I recently received this comment from a grossly misinformed individual who, in her zeal to delegitimize the Jewish people’s right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, offered the following argument:

“Well, actually the Canaanites were the earliest known inhabitants of the land, which the Hebrews murdered and stole. The Lebanese are the known descendants of the Canaanites. Maybe we should give the land to them.”

It is difficult to know where to begin with such a foolish assertion—one born either of profound historical ignorance or good old-fashioned antisemitism. I suspect it is a mixture of both.

Permit me to offer a few inconvenient facts.

From the biblical perspective, God commanded the Israelites to drive out the Canaanite nations because of their idolatry, child sacrifice, and other abhorrent practices condemned by the Torah. Whether one accepts the Torah as Divine revelation or not, the biblical account describes the Israelites’ entry into the land as conquest and settlement—not as the simple “theft” imagined by Israel’s........

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