Scripture and Modern Israel's Land Claim

In reading the Burge chapters and watching the PBS video, it seems obvious to me that something is wrong with Israel’s land claims. In the Torah God calls Israel to be a nation set apart to bless every other nation that blesses it. Israel was meant to be a hospitable place, a hospitable place that people could tell was different, and a different place that would cause others to wonder why it was different. I am not convinced that modern day Israel is that place for the people of the earth. The claims that Israel had to the land were based on God’s ownership. He gave them the land as tenant farmers and shepherds to demonstrate that it was his to give and take away. As long as the Israelites obeyed God and followed his decrees—caring for people and offering hospitality—the land belonged to them, but when they began to disobey and neglect the poor they quickly lost their claim to the land. The prophets were an important part of this process of land ownership and wickedness. They warned Israel that if it neglected its impoverished and widows and aliens and orphans, it would soon meet justice. This justice often took the form of being forcibly removed from their lands. Today, Israel is in fact not the theocracy that it was in the time that the Torah was written down as law. I do not believe that Israel has the mandate to take these lands as they are doing. For one thing, they are not living as hospitable people. Their region is ablaze with hate and rage; they are not caring for the alien within their gates. A second reason is that God founded the Israelite nation of long ago as a religious nation bound to him, today Israel is secular—only thirty percent of Jews are religious according to Professor Pierce. My third point is that Israel is breeding a culture of violence. They are forgetting their own victimization at the hands of the Nazis and have turned into the abusers. In Israel, domestic violence is up—rape and murder—because young Israelis that return from military duty cannot separate their family lives from the attitudes that the government expects from them in order to forcibly drive the Palestinians from the occupied regions. Through all of this however, we have hope. Hope that since the kingdom of God is here, it will be stronger than the conflict and enable us to move past the violence, in order to bring a solution. What will the solution look like—two states, one state, something else? We cannot know, but we must hope.