The relevant verses are from Sura 5, verses 20 and 21:
“Remember when Moses said to his people: O my people, remember the favors that God bestowed on you when he appointed apostles from among you, and made you kings and gave you what had never been given to any one in the world. Enter then, my people, the Holy Land that God has ordained for you.”
How, then, do Muslims there argue against a Jewish presence and against the existence of Israel? They allege that Jews today are really descended from the Khazhars, an Asiatic Russian tribe that converted to Judaism in the 9th century. They are, then, not really the original Hebrews mentioned in the Koran. This argument is curiously similar to the one used by Christian Identity to argue that the “Jews” are descendants of Satan and that Christian Identity members are the “true” Israel.
Unfortunately, that argument was undermined by the actions of Nabil Hilmi, dean of a law school in Cairo. He tried suing every Jew in the world for the “theft” of 1,125 trillion tons of Egyptian gold during the Exodus 3,000 years ago. How does this affect the right of Israel to exist? Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in the Jerusalem Post:
If Jews can be sued for the gold of the Exodus, then surely they are heirs to the Koran’s promise that the Holy Land would belongs to the people of Moses. Perhaps, when Zionists base their claims on Scripture, they should cite not just the Bible but the Koran too. I’m not the only one who has noted this. There are brave - admittedly isolated - Muslim voices who insist that the Koran does indeed recognize the Jewish right to the Holy Land. One of them is Khaleel Mohammed, an Islamic scholar who taught at Brandeis University and will begin teaching this fall at San Diego University.
I met him a few weeks ago at an interfaith seminar sponsored by “Brandeis in the Berkshires,” Brandeis’s adult education summer institute. “As a Muslim,” he told us then, “I have no choice but to believe that God gave the land to the Jews.” ... Clearly, scriptural interpretation can lead to all sorts of conclusions. I know one politically hard-line Muslim scholar in Jerusalem who accepts, on the basis of Sura 5, the right of Jews to live in the Holy Land, but not their right to sovereignty over it. The Koran, he explains, approves of Jewish immigration to the land, but says nothing about a Jewish state.
Arguably, God only “ordained” Jews to live in the region of Israel. Arguably, God also “ordained” that they take control over the region of Israel. I think that there is a better scriptural argument for the latter - but even if that isn’t correct, there are two things that are difficult to dispute: Muslim scriptures record a right of Jews to live in the region and it is reasonable to think that the same scriptures record a right to control it.
That creates religious problems for those who oppose Israel and the presence of Jews... for example, Iran’s contention that Israel should be eliminated. This wouldn’t be the first time that religious principles have taken a second place to political expediency, though. It’s ironic when people who proclaim the superiority of their religion find it convenient to ignore that religion when other interests become more important.
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