The Land Was Never Empty: Faith, Conquest, and the Politics of Dispossession
By Tom Somah - The Sherbro Islander
There is a question beneath the Israel-Palestine conflict: who was living on that land before it was claimed in the name of God?
I want to answer that question objectively.
I am a man of faith. But faith does not require us to read the Bible carelessly and use it to justify Israel's territorial claim of Palestinian Land.
That claim rests primarily on Genesis 15:18: God tells Abraham that his descendants will be given the land stretching from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. This promise was conditional. It came with obligations—obey, and the land is yours. Turn away, and you will be removed from it. They disobeyed.
The Babylonian exile of 586 BCE, in which the people were uprooted and carried into captivity, is explained by the biblical writers themselves as divine judgement for disobedience. If God gave the land forever, no matter what, then why were the people driven out of it? And if they were driven out because they broke God's laws, then the gift (the Land) was lost.
The Israeli archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman examined the evidence in their landmark work: The Bible Unearthed. Their conclusion was stark:
The Israelites did not arrive from outside Canaan. The current Israeli conquerors and the dehumanised Palestinians may well be the same people at different stages of their own history.
The territorial argument also assumes that today’s Jewish communities in Israel are the direct biological descendants of the ancient Israelites and therefore the rightful heirs of Abraham’s promise. History is not that simple. In The Invention of the Jewish People, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that Jewish identity was shaped, in significant part, by centuries of conversion, migration, and political change, not by an unbroken bloodline supposedly entitled by divine promise to possess the land.
Even if the biblical account were taken as true, no religious text can provide a legal or moral warrant for removing a living people from their land. Accept that principle, and the protections built by international law after the Second World War begin to collapse.
If divine promise can justify dispossession, and ancient ownership becomes the final test of rightful possession, then the argument cannot stop with one land. The United States would have to return its territory to Native Americans, and Australia to its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
That is the danger of turning history into a weapon and scripture into an ownership paper. It does not lead to justice, but to endless claims and the sanctification of conquest.
The land was never empty. It held families and homes long before it was turned into a theological argument.
And no faith worthy of God should sanctify the destruction of a defenceless generation.