I mean Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was recently asked a question regarding “Arab lands” in Israel. The PM’s response was that there was no such thing because, “It’s our land”.

People much smarter than me have rendered up answers to the question and I was particularly careful to ignore all of them – it just increases the time I have to spend on research. I first approached the issue from the standpoint of a real estate transaction. One of the benefits of that approach is that all land everywhere is owned or controlled by someone. That applies to Antarctica, Manhattan and Israel. Plus, I know a little about real estate already.

Location, location, location. Israel’s particular corner of the world lies at the confluence of Asia, Europe and Africa. It’s geopolitical value dates back to when western traders with baubles, bangles and beads passed through to the orient and then returned with spices and silks. If your people controlled Israel and it’s surroundings, you were entitled to rake-off a bit of all this commerce in an ancient version of the protection racket. “Tell ya what. Give us the paprika and we can guarantee that bandits won’t attack your caravan, slaughter your men, rape your women and barbecue your kids.” The New Jersey Turnpike should look into this marketing angle to increase revenue.

Prior to all that commerce, Israel just happened to be in an area that a lot of thugs wanted to conquer in order to conquer other people as well. And, since people have been living in that neck of the desert for thousands of years since history was invented, there’s an extensive historical record to examine; kind of the world’s longest title search. Sadly, this compelled me to abandon real estate law and trudge through that history.

It would appear that the city of Jerusalem was first inhabited in the fourth millenium BCE. This was during the “Copper Age”, which began in the fifth millenium BCE, somewhere else. The Copper Age lasted about a millenium, so the folks in Jerusalem were late-comers to the copper thingy. About the time the dullards in Jerusalem figured out copper, other people started mixing tin with copper to produce bronze. The Bronze Age opened a can of whup-ass on the copper-wielders so, at its founding, at least, the good people of Jerusalem were at a technological disadvantage, metal-wise. The superiority of bronze over copper weapons can be easily demonstrated in your own kitchen. Take a penny from your spouse or kids, place it on a plastic or bamboo cutting board, and whack it with a piece of bronze. I’m not sure where you’ll find an actual piece of bronze, but I’m pretty sure that the penny will not look too swell when you’re through. Mind you, I’m not actually suggesting that you do such a thing, given that defacement of United States coinage is a Federal offense punishable by stern looks, finger waggling and head-noogies.

The poor shlubs who first built their wattle and daub habitats in the vicinity of Jerusalem have been swallowed up by a variety of their betters over the millennia. A list of conquerors/conquerees reads like a Who’s Who of the Levant’s most bloodthirsty and idiotic tyrants. That rich tradition continues to the present day.

By the time king David got around to conquering the city, it was held by Jebusites – a Canaanite people much maligned in scriptures written by history’s winners. David made the city the capital of the Kingdom of Israel and his son Solomon built the Temple on Mt. Moriah. Solomon went to his reward around 930 BCE, after which ten of the twelve tribes of Israel booked and started their own kingdom. About 200 years later the ten tribes were evicted by the Assyrians and many returned to Jerusalem. The balance became the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and, depending on which crackpot theory you subscribe to, emerged later in history as either American Indians, Irishmen, East Indians, Ethiopians, Japanese, Scots, Persians or Brits.

In 586 BCE the Babylonians had their run at the place and defeated Assyrians and Jews alike. Jerusalem was taken, the Temple was destroyed and the surviving inhabitants were hauled off to be slaves in Babylon. In 538 BCE Cyrus the Great sent the Jews back to their city and invited them to rebuild their (second) Temple.

Now, neither scripture nor history says anything about the Jubusites, Canaanites or even Palestinians being given the same ticket back to Jerusalem. We don’t even know if they were hauled away in the first place. Actually, the word “Palestine” didn’t really emerge until around 135 CE when the Romans used the name to designate that area which roughly corresponds to what we now call the “Holy Land”. The word, however, has etymological roots in “Phylistia” which designated the coastal region of the area and whose people were never conquered by the Israelites (even though God told them to do it OR ELSE!!!). The Israelite Judge Samson used to amuse himself at the expense of the Philistines. He once single-handedly sent 10,000 of them to Baal using nothing more than the jawbone of a deceased domestic equine. Years later the shepherd David clobbered one of them with a rock and prospered.

Those Philistines who survived such ill use later became Phoenicians or live among us now as people of low taste. I suppose that if those who today call themselves “Palestinians” could trace their lineage back to Goliath as effectively as the Jews have traced theirs to David and Solomon, this whole Middle-East Crisis would never have emerged. It should be noted as well that there is no independent historical evidence that either David or Solomon ever even existed in anything but Jewish lore. But that lore continues today and is believed by people professing faith in the world’s first, second and ninth largest religions.

Back to the war and pillage. In 445 BCE a Macedonian galoot who styled himself Alexander the Great conquered the whole Babylonian schmear, including Jerusalem and its environs. Alex was one of that new breed of conquerors who eschewed slaughtering every living thing in a conquered locale, realizing that tax-paying subjects were more useful than heaps of corpses. So the Jews abided in Jerusalem, worshipped in their (second) Temple, paid their taxes and were ignored by the rest of the world. By-and-by, Alexander The Actually Mortal paid the debt that all men owe and his hardly-broken-in empire was split into three parts. Ptolemy I got the part of the empire that included Jerusalem and he continued his deceased patron’s policy.

But history is filled with raucousness and in 198 BCE the Seleucids gave Ptolemy V the bum’s rush and took title to Jerusalem for a brief period. The Seleucids tried to turn Jews into Greeks and the resulting Maccabean revolt and victory (source of the Jewish holiday of Hanukah) allowed the Jews to briefly rule their own city and country without any outside interference.

Enter Rome. Previous empires had come and gone, washing over Jerusalem but, with one exception, allowing the locals to retain local control. Rome sopped up Israel with hardly a thought and retained Alexander’s benign policy: pay your taxes, keep your noses clean and we’ll provide you with paved roads, aqueducts, clean water, sanitation, protection from highwaymen, rational civil administration, protection from foreign invasion, something akin to the rule of law, and swell blood sports at the Arena of your choice.

Herod The Great was installed as a sort-of local king but I’m switched if I can figure out who ever called this brute “The Great”. According to Jews he was a lickspittle for Rome and the Christians claim that he ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents in an attempt to bag the newborn Messiah. Nevertheless, he greatly expanded the Temple Mount and I guess even the devil should be given his due.
The Jews decided this exemplary arrangement was unsatisfactory and rebelled. In 70 CE the Romans finally nudged them aside, destroyed the second Temple and told the Jews to quit the province under pain of death. The actual terms of the sentence forbade Jews from living in Jerusalem until the seventh century CE or until they acquired better geopolitical strategies, whichever came first.

But Fortune finally turned a favorable eye on Jerusalem – if not on the expelled Jews – when Emperor Constantine Christianized the Empire in about 330 CE. His Ma went to Jerusalem seeking the sacred locales of her faith and encountered indigenous tour guides who had been gulling tourists for two centuries. The broad wanted to see The Savior’s grave so they found one. On to Bethlehem. Where was He born? Achmed’s wooden stable wouldn’t do so they found a cave, spread some straw on the floor, installed a manger-thing and convinced the batty old dame that EVERYONE in the immediate vicinity just KNEW that this was the place.

The tired old Persian empire re-took Jerusalem for a brief period, but the Eastern Roman Empire kicked them out after a few years.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. As Rome’s influence in the area diminished, Jerusalem was conquered, surrendered, pillaged, liberated, un-liberated, passed around and occupied by a wide variety of brigands. Anyone with a sword to wield seemed capable of ruling the joint. In 638 CE The Jews of Jerusalem had the great fortune to fall under the control of – wait for it – ARAB MUSLIMS!! The Caliph promised all the contending parties of his newest conquest that their holy sites would be under his protection and everybody was required to play nice.

This happy state of affairs for all concerned was only marred by the Caliph’s decision to build a honking-big mosque on Mt. Moriah to honor the site where Allah whisked Mohammed to Paradise. The Dome of the Rock stands today where the second Temple of the Jews once stood. All that remained was a huge retaining wall – the Western Wall – also incorrectly called the “Wailing Wall”.

Well! The very idea that a clot of dirty-necked Jews and Muslims were living in peace with decent Christians sent European Christianity into a spasm of Crusading. In 1099 they captured Jerusalem and put to the sword every non-Christian within reach. In 1187 Saladin scored one for the Muslims. The Tartars showed up in 1244, butchered the Christians and expelled the Jews (again!). Two years later the Ayyubids took over, only to be ousted by the Mamluks in 1250. The Mamluks defended the city against both Crusaders and Mongol hordes.

In 1517 the Ottoman Turks took over and, so far as we know, kept the carnage to a low boil. With a few gruesome exceptions, Jerusalem knew relative peace for about 400 years. Then the Brits showed up. By 1917 the city was a mixture of Arabs, Jews and Christians who lived together in a tense sort of peace because the various rulers of the city (The Ottomans had been forced out a few time in the previous 400 years) insisted on it. As frequently happens in a place that is relatively peaceful, relatively free and enormously important faith-wise, a lot of different people moved in.

The Limeys ran Jerusalem by virtue of their well-supplied army and in 1922 their armed might was granted a soupcon of legitimacy by the League of Nations, which made the whole of Palestine a British Mandate. The Colonial Office thought it was getting a boffo protective buffer for the east side of the Suez Canal but wasn’t prepared for the degree of hostility they endured until 1948. To begin with, the only things Jews and Arabs could agree on was that they wanted the British to leave so they could annihilate one another without any pesky outside interference.

The United Nations created Israel in 1948 from lands contemporaneously occupied by Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionists. The ink wasn’t dry on the U.N. resolution when the new nation’s Arab neighbors fell on it with the intent of undoing with tanks what the U.N. had done with paper. Israel won. They had learned a vital lesson during the Diaspora – people who don’t have their own country find it difficult to defend themselves, as Herr Hitler had proved several years earlier. I’m sure the Palestinians agree heartily.

But this historical examination really doesn’t help us determine the answer to the main question. The Jew’s claim to the turf could be overturned by Jebusites and Canaanites, but they don’t exist anymore. Ditto most of the other people who occupied the place. The folks in Rome, Italy could lodge a claim that is at least as valid as anyone else’s, but they’re not that stupid. Ditto the Turks. Palestinian claims suffer from a lack of U.N. documentation, so it’s kind of a gray area. Historical title searching doesn’t really help.

If we are to arrive at some conclusion as to who actually owns Israel, it might be useful to see what God had to say about it.

Abraham, the original founder of three great religious movements, was told by none other than God Himself that his descendents would some day inherit a land of their own in Canaan. Given that he was in his eighties at the time, Abraham thought that God was having a little joke at his expense, but, sure enough, the old guy fathered not one, but two sons.

Abraham’s wife Sarah was also on in years and thought that God was taunting her. Finally, she told her husband to take her servant, Hagar, as his wife and the old boy knocked her up. Hagar gave birth to Abraham’s first son, Ishmael. Unfortunately, Hagar had a tendency to rub Sarah’s nose in the fact that she had provided their husband with a son and Sarah had not. When Sarah did bear a son, Isaac, the scales seemed to balance, but Sarah was insistent that Ishmael would never supplant Abe’s “real” son Isaac. She told Abraham to get rid of Hagar and her whelp; something Abraham was reluctant to do since he was quite fond of the boy.

But God told Abraham to heed his wife and so Hagar and Ishmael were booted out to wander in the desert. Finally, Hagar was frantic and her son was crying for help. An angel appeared to Hagar and said “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”

Abraham’s other son, Isaac went on to become one of the three patriarchs of Israel along with dad and his son, Jacob.

So Abraham’s eldest son is regarded by all three religions as the father of the Arabs and his second son, Isaac, is regarded by all three religions as the father of the Israelites.

I submit that God’s plan tells us precisely who owns the Holy Land. It is jointly owned by both Jews and Arabs; the former descended from Isaac and the latter descended from Ishmael. Remember, God told Abraham that his descendents would inherit the land – not just one of them. They did. There they are. Furthermore, God told the Israelites that they should conquer all of Canaan, but the Israelites were too lazy to finish the job and the Canaanite/proto-Arabs retained a redoubt on the coast for the purpose of clouding Israel’s title to this day. That is no accident. Does anyone doubt that God knew the Israelites would slacken?

So there they are, like siblings fighting during the reading of the will. If God Almighty has prophesied and decreed that both should inherit the land, they had better get busy getting along or you-know-Who might just decide to kick them both out and hand the place over to … I don’t know … the Dalai Lama.