North Sinai Turmoil and Future Palestine

North Sinai Turmoil and Future Palestine July 3, 2015

Current events in the Middle East increasingly support what I proposed for a Palestinian state 25 years ago in my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990). (Actually, I wrote a magazine article about it in 1981, but I could not get it published.) Recent evidence supporting my proposal has been the continuing turmoil in the northern Sinai Peninsula between the Gaza Strip and the Wadi el Arish basin 25 miles to the south.

An Islamic terrorist group called Sinai Province is an affiliate of the terrorist group Islamic State that is fighting mostly in Syria, but also part of northern Iraq. Two days ago, Sinai Province attacked Egyptian soldiers and police in this region, and they responded. Seventeen Egyptian soldiers and police were killed, and one hundred militants of Sinai Province were killed. This conflict has been ongoing, with hundreds having been killed in recent months. But this time, Egypt used airpower that included fighter jets with their weaponry.

Sinai Province is seeking to take over this region in the northern Sinai and declare an Islamic caliphate government there just as the brutal Islamic State is trying to do to the north. Two days ago Egypt’s Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleh said of this Islamic insurgency in the North Sinai, “We are in a real state of war.”

Today, an Egyptian general said that the Islamic organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, has been supplying weapons to this terrorist organization Sinai Province. One reason for this turmoil in the northern Sinai is that Egyptian President el-Sisi accomplished a military coup in Egypt two years ago by overthrowing the Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. He had served as Egypt’s elected president for the previous two years. He is now serving 2o years in prison, and a death sentence for him is still undetermined. The Muslim Brotherhood created Hamas in the Gaza Strip during the late 1980s.

For those who know where ancient Philistia was located, the title of my book reveals what my proposal is: give the West Bank to Israel and let the Palestinians have “the land of the Philistines,” Israel’s ancient chief rival and the people from the modern Palestinians derive their name. Thus, my proposal is for the Gaza Strip to be very expanded to become the State of Palestine, reaching southward all the way to the Wadi el Arish basin and eastward to the western environs of Beersheba and Kadesh Barnea. This territory of the northern Sinai usually did not belong to ancient Egypt. Instead, Egypt’s ancient border usually was the Wadi el Arish. That is why it was called “the brook of Egypt” in ancient times, including in the Bible.

I made this proposal in my book for a future Palestinian state because I think such a state is predicted in the Bible in perhaps as many as ten Old Testament prophecies. When it happens, it will be one of so many reasons for human beings to take notice and believe that there is a God who created this world and that he speaks through his prophets about the future and about his plan to someday bring about his worldwide kingdom of peace on earth.


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