Covenant or Colonisation: Seeing Israel Through Middle Eastern Eyes
I write this not from anger, but from geography. The Middle East is the land where the prophets walked, where covenant was born, and where divine promise first entered human history. From these sands and olive groves came Abraham's faith, Moses' law, and the compassion of Jesus: three traditions that once shared not only revelation, but soil. Yet in our modern age, the ground that birthed the language of holiness has become the stage for one of history's most enduring moral contradictions: the claim that the modern State of Israel is the direct continuation of the Israel of the Bible.
It is not.
A European Idea on Eastern Soil
The modern State of Israel did not emerge from Sinai or Zion, but from Europe's ashes. Zionism arose in the late nineteenth century as a nationalist project of Jewish survival, a response to centuries of European persecution that culminated in the Holocaust. The tragedy of that history is indisputable. But the remedy was imposed upon a region that bore no responsibility for it. The Holocaust was Europe's crime, yet its resolution was written onto Palestinian soil.
To understand the region's enduring wound, one must see this not as an ancient tribal feud, but as a colonial transposition. European settlers, whether secular nationalists or religious revivalists, arrived invoking the prophets while armed with the methods of empire. What began as refuge became replacement. The rhetoric of "return" concealed the reality of dispossession.
This is not to deny Jewish historical connection to the land. That connection is real and ancient. The question is whether those ties justify the political reality we see today: permanent occupation, systemic inequality, and the subordination of one people to another.
The Covenant Was Moral, Not Militarised
Those who appeal to Scripture to defend the modern state often forget what the covenant required. In every prophetic text, divine favour is conditional, not on possession, but on righteousness. Israel's legitimacy in the Bible rested not on land deeds, but on moral conduct. When Israel's kings oppressed the poor, defied the law, or sought power through arms, the prophets pronounced judgment: "You have turned justice into bitterness, and cast righteousness to the ground."
The covenant was never unconditional. To occupy without justice is to break it. To claim divine promise whilst practising cruelty is to turn covenant into idolatry.
The Israel of today is not the Israel of the prophets, because its covenant is not moral but militarised. It defines its chosenness not by holiness but by might, by borders drawn in blood and guarded by walls. That resembles nationalism more than revelation.
The Middle East's Moral Position
To speak from the Middle East is to speak from memory — a memory of coexistence that long predates European Zionism. Jews, Christians, and Muslims once shared cities, markets, and even melodies across Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, and Córdoba. In medieval Al-Andalus, Jewish scholars like Maimonides wrote in Arabic and served Muslim courts. In Ottoman Palestine, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities coexisted for centuries under complex but functioning pluralism. Jewish communities thrived under Muslim rule long before the rise of modern nation-states. The rupture came not from religious incompatibility, but from the imposition of European political models onto Eastern social fabric.
The tension we witness today is not between religions; it is between justice and dispossession.
The Arab position, stripped of propaganda, has always been this: one people's suffering does not sanctify another's occupation. The right to safety for Jews does not override the right to dignity for Palestinians. Both are sacred, but neither can be preserved by the destruction of the other.
The region's opposition to Zionism is not a rejection of Judaism: it is a rejection of the political exploitation of faith. It is a defence of the principle that God does not bless injustice, even when it is cloaked in His name.
Addressing the Counterargument
Critics will say this analysis ignores Jewish historical connection to the land, or dismisses genuine security concerns. Neither is true. The question before us is not whether Jews have historical ties to this geography — they manifestly do — but whether those ties can justify the political structure imposed upon it: what international human rights organisations have termed apartheid conditions, indefinite military rule over millions without citizenship or rights, and the steady erasure of Palestinian presence through settlement expansion.
Security earned through permanent domination is not security at all, it is merely delayed reckoning. And no amount of biblical citation can transform structural injustice into divine will.
From Abraham to the Present
Abraham's story is not about ownership; it is about obedience. His journey did not end with conquest but with faith — the willingness to trust God's promise without violating God's image in another. If there is to be an Israel worthy of that name, it will not be built upon occupation, but upon repentance. And if there is to be peace worthy of the prophets, it will come when covenant once again means compassion rather than control.
The modern Middle East does not ask for vengeance, it asks for memory — for the world to remember that the Holy Land is holy not because of who holds it, but because of how it is held. Holiness demands humility. Justice demands restraint. Peace demands truth — the truth that the State of Israel, as it exists today, is primarily a political construct of the twentieth century, not the prophetic continuation some claim.
Until that truth is spoken, no diplomacy will heal the wound, and no scripture will justify the suffering.