It seems so simple. God gave Eretz Yisroel to the Jewish people and told Avraham that Yishmael and his descendants have no inheritance in it. This was an accepted fact even by conquering nations. Babylonia, Media, Greece, and Rome all knew that they were conquering the land of the Jews.
Koresh, the king of Persia, conquered Babylonia in 3390 (370 BCE) and allowed the Jews to return home to THEIR land, even to begin construction on THEIR Second Temple. After Haman was toppled 18 years later, the rest of the Jewish nation returned there too.
The Greeks didn’t even bother to displace us. They just occupied the land for 180 years and try to convert us to their way of life. By the time the Chashmonaim wrestled some of the control of the land back into Jewish hands, the Jewish people had been in possession of Eretz Yisroel already for over 1,200 years.
Then came the Romans. They had also been content to leave the Jews in their land doing their thing and just collect tribute. However, Jews who refused to be controlled by Rome fought back, bringing the full might of the Roman Empire to Eretz Yisroel, leading to exile from the land of many Jews. It was to be the fourth and final exile of Jewish history, prophesied before Rome even existed.
Though the land was conquered by several different nations and victimized by the Crusades, a small contingent of Jews always lived on the land during the next two millennia. Though the land became barren and extremely hard to cultivate, some Jews always remained on the land, quietly just trying to survive.
Then history reached the 5500 year mark, the half-way point of the sixth millennium which the Zohar said would correspond to noon on Erev Shabbos. That is the time on Friday when a person should stop focussing on business matters and finish their Shabbos preparations.
In millennium talk, it means getting ready for the final redemption. So, in 1740 CE (5500), the Vilna Gaon did exactly that, preparing his students to make aliyah and begin the process of rebuilding the settlement there. The Gaon focused on kibbutz golios, the ingathering of the exiles, prophesied in Parashas Nitzavim.
Hundreds of years later, more than half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Eretz Yisroel, the country is very built up and modernized, and amazing prophecies have come true. When the GR”A tried to convince the people of Vilna that the time to move to Israel had begun, they scoffed and mocked. Two hundred years later, the Gaon was right and they were extremely shortsighted.
No religion in the history of mankind ever made such grandiose promises of a future return to their Biblical land, and then lived to witness it come true. No other nation has experienced as many miracles as the Jewish people have to get to the point they have reached today, especially following the genocide of their people. The stamp of God is all over it.
Yet, once again we are also fighting a mortal enemy bent on destroying the Jewish state. Once again, so much of the world either sympathizes with the enemy of the Jewish people or doesn’t care enough about what that enemy has done to them.
“Don’t bother me with the facts,” they basically say. Some, for one reason or another, just hate the Jews and hope for their demise. It has nothing to do with right or wrong or justice. Their hatred is reason enough for them to cheer on those who share their hatred of the Jewish people.
The rest are just so poorly informed, or very much misinformed. They think they know enough to accurately assess the real problem in the Middle East and have an opinion about it. They think they are smart enough to accurately evaluate which people has rights and which one is the offender…even though properly informed and smarter people are telling them to the contrary.
And Divine right to the land? Perhaps there are some pro-Israel gentiles who believe that, because they believe in God and Jewish destiny. But the rest of the world? They either do not believe in God, and therefore not in Jewish destiny, or the wrong thing about both.
In a balanced world, they’d have no say. In a balanced world, they’d have no vote. It is dangerous to give credibility to people who don’t deserve it. So much of what has gone wrong in history has been because we did. Just because they are so idolized or prominent in social media, they qualify as “blind leading the blind.”
They would be comical if not for the threat they pose to world security and Jewish safety. It would almost be a slapstick movie if they did not make up a huge portion of the world’s population and have so much influence over others. It wouldn’t be so alarming if they weren’t so vulnerable to the falsehoods of Israel’s enemies, who exploit their naiveté to the max and leverage it to their irrational advantage.
They will have their rude awakening, as others did once they were shown what had happened in the three years it took to liberate the camps. They will learn who the true enemy is once they have to face it for themselves. And they will understand firsthand that God was always here, Torah was always true, and the Jewish people were always destined to have the land, when Moshiach finally comes.
When? Soon. How soon? Who knows. But one thing is for sure, it has already started happening. Revelation is in levels, increasing intensity as God sees fit. The worthy get it first and have, the less worthy, next, and finally, the unworthy, last…when it is too late to do anything but regret their moronic approach to life on their way out of it.
In the meantime, we just have to remain aware of what kind of world we are living in, and who is saying what. If you approach an unbalanced world as if it is, or at least should be, a balanced one, you will lose your mind. You will certainly lose your patience and hope.
But if you see the world as it is, as God does, then you can respond to it accordingly. It won’t make for a more peaceful life necessarily, but it will make for a safe one if only because you won’t be that surprised when the world acts insanely, once again. You’ll realize that the only constant in human history is God, the only Source of objective truth and doer of good. We don’t plan how we come into this world or how we leave it, but we can decide to stick with Him through all of it and rise above the craziness of human history even while a part of it.