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America in the Middle East

Rice: This is Israel's native land


By Ryan Jones
November 14, 2005

Perhaps unintentionally, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Sunday shot down the Arab world's decades-old assertion that the Jews are aliens and usurpers in this region.

The children of Israel are living in their ?native land,? Rice implied during an address to the Saban Forum in Jerusalem.

The event coincided with the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who Rice said ?represented the pioneer spirit of the Israeli heartland -- the impatient optimism and rugged determination that helped Israel to turn its barren soil green.?

The biblical books of Genesis, Deuteronomy and Joshua detail the Almighty's promise of this land to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the sovereign realization of that promise several centuries later.

From the time of their exodus from Egypt until the present day, the children of Israel have regarded the lands of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard as their native soil.

That most of the Jews lived in exile imposed upon them by foreign powers for nearly 2,000 years in no way diminished that claim, many have argued.

The Arabic-speaking Islamic forces that conquered the area some two millennia after the establishment of Israel's first kingdom today insist the land is and always has been theirs, going so far as to claim descent from the original Canaanite inhabitants.

That assertion contradicts their other claim to be of Abraham's lineage. The biblical patriarch interacted with the Canaanites and was not the father of those people.

While the late PLO terror chief Yasser Arafat claimed that the land of Israel (which he called Palestine) had been green and well nurtured before Jews began to immigrate in large numbers towards the end of the 1800s, numerous travelers to the land in the three centuries prior to that time recorded visiting a wasteland that was uncared for, barren, devoid of virtually all trees and other plant life.

Their accounts line up with the biblical predictions that the land would lie desolate and ?enjoy her Sabbaths? until the Jews began to return.

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