Will Israel Ever Find Peace? - J.L. Robb -
It has been the dream of most US Presidents since the rebirth of Israel as a country, 69 years ago, to bring peace between Israel and Palestine. Most US Presidents have failed miserably.
Thanks to the Balfour Declaration and the work of Christians around the world, May 14, 1948, Israel was reborn as an independent country. The Christians, who a few hundred years earlier hated the Jews, began to realize that if the Jews were the Chosen People as the Bible stated, Christians needed to get on board. God would mete out His own justice on the Jewish people and did not need Christians to help. We helped anyway via the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust.
Finally, Christians began to understand that had the Jewish folk 2,000 years ago not insisted on the death of Jesus, then Jesus would not be the Messiah. His death at the hands of those Jesus came to save had been predicted hundreds of years before the actual event.
In May, 1948, from Tel Aviv since Jerusalem was not part of the deal, Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said this in his speech:
"The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom."
But Jerusalem, the City of David and capital of ancient Israel, was not part of the deal. Can President Trump, the deal-maker, accomplish the seemingly unachievable?
"Over the course of my lifetime, I've always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Let's see if we can prove them wrong." President Donald J. Trump
Like other U.S. Presidents before him, the quest for peace in Israel has been somewhat elusive. Their peace treaties have a history of Israeli tolerance toward multiple incursions and rocket attacks from Palestinians. The descendants of Ismael and the descendants of Isaac have been fighting for a long time.
In President Trump's first foreign visit, he will be in Israel May 22, 2017. President Obama made it to Israel after four years; but President Trump is letting this great ally know that the United States, once again, has her back.
President Trump begins his Religious Tour with a visit to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican. Visiting the House of Saud and then Israel, makes sense according to strategists, at least in the world of Israeli Peace Treaties.
If President Trump, who never says never, should manage a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, it will be a first if successful. It would also be a huge feather in the Trump hat. The key word is successful.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter managed to negotiate the Camp David Accord. In that peace treaty, Israel's Arab neighbors agreed to stop attacking Israel if Israel would return the Arab land they captured in the previous Arab attack, including Jerusalem. The Arab-Israeli War was fifty years ago. In 1979 the Islamic Revolution was ushered in and Islamism has been different since. Carter was a one-term president.
Then there is the Oslo Accord of 1993 under President Clinton. In this peace treaty, Israel again gave back land, which used to be called "war booty;" and the Arab lands would leave Israel alone. There have been thousands of Palestinian incursions and rocket attacks throughout this treaty.
The Palestinians have had ample opportunities for a peace deal with Israel, but peace is difficult when Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a country with whom they would make peace. That is interesting, because in the real world, Palestine has never in history been a state, a country or had a capital city, though they claim Jerusalem is their capital of... something.
If President Trump can weave a genuine peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, a deal with no incursions, no rocket attacks, no driving-into-Jews attacks and no stabbings, then he will be the Mother of all Wheeler-Dealers.
While Donald Trump was campaigning and everyone seemed to believe he would lose the election, he campaigned that he would move the recognized capital of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would be a first and very controversial. While Trump is a deal maker, that would be a deal breaker.
On April 24, 2017, Trump, who was labeled as an anti-Semite throughout his campaign, had this to say for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"On Yom Hashoah, we look back at the darkest chapter of human history. We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: Never again. I say it, never again.
"The mind cannot fathom the pain, the horror, and the loss. Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide. They were murdered by an evil that words cannot describe, and that the human heart cannot bear.
"'If you will it, it is no dream that Israel is a great nation that has risen from the desert'.
"We cannot let that ever even be thought."
Most Arabs do not believe Jerusalem was ever a capital of Israel, there was no Holocaust and the Jewish God is really Allah. In the Koranic version, Muhammad replaces Jesus as the savior; though they proclaim to "believe in Jesus."
Will Trump trump up a deal that is satisfactory for the Palestinians and the Israelis? Will he set up a peace treaty that appears successful? Will he go where others have failed to go?
Probably not.
Two weeks ago, the Palestinian terrorist group that helps run the Palestinian Territory, Hamas, dropped its call for the destruction of Israel, sort of.
No successful peace until after the battle at Armageddon is also predicted. Had the reborn Israel finally accepted their Messiah, things would be much different. But that is not in God's Magnificent Play. That is why the 144,000 witnesses were predicted.
Israel's Identity Crisis - Terry James -
It seems strange that the one nation on planet earth that God Himself calls His "chosen" suffers such low self-esteem. I use the term self-esteem in the sense that there is an internal, national uncertainty concerning where the nation fits within the international scheme of things. There projects from Israel an aura of not belonging.
I suppose this shouldn't surprise, considering that most countries making up the United Nations join in voting against Israel in almost every case that is brought against the nation. The history of such anti-Israel voting is stunning.
Israel completely outperforms all of its neighbors in productivity. Its ingenuity benefits not only the region but all the world. That tiny sliver of land encompasses only a fraction of the land grant the lord says is theirs. Yet it is an island of technological, agricultural, and societal creativity that is second only to that generated by the United States. And, fact is, much of America's such creativity and activity is directly due to the brilliance of U.S. Jewish citizenry.
Its tentativeness in national confidence has long been the concern of Israeli thinkers and innovators. Just this past week, initiatives to deal with Israel's identity crisis came to the surface as breaking news.
A proposal to anchor Israel's status as a Jewish state in a Basic Law was approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation Sunday.
MK Avi Dichter (Likud), who proposed the bill, called the vote "a big step towards establishing our identity, not only universally, but mainly towards ourselves, the Israelis, to be a free nation in our land," a line from Hatikva...
"I've been working on the Jewish State bill for six years," Dichter recounted. "Six years to establish the simple and most basic truth: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People."...
The legislation states that "the State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its aspirations for self-determination according to its cultural and historic traditions. The realization of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people."...
... It also mentions the Law of Return, and calls for the government to work to strengthen Israel-Diaspora ties.
It states that Hebrew is Israel's official language and Arabic has a special status, requiring all government services to be available in Arabic. (ISRAEL NEWS, Jerusalem Post, May 7, 2017)
The bill, if approved, was set for a preliminary vote on Wednesday. It will thus take place in the first week of the Knesset's summer session. The Justice Ministry will be charged with drafting its own version of the bill within sixty days. The two bills will then be combined.
The bill is receiving push-back by those who see it as a racist action that puts too much emphasis on Israel being Jewish and not enough on democracy.
Such an accusation has some validity. But, with things going on as of late, it is action that is warranted, in my view.
One example of the world doing all possible to strip Israel of its sovereignty and even its right to exist is that perpetrated by the U.N.
The UNESCO Executive Board passed a resolution in Paris that disavowed Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. The organization insists, thereby, that Israel should no longer have authority in the city. The vote was meant to delegitimize Israel's right to the city governance that was won during the 1967 Six Day War.
Because of continuing such actions by the U.N. against Israel, the Israeli government is considering ousting that organization from its facilities within the city of Jerusalem.
The government on Sunday is set to debate the question whether or not to oust the United Nations from its Jerusalem headquarters, but is not expected to take any action on the matter at this time...
In a statement to Channel 2, [Miri] Regev [Culture and Sports Minister ] said that clearly there was no longer any logic to the UN remaining at that location.
"We've been sovereign in the city for 50 years, so there is no need for UN monitors. They were given use of the compound to oversee the cease-fire agreement from the Six-Day war, it's an agreement that is no longer relevant. This saga has to end," she said. (ISRAEL NEWS, Jerusalem Post, May 5, 2017)
Israel's identity crisis is destined to become much more acute. Zechariah the prophet and other prophets foretell a time when all nations will seek to kill all Jews. Haven't we heard that before?
Anti-Semitism on the rise is only one symptom of the great hatred that Antichrist will foment, especially during the second three and one-half years of the Tribulation.
"Alas! for that day is great, so that there is none like it : it is even the time of Jacob's trouble; but he shall be saved out of it." (Jeremiah 30: 7)
Israel's identity will one day be firmly established, however. God has promised to make it the head of the nations when Christ rules and reigns from atop Zion in Jerusalem as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
The UN's Obsession against Israel - By Pierre Rehov - Gatestone Institute - http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-uns-obsession-against-israel/2017/05/15/
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) met once again on March 20 to debate "Agenda Item 7," a mandatory subject of debate since June 2006, the only one whose goal is systematically to condemn the Israeli democracy for crimes the existence of which remain to be proven.
The agenda, officially designed to assess the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories, in the light of the reports submitted by Fatah, the PLO and various NGOs, is part of a wider campaign, carried out by countries such as Libya, Algeria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Sudan and Yemen. Israel is thus the only country on the planet to benefit from the doubtful privilege of being scrutinized on the least of its actions, through an agenda decided by its enemies.
If it were only a question of expressing this obsession, born out of an old habit for the Arab-Muslim dictatorships to turn the Hebrew state into their scapegoat, responsible for all the misfortunes plaguing their societies, Agenda Item 7 would be a mere oddity, especially since the session is regularly boycotted by a majority of Western countries, and systematically by the United States.
Unfortunately, this Israelphobia has been spreading throughout the United Nations. In 1948, when Israel, after being officially recognized as a sovereign state by virtually all Western democracies, had just repelled the genocidal aggression of five neighboring countries, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were fleeing the oppression of Arab dictatorships, the UN gave birth to UNRWA, an organization designed to help Palestinian refugees exclusively. This was despite there already being a program for refugees at the UN, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The mandate of UNRWA was for one year. Seventy years later, the organization, now a lavish UN jobs program, continues to function within the Palestinian territories and neighboring countries, with an annual budget close to one billion dollars. Part of that covers salaries and pension funds for 25,000 to 27,000 employees (including many members of Hamas); schools in which the descendants of descendants of "refugees", in suburbs or villages called "camps", are inaccurately told that Tel Aviv and Haifa had belonged to them and should be returned to them, and where the myth of an impossible "right of return" continues to hold new generations of Palestinians hostage and inciting hatred of Israel and Jews.
As Said Aburish, one of Yasser Arafat's biographers and a former adviser to Saddam Hussein, told this author:
"In order to conserve UNRWA rations, Palestinians had become accustomed to bury their dead at night, so that no one died in the camps except when it was possible to accuse Israel of it. As a result, the refugee figures have always been distorted, with the passive complicity of UNRWA, as its annual budget depends on the number of souls for which they are responsible."
It is no secret that, in fewer than 70 years, the UN has condemned Israel more often than all the countries of the world combined, including those guilty of slavery, mass executions, genocide - every human rights abuse imaginable - to the extent that it has almost became a joke.
It is worth recalling that between 1981 and 1986, when Israel had set up a social program to rehabilitate Arab refugees based in Gaza, the only response from the UN, under pressure from Fatah Chairman Yasser Arafat, was to condemn the Hebrew State for its initiative, concluding each of its resolutions by this distressing order: "Return the refugees to the camps".
There is also no need to go back to 1975, to remember the infamous UN Resolution 3379, "Zionism is a form of Racism," under the Secretary-Generalship of a former Nazi, Kurt Waldheim, a week after Uganda's brutal Idi Amin received a triumphant reception at the UN headquarters.
It is enough, however, to refer to the General Assembly of December 21, 2016 to find that Israel, once again, was condemned 20 times while all the tragic events on the planet, massacres in Syria, the North Korean threats, the Crimean crisis and the ill-treatment of women and minorities in both Iran and Saudi Arabia were penalized almost reluctantly by a tiny half dozen resolutions.
The list of the injustices done to the Jewish state by an organization supposed to preserve peace in the world, which De Gaulle scornfully called "le machin", "the thingy," is so long that it would take several volumes of an encyclopedia to expose them.
None, however, has made as much noise or provoked as much rejection on the international scene as that enacted by UNESCO on October 26, 2016, followed by a similar text on April 29, 2017, the very day Israel was celebrating its 69th year of independence.
Submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan, this text, ratified by the automatic Arab majority, and benefiting from the abstention of almost all the European countries, including France, offered a new and surprising rewriting of history by denying any connection between Judaism and Jerusalem's Temple Mount, including the Western Wall, described in each paragraph by only their Arab names, the Haram Al Sharif and the Al Buraq wall. The counter-factualness of this resolution, led the new Secretary-General of UNESCO, Antonio Guterres, to contradict it, by a declaration that the Palestinian Authority withdraw it, together with issuing an apology.
Although it may seem outrageous systematically to target the Hebrew state, the UN framework enables it. First, there is the composition of preponderance of anti-democratic members of the United Nations, as well as the challenges posed by the terrorist hammer and the oil anvil.
On the other hand, why should UNESCO, whose prescribed function is precisely the preservation of history and the preservation of peace, participate in a farce whose conclusion, strictly speaking, would be that Jesus chased the merchants of the "Esplanade of the mosques" six centuries before the birth of Islam?
As for the religious context, Jerusalem - especially the Old City and the Temple Mount - are sacred places for the three monotheisms. When they were in the possession of Jordan, which had illegally seized them in 1948 until the Israelis liberated them in 1967, all the Jews were driven from the Jordanian-controlled part of the city; their property and belongings taken, and their holy sites desecrated.
In the dissenting opinion of Dr. Yussuf Natshe, in charge of the Waqf, the Muslim organization in charge of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, and Sheikh Omar Awadallah Kiswani, director of the Al Aqsa mosque, these places are not to be shared: "They have belonged to Islam from all eternity, as God and UNESCO have wished." (Remarks collected by the author).
The goal of the Palestinians, supported by the Muslim world, would be to give the name of the Al Aqsa mosque to the whole Haram Al Sharif (Temple Mount) so that access to it would definitely be forbidden for any non-Muslims, as are Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
In this case, why did France become an accomplice, by abstaining on the votes of October 26, 2016, and followed by a similar text on April 29, 2017.
It was part of a broader program. The American president at the time, Barack Hussein Obama, had recalibrated the US stance in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. At the heart of Obama's credo, the famous Israeli "settlements" seemed to symbolize only absolute evil, while international terrorism, including Palestinian terror, could, under no circumstances, possibly emanate from the excesses of a religion described as one of love and peace.
This position, rational or not, may also have been considered by many a way of gradually disengaging the United States from a moribund peace process after its umpteenth failure in 2014, under the leadership of US Secretary of State John Kerry.
French President François Hollande's government may well have thought that the vote was a great opportunity to put France back on the front line of international diplomacy by plunging daggers into the knot of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Hence the plan for an international conference convened in Paris (but from which the main stakeholders, Israel and the Palestinians, would be excluded. (One has to wonder what the French would have said if other countries had gathered, without including the French, to discuss the future of Paris.)
Arab policy, as instituted by De Gaulle in 1967 and followed by successive French governments, was not a matter of leaving the Jewish state alive, albeit officially still called Israel. In terms of security, France had to support its conference by appealing to the countries on which it imagined its energy supply depended, disregarding the small fact that the Arabs had to sell the oil rather than drink it.
The new US administration of President Donald J. Trump, however, with US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, rebalanced the American position again, and, by extension, those taken by Europe and France, in a conflict which has for too long been suffering from double standards such as those mentioned above.
Why, indeed, would the Palestinians make the slightest concession, if it were enough for the international community to hand them a state, cost-free, on a platter?
In the opinion of Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist and political analyst:
"The Palestinian Authority is like an opposition party. It is enough for it to criticize and accuse Israel, it has nothing else to do or to prove, to receive all the support and all the money it needs. And while France and Europe offer medals to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian people continue to suffer under its dictatorship. "
Unfortunately, on April 29, at the UNESCO, France abstained again.
It is now time for France and the European Union to recognize that if they want to keep the glimmer of credibility they still have as participants to any peace process, they should cease demonizing Israel at the same time as they accept all demands, including the use of terrorism, threats of terrorism and payments for terrorism from Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority - all delivered with the approval of an organization, the UN, which Palestinians have long ago swallowed up.
It is high time that such a toxic organization was defunded. Agencies deemed helpful, such as the World Health Organization, can be funded separately.
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