Facing a soaring death toll from Israel's renewed offensive in southern Gaza, the Biden administration is trying to pressure its ally to minimize civilian deaths while stopping well short of the kind of measures that might force it to listen, such as threatening to restrict military aid.
Because these conversations always go back to that. We can go back and forth about who lived where, and when, and it will always lead back to “the Bible says that land is theirs.” Because when you get down to it, that’s the only claim they really have. And even if you did want to go back that far, they still took that land from someone else.
If that’s not where it was going, then there’s no valid argument whatsoever that Israelis were there first. It’s just not true.
I don’t give a shit about the Bible, but I would say that a bunch of Jews legally bought a bunch of land in the late Ottoman period, a lot more legally immigrated during the British mandate after WW1 (which was wrong, I’d say; the land had been promised to the Hashemites before Sykes-Picot to create a unified Arab state in exchange for Arab support against the Ottomans, but the British and French reneged), then ethnic tensions exploded as everyone did a lot of violence to everyone. In 1947, a UN partition plan was proposed to create two states; the Jews accepted, the Arabs didn’t, and war broke out. Once fighting had ended and the first lines were drawn, we have a state of Israel and the mess has properly begun.
None of this involves the Bible.