The Torah famously opens not with the first mitzvah given to Israel but with a cosmic declaration:
“כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ, לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם” (Psalms 111:6)
“He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the inheritance of nations.”
Rashi famously explains on Genesis 1:1 that the Torah begins with this declaration so that if the nations accuse Israel of being “thieves” for taking the land of Canaan, the response is clear: the land belongs to God, who created it and gave it to whom He pleased. At one point He gave it to the Canaanites; then He took it from them and gave it to Israel. Crucially, this answer is not aimed at the nations of the world but at Israel itself — “koach ma’asav higid le’amo.”
The point is to prevent moral self-doubt.
This becomes more pointed later in the text. On Genesis 12:6, Rashi comments:
“והכנעני אז בארץ — היה הולך וכובש את ארץ ישראל מזרעו של שם.”
“And the Canaanite was then in the land — he was in the process of conquering the Land of Israel from the descendants of Shem.”
Here the moral and historical frame is flipped on its head: the Canaanites are not the natives; they are the occupiers. The divine promise to Abraham is not conquest ex nihilo but restoration: the return of ancestral territory to its rightful heirs.
A number of modern rabbinic thinkers have stressed that Rashi’s opening comment is directed inward. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Shlomo Goren all emphasized that the pasuk is not hasbara for the United Nations. It is a theological anchor meant to prevent Jews from apologizing for possessing their own land.
Rashi on Genesis 12:6 adds a second layer. By noting that the Canaanite was already in the act of conquering the land from Shem’s descendants, the Torah presents Israel’s arrival centuries later not as an imperial act but as a rectification of a previous usurpation. This is more than a narrative flourish. It is a fundamental reframing of moral legitimacy: the Jews are not the conquerors but the heirs returning home.
This reading has had a long afterlife. In the modern period, three broad streams — religious Zionist, academic, and secular nationalist — all converged on this verse, each in its own register.
Religious Zionist thinkers such as Goren, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Shlomo Aviner, and Yoel Bin-Nun have repeatedly cited Rashi on Genesis 12:6 to underline the moral asymmetry of the Jewish return. Aviner even borrowed halakhic language, likening Israel’s modern return to the Land to hashavat aveidah — the mitzvah of returning lost property. “This is not conquest,” he said, “but returning what was stolen from us.”
Academic biblical scholars — notably Yehezkel Kaufmann, Yair Zakovitch, Moshe Weinfeld, Israel Finkelstein, and Shmuel Ahituv — interpret the phrase “והכנעני אז בארץ” as a deliberate ideological marker. It frames the Canaanites as latecomers, not natives, and casts Israel’s conquest as the rectification of an earlier wrong. Even from a strictly historical-critical perspective, the verse is an anti-occupier polemic embedded in the biblical text.
Early secular Zionist leaders embraced this logic as well. David Ben-Gurion explicitly cited Genesis 12:6 in speeches from the 1930s through the early years of statehood: “We are not conquerors. We are returning to our ancient homeland. Others conquered it after us, but it was never truly theirs.” Berl Katznelson and A. D. Gordon likewise used “return” and “restoration” language rather than “conquest.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, said essentially the same thing: “This land is ours — not because we conquered it, but because it was ours and was taken from us.”
For roughly the first half of the 20th century, this restorationist frame was a shared national narrative that transcended religious-secular divides.
By the late 20th century, however, this framing had largely disappeared from mainstream Israeli discourse. Historians and legal scholars have identified several reasons:
Secularization of political language: Post-1948 leaders like Moshe Sharett preferred legalistic and civic nationalism to biblical language. The restoration claim, associated with Genesis and covenant, was seen as too religious and “unmodern.”
Temporal narrowing: After 1948 and especially after 1967, the world framed the conflict around contemporary events — wars, armistice lines, occupation — not 3,000-year-old claims. Israel responded within that narrowed frame, letting the ancient narrative fade from view.
Legal pragmatism: In diplomatic and legal forums, appeals to Bronze Age ownership have no standing. Israeli legal teams emphasized Mandate history, defensive war, and sovereignty — pragmatic arguments that sidelined theological or historical rhetoric.
Ideological polarization: After 1967, biblical language became coded as belonging to the Religious Zionist right (e.g., Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Gush Emunim). Secular centrists recoiled from using language that now felt sectarian, even though the same verses had been invoked by Ben-Gurion a generation earlier.
The result was a kind of rhetorical amnesia: what had once been a powerful shared national narrative — “you were never the original owners” — was no longer part of the mainstream conversation. Internationally, the debate flattened into symmetrical claims: “ours” versus “ours,” as though both peoples stood on identical moral footing.
Here lies the irony. Moshe Sharett and the early diplomatic establishment deliberately avoided biblical language out of a desire to sound pragmatic and modern. But in doing so, they abandoned the single most powerful asymmetric claim available: that Jewish presence in the land is not merely a competing claim but a prior claim, rooted in both sacred text and national memory.
Had they followed the logic of the first Rashi — “Koach ma’asav higid le’amo” — they might have realized that this was never primarily a foreign-policy argument. It was a narrative for themselves: a way of framing their own return without apology or embarrassment. A people that stops telling its own story leaves the stage for others to tell it for them.
Two Rashis — one on Genesis 1:1 and one on 12:6 — contain a remarkably sophisticated land claim. The first teaches that Jewish moral confidence comes from knowing that possession of the land is not theft but divine allocation. The second reframes history: Canaanite occupation was itself an act of conquest, and Israel’s later arrival was an act of restoration.
For centuries this was understood as theological argument. In the early Zionist period, it was secularized into a national-historical narrative that unified religious and secular leaders alike. But in the post-1948 era, that language was gradually abandoned in favor of pragmatic, legal, and security-based rhetoric — a shift that unintentionally weakened Israel’s moral narrative on the world stage.
The irony is striking: the first Rashi, so often read as a religious apologetic, may in fact have been the strongest secular rhetorical asset early Zionism ever had. By ceasing to use it, the movement inadvertently flattened its own claim. The result was not modern sophistication but a self-imposed amnesia — one that reduced a 3,000-year story to a mere border dispute.
Perhaps it is time to listen again to Rashi’s opening line, not as prophecy, but as political clarity:
“כח מעשיו הגיד לְעַמּוֹ”
The point was never to convince the nations.
It was to remind ourselves who was here first.
