A stranger walks up to your house, rings the doorbell, and you answer the door. “Hi”, he says, “I’m Jeff and I need to let you know that, well, the house you’re living in, is actually mine.” You start to laugh and then realize that Jeff is serious so you inquire how your house could possibly be his. He tells you that years ago, his great grandparents bought the property and built the original structure that you refer to as your house. You tell him, that you see where he’s gone wrong because this property has been in your family for three generations. “But it was my family’s before it was yours.”,he retorts.He shows you an actual deed as proof that the property is, in fact, his. “Ahh”, you tell him, “That’s the problem. Your deed is no longer valid. Since the property was originally owned by my ancestors and my grandparents just claimed legal ownership by historicity.

This is the problem with land ownership. The land your home is on, at some point in history, belonged to someone else and if their descendants appeared in your doorway today, demanding that you return the land to it’s legitimate owner, would you? I think most of us would not take any proper claim seriously. You can see where this is going, can’t you? This is the ongoing issue in the Middle East, an area that for thousands of years, yes, up to current time, has been fought over by numerous kingdoms and empires. One small strip on the Eastern Mediteranian has been of consequence for the entire western world for nearly two millennia and the situation hasn’t improved in any significant way in the last century, even though there might be some that will say different.

when god gave land to the Hebrews, it doesn’t appear he came with a deed, handed it to Joshua, and said, “there you go, boy. all yours!”. No, he told the Hebrews that they were going to have to conquer the land. Why would a loving god do that to his people? I mean, when I was a Christian, I was taught that god nknew everything (omniscient) so it was impossible to do anything without god already knowing the outcome. Why wouldn’t god just clear the land of the bad people for them? Really. Why tell people something is theirs, when in fact, it’s not and that they have to attack every city within the region and completely destroy it. Yrd, that means kill every human being that currently lives there, plus all their sheep, cattle, etc. Kill it all.

Now, it’s yours.

So Christians today look at the Old Testament and do not see what is going on in that area today as being a reoccurrence of what is written in the Old Testament. The weapons are different, the goals are the same. But supposedly the Hebrews did conquer all the land their god gave them but over time, because they became unfaithful, lost most and finally all of it to various invading armies from the Assyrians, to the Babylonians, to the Romans (I know I probably skipped one or two). Yes, now, the government of Israel wants all their land back and is willing to do whatever it takes to take it back from the new bad people in the area, Arabs.There’s really not enough time or space here for me to argue one side or the other here, suffice to say there is a dispute and the one’s with the bigger guns, are currently winning.

That doesn’t make it right. It’s a feature of hegemony. And the more I sit here trying to reason this out in my mind, the more I shake my head and decide that I don’t want to be angry about this anymore. what I’d like is a government (including the legislative branch) that is America first and does not take money, or any kind of support, from political committees that belong to any nation state. In fact, any monies being spent for any politician (at the federal level) by someone or some entity representing such a state, should be illegal. Let’s start there. Then let’s go back and look at who owns what.