NOTES for Deu 10:19
The readers of the Old Testament argue rather often about God's chosen people as of something that distinguishes them from other peoples, giving them certain special rights and developing in them exclusive religious and spiritual feelings, and maybe, even national. Of course, such feelings and such ideas were appropriate to some of the Jews before and are appropriate today still. But in any case, the Torah cultivates in no way anything similar in the people of God and teaches nothing similar.
The elected of God is understood in the Torah, above all, as a special responsibility of the Jewish people for the received revelation and for the Torah which is entrusted to them. We can find not less of indications on this account in the Torah, and one of them can be considered the requirement of an equal relationship between the Jews and those who were on the land given by God to His people as strangers. It is necessary to notice that the heathen antiquity is rather generally appropriate to a contemptuous relationship to the strangers, foreigners in general.
Of course, there were here international practices elaborated during millenniums, and even before intertribal relationships label connected with the status of foreigner, which sometimes, in particular cases, could give a considerable respect. And if it was, only by virtue of the special status of such a foreigner, conditioned by the intergovernmental or intertribal relationships. "The common" stranger had as a rule no respect. But the Torah requires not simply for respect, but in particular for the love of the stranger, the foreigner in general, the same that people show to their tribesmen.
And it is clear: because the land given by God to His people, was given to them not in an unconditional possession, but rather for use, with the condition of the observation of the union-alliance concluded before and the fulfillment of God's commandments. And if it is the case, then acts in the relationships of the earth the principle not so much of the right, but the responsibility: the people of God are responsible for the fact that all the inhabitants living on the land that was given to them by God, live according to the norms of the Torah.
But this responsibility does not suppose in itself an exclusive right of the people for the land: it is not accidentally that on the Jewish land and in the Jewish State (when it existed on the political map) in all the times, other peoples also lived next to the Jews. And it was in particular from the spiritual choice of the people of God that depended, which was the environment and how were solved the problems of relationships with those whom the Jews perceived as foreigners. Because the land was not given to a specific ethnic group, but to people-community. Respecting the commandments and keeping the Torah.