The Arab-Israeli Conflict



A short history lesson of the endless conflict between Ishmael and Isaac.

First published on the 6th of August 2017 — Last updated on the 17th of March 2022

Arabs endlessly hate and kill other Arabs

The Arab-Israeli conflict is almost 100 years old, and the hatreds are still deadly.

This is a very complex conflict that has no real human solution. God chose the Jews as His nation and gave them Palestine as a Promised Land. The Old Testament is full of the descriptions of nations that endlessly attacked Israel because this is a “God versus Satan” battle in the spiritual dimension. The conflict will continue and spread in the 3½  years of great Tribulation as the world turns against Israel. But Jesus will finally return to the Jews as if they are the broken-off branch of an olive tree that will be grafted back into the olive tree.

ROMANS 11:20   Well; because of unbelief they [the Jews] were broken off, and thou [the church] standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear:

:21   For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee.

:22     Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.

:23   And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again.

:24     For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree:

how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?

:25     For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits;

that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

:26     And so

all Israel shall be saved:

When God is finished with the Gentile church, then He will return to Israel.

Just as the Devil attacks Christians in the church world, so his attacks are also directed against the land of Israel.

We must not forget that many thousands of Jews live peacefully in Arab countries. So it is not true to say that Jews and Arabs will automatically fight. These Jews are not a threat to Satan, because his main aim is to stop the land of Israel from returning to the Jews. Once the Jewish people are back in their homeland, then two prophets will guide them back to their Messiah. Thus Satan must try at all costs to stop the Jews from occupying the land of Israel.

The hardship caused by their enemies will drive the Jews to accept Jesus as their Messiah, as He alone will be able to save them.

The Jewish-Arab conflict has a spiritual basis.

The Jews in Romans Chapter 11 were promised to return, not just to their homeland, but also to Christ.

So Satan must oppose them in every way to stop this from happening. I have been on earth for more than 70 years, and only one theme has been constant in my life -- nations trying to destroy Israel. Born in 1944 at the height of Hitler’s Holocaust when 6 million Jews died in his gas ovens, and then as a child lived while Israel was being attacked in 1948 by five Arab armies. President Nasser of Egypt threatened to eliminate them, and war followed in 1956, 1963, and 1973 by Arab armies.  No other modern state endured so many attacks against it. So this is not just a normal conflict. It is inspired by something deeper. None of these attacking armies had any territorial rights in Israel. They had no claim to the territory -- their desire, as they repeatedly maintained, was to wipe Israel off the map.

The only ones with any possible claim to the territory are the Palestinians.

But there are about seven different Palestinian liberation groups who would simply attack each other if the Jews disappeared. Hamas in Gaza shot their way to power over their rival groups. So if there were no more Jews, then the Palestinians would fight each other for the territory, and there would still be no peace. Syrians were fighting each other in Syria with a death toll of over 300,000 by 2017. Not to mention 12 million displaced refugees. When America defeated the Muslim Taliban in Afghanistan, the Muslim Afghan warlords who had combined to fight the Taliban promptly began to fight each other, leading to a resurgence of the Taliban, who now rule Afghanistan again. Yemen has a civil war going on with thousands of casualties as Muslim Yemenis slaughter each other. Peace is not something that will easily find a home in the hatreds that swirl around in the Middle East.

Jewish-Arab warfare produces far fewer casualties than Arab-Arab warfare.

Since 1992 over 200,000 Algerians have savagely butchered each other in their Muslim-Muslim civil war.

But Israel has a right to live in their Promised land. God promised this land to their ancestor Abraham.

So we are faced with a dilemma.

The human rights of the Palestinians to own the land versus the divine right of God to give the land to the Jews.

We live in the last church age of the Laodiceans which means " people's rights". Modern-day people make up their own rights. But the Bible has only criticism and condemnation for this age. There are no compliments. So standing up for human rights which enables us to do what we want to do, is a dangerous policy when it opposes God's right to do what He wants to do. God wants the Jews back in Israel so that Messiah can come to them during great Tribulation.

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

Their national flag is the Star of David, a Jewish king who lived around 1050 BC. No other nation has such an ancient heritage in their flag.

Under Moses, Israel became a nation about 1500 BC, two thousand years before the rise of Islam. The people of modern-day Israel share the same language and culture shaped by the Jewish heritage and their religion passed through generations, starting around 1900 BC with their founding father Abraham. Since the Jewish conquest of Israel by Joshua around 1450 BC, the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence, though in small numbers during New Testament times, in the land for about the past 3,400 years.

After the Romans conquered Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago, Jewish people were expelled and dispersed (the Diaspora), and the Land of Israel was ruled by Rome, then by Islamic, and Christian crusaders, by the Ottoman Empire, and by the British Empire. So no-one has a continuous claim over Palestine. The territory passed from one invader to another. A few Jews remained in the land during all these invasions.

It was only after the Jews re-inhabited their historic homeland of Judea and Samaria in 1948, that the myth of a Palestinian nation was created and marketed worldwide.

Jews come from Judea. Palestinians have never come from Judea.

There is no language known as Palestinian, nor any Palestinian culture distinct from that of all the Arabs in the area.

There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians.

Palestinians are Arabs who are indistinguishable from Arabs throughout the Middle East. The Palestinian National Charter adopted by the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) states this fact in the first article.

The area called Palestine included the territories of present-day Israel and Jordan. Under the Lausanne agreement of 1923 Turkey transferred all claims over Palestine to the mandatory power Britain. In 1922 Britain allocated nearly 80% of Palestine to Transjordan. In 1947 the UN (United Nations) partitioned this remaining 20% of land into two states, a second Arab state, Palestine, and Israel. The great majority of Arabs in greater Palestine and Israel share the same culture and language. The Arabs in the area began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel. This was in reaction to the Jews winning the 6-Day war and taking over the West Bank from Jordan, whose army was defeated. From 1948 to 1967 Jordan had ruled the west bank. No Palestinians complained.

Palestinians formed about two-thirds of Jordan’s population and as such, they were ruled by a minority monarchy of king Hussein.

According to King Hussein, the Palestinian problem spelled "life or death" for Jordan, and would remain the country's overriding national security issue.

King Hussein feared that an independent West Bank under PLO administration would threaten the autonomy of his Hashemite kingdom. The Palestinian factions were supported variously by many Arab regimes, most notably Egypt's president Nasser, who gave political support; and Saudi Arabia, which gave financial support.

A huge problem with any form of Arab unity is their mutual mistrust and their ability to back one faction against another.

Palestinian armed groups proliferated in Jordan after 1967 and began to attack Israel and undermine the Jordanian monarchy. Between mid-1968 and the end of 1969, no fewer than five hundred violent clashes occurred between the Palestinian guerrillas and Jordanian security forces

In one extreme instance, "the fedayeen (Palestinians) in Jordan killed a Jordanian soldier, beheaded him, and played football with his head in the area where he used to live".

Armed Palestinians set up a parallel system of visa controls, customs checks, and checkpoints in Jordanian cities, adding more tensions to an already polarized Jordanian society and army. Between February and June 1970, about a thousand lives were lost in Jordan due to the conflict.

Then the war between Jordan and the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat broke out in earnest. Many thousands died as Jordan struggled to expel the Palestinian Fatah faction of Arafat. A Syrian invasion was launched into Jordan to help the Palestinians. A fierce clash that lasted for 11 days is known as Black September, whereby  5,000 Palestinians were killed by the Jordanian army.

By 1971 Jordan finally expelled Arafat and his Fatah Palestinians, who then took refuge in Lebanon. About 20,000 people had been killed.

There are more than seven liberation organizations in Gaza, and the recent infighting which saw Hamas gun down their opponents and emerge as winners shows that Palestinians do not settle peaceably in a territory, even if they are amongst fellow Arabs.

Muslims have killed many Muslims

Fighting seems to be a way of life for many Arabs in the Middle East.

400,000 Syrians have killed each other in 11 years of brutal civil war that produced 12 million refugees. This is the biggest humanitarian disaster since the second world war. Unless we compare it to the 2 million deaths and missing people in 1947 when India and Pakistan became separate nations. There were 11 million refugees that were displaced from one country to the other. This was a Hindu-Muslim conflict between people who had previously lived peaceably together.

Then in 1971, West Pakistan fought East Pakistan which wanted to separate as it became Bangladesh. 10 million refugees from East Pakistan fled to India. 30 million refugees inside east Pakistan were displaced. West Pakistan president Yahya Khan wanted his military to kill 3 million of the East Pakistanis. Political scientist Rudolf Rummel estimates that the death toll was one-and-a-half million. This was more of a Muslim-Muslim conflict as the majority of people in both west and east Pakistan were Muslim.

Once again, Muslim people were fighting each other.

An eight-year war of independence, 1954 to 1962, in Algeria saw 1 million Algerians die as they fought against France to get rid of the French. But, in addition, during that same time 500,000 Algerians were slaughtered by fellow Algerians during vicious Arab-Arab betrayals and fighting amongst the different factions. All factions were Muslim.

In 1992 a civil war broke out in Algeria. By 2002 it had claimed 200,000 lives as well as 15,000 Algerians who just forcibly "disappeared". An extreme example of Arab-Arab hatred despite all of them being Muslim.

The eight-year war from 1980 - 1988 between Muslim Iraq and Muslim Iran was the longest war of the last century which left a million people dead and in the end the two armies were in exactly the same position as when the war started. A new tactic by Iran was to give their teenagers motor bikes and make them drive into minefields to explode the mines so that the soldiers could advance safely. Their logic was that teenagers were cheaper to lose than soldiers who had cost a lot of money to train. Iran and Iraq were both basically Shiite Muslims. But a shared faith did not stop the blood-letting.

Afghanistan is consistently subject to violence between different sectarian Muslim groups. When the Russians were driven out of Afghanistan, the Afghan warlords then turned their violence on each other. This allowed the Taliban to rise up, and they continue with the killing of fellow Afghans.

A full-scale civil war in Yemen saw 16,000 people killed between 2015 and 2017. Arab-Arab violence keeps exploding despite their common Muslim faith.

Egypt is full of dissension that flows over into violence.

When Muslim Ayatollah Komeini took over Iran from the Shah, some 70,000 Iranian Muslim opponents were killed.

It seems that certain Arab factions hate other Arab factions, and then wish to settle differences using violence and murder.

Thus violence is not limited to the Jews and the Palestinians.

Violence seems to be the default mode in the Middle East.

Lebanon has a mixture of sects and religious groupings. But this did not spare them a devastating civil war from 1975 - 1990 when 120,000 died and 1 million refugees left Lebanon. Today there are still 76,000 displaced persons.

For over 3,400 years, Jerusalem has been regarded as the Jewish capital by the Jews. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem (1948-1967), they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

In the Jewish Old Testament Bible, Jerusalem is mentioned over 669 times

and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem, sometimes the Land of Israel) 154 times, for a total of 823 times. The Christian New Testament mentions Jerusalem 154 times and Zion 7 times.

Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

Jerusalem is also not mentioned in the Palestinian Covenant.

King David established the city of Jerusalem as the capital of the whole Land of Israel. Mohammed never physically came to Jerusalem. Jerusalem remained under Turkish Ottoman Empire rule from 1517 to 1917, and under British rule from 1917 to 1948. Then Jordan ruled it from 1948–1967.

So the Palestinians as such, have never ruled Jerusalem.

Most of the Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in the West Bank of Jordan River have complete autonomy under the rule of the Palestinian Authority.

The Arabs were offered a part of Israel but refused it

Many people think that the Arabs were never offered a chunk of Israel that they could rule for themselves. They were offered a partition plan in 1947, but all six Arab states on the Council voted against it. They were playing for higher stakes.

They wanted to declare war to eliminate Israel, and they would have the whole area to themselves.

The Arabs in the Jewish section were told to leave when the war started in 1948. They were promised that it would only take a week, at most a month, for the Arab armies to wipe out the Jews. Then the Arabs could return to their homes and take over all the Jewish territory as well. The Arab leaders thus seriously misled their people as they lost the war and the Arabs who listened to their leaders and fled, also lost their properties.

The Jews had just lost 6 million out of 9 million Jews in Europe to Hitler’s gas ovens. They were weak and demoralised. It was the perfect time for five Arab armies to attack. Israel seemed to have no chance of survival. The vote against partition by the Arabs caused the UN to offer Israel a portion of their homeland where they would be safe from the horrors of the Holocaust. The Arabs miscalculated. The nations of the world had a brief feeling of sympathy for Israel as a result of their awful sufferings. It had nothing to do with legal technicalities. It was a brief moment of saying 'sorry' to a nation that had suffered more than any other in the Second World War. A majority vote in the UN still had authority. The majority perception that the Arabs had of the Jews was that they had not really fought back against the Germans. Most seemed to simply submit to their fate. So, the Arabs thought that they could easily win the impending war against the docile Jews.

The Arabs miscalculated because many Jews had fought back against the Nazis very bravely.

Despite being out-numbered and out-gunned, somehow, by a miracle, the Jews won the 1948 War. God was intervening on their side. Birth pains are part of the cycle of life. The re-birth of Israel in the Promised Land would also be accompanied by much pain and struggle.

In 2000, then-president Bill Clinton, in his last year in the White House, brokered a deal between Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak that exceeded Clinton’s wildest expectations. Israel not only offered to surrender all of Gaza and 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank, he also offered to carve out one to three percent of Israel proper and to give the Arabs control over much of east Jerusalem and the holy sites, such as the Temple Mount, sacred to Jews. The Palestinian state would also receive US$30 billion in compensation for its refugees.

Arafat refused this offer. He claimed that if he made peace with Israel, he would be assassinated like Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.

So Palestinian leaders are unlikely to accept the partition plan out of fear for their lives.

One of Arafat's close advisers said that Arafat turned down the offer because of laziness. He was collecting so many millions from Arabs who opposed Israel and who regarded Arafat as their fighting leader. Why declare a Palestinian state with all the hard work entailed in running a modern state? He was receiving so much money anyway.

Refugees prove that we humans cannot solve our problems

Because the Arabs never tried partition, we do not know how it would have worked out. Had they tried partition they would have lost a lot of their land to the Jews, but today they would still have retained far more land than what they now own. Plus, they would not have their sad refugee problem. By making a grab to get it all in the 1948 war, they actually ended up with much less.

Refugees are a worldwide, sad example of our inability as humans to live in peace.

The United Nations declared June 15,  2016 as world refugee day. They claimed there were 65 million refugees at that time. Meagre provisions and harsh environments are their tragic fate.

A further 10 million have been declared stateless, having no access to any basic rights.

Many say that Israel is unjustly taking over Arab lands. But consider who owns Syria?

Sanjak of Alexandretta was part of northwest Syria that France handed over to Turkey after the second world war. No one seems to feel that Syria can demand this territory back, though it is almost equal in size to the West Bank.

Syrians have killed over 400,000 of their own, since 2011, in order for some Syrians to take over the territory of other Syrians. ISIS Arabs took over large sections of Iraq and Syria from other Arabs. Muslim Turkey and the Muslim Kurds on their border fight each other. Sunni and Shia Arabs endlessly fight each other. Yemen has a civil war, as well as Afghanistan. Fighting over territory is endemic in the Middle East.

In 1948 the Arab armies were not fighting to regain Arab territory from the Jews. They told the Arabs in Israel to move out of Israel so that the land was empty. Their Arab armies would go in, smash the Jews and eliminate them, and then the Arabs could return and have it all.

The purpose of the 1948 war was not land, as the Jews only had three small sections of Israel. The purpose of the war was to finish what Hitler had started - the elimination of the Jews.

When the Palestinians were in Jordan after 1967, they spent most of their time fighting the Jordanians and doing their best to topple king Hussein. About 20,000 died in this Arab-Arab conflict. The Palestinians were not the nicest of neighbours, according to Hussein. He eventually booted them out. Such is the Palestinian-Arab harmony.

Israel wrongly took Sinai in 1967 and left it in 1982

The Sinai desert never was part of Abraham's Promised Land.

We must never step outside of God's limits.

Israel conquered Sinai in 1967 but arrogance led to a traumatic hammering from the Arabs in 1973 until America sent them the Wild Weasel aircraft whose missiles could neutralize the devastating Russian surface-to-air missiles that were destroying the Israeli airforce. Israel finally won the war but suffered big losses. They returned the Sinai desert to Egypt in 1982.

Thus the Jews were finally with the southern borders that God gave Abraham and could be considered a nation. We, humans, are all the same. In moments of success, we overstep the line and when we get hammered then we tend to toe the line.

Many people claim that Nasser was a great Arab leader. Egyptian president Nasser was a big-mouthed bluffer, but he made the fatal mistake of believing his own threats to destroy Israel. When, in 1967, he ordered the United Nations peacekeepers out, who stood between Egypt and Israel, the way was open for him to attack. Then his pride was at stake. He had said he would attack and he needed to keep face with the Arab world. He had delusions of grandeur that he was the leader of the Arab states. Victory over Israel would make him immortal amongst the Arabs.

Egypt on its own could not destroy Israel. But there was also Syria and Jordan. If all three attacked simultaneously, Israel would be fighting a war on three fronts. This is any nation’s nightmare.  The only way of ensuring a Jewish success was to attack Egypt, Jordan and Syria separately.

Drawing2

Which was only possible if Israel attacked first. So it was a brilliant campaign, reminiscent of the Sabbath day. They fought for six days and peace and rest entered on the seventh day. If winning in 1948 against five Arab armies was a miracle, then this lightning war in 1967 was the second miracle. The Arabs failed to realize that God was turning back to Israel.

It is quite something that Arab nations could continuously and loudly threaten war, build up their forces on their borders, get rid of peacekeepers, and then complain bitterly that the other side went to war. It shows the shocking bias of the world press and Arab opinions against Israel. The Jews are God's nation, and thus other nations all too often feel obliged to oppose the Jews. If God wants the Jews back in their homeland, then Satan will oppose this at all costs.

A modern-day myth claims that the Arabs are allowed to attack Israel (and the world will sit by and watch) but Israel is not allowed to attack the Arabs because then the world will squeal loudly. The world media is shockingly biased.

The 1973 war was fought over 3 weeks. Week one saw Israel hammered by a surprise invasion. No-one said anything. Week two saw the United States helping the Jews with advanced weapons brought in from America thanks to an incredibly huge air-lift. In a life-or-death struggle, Israel halted the Egyptian–Syrian invasion. Week 3 saw the Arabs being pushed backward in retreat, and then the whole world screamed for a cease-fire. Such is the obvious bias of the modern world. Israel is allowed to lose, but is not allowed to win.

This incredible bias against Israel shows that there is a much deeper spiritual battle going on. Satan does not want Israel restored to her homeland. Israel is the only nation that God calls His own. Thus Satan must oppose the Jews. Satan's job is to oppose God. Call yourself a Christian and Satan is obligated to oppose you. God wants the Jews back in their Promised Land to meet their Messiah. Satan has to raise up enemies to stop the Jews from occupying the Promised Land.

The Sinai desert was never part of original Israel. They had no mandate from God to occupy it after the 6-day war of 1967. That was a mistake. So after they won the 1973 war, they handed back Sinai to Egypt. Their initial hiding in the Sinai at the start of the 1973 war was to remind them that Jews not to take any territory that was not promised to Abraham. The Golan Heights are part of the original Israel that God gave to Abraham. The Syrians had their cannons on these heights and could shell the Jews down below any time they wanted to. Militarily, the Jews have to hang on to the Golan. The Jews have always managed to beat the Syrians here. But when the Jews invaded Lebanon, they had to withdraw in the year 2000 as  they were out of their Promised Land and Hizballah forced them to retreat again in 2006. Christians must be confined to the Bible. The Jews must be confined to the area that God gave to Abraham.

Unfortunately, the territory belongs to the conqueror in war. ISIS ruled the city of Mosul after capturing it. Then Iraq took Mosul back by the force of arms. Whoever wins the battle, rules the territory.

In 1893 Americans forced the queen of the island of Hawaii to abdicate. Today Hawaii is an American state. The American military defeated the Native Americans and conquered and kept their territory. They declared war on Mexico and took Texas, New Mexico, and California from the Mexicans. This was almost half of Mexico.

If the Jews beat the Arabs, they will keep the territory if they want to. If the Arabs beat the Jews, they will keep the territory. Muhammad led an army from Medina to conquer Mecca. He kept Mecca. That set the pattern. Whoever wins the war, stays to rule.

After World War 2 the Russians occupied Manchuria, Poland and, Eastern Europe. Why did the Arabs not get up in arms about this? Russia recently took over the Crimea. The Arabs collected no armies to repel them. China conquered Tibet, and they still rule there. No loud protests from the Arab world. In 2008 Russia established a military occupation of two sections of Georgia. The Russian army stays there. The area around the city of Kargil on the Pakistan border was conquered in 1971 by India and they kept it. Aksai Chin, a border territory between China and India, was conquered by China in 1962 and China keeps it.

The Taliban conquered most of the warlords in Afghanistan and took over their territory. Why did the Arabs not object to this?  The Arab group ISIS took over large chunks of Iraq and Syria by armed force. If the world tell ISIS to give the land back, will ISIS listen? Obviously not. Which conquerors give back the territory they conquered if they do not want to?

ISIS had to be conquered by force of arms.

Rebels in Syria have taken over large chunks of Syrian territory from President Assad. Do they have to give it back? Only if they are beaten in a war. That is why Russia stepped in to help President Assad. Their aircraft killed 100,000 Syrian rebels.

Starting in AD 634 the Muslim Caliphate was set up from Afghanistan to Spain - simply because the Arabs were better fighters, and they kept what they conquered. Muhammed led the way as he was a gifted general in warfare. So was Ghengis Khan, so was Atilla the Hun, and Alexander the Great. Those who win the war, keep the territory.

Many people believe that the Arabs only act with the backing of the United Nations (UN).

In 1947 the UN wanted to partition Israel, and the Arabs disagreed. The UN never voted for war in 1948, so the Arabs acted outside of the UN in pursuit of their own interests when they declared war on Israel.

They acted against the UN mandate which was to set up a small Jewish state in Palestine.

Nasser ordered the UN peacekeepers out of Sinai in 1967. No Arabs criticized him for flagrantly acting against the policy of the UN.

So Arabs work with or work against the UN - when it suits them.

No Arabs stood up to Saddam Hussein during his murderous rule of Iraq. Killing 5,000 Kurds with poison gas in one village evoked no Arab protest. When mass graves were dug up in Iraq, no Arab protests were heard. The Iraqi Arab Saddam butchered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Arabs during his brutal dictatorship of 23 years. No chorus of Arab protests were heard from outside Iraq.

Forty-two years of misrule in Libya by the cruel and crazy dictator Gaddafi have turned the country into a toxic mixture of about 1,700 armed groups that are all fighting for their local interests amidst a growing financial crisis that is helping the rise of ISIS. Arab-Arab violence and blood-lust show little signs of going away.

If Arabs can so hate and be cruel to each other, is it a surprise that violence and hatred on both sides of the Jewish-Arab conflict can spill over into tragic atrocities. Both sides, Jewish and Arab, have cruelly killed civilians of all ages. This is obviously wrong but is a symptom of deep hatred. Thousands of rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel. Israel is the only modern state that has a neighbour that keeps firing rockets into their territory.

Who knows how to cope with this situation? Provocation leads to retaliation. In modern war, civilians suffer. It is an all-around tragedy. But until the rockets stop, and the underground tunnels stop bringing forth armed men who ambush, kill or kidnap Jews, the too-and-fro will continue. This does not do the reputation of either side much good. Jews are human and they can overreact and miscalculate. Arabs have the same shortcomings.

Killing each other is not a long-term solution. The intense hatreds that exist between all these rival groups in the Middle East make peace a forlorn prospect, not just in Palestine-Israel but also in Syria (with its complex fighting coalitions and rival groups) and Iraq and Egypt and Libya and Yemen and Afghanistan, not to mention on-going violence in Muslim Pakistan and Turkey and Sudan, etc.

Murderous violence is evident on a worldwide scale

During 1977, over 40 serious armed conflicts were raging in different countries.

Recently five million were killed in the Congo, one million in Rwanda, etc.

Cambodia had a population of 5 million, and the extremist group Khmer Rouge that took power from 1975 - 1979 killed 1 million Cambodians.

Tens of thousands have died in the drug wars of Colombia.

Thousands have died in the drug wars in the Philippines.

Africa too is riddled with civil wars, terrorist groups, and tribal hatreds.

Last century over 100 million people were killed in our worldwide wars. Satan is on the rampage and angry aggressors are his pliable puppets who do his bidding.

It is easy to point a finger at the Jews, but you need a lot of fingers to point at so many others who are also involved in this endless and growing violence. The Arabs do not have clean hands either.

So claiming that there should be peace between nations is an excellent agenda, but all too often it does not work that way. This is just a sad reflection on us sinful human beings.

Ever since Cain tried to settle the dispute by killing Abel. We still have not learned a better way.

Russia's vicious attack against Ukraine in 2022 was yet another example of man's insatiable greed for power and money.

President Putin of Russia wants the power to rule Ukraine and take their money.

Putin rules Russia, the biggest country on earth. But he will not be satisfied until he also rules Ukraine which is the biggest country in Europe. Giving land to a greedy man is like putting dry wood on a fire. It just makes the flames of greed burn more intensely.

God will turn back to the Jews during great Tribulation

The Arabs claimed the land of Palestine because God had promised to exile and scatter the Jews if they disobeyed God. They crucified their Messiah and God used the Romans to evict them.

This logic is good, but Romans Chapter 11 also promised that God would bring back the dispersed and scattered Jews. Once they are back in their Promised Land, the two prophets Moses and Elijah will prepare them for the coming of their Messiah during the 3½ years of great Tribulation.

Thus, the Jews will return to their Promised Land despite all the waves of Arab hatred that will try to stop them. All the Arabs and Palestinians in the world cannot stop a promise of God from happening.

Part of the intense hatred is that the Jews, despite all their faults and mistakes, have this promise that God will return to them. God never said that to any other nation.

Satan wants to stop the Jews from being ready for Messiah. That means the Devil wants to destroy them and their homeland. So, sadly, he stokes up all their neighbours to try to destroy them. Satan will do a lot of damage to them, but ultimately the Jews will survive, and their two prophets will guide them to their Messiah. Then comes Armageddon, and I can only feel sorry for the intense Jew-haters when they find themselves facing an angry God. The Jews are God’s children. God will not allow them to be destroyed, however hard the Arabs try, and whatever successes they may have in that direction. The Jews have a promise that they will meet God in Israel and this makes them the ultimate survivors.

In 1900 there were excellent Bible teachers who taught that the Bible prophecies stating that the Jews would return to their Promised Land were not to be taken literally because it seemed absolutely impossible for that to happen. Yet, one hundred years later, the Jews are back despite a Holocaust which was the worst mass murder in history. Despite four savage wars against numerous strong Arab armies. The Jews obviously have Someone on their side.

The Palestinians have so often been let down by the bad decisions of their leaders, who were offered a two-party state in 1947, and again in 2000. They unwisely turned it down both times. So Israel fought for survival to develop a viable democratic state. Their many wars against the Arabs made the Jews realize that the Jews have to have depth to absorb an invasion if they are to survive. That was really proven in 1973 when the surprise invasion of both Egypt and Syria punched big holes into the Jewish defences.

Now the Palestinians want a two-party state, as that would have given them far more territory than they now have. But does Israel want another enemy state right alongside of her? Israel has no real width. The more Hamas fires rockets into Israel, the less Israel wants Hamas as a near neighbour, as that would lay all of Israel open to their rocket fire.

It is sad for the Palestinians that their leaders voted against the partition plan. It may well have worked. But with today’s endless lust for violence against the Jews, it might not work.

The United States is very much on Israel’s side. Israel is the only Middle East country that has always supported America. The Arab nations have endlessly criticized the US, calling America the Great Satan. This will hardly endear the Arab states to the Americans. The Arab states all back Gaza, whether Hamas fires rockets at Israel or not. Then they blame America for backing Israel, right or wrong. Not very logical.

Now Russia has entered the fight in Syria. This really complicates the issue.

There is no honest broker in the Middle East. Each group has an agenda. American power is needed to protect Israel at the moment.

In 2018 President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. That was an incredible fulfillment of the prophecies that the Jews would return to Israel.

In 2016 Trump had no political experience and was a complete outsider who had no chance according to the polls. But then he announced that Jerusalem would be recognized as the capital of Israel and his campaign defied all expectations as he won the presidency.

In 2020 Bernie Sanders was leading Joe Biden by far for the Democratic nomination until Bernie announced that he would take the capital of Israel back to Tel Aviv. Almost immediately, his successful campaign fell apart and Joe Biden's campaign came back from the dead.

God wanted Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and that is what happened. God's will has triumphed.

In the meanwhile, God has re-arranged things to ensure Israel's survival.

Hizballah ( also called  Hezbollah ) emerged as a very powerful private army in Lebanon. In 2006 they fought an intense battle against Israel and seemed to get the better of the Jews. With a powerful Hizballah, and a powerful Syria on their northern borders, Israel was in grave danger. Then the Syrian civil war exploded in 2011 as President Assad tried to crush Syrian protests against his incompetent rule. Assad was losing territory, so he frantically called in Hizballah to help him. With Hizballah and Syria both locked into the Syrian civil war, neither of them were able to seriously threaten Israel for the moment. By 2020 this tragic civil war had already lasted 10 years, with more than 400,000 Syrian deaths and 12 million displaced refugees. This is the sad price for the Syrians to pay for their hatred of Israel. Only by Syrians fighting each other is God able to keep them from fighting the Jews. This Syrian-Syrian hatred is also keeping Hizballah fully occupied in Syria so that they cannot fight the Jews.

Yemen was one of seven countries that declared war on Israel in 1948. Now they face a destructive civil war that has killed thousands and released a devastating cholera epidemic.

While many Arabs hate Israel, their own Arab-Arab violence is causing them much harm.

American weapons defend Israel but when America crumbles, it will take two prophets who have the power to interrupt nature and smite the earth with plagues, that will hold back the forces trying to destroy Israel. Then the 144,000 Jews will meet Messiah. Finally, He will return at Armageddon to smash the Beast and his armies. All those who fought against Israel will realize that they have been fooled, and have been on the wrong side all along. Then they will face the wrath of an angry God, and one can only feel sorry for them.

Their blood will flow for 200 miles up to the horses' bridles. That blood will soak into the soil, and make it so fertile that the desert will bloom like a rose. That will be the final contribution made to the surviving Jews by their enemies. The Jews are the ultimate survivors as they go into the Millennium which is God's Kingdom that will last 1000 years.

 

 

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” — 1 Corinthians 16:23