Readers of the Old Testament often speak of the chosenness of God's people as something that sets them apart from other peoples, giving them certain special rights and developing in them a sense of religious and spiritual, and perhaps even national, exclusiveness. Of course, some Jews had such feelings and thoughts in former times, and some have them today. But in any case, the Torah cultivates nothing of the kind among God's people in any way, and it teaches nothing of the kind.
In the Torah, being chosen by God is understood, above all, as the special responsibility of the Jewish people for the revelation they received and for the Torah entrusted to them. In the Torah one can find quite a few instructions on this point, and one of them can be seen in the demand for equal treatment of Jews and of those who ended up on the land given by God to His people as resident foreigners.
It should be noted that pagan antiquity in general tended to treat resident foreigners, foreigners, and strangers of every kind with disdain. Of course, there was an etiquette, developed over millennia of interethnic and, earlier still, intertribal relations, connected with the status of a foreigner, to whom in special cases considerable respect could be shown. But when such respect was shown, it was only because of the special status of that foreigner, a status determined by interstate or intertribal relations. The "ordinary" resident foreigner, as a rule, did not enjoy respect.
The Torah requires not merely respect, but precisely love for the resident foreigner, the foreigner, the stranger in general, the same love shown to one's own tribesmen. This is understandable: the land given by God to His people was given to them not as unconditional possession, but rather for use, on condition that they keep the covenant once made and fulfill God's commandments. And if so, then with regard to the land the operative principle is not so much right as responsibility: God's people are responsible for ensuring that those who live on the land God has given them live in accordance with the norms of the Torah.
But this responsibility in itself does not imply an exclusive right of the people to the land. It is no accident that on Jewish land and in the Jewish state, in the periods when it existed on the political map, other peoples also lived alongside Jews at all times. And it was precisely on the spiritual choice of God's people that the environment depended, as did the way problems of relations with those whom Jews perceived as strangers were resolved. For the land was given not to a specific ethnic group, but to a people as a community: those who keep the commandments and preserve the Torah.
