One of the most striking passages in this week’s Haftorah for Parshat Chukat sounds remarkably familiar.
More than three thousand years ago, the king of the Ammonites leveled a charge against the Jewish people that continues to echo in our own day. Israel, he claimed, was occupying stolen land.
In the Haftorah (Judges 11:1-33), Yiftach is preparing to confront the Ammonites, who had launched military hostilities against Israel. Before going to war, however, Yiftach attempts diplomacy. He sends messengers to ask why the Ammonites are attacking.
The response of the Ammonite king is immediate: “Because Israel took away my land when they came up out of Egypt" (Judges 11:13).
The accusation could hardly be clearer. The Israelites, insisted the king of Ammon, had seized territory that rightfully belonged to his people. Therefore, he demanded that the land be returned.
Sound familiar?
Today, critics of Israel routinely advance a similar claim. They assert that the Jewish state was established on land stolen from others and that the Jewish people are foreign interlopers with no legitimate claim to the Land of Israel.
The remarkable thing is that Yiftach answered this allegation centuries before today’s critics ever raised it.
His response was not emotional. It was factual.
Yiftach carefully reviewed the historical record. When the Israelites left Egypt, he explained, they did not conquer the territory of either Ammon or Moab. On the contrary, G-d explicitly commanded them not to attack those nations.
Instead, the disputed territory belonged to Sichon, king of the Amorites. The Amorites had previously conquered it from Moab. Only after Sichon attacked Israel did the Israelites wage war and defeat him, thereby acquiring the land in a defensive action.
In other words, Israel had not taken Ammonite territory at all.
The claim was false.
Yiftach then posed a devastating question. If the land truly belonged to Ammon, why had the Ammonites failed to challenge Israel’s possession of it for nearly three hundred years?
“While Israel dwelt in Heshbon and its towns … for three hundred years, why did you not recover them during that time?" (Judges 11:26).
The silence of previous generations exposed the weakness of the Ammonite argument.
Yiftach understood something that remains true to this day: falsehoods often gain traction not because they are convincing, but because they are repeated often enough.
The king of Ammon was not interested in historical accuracy. He was searching for a justification for aggression.
Sadly, the same phenomenon is all too common today.
The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is one of the best-documented relationships between a people and its homeland in human history. Long before the rise of Christianity or Islam, the Hebrew Bible recorded the Jewish presence in the land. Archaeological discoveries continue to uncover evidence of ancient Jewish kingdoms, Hebrew inscriptions, coins, seals and public buildings throughout the country.
Jerusalem served as the capital of the Jewish people more than three thousand years ago. Jews prayed toward it throughout centuries of exile and repeatedly sought to return. The modern State of Israel did not create the Jewish connection to the land. It restored Jewish sovereignty in the birthplace of Jewish civilization.
Yet despite the overwhelming historical evidence, the accusation of “stolen land" persists.
From university campuses to international organizations, from social media to diplomatic forums, Israel is routinely portrayed as an illegitimate colonial enterprise.
Like the king of Ammon, many of Israel’s detractors begin with a conclusion and then search for arguments to support it.
Facts become secondary, history becomes optional and truth becomes inconvenient.
The Haftorah teaches that such distortions are hardly new. Already in the days of the Judges, Israel found itself confronting efforts to rewrite the past in order to delegitimize the Jewish people’s presence in their land.
Yiftach’s response offers an important lesson.
He did not ignore the accusation nor did he simply dismiss it. Instead, he confronted it directly, marshaling facts, history and evidence to expose its falsehood.
In an age when misinformation spreads with unprecedented speed, that remains our task as well.
We cannot assume that the truth will speak for itself.
We must know our history. We must be prepared to articulate it. And we must have the confidence to challenge those who seek to erase it.
The dispute between Yiftach and the king of Ammon was not merely a disagreement over territory. It was a battle over historical memory.
And it is a battle that, in many ways, continues to this very day. Our task now is to wage it with uncompromising determination.