“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
The chant is heard, accompanied by flags representing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), wherever angry Muslims and their left-leaning supporters gather in Europe and America to protest Israeli “occupation” of “their” land.
The river is the Jordan, flowing south from the mountains of Lebanon to the Dead Sea, and the sea is the Mediterranean that forms the western boundary of a small patch of land where the nation of Israel resides.
The inconvenient truth behind the anger and activism is that there never was, and never will be, a nation named Palestine—but there will always be an Israel! It is a truth so confounding to the Muslim world that the war to establish Palestine in Israel’s stead will not end until Jesus Christ returns to claim His throne in Jerusalem.
A Hollywood movie released in 1961 perfectly captures in its opening the impulse behind Muslim anger that will not be quenched. Starring a very young and handsome Charlton Heston (now deceased), as El Cid, a Spanish hero who lived over 1,000 years ago, the story begins with the arrival of a Muslim war lord from North Africa who rages against fellow Muslims for their lack of aggressiveness in fighting the Spanish. The aim, he says, is to conquer Spain, then Europe, then the whole world, for Allah.
Given the political correctness of our time, no Hollywood production would dare to repeat that scene today!
The source of the conflict for El Cid has not changed for the world in which we now live. Over 4,000 years ago God appeared to Abraham and bequeathed to him and to his descendants the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:3), a territorial area occupied by various tribal kingdoms often identified in Scripture as Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.
It was the area later conquered by Joshua and the Israelites, where David established his kingdom and Solomon greatly expanded it.
From that day to this, Israelites (Jews) have lived there. Kingdoms rose and fell, Israel (and the later offshoot, Judah) was conquered many times, by Assyrians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans until—seventy years after the birth of Jesus Christ—what was left of the nation was finally banished from the land by Romans who ruled there from about 60BC to 400AD. The Jerusalem temple was destroyed, and Jews were scattered amongst the nations of the world.
But a small remnant remained and centuries passed while Jerusalem and its surrounding areas fell under the control of the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire (400 to 1450), invading Muslim armies, the Crusaders, then the Turks (the Muslim Ottoman Empire, 1450 to 1917) and then the British in 1917. In all, Jerusalem has been conquered and recaptured 44 times throughout its history. It has been destroyed twice.
The name "Palestine" dates to the Philistines, a sea-faring people related to the ancient Greeks. It became the name of a province under the rule of the Eastern Roman Empire and has since been associated with the coastal strip of land stretching south from Lebanon to Gaza on the border with Egypt. The population there was a mix of Arabs, Jews and the descendants of various conquering armies.
The British maintained control of “Palestine” under a commission from the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations) until 1948. When the British mandate ended in 1948 a war broke out between Jews and Arabs. It had been simmering for a long time, fueled by a steady influx of Jews from all over the world to their Promised Land following the “Balfour Declaration”, a letter written in November 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour that viewed with favor the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, while also stating that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities there.
(See Part Two next week: The Miracle of Israel’s Rebirth).