Israel Is Causing Some of the World’s Growing Anti-Semitism

Last updated on: April 28, 2017 at 6:48 pm by Kermit Zarley

Israel Is Causing Some of the World’s Growing Anti-Semitism 2017-04-28T18:48:07-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel, everything stopped for two minutes while Israelis remembered, if not prayed about, the horrible slaughter of six million Jews by Adolf Hitler’s German Nazis in WWII. Humans must never forget so that perhaps it will never happen again.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decried the rise of anti-Semitism in recent years worldwide by saying, “Hypocrisy is screaming to the sky,” claiming “the world’s indifference” to this rise of anti-Semitism.

But Netanyahu never admits that Israel, and more particularly his leadership of Israel, is a contributing cause of increased anti-Semitism. How so? Talk about indifference, that is what it appears that he has toward the Palestinian plight.

Next year, it will be the 70th anniversary of the modern State of Israel. It will also be the 70th anniversary of there being no State of Palestine. In November, 1947, the new United Nations tried to create both states by drafting a resolution to that end. But nothing came of it except war, which Jews won as they created their own state. BTW, the old saw we often hear–that the UN created the State of Israel–is false.

Another anniversary is just around the corner for the Palestinians. In June this year, it will the 50th anniversary since the Six-Day War of 1967. That’s when Israel defeated its Arab neighboring states, resulting in its occupation of four territories: Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and West Bank. Israel eventually returned the Sinai due to the 1979 Camp David Accords peace treaty with Egypt. In 2005, Israel unilaterally gave the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. But the most important of these four land parcels has always been the West Bank, and Israel has continued as the “occupier” of it for the past fifty years.

That “occupier” word is UN language. Soon after Israel became a nation again, it was accepted as a member of the UN. One important UN principal is that if war results in one nation occupying the land of another nation, it must return that land. Now, the Palestinians have never had their own nation. But that’s only because Israel got their’s and the Palestinians didn’t. UN member nations have unanimously believed that Israel should return the West Bank to Palestinians because they were by far the dominant people there in numbers. Yet Palestinians are farther away from Israel returning the West Bank to them, and thus Palestinians getting their own state, than they ever have been for the past fifty years.

Now, the nations are not indifferent to this situation, though Palestinians wish the UN would do more. UN members demand that Israel return at least some of the West Bank to Palestinians. It is mostly Netanyahu and his Likud Party that is indifferent about this. They have allowed Jewish settlers to create settlements in the West Bank so that their numbers there are approaching half a million. That seriously stalls the “peace process,” which no longer exists.

Yet since 1981, I have maintained that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will not work and probably will never happen. Why? The main problem about trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is demographics and ignoring history.

According to the Bible, God gave the Hebrew people their land–Eretz Yisrael (land of Israel). But the Jews’ Bible (Old Testament) says this land gift came in the form of a covenant God made with the Hebrews in which he attached to it a Law of Commandments (Torah). This Law said that if Israel obeyed God’s commandments, he would bless Israel; but if Israel continued to disobey God’s commandments, he would judge Israel by, first of all, casting it out of the land that God had given Israel.

That is what happened twice: the Babylonian Captivity/Exile (fifty century BC), and the Diaspora. The latter was a dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the nations of the earth which began with the First Jewish Revolt (70 AD) and more thoroughly in the Second Jewish Revolt (132-135). Both of these revolts were Jewish uprisings against Roman rule, and the Romans defeated the Jews both times. The Jewish people then remained dispersed worldwide for over seventeen centuries.

When some Jews began to return to their ancestral land during the late nineteenth century, they saw Arabs living in the hill country that later became known to the world as the West Bank. But it was always known to Jews as Judea and Samaria–the very heartland of ancient Israel. But there was hardly anyone living in the coastal plain to the west of that hill country. That was because that land had laid waste for so long that Mediterranean seawater marshes existed there that were full of malaria-infected mosquitoes. That’s why Arabs had not settled there. And was that not exactly what God had predicted in his Torah? Here’s some of what God says in it:

“All the curses written in this book will descend on them, and the LORD will bloty out their names from under heaven…. The next generation, your children who rise up after you, as well as the foreigner who comes from a distant country, will see the devastation of that land and the afflictions with which the LORD has afflicted it–all its soil burned out by sulfur and salt, nothing planted, nothing sprouting, unable to support any vegetation,… the LORD destroyed in his fierce anger–they and indeed all the nations will wonder, ‘Why has the LORD done thus to this? What caused this great display of anger?’ They will conclude, ‘It is because the abandoned the covenant of the LORD, the God of their ancestors, which he made with them when brought them our of the land of Egypt…. The LORD uprooted them from their land in anger, fury, and great wrath, and cast them into another land'” (Deuteronomy 29.20-28 NRSV).

So, when Diaspora Jews arrived there, they settled mostly in the coastal plain opposite Jerusalem. That’s why Tel Aviv, known as Joppa in antiquity, is the largest city in Israel. Thus, the present demographics occurred due to Jews settling mostly in the coastal plain and Arabs, who later named themselves Palestinians, living in the hill country that later became known as the West Bank. THIS IS THE MAIN PROBLEM! It happened due to the Jews’ disobedience toward their God.

I believe the Israeli-Palestinian problem will never be solved except by there being two states lying side-by-side, with the Palestinian state being located in the coastal plain and the Jewish state being located in east of it, thus mostly in Judea, Samaria, and parts north and south of this. And I believe that Bible prophecy indicates that this will indeed happen. See my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia. As my book’s subtitle says, I think Bible prophecies indicate that the future Palestinian state will be a revival of ancient Philistia because it will be located pretty much where that ancient nation existed.

In the meantime, growing anti-Semitism in the world is being fueled by the State of Israel not moving forward in settling its conflict with the Palestinians.

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Benjamin Netanyahu

Torah

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