“He was talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, not the state of Israel.”
Wrong! And that’s one of the problems with the heresy of replacement theology.
The promise of the land is to literal Israel and the Jewish people, not the church or the kingdom of heaven.
One of the worse problems of replacement theology is how Christians who buy into that false doctrine take Scriptures from the Bible meant for Israel and falsely “spiritualise” them to mean the “church” or as you stated the “kingdom of heaven” in that instance.
That promise was to the Hebrew descendants of Abraham through “Isaac” and “Jacob” literally.
In Ezekial 36:21-22 the promise was made by the Lord-
“I will bring you back from the nations where I have scattered you, back to ‘your own land’.,
no longer will there be two kingdoms in ‘your land’, and no longer will ‘your land’ be divided by two nations.”
“And there shall be one king over you.”
And the reference to king is a reference to the Messiah,-Yeshua!
In Luke 21:24 the Lord prophesied:
“And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and be led away captive into all nations; and Jerusalem shall be trodden down [conquered, occupied] of the Gentiles, ‘until’the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.”
The word ‘until’ is very important. It means the Lord was saying that the time would come when these bad fortunes for the Jewish people of Israel would be reversed.
In June of 1967, for the first time in 2,000 years, Jerusalem was no longer ‘trodden down’ and occupied by foreigners. In a war of self-defense, all Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were returned to Israel.
1948 saw a fullfilment of the restoration of ‘national’ Israel.
The “spiritual restoration” is also occurring. Many are coming to know and embrace the true Messiah of Israel-Yeshua [Jesus]
Baloney. I suppose that includes kicking the Palestinians off their land. Right?
That said, I do not doubt that the current Jewish presence in Palestine/Israel may have biblical, even apocalyptic significance, but will not go so far as to acknowledge a divine right to that land based upon the Old Covenant promise to the patriarchs and their descendants. The complete absence of the Jewish Temple and inability to offer true worship in its absence strongly suggests that the old promises have now been realized in new covenant ways and were meant to pass and give way to Christ and what came to be known as Christianity.
God has not abandoned the Jewish people, and many will come to Christ at some point prior to the end, but it does not follow that the Old Covenant promises continue to remain intact, as they once stood.
P.S. The Catholic Church does not subscribe to the view that the modern political state of Israel has some God given claim to the land.
As far as replacement theology goes, the Church teaches that the Jewish Nation was destined to give way to the Catholic Church as the fullment of God’s promise to Abraham that the whole world would be blessed through his descendants,the Jewish People. And that happened. It was through Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, all Jews, and through the Apostles, all Jews, that the Catholic Church began. Catholics today then are also descendants of Abraham, not in a racial sense, but in a spiritual sense.