Do anti-Zionist religious Jews have the same biblical reason as Catholics to reject the claim that God gave Israel the land forever?
A viewer asks whether anti-Zionist religious Jews share the same grounds as Catholic teaching for opposing the Zionist interpretation that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews.
Answer
Yes, because it is all based on Scripture. Most Zionists do not know the Bible well; they know the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible, which teaches that God still owes the land of Israel to the Jews from the Old Testament, and this matters because a nuclear war could turn on people who think God will fight for them to give them that land. Scofield made a mistake: God promised land forever to Abraham and his seed, but Abraham himself died without ever receiving a stitch of land on this earth. Hebrews 11 tells us God fulfilled that promise by giving Abraham a heavenly land built by God, and that Abraham had to wait for us to receive it together at the second coming in the new heaven and new earth. There is no passage that says God promised land forever to Abraham's seed alone. The only verse that connects forever with the seed is Moses speaking in Exodus 32:13, not God, and Moses was confused, conflating the passages. The physical seed, the Jews, did receive the land of Canaan, and Joshua 21:43-45 says God fulfilled every word, but never forever. In fact Moses himself in Deuteronomy 28 warned that disobedience would lose them the land, and God took it away several times, in 722 BC and again in the Babylonian captivity.