A History of Israel and the Palestinians

A History of Israel and the Palestinians
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I transcribed this message from a portion of a message by Pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia entitled Israel, Hamas, and End Times, October 15, 2023. To listen to his entire message, click here https://cornerstonechapel.net/teaching/20231015/

In this first map, I have done my best to outline in pink the region God promised to Abraham.

Pastor Hamrick started by noting that the Jews are not occupiers or colonialists but are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. They lived in the land 2,100 years before anyone was called a Palestinian and 2,600 years before Islam was a religion. Archeology dating back to the 13^th century BC confirms the Bible is true about this. So, why did the Jews have to return? Let’s start at the beginning with the history:

Genesis 15:18 says, “On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, ‘To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great River, the River Euphrates.’”
God gave the title deed of this land to Abraham. It covered about 300,000 square miles. Israel never occupied the extent of this territory; the most they occupied was during the reign of King David.

From 586 BC (when the Babylonians sieged Israel) until 1948 (about 2,500 years), Jews were oppressed, dispersed, and murdered around the world. The Jews who managed to stay in their homeland were dominated by another world empire. Here is the list of those empires:
First the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Byzantines, then the Arab-Islamic empire, then the Catholic crusaders, then the Mamluks, then the Ottomans, and then the British Empire.
So, where did the term Palestinian come from?
In AD 135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian quashed the Jews when they revolted, and Hadrian renamed the land Palestina, the Latin term for the Philistines, as a way of dishonoring the Jews, because the Philistines were their perennial enemy. So, from AD 135 until 1948 (1,800 years), the land was called Palestine. Arabs as well as Jews living in the land were called Palestinians. In fact, prior to 1948, the birth certificates of Jews said “Palestinian” on them. After 1948, they were called Israelis.
The Ottoman Turks had control of the territory during World War 1.
Great Britain defeated the Ottoman Turks at the end of WW1 and took back this territory as part of the British Mandate. In 1917, the Brits enforced the Balfour Declaration (The British Foreign Secretary at the time was Arthur James Balfour), because they knew the Jews had been dispersed and needed to return to their homeland. They determined that their land should be what is shown in blue:
But in 1922, the Hussein family objected and said the Brits were giving too much land to the Jewish people. And so, Winston Churchill (before he was Prime Minister when he was Secretary of State of the colonies) deferred to the Hussein family and drew a line down the Jordan River.
He ignored the Balfour Declaration to appease the Hussein family. Everything to the east of the river was called Transjordan (named Jordan in 1946). Everything west of the river was called Palestine until 1948.
The Hussein family still controls Jordan (King Abdullah II, Ben Al-Hussein).
In 1947, the United Nations recognized the homeland of the Jewish people. On May 15, 1948, the Jewish people reclaimed their land and occupied a fraction of what they were originally promised by God. Today they have 8,100 square miles as opposed to the approximately 300,000 square miles mentioned in Genesis 15:18.