What is the morality of American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Discussing this question usually raises a second question: Who has a greater moral right to the land? How one answers the latter question greatly influences how one evaluates the morality of America's actions in the conflict. Palestinians maintain that until they either fled or were driven off their land during the 1947-49 war, they had owned the land either privately or in common and therefore still have a moral right to it.  Many Israelis, other Jews, and some non-Jews maintain that Jews have a prior and stronger moral right than do Palestinians to this same land. Their claims are based in part on (a) biblical stories of events they believe occurred between about 1800 and 500 B.C., and on (b) the history of the Jews between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 135. They maintain that the Bible is the Jews' "deed of ownership" to the land of Canaan. For instance, the Jewish National Fund uses the expression, "...the Bible, which is the Jewish People's 'Deed of Ownership' of the Land of Israel...."  This chapter explores the question: Does the Bible give today's Jewish people a "deed of ownership" to this land?

I. The Historical Accuracy in the Old Testament.

   How one answers that last question depends greatly on how historically accurate one considers the pertinent books of the Jewish Scriptures, the Old Testament. We will look at three major positions: those of what may be coined the literalists, the moderate historicalists, and the reductionists.
   1. Literalists include Jewish and Christian fundamentalists. Some theologically very conservative Jews and Christians also embrace literalism. Typical literalists believe that each word of the Bible is literally true and historically accurate. Literalists tend to equate both God's inspiration of the human biblical authors and God's own authorship of the Bible with historical accuracy. Moreover, they tend to equate all parts of the Bible that are expressed in narrative style with history as history is understood in a modern western sense. Therefore narratives which at first glance seem to be historical are understood by literalists as certainly historically accurate. To question this would be, for literalists, to question God's authorship of the Bible and God's inspiration of the human biblical authors. Some literalists may occasionally bend their own rules. For instance, some believe that the universe was created not in six days of twenty-four hours each but in six periods of time according to the sequence outlined in the Book of Genesis. Usually, however, literalists hold that "if the Bible says it, it says it; end of discussion." Therefore the promises that God is portrayed as making to Abraham regarding Canaan are to be understood literally. For typical literalists the Bible is for Jews a "deed of ownership" to that land.
   2. Moderate historicalists include many mainline Protestant, Jewish and Catholic scripture scholars, many archaeologists, and people who consider their interpretations of events portrayed in the Bible as reasonable. They do not equate either God's inspiration of the Bible's human authors or God's own authorship of the Bible with its historical accuracy. Nor do they equate biblical concepts of history with modern western ideas of history. Thus they feel free to question the historical accuracy of some biblical passages, if they judge that this is warranted, without compromising their own faith either in the Bible itself or in God as its author. Moderate historicalists do not think that their present conclusions are necessarily fully accurate or the final word but rather the most plausible in the light of information they now have. They extensively use data that has come to light in Mideast archaeological excavations during the past 150 years. This includes a vast amount of information regarding ancient literature, cultures, trade, migration patterns, farming methods, livestock production, weather patterns (including periods of drought and plentiful rainfall), military expeditions, development of tool making and housing construction, and religious beliefs and practices.
   Moderate historicalists try to synthesize this data with the Bible. From this synthesis they attempt to reconstruct, insofar as they can, a history of the Hebrews from the nineteenth century B.C. through the first century A.D. Moderate historicalists maintain that the Bible's portrayals of events have varying degrees of historical value and must at least be considered part of the data when one is trying to reconstruct Hebrew history. As noted below, moderate historicalists hold positions that raise serious problems for those who claim that the Bible is a "deed of ownership" to Canaan.
   3. Reductionists are similar to moderate historicalists but tend to assign less historical value to the Bible's portrayals of events. They rely more heavily, if not exclusively, on non-biblical data in trying to construct a history of Palestine's people. Reductionists have become more prominent since the mid-1970s. They do not hold identical positions among themselves. Reductionists agree that there are literary sources for the Pentateuch (the Bible's first five books), for the Old Testament's "historical" books from Joshua through Kings II, and for the books of the older prophets. How-ever, reductionists tend to think that these sources were developed much later than moderate historicalists think. Reductionists hold other positions that raise even more serious problems than those raised by moderate historicalists for those who claim that the Bible is today's Jewish people's "deed of ownership" to Canaan.
   Examining these positions more fully can help one understand how they relate to that claim of a "deed." First, at the risk of oversimplifying, these are some representative positions of moderate historicalists:

II. Abram and His World, 2000-1750 B.C.

   Abram (Abraham), a central character in the claim that the Bible is the Jews' "deed of ownership" to Canaan, is portrayed in Genesis as the Hebrews' key ancestor. To the extent that he may be historical he is thought to have lived between 2000 and 1750 B.C. According to Genesis, Abram was from Ur in southern Mesopotamia but moved to Haran, a city in what is now southern Turkey. (Cf. Map One, p. 227.) Members of Abram's immediate ethnic group, the Arameans, were perhaps part of a larger group, the Amorites. Arameans lived in and near Haran. Some moderate historicalists think that between 2000 and 1750 B.C. many Arameans migrated southwest from there to Canaan. Archaeological evidence suggests that Canaan may have suffered greatly from marauders and had lost much of its population shortly before Abram's time. The Bible depicts God as calling him to migrate from Haran to Canaan.
   How historical are Abram, his son, Isaac, and his grandson, Jacob - the Patriarchs - and the events which the Bible depicts about them? Our only accounts of them are in Genesis, probably written in its final form in the sixth or fifth century B.C.  However, many of these stories are thought to have been taken from two older pieces of literature, or at least from two traditions, which moderate historicalists think must have existed. If they did exist, moderate historicalists think they were probably shaped and perhaps even written between the tenth and eighth centuries B.C. These two traditions in turn would have incorporated much older traditions, either written or oral or both.  Therefore our lack of written documents dating back to the Patriarchs does not necessarily invalidate the factualness of the traditions about them. However, the passage of nearly one thousand years between the depicted events and the shaping of the two hypothesized traditions leaves room for doubt. The passage of another 300-500 years between the possible writing down of these traditions and the final draft of Genesis increases that room for doubt.
   A similar caution applies to later events portrayed in the Pentateuch and in the books of Joshua and Judges regarding the Hebrew flight from Egypt, the promises God made to Moses, and the Hebrew entry into Canaan. According to scripture scholar Richard Clifford, "authentic stories of 2d-millennium ancestors have been revised and added to in the long course of their transmission; recovery of the 'original' stories is impossible because of the lack of extrabiblical sources."  Scholar Roland Murphy notes: "history is to be found in the book of Kings, rather than in the Pentateuch, although some kind of historical memory is preserved in the patriarchal and exodus narratives."
   Artifacts that tell about the era in which the Patriarchs supposedly lived neither confirm nor deny their existence but do indicate that some of what Genesis depicts about them could have taken place. However, the stories in Genesis and the other Pentateuch books, insofar as they may reflect real people and events, are thought to be highly simplified. Some or all of the events attributed to the three Patriarchs and their families may have happened to other people but were combined and simplified as happening to members of these three families. Moderate historicalists think that the author or authors of Genesis were not trying to write history as we think of it. They were trying to explain to sixth or fifth century B.C. Jews how, from a religious viewpoint, the devastating Babylonian Captivity, 597/587-539, could have happened. They freely adapted existing traditions to meet their pedagogical needs.  Thus the purpose for which Genesis was written greatly increases the doubts about historical accuracy which were already created by the passage of time.
   All of these factors make it impossible today to know how factual are the promises about the land, which God is portrayed as making to the Patriarchs.
   Genesis  depicts Abraham and his family as seminomads, sometimes moving in search of grazing land, sometimes settling down for a while on the edge of towns. The family enjoyed, with few exceptions, a peaceful existence; it used Canaan's less populated regions. Here seminomadic livestock producers could live peaceably with their townsfolk neighbors, supplying them with meat, wool and other products. Abraham and Isaac are not depicted as displacing the natives. The same is generally true of Genesis' portrayal of Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons.  This pastoral backdrop may suggest that if God promised anything it was only a share in the land's use, not exclusive ownership of it.

III. Abraham's Descendants.

   Typical moderate historicalists think that some of the stories about Abraham's sons and grandsons are probably not factual but a way of portraying the relationship between the Hebrews and their neighbors. According to this theory the story about the problems between the half brothers, Isaac and Ishmael, may ex-press the troubled relationship between the Hebrews and the Arab tribes around them.  If Ishmael and the incident are factual, which moderate historicalists think unlikely, his descendants are presumably still among the Arabs in the area. Because literalist Jews and Christians accept the incident as factual, they believe it strengthens Jewish claims that God promised Canaan exclusively to Isaac's descendants. Genesis also portrays God as renewing to Isaac God's promise of the land.
   According to the same theory that moderate historicalists apply to the portrayal of the relationship between Isaac and Ishmael, the hostile relationship between Isaac's twin sons, Jacob and Esau, also is probably not factual. Instead it may represent the relationship between the Hebrews and the Edomites, their southeastern neighbors.  Genesis portrays the disinherited Esau as going to his banished uncle, Ishmael, and choosing one of his daughters as a wife, in addition to the wives he had. Thus she was his first cousin and their child was a descendant of Abraham on both of his parents' sides. If Esau and his disinheritance are factual, which moderate historicalists think unlikely, he lost his legal rights. But did Esau and his descendants, which presumably include Arabs in today's Holy Land, also lose their share in the promise made to Esau's grandfather, Abraham? This share would have been more than a legal right. Jews and Arabs disagree on the issue. It is relevant only to those who hold that the story is factual.
   Thus, for the moderate historicalists the promises that God is portrayed as making to Abraham and Isaac, and the blessings which Isaac is portrayed as giving to Jacob rather than to Esau, are shrouded in doubt. Did they really take place, and if so, did they grant what they are depicted as granting? Or were they invented as symbols of some deeper reality? If one believes that in these particular passages (as in many others) the Bible perhaps teaches a deeper truth instead of the literal meaning, these promises and blessings lose any value as a basis for claiming that the Bible is the modern Jews' "deed of ownership" to the Holy Land. But if one holds with the literalists that every word of the Bible is literally and historically true, one has no choice but to conclude that these promises and blessings are historically factual.

IV. Hebrews' Migration to Egypt and Settlement in Canaan.

   Those who maintain that the Bible gives the Jews a moral right to Canaan also point, in support of this, to the Bible's portrayal of God as aiding the Hebrews' conquest of Canaan forty years after their flight from Egypt. By way of background: According to Genesis, eleven of Jacob's sons had sold their brother, Joseph, into slavery. He became Egypt's prime minister. During a famine in Canaan, probably shortly before 1700 B.C., he forgivingly arranged for his father, brothers and their families to migrate to Egypt. Genesis indicates that it was 215 years after Abraham migrated to Canaan. The Book of Exodus, which continues the story after Genesis, says Jacob's descendants ("Hebrews" or "Is-raelites") remained in Egypt 430 years. However, the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Bible from Hebrew, says the Hebrews were in Egypt only 215 years. This discrepancy may indicate that there was more than one Israelite migration both to Egypt and back to Canaan. In about 1550 B.C., a pharaoh virtually enslaved the Hebrews to work on state-owned projects. According to Exo-dus, Moses, under God's guidance and urging, led the Hebrews out of Egypt and into Sinai (probably between 1300 and 1280 B.C.). More than 600,000 men, plus women and children, are portrayed as taking part in the flight. On several occasions during the Hebrews' forty years in Sinai, God is depicted as promising them possession of Canaan. At the end of the forty years Moses died. According to the Book of Joshua, Moses' first assistant, Joshua, led the Hebrews west across the Jordan River. Through a series of military conquests they subdued part, but not all, of Canaan. God is portrayed as intervening on several occasions to help the Hebrews gain military victories.
   From their present store of archaeological data, moderate historicalists think that some type of migration from Canaan into Egypt and some type of exodus from Egypt into Sinai occurred. After a time in Sinai, Hebrews in some way entered Canaan. However, whatever happened was much more complex than Exodus and Joshua portray. Some moderate historicalists conjecture that:
   1. The Hebrews who participated in Moses' flight had to be many fewer than the 600,000 men plus women and children stated in the books of Exodus and Numbers - an estimated total of 2.5 million people.  It is unlikely that the eleven families - seventy people - who moved to Egypt at Joseph's invitation multiplied within 430 years - some eleven generations - to about 2.5 million people, even if later migrations from Canaan greatly increased Egypt's Hebrew population. A. Lucas estimates that "the original seventy Israelites would have become 10,363 at the end of 430 years."  Lucas's projected figures are very unlikely but he could still be correct in arguing that a relatively small number of people could have fled Egypt and entered a land that was then sparsely settled. There may have been slightly more than 200,000 people in Canaan in the fourteenth century, about a century before Joshua supposedly entered it.
   2. Archaeological data suggests that during the time leading up to Joshua's era, Canaan had palatial villas owned by the very rich next to the hovels of their oppressed serfs. Perhaps at that time Canaan had virtually no middle class. Contemporary documents speak of "rootless" people with no place in the economic system, people who lived as outlaws. Canaan was seemingly ripe for revo-lution. Its city-states were under the loose control of Egypt's in-creasingly weak government. When the lords of these cities asked Egypt for military help to maintain order, their urgent requests went unanswered. Thus the political and military situation would have worked to the advantage of invading Hebrews and of rebels who may have allied themselves with them. Archaeologists have found several Canaanite cities that were destroyed at about the time Joshua would have entered Canaan. Some of the cities may have been torched either by natives rebelling against their overlords, or by rebels working in tandem with Hebrews attacking from outside.
   3. The Book of Judges and the Book of Joshua itself frequently contradict the portrayal of the destruction of Canaan's inhabitants depicted in Joshua. According to Catholic scripture scholar Michael Coogan:
 Archaeological evidence confirms the literary analysis of the book: few if any of the major episodes in Joshua can be shown to be historical. Thus, neither Jericho nor Ai nor Gibeon [cities portrayed in Joshua as destroyed by invading Israelites] was occupied in the period in which most scholars would date the emergence of Israel in Canaan (ca. 1200). Although some of the cities said to have been destroyed by Joshua show evidence of destruction in this period, the dates vary considerably; Hazor, for example, was destroyed a century before Lachish.
   4. Many native Canaanites were perhaps Amorites,  the large ethnic group of which Abram's Arameans were perhaps a sub-group. These Amorites would perhaps have been ethnically related to the incoming Hebrews.  If some of the natives were Jacob's descendants who had never left Canaan for Egypt or who had immigrated back to Canaan at various times during the 430 years before Moses' flight, they would have been even more closely related to the incoming Hebrews. When Moses' people arrived, they would have had relatives already there. The Bible portrays some natives as allying themselves with incoming Hebrews. There is no biblical or non-biblical evidence that Hebrews ever killed or expelled these natives.
   5. The Bible states that not only Amorites but other ethnic groups lived in Canaan in Joshua's era. He did not conquer all of them. Judges 1 states that Hebrews enslaved many natives rather than expel or kill them. Judges 3:5-6 also relates: "The Israelites lived among the Canaanites and Hittites and Amorites, the Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites; they married the daughters of these peoples, gave their own daughters in marriage to their sons, and served their gods." According to this, extensive genetic, religious and cultural blending occurred. Large ethnic groups remained free. Some, including Hittites and Edomites, were noted in David's reign, more than two hundred years later. David vastly extended Hebrew rule by both assimilation and conquest within Canaan. This shows how incomplete Hebrew rule was when he began to reign about 1000 B.C.  The Philistines, in Canaan's central and southern coastal area, became David's vassals but kept their identity until the second century B.C. or later.
   In light of these five points, many moderate historicalists main-tain that what appears from a quick reading of Exodus and Joshua as primarily a military conquest may in fact have been much more of a gradual assimilation of the indigenous and the incoming populations under the control or leadership of the Israelites. What emerged as the Israelites in the early centuries of the first millennium B.C. was in reality a blend of Canaanite and Hebrew ancestry, with most of the ancestry having been Canaanite. Thus the Canaanites were not driven out but lived on as Israelites.
   These conjectures greatly change the picture one gets from read-ing Exodus, Deuteronomy, Joshua and other Old Testament books about the type of migration that God is pictured as urging and as-sisting. However, the impression given in these books is that God promised a group of several million people that they and their des-cendants would receive exclusive, perpetual ownership of a land from which the natives should be completely either driven out or destroyed. It is this blood-soaked picture that has been handed down within the Judeo-Christian tradition at least since these books were written in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. In the last 150 years the validity of that picture has been seriously questioned.

V. The Conquest of Land.

   With regard to the area's land: The Bible indicates that during the 150-year era of Judges - the period after Joshua and before the first king, Saul - land claimed by the twelve tribes included all of Palestine west of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, and southwest from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean, well south of the present-day Gaza Strip.  The tribes did not claim the southern Negev  Desert. At that time tribes also claimed land northwest of the Sea of Galilee to a point slightly above Tyre, in modern Lebanon. Two and a half tribes also claimed land east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, in the biblical Trans-Jordan region, now part of modern Jordan and Syria.
   Although the Bible portrays the twelve tribes as claiming all of this land during the era of Judges, they did not control all of it, as David's wars with various groups also portray. Philistines ruled much of the coastal plain, including the modern Gaza Strip. They also may have controlled the Plain of Esdraelon, a long northwest-to-southeast valley south of Galilee. If they did, they would have virtually cut Hebrews' holdings into a northern and a southern region. The modern Gaza Strip was inhabited primarily by Philis-tines for most of the time between the twelfth and fifth centuries B.C. Therefore it was inhabited to a lesser extent by Hebrews than were other parts of Palestine. This helps explain why some modern Israelis are more willing, ideologically, to relinquish Gaza than they are West Bank - biblical Judea and Samaria - which was more often extensively inhabited by Hebrews.

VI. The Twelve Tribes' Relationship: an Alternate Theory.

   The Bible fairly consistently portrays ancient Israel as composed of twelve tribes descended from Jacob's twelve sons. However, the lists vary. According to Old Testament scholar Lawrence Boadt: "As with so many biblical genealogies in the Book of Genesis, we must reckon that each 'son' really represents a whole tribe or clan, and that the twelve-tribe family understood themselves as equals ('brother') in some form of federation."  Father Boadt adds that differences in the lists of tribes may indicate that it took many decades for all twelve tribes to unite. Differences in the lists and what led to them "let us know that the simple stories of Jacob and his sons mask a long history of groups and individuals coming together to form what emerges at the end of the period of the judges as the nation of Israel."  If the theory is correct, perhaps the "Promised Land" was not so much a land conquered by outsiders as a land united by people already there.
   The story of the Hebrew entry into Canaan is a major factor in modern attitudes toward Jewish claims to it. Any position regarding that account must be approached cautiously. Father Boadt notes:
 In studying the historical remembrances of the early period in Joshua and Judges we are faced with their claims that Israel took the land of Palestine by violent assault. Many scholars today offer other possible means by which Israel gained possession of its land. The evidence is complex and difficult to use because there is so little on which to base a conclusion. The newer theories point out the problems with a military conquest of the land, but their own counter proposals are even less certain.

VII. Israel's Expansion Under David.

   According to the Bible,  through many wars (of aggression), David expanded Israel's territory farther south into the Negev, into southwestern Syria, and somewhat farther east into Trans-Jordan than had been true during the Judges' era. Conflicting statements in the Bible present a confused picture of the actual size of the David-Solomon empire. David's son, Solomon, may also have gained some economic control of the area north of his Syrian holdings. Significantly, not all of the land under David and Solomon's military and political control became inhabited by Israelites, who remained within their traditional home areas. Lands beyond these claims were more like David and Solomon's personal possessions; they continued to be populated by their native ethnic groups. After Solomon died in 931, the ten northern tribes rebelled against the House of David and formed the Kingdom of Israel. Its capital was the city of Samaria. David's tribe of Judah, the tribe of Benjamin and part of the tribe of Simeon supported the kings descended from David and formed the southern Kingdom of Judah. The two kingdoms, weakened by their division, lost most of David's non-tribal conquests. They were regained briefly but were soon lost again permanently until the Negev was allotted to modern Israel in 1947. Many Jews today do not consider David's acquisitions outside of Palestine and tribal Trans-Jordan part of the true Israel of old - Eretz Israel. Therefore they are not part of the land they want to claim. But the former existence of that expanded empire worries modern Arab states whose areas include parts of that empire: If Jews have a moral right to the biblical land of Israel, will the distinction between the tribal land and the non-tribal Davidic additions always be recognized in the future?

   Moderate historicalists may not unanimously accept the positions concerning the Old Testament exactly as stated above but many of them hold either these or similar positions. These positions seriously question the validity of claiming that the Bible is the Jews' "deed of ownership" to the Holy Land.

VIII. Positions of Reductionists.

   Although reductionists vary in their positions, they tend to carry the historical method of moderate historicalists further and therefore draw different conclusions. They tend to be more doubtful of the historical value of the pertinent books of the Bible. They see them more as fiction than as history. They think these books reflect very late written traditions, some as late as the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Relying largely or solely on archaeological evidence reductionists tend to think that:
   1. There was no Amorite-Aramean migration into Canaan be-tween 2000 and 1750 B.C.
   2. There was no major Hebrew invasion of Canaan in the thir-teenth or any other century B.C. - perhaps no invasion at all. Instead, the movements of people in Canaan during the thirteenth century are better explained by: (a) natives moving from farming to grazing areas and back, due to long droughts followed by periods of plentiful rainfall; (b) serfs escaping from lowland city-states into relatively uninhabited highlands, where they began agricultural villages; (c) perhaps some gradual immigration by Amorites and by slaves escaping from Egypt; and (d) a variety of other possible causes. Each of the above causes is conjectural.
   3. We have no evidence to indicate that the Hebrews were im-migrants or invaders rather than simply, or at least primarily, des-cendants of the area's natives, whom the Bible calls Canaanites. On the contrary there is positive evidence indicating that the He-brews are simply or at least primarily descendants of these Ca-naanites, rather than a blend of Canaanites and incoming Hebrews.    4. We have a single Egyptian reference to "Israel" about 1230 B.C., and several references to Hapiru (Hebrews?) in the Amarna letters in the late fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Aside from these we have only a fragmentary non-biblical history of the region which the Bible calls Canaan, before the reign of King Omri of Samaria in the mid-ninth century. However, we have some archaeological evidence of what happened and what probably did not happen. We have no non-biblical evidence that the Patriarchs or Moses existed or that God made any promises to anyone about the land of Canaan.
   5. According to at least one reductionist, archaeological data indicates that Jerusalem was not an important city until the late eighth century B.C., after Assyria captured Samaria and destroyed the Kingdom of Israel, the "northern kingdom." Therefore, he maintains, Jerusalem was developed much later than was the city of Samaria. Jerusalem could not have been the capital of a monarchy uniting Judea and Samaria under David and Solomon during the tenth century. Moreover, there was no united monarchy before Assyria destroyed the Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. (And there could have been none afterward until the Maccabean period in the second and first centuries B.C.) Thus the historical factualness of Saul, David and Solomon, their wars of conquest, and the size of their empires would seem to be seriously questioned by this reductionist.
   Another reductionist, J.M. Miller, thinks that many, perhaps most, traditions about David and Solomon are based on actual historical persons and events. But he thinks that their empire was much smaller than some moderate historicalists believe. Miller maintains that it extended only some fifteen miles north of Lake Hulah and some twenty-five miles east into Syria. It did not include the Bakaa Valley, Damascus, or lands nearer to the Euphrates River, as some Bible passages seem to indicate.

   The reductionist group of archaeologists and biblical scholars has grown in the past twenty years. Its scholarship, especially its conclusions, have met with moderate-historicalist criticism. For what they are worth, reductionists' conclusions even more seriously call into question the claim that the Bible is the Jewish people's "deed of ownership" to the Holy Land.

IX. Positions of Fundamentalists and Other Biblical Literalists.

   As noted above, fundamentalists and other biblical literalists assert that the Bible is such a deed. They contend that every word of the Bible, including God's promises to Abraham and Moses, must be understood exactly as stated. Fundamentalists' God of fire and brimstone has Its own terrifying code of justice unfettered by human concepts of human rights or of justice between humans. God can therefore authorize human beings to destroy other human beings - soldiers, civilians, little children - and take over their land. Some fundamentalists are also premillennialists. They believe that one condition for the second coming of Christ and for the Millennium to follow is the "ingathering" of all Jews into the Promised Land. Therefore they strongly support the state of Israel and Jewish immigration to the Holy Land. There are perhaps thirty million American fundamentalists. Many of them regularly watch premillennialism being preached by leading TV evangelists.  To deal adequately with biblical literalism as it relates to the morality of American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would require a tangent beyond the scope of this study. The moral principles used herein should speak to all people, including biblical literalists.

X. Doubtful Rights Versus Definite Rights.

   Whether or not the historical factualness of God's promises to Abraham, Isaac and Moses can be proved, they still may have taken place. They may still be factual although unprovable to anyone but literalists. (Provability is not only in the evidence but also in the minds and hearts of those weighing it.) It would seem that the most that can be stated with certainty is that the Bible may reflect either (a) a non-historical literary devise, or (b) the existence of a deed of ownership to the land of Canaan, or (c) something between these two extremes. With the evidence we now have, this deed's existence seemingly cannot be proved to the satisfaction of anyone but biblical literalists. Its existence is at best doubtful not only to many people in general but to many non-fundamentalist Jews in particular. Therefore the moral rights which depend solely on the existence of a biblical deed of ownership either do not exist or are at best doubtful. Moreover, doubts exist about what the promises meant when they were supposedly made, and - if they were made - what they mean today. At the time of Abraham did they refer to real estate or to spiritual values? Today do they still refer to inherited real estate or to inherited spiritual values? Palestinians who had definite possession of that land for countless generations had a definite, clear right to it. Thus it is a case of weighing the definite right of the Palestinians against the at-best doubtful right of the Zionists. To take away a definite right from one person to make way for at best a doubtful right of another person does not seem morally just.

XI. Perspectives of Church Personnel in the Holy Land.

   When I was in the Holy Land in 1991 I interviewed several people, including an Arab leader of a mainline Protestant church. He told me that the most difficult questions he faced regarding religious faith among his Palestinian Arab church members were these: Are the Jews really the People of God? Is this land theirs or ours? If it's theirs, how can God do such a thing? Does God love the Jews more than He loves the Palestinians? Is there any justice from God or don't we have justice from God either? This Protes-tant leader told me he would reply to his Arab students: Some churches, such as the Baptist Church and the new evangelical churches, interpret literally the portrayal of God taking the land away from the Canaanites and giving it to the Israelites; however, it is not our theology as non-fundamentalist Palestinians to take it literally.
   His Beatitude, Msgr. Michel Sabbah, is the first Arab appointed Latin Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem. He was the only one I interviewed who did not request anonymity. When I asked him if the covenants portrayed in the Old Testament give Jews today any special claim to the Holy Land, he replied in part: "God loves every human without discrimination....No injustice at all can be committed in the name of God's love. That is the criteria to judge whether the Jews have a religious right to the land or not....God's love cannot admit any injustice by one people against another."
   I spoke with several "third party" Catholic church personnel, that is, non-Jewish and non-Palestinian residents of the Holy Land. They are not a party to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but live with its consequences and are forced to reflect on it. To the same question about whether the Old Testament covenants give Jews today any special claim to the Holy Land, a priest from Europe replied: This is a question not about morality but about how one interprets biblical passages. The answer would be different for a Christian, for a Jew and for a non-believer. The Bible is a religious book. Maybe it's also a cultural history, at least a cultural heritage for the Jewish people and also for Christians in a certain sense. But it's not a juridical book; it's not a code of law. The Bible, he said, does not in itself give any rights.
   Jewish people, this priest continued, feel very attached to this land and consider it given to them by God, or at least linked to their destiny by God's will. But someone who does not believe as Jews believe, who is not a Jew, is not obliged to have the same conviction. Some Christians say the covenant is still valid; the promise of the land is still valid. However, we have the New Testament and the fact that now all the peoples are elected. Now the Covenant is with all the peoples of the earth. There is no one special people any more. The barrier between Jews and Gentiles has been abolished in Christ.
   As a people, the Catholic priest said, the Jews are attached to this land for historical, cultural or religious reasons; the Bible and what it says to the Jewish people are one element of this attachment. The Palestinian people are attached to the same land for historical, social, cultural and sometimes religious reasons. But the religious reasons, whether held by Jews or Palestinians, are not absolute. Why? Because for someone who does not have the same faith, these religious reasons, and the rights based on them, are only on the same level as cultural, historical or social reasons. Moreover, both believer and non-believer can recognize Palestinians' and Jews' attachment to the land. But the question of whether this attachment creates rights to the land depends on whether or not the implementation of these rights can be realized without creating injustice for other people. Then we pass from the religious field to a completely different one - the field of international law. Again, the Bible does not give rights.

   Another European Catholic priest and longtime Holy Land resident replied to my question about rights to the land being conveyed by the Old Testament covenants: Political rights, he said, are based on the rule of the civilization we live in, not on the Bible. He added: I do not believe that the Bible is to be strictly implemented today as it is written, because the framework is very different. Did Abraham have the boundaries of the country promised to him? No. National boundaries at that time were not known in the world. Even Assyria and Egypt did not have boundaries. Egypt consisted politically of its towns and in some way of the countryside. This was the concept of the state at that time. We cannot apply the manner of living of four millennia ago to the framework of the political family, of the human family, today. It's quite different. We cannot do it; it would be unjust.
   The human race is a family, this second priest added. This family has grown during the intervening four thousand years. We must accept the political realities resulting from these changes if we're to see the current situation correctly. We cannot take a spiritual book written several millennia ago for a nation's spiritual destiny and apply it, just as it was written, to a political reality now. Such an attempt is not being true to the Bible.

   My attempts to obtain Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish interviews in the Holy Land were unsuccessful. Several books by Jews at least touch on the moral dimensions of the conflict.  The basic principle among the Catholic and mainline Protestant church personnel I interviewed is that God could not be a party to an injustice, let alone promote it. Therefore God promised the Israelites nothing that would have been unjust to the Canaanite inhabitants. God promised nothing that would have violated Canaanites' rights to the land they called home. God would not have helped the Israelites capture Jericho from its rightful inhabitants. God would not have ordered the Israelites to slay soldiers and civilians captured in whatever cities they may have conquered. By the same line of reasoning, these Catholic and mainline Protestant church personnel maintain that God could not be a party to injustices against twentieth century Palestinians. They therefore deny that the Bible is the Jewish people's "deed of ownership" to the Holy Land.