Friday, January 6, 2017

Endgame: Politics of Palestinian Statehood



According to Daniel 9:27, one of the last events that will close the history of the nation of Israel, is a 7-year peace treaty that would be forged by the Antichrist between Israel and her neighbours.  This final “one week” (7 years) event will commence immediately after the Church has been raptured and the partial blindness on Israel begins to get lifted (Rom. 11:25).
Key endtime events are doubly guaranteed to be fulfilled, by the fact that both Divine and demonic strategies converge on them. In other words, both God and the Devil are in perfect agreement that those events will come to pass.  Rev 17:17 explains how this convergence typically works out:
For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled.”
The coming “peaceful” establishment of Israel in ALL her historic promised land is one such classic endtime event.
The dying days of Obama’s administration has seen him desperately pushing what he had been unable to do in eight years: decree into existence a Palestinian state that would co-exist peacefully with the state of Israel. Of course Barak Obama is doing this principally to spite and punish Israel.
The desperate moves began with a resolution (Resolution 2334) passed at the UN Security Council on December 23.  The resolution essentially holds that Israel is an occupier and usurper in any land from East Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall) throughout Judea and Samaria up to the Jordan river.  But this is the exact heartland of Israel from the days of David to New Testament time! Apparently the UN doesn’t think the Bible a reliable source of history!  PM Benjamin Netanyahu avers that he has iron-clad evidence that the resolution was actually drafted and pushed by Obama administration, which pretended as only standing aloof of the development.
Next was the incendiary speech by John Kerry, outgoing US secretary of state on December 28.  After a lengthy lesson in history, Kerry sanctimoniously declared that the Obama administration will be pushing every option necessary in order to ensure a two –state solution remains viable in the Middle East.  He correctly analysed that the possibility of the two-state solution was fast fritzing away. Largely because the Palestinians continue to glamourize and promote terror on Israel, and because Israel also continues to build Jewish settlements in what might eventually be a Palestinian state, if the two state option were to be realized.
However, while Kerry mentioned the Palestinian terror issue merely in passing, he spent the rest of his very very long speech attacking Israel’s settlement policy and eventually demanded immediate stoppage. In his sharp response to the speech, Netanyahu pointed out that the safety of Israel cannot be simply dismissed by some “throwaway lines in a speech.”  For Israel, the grim reality translates to “hundreds of suicide bombings, thousand, tens of thousands of rockets, millions of Israelis in bomb shelters “ – all because some people somewhere are engineering theoretical policies only meant to gain “thunderous applause of the world”.
According to Netanyahu, terror is an awful reality that Israel would be happy to be free from, but which they are forced to live with since the harbingers of terror have very little motivation to explore alternative methods to achieve their goals. Furthermore, neither Kerry nor his principal, Obama, are in any position to come teach Israel about the need for peace!
It is well understood that both the resolution 2334 and the Kerry speech are desperate moves towards the possible declaration of a Palestinian state by the UN Security Council before Trump cold be sworn in as US president on January 20.  A decisive meeting, involving 70 nations is scheduled to hold in Paris on January 15 to leverage on the speech by Kerry and attempt to push the recognition of a Palestinian state through the UN!
Which brings us back to the immutability of the Scriptures’ position on how these things would end.  From the beginning, Israel had excitedly embraced UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (November 29, 1947) calling for two states for two people in “Palestine”; and on the strength of that, announced the establishment of the State of Israel on a tiny portion of the land in 1948.  The Arabs, assured of their military superiority over the ramshackle Jewish forces at that time, rejected the idea of a Jewish state, and threatened to overrun and annihilate it in a matter of hours, should it be created. From that time till the present time, the Arabs have woefully lost every war against Israel. More significantly, with each Arab loss, the size of the state of Israel kept expanding as the Jews acquired more and more land they never intended to gain! (For recent examples of obvious divine interventions in the Israeli’s military campaigns, see http://churcharise.blogspot.com.ng/2014/09/israels-latest-50-day-war-harvest-of.html  and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOPAxLDGRIU )
Eventually, the Arabs (at least in the majority) resigned to the reality of a militarily undefeatable Israel and settled for a two-state solution – provided Israel would relinquish the land acquired through the wars (provoked by the Arabs), especially since the 1967 six-day war.  As subsequent events have clearly shown, most of Israel (at least initially) had no serious objections to this demand.  However, the Divine-demonic confluence clearly kept pushing matters out of the hands of both the Jews and the Arabs.
To pressurize Israel, Arab governments had resorted to use of suicidal youths to terrorize Israeli’s civilian population, as well as attract global sympathy.  And to get a steady stream of suicidal youths, Arab leadership had to embark on a rigorous systematic brainwashing of their population, programming them via both education and religious institutions to uncompromisingly hate Israel.  John Kerry himself described this situation in his speech:
“And the most recent wave of Palestinian violence has included hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past year, including stabbings, shootings, vehicular attacks and bombings, many by individuals who have been radicalized by social media. Yet the murderers of innocents are still glorified on Fatah websites, including showing attackers next to Palestinian leaders following attacks. And despite statements by President Abbas and his party’s leaders making clear their opposition to violence, too often they send a different message by failing to condemn specific terrorist attacks and naming public squares, streets and schools after terrorists”

The inevitable outcome of this development is that too many Palestinians have been radicalised to the point where, to them, the concept of peaceful co-existence with the State of Israeli has now virtually been precluded.  To these hot-heads, the allure of an independent Palestinian state is more in its value to hasten the destruction of Israel!  In his autobiography, Son of Hamas, Mossab Yousef explains this situation:
“For Israel, the PLO nationalists had been simply a political problem in need of a political solution.  Hamas, on the other hand, Islamized the Palestinian problem, making it a religious problem.  And this problem could be resolved only with a religious solution, which meant that it could never be resolved because we believed that the land belonged to Allah.  Period.  End of discussion.  Thus for Hamas, the ultimate problem was not Israel’s policies.  It was the nation-state Israel’s very existence.”
This reality was clearly demonstrated during the Camp David Summit in 2000, when President Bill Clinton got Israeli PM Ehud Barak and PLO’s Yassef Arafat to negotiate peace directly. Mosab Hassan Yousef captured the incredible outcome of the negotiations in these words:
“The Camp David Summit between Yasser Arafat, American president Bill Clinton, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Brak ended on July 25, 2000.  Barak had offered Arafat about 90 percent of the West Bank, the entire Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state.  In addition, a new international fund would be established to compensate Palestinians for the property that had been taken from them.  This “land for peace” offer represented a historic opportunity for the long-suffering Palestinian people, something few Palestinians would have dared imagine possible.  But even so, it was not enough for Arafat.”

Mossab further explained how Arafat “had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood,”  and he wasn’t too excited about giving up that status to face the responsibility of actually building a functioning society.  Moreover, there was always the guaranteed threat of local assassins taking matter into their own hands, should any leader be perceived to have sold-out!
PM Netanyahu affirmed the same point in his sweeping peace offer to the Palestinian on the floor of the UN in 2011.  He reminded the entire world:
“These people say to me constantly: Just make a sweeping offer, and everything will work out. You know, there's only one problem with that theory. We've tried it and it hasn't worked. In 2000 Israel made a sweeping peace offer that met virtually all of the Palestinian demands. Arafat rejected it. The Palestinians then launched a terror attack that claimed a thousand Israeli lives.  Prime Minister Olmert afterwards made an even more sweeping offer, in 2008. President Abbas didn't even respond to it.”

In short, the singular most important point which US Secretary John Kerry missed in his extensive lecture is the stark reality that no Arab leader could now dare make peace with Israel unless the terms will clearly guarantee the destruction of Israel.

Mossab Yousef in fact addressed himself to an interesting hypothetical scenario: “I asked myself what Palestinians would do if Israel disappeared – if everything not only went back to the way it was before 1948 but if all the Jewish people abandoned the Holy Land and were scattered again.  And for the first time, I knew the answer. We would still fight.  Over nothing.  Over a girl without a head scarf.  Over who was toughest and most important.  Over who would make the rules and who would get the best seat”
In conclusion, even when the Israelis appear desperate enough to be willing to swap land for peace, some higher forces seemed to always play out, moving the Palestinians to take steps that only end up giving more land to Israel.  This outcome fits both the divine agenda that Israel would be restored all her historic land, and the demonic agenda that would not stop at anything but the ultimate annihilation of Israel.  Humanly speaking, the two-state concept is an obvious “reasonable” solution; but both divine and demonic strategies seem to squarely oppose such an outcome.
From his early days in office, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated his willingness to directly discuss a two-state solution with Palestinian leadership.  Even though his belief in that form of solution has obviously considerably waned, he still keeps the option opened.  But as John Kerry point-blankly stated (and as confirmed in several other reports) most Palestinians now consider the two-state solution a dead option.
Obama’s last minute desperate resolves seek to crash the unending ding-dong game and enforce a solution once and for all!  The days  (literally) ahead will reveal where it would all end; but suffice to say, the events playing out before our very eyes are of mighty Biblical proportions.  The endgame is certainly here.

No comments: