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Unknown, Iran, Isfahan Mihrab and Inscription Frieze from a Mosque c. 1500 The inscriptions on the mihrab and frieze are from the Koran. On the frieze are written the first 30 verses from the Chapter of the Dawn (89). The inscription on the mihrab is from the Chapter of Light (24: 35-36) and translates: God is the light of the Hea (heavens?) The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA Gift of Katharine Holden Thayer

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When Debating Muslims and others:

The Koran — Direct Text

Surah 5:20-21 — Moses tells the Children of Israel: "O my people, enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you." Allah's own assignment of the land to the Jewish people, stated explicitly.

Surah 7:137 — "And We caused the people who had been oppressed to inherit the eastern regions of the land and the western ones, which We had blessed." The Children of Israel are the inheritors.

Surah 17:104 — "And We said after Pharaoh to the Children of Israel, 'Dwell in the land, and when there comes the promise of the Hereafter, We will bring you forth in one gathering.'" Allah commands Jewish habitation of the land — and promises a future ingathering.

Surah 26:59 — "Thus. And We caused the Children of Israel to inherit it." Unambiguous.

Surah 10:93 — "And We settled the Children of Israel in a blessed settlement." Allah settles them there directly.

Surah 2:47 and 2:122 — "O Children of Israel, remember My favor that I have bestowed upon you and that I preferred you over the worlds." Repeated twice for emphasis.

Surah 44:32 — "And We chose them knowingly above the worlds." The election of Israel — stated in the Koran.

Surah 45:16 — "And We did certainly give the Children of Israel the Scripture and judgement and prophethood, and We provided them with good things and preferred them over the worlds."

Hadith

Sahih Bukhari, Book 60 (Prophets) — Contains the account of Moses and the Promised Land, affirming the Jewish covenantal relationship with the land as part of Islamic sacred narrative.

Sahih Muslim — The Night Journey (Isra and Mi'raj) has Muhammad praying at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, leading all the prophets in prayer. The site's sanctity in Islam derives entirely from its prior Jewish sanctity — Islam inherited the holiness, it did not originate it.

Classical Islamic Scholarship

Tafsir Ibn Kathir — The most authoritative classical Koranic commentary in Sunni Islam. Ibn Kathir's commentary on Surah 5:20-21 and Surah 17:104 explicitly discusses the divine assignment of the land to the Children of Israel. His tafsir is the standard reference in Islamic seminaries worldwide.

Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (14th century) — The most celebrated Islamic historian and sociologist acknowledged the historical Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah as established historical fact.

Al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wal-Muluk — The foundational Islamic universal history devotes extensive sections to the Israelite kingdoms, treating Jewish sovereignty over the land as historical reality within the Islamic scholarly tradition.

The Summary Line

The Koran assigns the land to the Jews in Allah's own voice, in multiple surahs, using the words "assigned," "inherit," "settled," "dwell," and "chosen above the worlds." The hadith record Muhammad praying at the Jewish Temple Mount. The greatest classical Islamic scholars — Ibn Kathir, Ibn Khaldun, al-Tabari — all treated Jewish historical presence and sovereignty as established fact. There is no classical Islamic textual basis for denying Jewish indigeneity to the Land of Israel. That denial is a 20th century political invention, not a religious or historical position.

Zionism Is Not a Political Movement Grafted Onto Judaism. It Is Judaism.

Zionism — the Jewish people's yearning for and return to their ancestral homeland — is not a 19th century invention. It is the oldest continuous national aspiration in recorded history, embedded in every layer of Jewish religious life for three thousand years.

Every single day, observant Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Three times daily. The Amidah — the central prayer of Jewish liturgy recited since the Second Temple era — contains explicit petitions: for the ingathering of exiles to Israel, for the restoration of Jerusalem, for the rebuilding of the Temple, for the return of the Davidic kingdom. These are not metaphors. They are literal national prayers for literal return to a literal land. Recited. Every. Day. For two thousand years of exile.

Birkat Hamazon — the grace after meals, recited after every Jewish meal — contains a petition to rebuild Jerusalem. A Jew cannot eat a meal without praying for return to Israel.

Tisha B'Av — the saddest day on the Jewish calendar — is a full fast day mourning the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jews sit on the floor, remove leather shoes, read Lamentations, and weep over exile from their land. This has been observed continuously for over 2,500 years.

Every Passover Seder — the most widely observed Jewish ritual on earth — ends with the declaration: L'shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem. Said in homes from Morocco to Poland to Yemen to Brooklyn for millennia.

Yom Kippur — the holiest day of the Jewish year — ends the same way. L'shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim.

Sukkot, Shavuot, and Passover are called the Shalosh Regalim — the Three Pilgrimage Festivals — because Jews were commanded to make pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem three times a year. The land is not background to the religion. The land is built into the architecture of the religion.

A Jewish wedding: a glass is shattered under the chuppah to commemorate the destruction of the Temple. Even at the peak of personal joy, a Jew is required to remember Jerusalem and mourn its absence. Psalm 137 is recited at some weddings: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning."

Mezuzot on Jewish doorposts contain the Shema, which includes the command to love God in the land He promised. The land is in the daily home ritual.

The Hebrew calendar itself is calibrated to the agricultural seasons of the Land of Israel — not Babylon, not Europe, not anywhere Jews lived in exile. Sukkot marks the Israeli harvest. Shavuot marks the Israeli first fruits. The entire Jewish year is timed to a land Jews were exiled from, because the religion was designed for return.

Theodor Herzl did not invent Zionism. He gave a modern political name to a three-thousand-year-old religious imperative. Every Jew who ever prayed the Amidah was a Zionist before the word existed.

Continuous Jewish Presence on the Land

The narrative that Jews left Israel and returned as strangers in 1948 is historically illiterate. Jews never fully left.

Following the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE) and the Babylonian exile, Jews returned under Cyrus the Great and rebuilt. Following the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) and the Roman exile, Jewish communities remained continuously in the Galilee, in Tiberias, in Safed, in Hebron, in Jerusalem itself — through Byzantine rule, Arab conquest, Crusader rule, Mamluk rule, and Ottoman rule.

The Sanhedrin — the supreme Jewish legal body — relocated to Yavneh, then Tiberias, and continued functioning in the Land of Israel for centuries after the Roman destruction. The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in Tiberias, in the Land of Israel, in the 4th-5th century CE. Jewish scholarship never left the land entirely.

Nachmanides (Ramban) — one of the greatest medieval Jewish scholars — emigrated from Spain to Acre in 1267 and reestablished the Jewish community there. He wrote that despite destruction and exile, the commandment to live in the Land of Israel remains binding.

The Jewish communities of Safed in the 16th century produced the greatest explosion of Kabbalistic scholarship in history — the Arizal, Rabbi Joseph Karo (author of the Shulchan Aruch), Rabbi Moses Cordovero — all living and teaching in the Land of Israel while European Jews were being massacred in pogroms.

Hebron maintained a continuous Jewish community for centuries until the 1929 Arab massacre of Jewish residents — an Arab pogrom against a community that had been there without interruption for generations.

Jerusalem had a Jewish majority population by 1863 — before the Zionist movement began — documented in Ottoman census records and by British consular reports of the period.

Jews Are the Indigenous People of Israel

Indigenous status under the framework established by the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples rests on several criteria: original habitation of a territory, distinct language, distinct culture, continuous connection to the land, and identification as a people rooted in that specific place.

Jews meet every single criterion.

The Hebrew language is indigenous to the Land of Israel. It evolved there. It contains the names of Israeli geography, Israeli flora, Israeli fauna, Israeli agricultural cycles. Modern Hebrew — revived as a spoken language in the 19th century by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda — is the same language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the same language of the Siloam Inscription carved into a tunnel in Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE, the same language of the Gezer Calendar from the 10th century BCE.

Jewish religious law (Halakhah) is structured around the Land of Israel. Laws of agriculture — shmita (the sabbatical year for the land), terumah (agricultural tithes), bikkurim (first fruits) — apply specifically and only to the Land of Israel. You cannot practice the full scope of Torah in any other location. The land is not incidental to the religion. The religion is geographically bound to this specific land.

The word "Jew" itself is the proof. Jew derives from Judah — Yehudah in Hebrew — the tribe and the kingdom whose capital was Jerusalem. Judea is the Latinized form of Yehudah. Jews are literally named after their land. There is no other people on earth whose ethnic name is a direct derivation of the name of their homeland. The word "Jew" is itself an indigenous land claim encoded in language.

The Archaeology

The archaeological record of Jewish presence and sovereignty in the Land of Israel is among the most extensively documented in the ancient world.

The Tel Dan Stele (9th century BCE) — discovered in northern Israel in 1993 — contains the first extra-biblical reference to the "House of David," confirming the Davidic dynasty as a historical reality, not mythology. It is on display in the Israel Museum.

The Siloam Inscription (701 BCE) — carved in Hebrew inside a tunnel built by King Hezekiah beneath Jerusalem to supply water during the Assyrian siege. The tunnel still exists. You can walk through it today.

The Mesha Stele (9th century BCE, Moabite Stone) — a Moabite king boasting of victories over Israel explicitly names Israel and references Israelite presence in the region. An enemy inscription confirming Jewish national existence.

The Lachish Letters (6th century BCE) — Hebrew military correspondence discovered at the ancient Judean city of Lachish, written during the Babylonian invasion. Soldiers writing in Hebrew about defending Judean cities.

Bullae (clay seal impressions) bearing Hebrew names of biblical figures — including one bearing the name of Baruch ben Neriah, the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah — have been authenticated and are held in museums. Biblical figures leaving physical archaeological traces.

The City of David in Jerusalem — the oldest settled part of Jerusalem, continuously excavated — has yielded Hebrew inscriptions, Israelite pottery, ritual objects, and administrative seals from the First Temple period, all consistent with the biblical account of Israelite Jerusalem.

Masada — Herod's fortress on the Dead Sea — yielded Hebrew and Aramaic ostraca (pottery shards used as writing material), personal name inscriptions, Torah scroll fragments, and evidence of Jewish ritual practice including a synagogue facing Jerusalem. Masada fell in 73 CE. The Jews defending it were not European colonizers. They were Jews living in their ancestral homeland.

The Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered 1947-1956) — over 900 manuscripts dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE — are written in Hebrew and Aramaic, containing the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, found in the caves of Judea. The land preserved Jewish scripture in its own soil for two thousand years.

Coins of the Jewish Revolts — minted during the First Jewish Revolt (66-70 CE) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 CE) bear Hebrew inscriptions reading "Shekel of Israel," "Year One of the Redemption of Israel," "For the Freedom of Jerusalem." Jews minting coins declaring sovereignty over their land, in their language, while fighting Roman occupation.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian — after crushing the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE — renamed the land Syria Palaestina specifically to erase the Jewish connection to it. He renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and banned Jews from entering. The Romans knew whose land it was. That is why they worked so hard to rename it.

Palaestina derives from Philistia — the Philistines, a sea people from the Aegean who settled the coastal strip and disappeared from history by the 6th century BCE. The Philistines have no genetic, cultural, linguistic, or historical connection to modern Arabs. The Roman act of renaming was a political erasure — and it is the only historical basis for the name "Palestine." A Roman emperor's colonial rename, applied to erase Jewish identity from the land.

The totality: the prayers, the calendar, the language, the law, the name, the archaeology, the genetics, the continuous presence, the enemy inscriptions, the Roman rename designed specifically to sever the connection — every single line of evidence points in one direction. The Jewish people are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. This is not a political opinion. It is the convergence of linguistics, archaeology, genetics, religious history, and the testimony of every civilization that ever encountered the Jewish people in their own land.

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