Dave Hunt: Because the world loves to follow lies, especially against Jews and against Israel. We have a controversy in the Middle East right now. The basis of the controversy is there are two people who have a claim to this land. On the one hand are the Jews, the Israelis, and their claim goes back 4,000 years. They have a title deed from God, they trace themselves through Abraham. All three, Muslims, Christians and Jews agree that God gave this land to Abraham, and to his heirs. So, the question is, who are the heirs? We have a conflict over there. Christians are not claiming the land, but there is a group of Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, and they claim that they are descended from the original Palestinians, going back thousands of years, through Ishmael. Ishmael was Abraham’s first son, and ordinarily the first son would inherit, but he was the son of Abraham through, not his wife Sarah, but through Sarah’s maid Hagar. Then we have the Jews, who claim—well, sadly Tom, most of them don’t even claim it as they legitimately should. They don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in the promises, and so forth. But they have a right to claim it, being the descendents of Isaac and Jacob. Twelve times God has called the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; two hundred and three times He is called the God of Israel. Well, who are the Palestinians? Well, first of all you go to Genesis chapter 12, and it’s very clear.
There was no such place as Palestine, there were no such people as Palestinians, they were Canaanites, this was a land of Canaan. It says: Into the land of Canaan Abraham came, and the Canaanite was in the land, this is already settled. Now, who were the parents of Ishmael that the Arabs claim they are descended from, and he must have been an original Palestinian if they are descended from the original Palestinians. His mother was an Egyptian, Hagar the Egyptian. His father was Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, and when Abraham and his entourage arrived in Canaan that land had already been settled with Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, you name them, a number of different groups, but they were all called Canaanites. Well then, how can the Arabs be descended from the original Palestinians? There were no original Palestinians. That land was called Canaan. Because of the wickedness of these people, God gave it to the Jews and He told them to wipe out all of these people and they are pretty much extinct to this day, you couldn’t trace yourself back to any of them. Now we have descendents of a man whose mother was Egyptian, his father was a Chaldean, and when they arrived in Canaan it was already settled and they called themselves descendents from the original Palestinians. Now, that land became Israel, when Israel conquered it, it became Israel. It was called Israel for more than a thousand years. How did it become Palestine? In 130 AD, the Romans, who had destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, they began to re-build it as a pagan city dedicated to Jupiter and they started to erect a temple to Jupiter on Temple Mount. That upset the Jews, obviously, with good cause and they re-belled. There was an uprising, at first it was quite successful, until the Romans brought in more legions and they eventually destroyed more than a thousand Jewish villages. This land was inhabited by Jews, not by Arabs, and certainly not by Muslims! Islam didn’t even exist at that point. So, they destroyed more than a thousand villages. They killed more than 500,000 Jews, thousands were sold into slavery, and they scattered, they fled, another Diaspora.
And in anger the Romans renamed Israel, Provincia Syria-Palestina, after the Philistines, the chief enemy of the Jews. It was just an angry nickname they gave to it. From then on, everyone living there was called a Palestinian. Well, who lived there? The Jews, there were no Arabs there.
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