is no Islamic counterclaim to the Land anywhere in the traditional corpus of commentary.”

Dr Al-Husseini is a British imam who teaches a course on the Koran as part of interfaith studies at the Leo Baeck College, the Progressive rabbinic college in Finchley, north London. One of the texts he has taught is the following verse in the Koran (5:21), “O my people! Enter the Holy Land which God has decreed for you, and turn back on your heels otherwise you will be overturned as losers.”

He examines this passage through the eyes of one classic commentator of the Koran, Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838-923), who says the remark is “a narrative from God… concerning the saying of Moses… to his community from among the children of Israel and his order to them according to the order of God to him, ordering them to enter the holy land.”

Al-Tabari, Dr Al-Husseni says, is “our Rashi”, the founder of tafsir, “the science of exegesis” — the Arabic word is similar to pesher, Hebrew for interpretation. “One of the key rules of Islamic exegesis by which Islamic scholarship is bound is that the authority to interpret lies in the hands of the Prophet and of the Prophets’ Companions alone,” he says, “Nobody can go to the text and just freely interpret the text for their own purposes. This is really important… because if the Prophet, or one of his Companions, has given an interpretation, then we are bound by it.”

Just as you find in the Talmud that one rabbi quotes a saying in the name of one of his teachers, so al-Tabari will cite the interpretations of earlier, oral commentators in a chain going back to one of the Prophet Muhammad’s Companions, the ultimate source of authority for that interpretation.

The Muslim commentators may differ over exactly where “the Holy Land” is — one says the area around Mount Sinai, another the Levant. But what is significant, Dr Al-Husseini, is that “they are pointing to the same area — it is not Egypt, Saudi or Iraq.”

The Arabic for “the holy land”, al-ard al-muqaddasa, is close to the Hebrew, eretz kodesh and refers to this piece of land rather than other sites sacred to Muslims. “During the life of the Prophet, there was an enormous territorial ambition to get Makka back from the Makkans,” he says. “There was no territorial ambition to claim Jerusalem, Palestine.

“What happens during his lifetime is what God wants to happen for the Muslim community. His prophecy and his objective was the reclamation of the Islamic holy site which is Makka. If God had decreed that His Prophet should have Jerusalem, then it would have been something that he would have been preoccupied with during his lifetime and he conquered the whole of the Arabian peninsula.

“It was never the case during the early period of Islam…that there was any kind of sacerdotal attachment to Jerusalem as a territorial claim. Jerusalem is holy but Mount Sinai is more holy. Sinai is mentioned far more often, and Jerusalem isn’t actually mentioned by name.” (Jerusalem is alluded to in the phrase “the further mosque”).

Al-Tabari’s commentary also notes that the word “decreed” — kataba in Arabic, related to katav, “written”, in Hebrew — has the connotations of “ordered”: in other words, settling the land was regarded as a mitzvah for the children of Israel. Al-Tabari also observes that the decree is confirmed in al-lawh al-mahfuz, the eternally preserved tablet” — a reference to the Islamic idea that in heaven exists a sacred blueprint from which the Muslim, Christian and Jewish scriptures emanate, hence the covenant with the Jewish people over Israel is everlasting.

Dr Al-Husseini— who stresses his support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — points out that other contemporary Muslim scholars draw attention to this tradition, such as Professor Khaleel Mohammed in San Diego (see: www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~khaleel/) and Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi in Rome (http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/1002.htm).

But he also observes that many Muslims are unfamiliar with al-Tabari’s work because it is mostly untranslated and accessible only to an educated elite who understand Arabic. By contrast, the teachings of 20th-century radicals linked to political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are often widely available in English. Since the militants cannot contradict the Koranic precedent for Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel, they adopt another tactic, Dr Al-Husseini says: they argue that Jews are a wicked people who “must be punished” — hence the spread of antisemitism within the Muslim world. “But no fundamentalist, no matter how hard they try,” he says, “can overrule the existing tradition to say there is, in fact, an Islamic counterclaim to Eretz Yisrael.”

Studying Islam in a Jewish setting

Leo Baeck College, the Progressive rabbinic academy, has long been at the forefront of dialogue between Jews and members of other religions. Interfaith dialogue forms part of its rabbinic training.

Last autumn it launched a weekly, 10-part introduction to the classical study of the Koran, open not only to serving and trainee rabbis but also to Jewish community leaders. It is taught by Shiekh Dr Muhammad Al-Husseini, a Cairo-trained British imam who grew up in Hertfordshire with many Jewish schoolfriends — “I’ve been to more Jewish than Muslim weddings!” he said.

Committed to challenging antisemitism within the Muslim community, he is keen to demonstrate “the common DNA that exists between Judaism and Islam”.