One of the weirdest things Christians and other Zionists say is that Jews have a right to the land:
Israeli educational textbooks now carry the same message of the right to the land based on a biblical promise. According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 to all schools in Israel: “the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored.”26 Bible studies are now a crucial and expanded component of the curriculum—with a particular focus on the Bible as recording an ancient history that justifies the claim to the land."*
This is perhaps the strangest idea ever brought up on this issue. I don't know how anyone who reads the Bible can come to this conclusion, as nothing is more clear than the conditional nature of Israel's relationship to the land.
For one this "right" is never mentioned in scripture, Israel had no right to the land. Israel's relationship to the land is never discussed in the context of it having a right to it. Rights are things reserved for the king and what he may take from the people (1 Samuel 8) or the poor, or destitute, or marital rights. In other words rights are about how people should interact justly, and never something to do with Israel's possession of the land.
Israel, rather, had a responsibility to the land. No theology of possession is complete or accurate without this recognition. For instance the exile was timed for 70 years precisely because the Israelites had not granted the land the fallow years it was due. In fact God went to great pains to remind them they never owned a centermeter of the land (Leviticus 25:23). It would be more accurate to say that the land had rights, and the Israelites would be punished if they did not treat it right,
"20 He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, 21 to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years" (2 Chronickes 36:20-21).
