Thursday, a masked gunman representing an Islamic terrorist group in the North Sinai that is affiliated with ISIS walked up to 46-year old Rafael Moussa, a Coptic Orthodox Church priest, and shot him dead as he was standing near the Coptic St. George Church in El Arish, the capital city of North Sinai, which is part of the large Sinai Peninsula, a mostly wilderness that belongs to Egypt. An ISIS message was soon posted on the Internet describing Moussa as a “disbelieving combatant.”
For about the past three years, the Egyptian Army has been fighting this Islamic, ISIS-affiliated terrorist group in the North Sinai without success. This group has killed eight members of this St. George Church. That is why some of its members have relocated to Cairo.
Egypt is largely Muslim, with ten percent of its population consisting of Coptic Christians. The Coptic Church traces its roots to a Ethiopic eunuch official whom the New Testament book of Acts says was converted to faith in Jesus through the ministry of the evangelist Philip (Acts 8.26-39).
The North Sinai between the Gaza Strip and El Arish to the south along the Mediterranean coast and stretching eastward for several miles is becoming for Egypt like the Gaza Strip was for Israel for decades. For many years during that time, Israel’s celebrated General Dayan constantly said that the Gaza Strip was nothing but trouble and useless to Israel, so that the nation should have given it up to the Palestinians. Israel finally did that decades later, in 2005, and at the same time required eight Jewish settlements there to leave and relocate in Israel.
In my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, published in 1990, I say on the basis on my interpretations of certain biblical prophecies in the Jewish Bible (=Old Testament) that someday a Palestinian state will be created on the coastal plain with its northern border being some miles south of Tel Aviv and its southern border probably as far south as the city of El Arish. I also wrote that in order for this to happen, “Israel will someday release the Gaza Strip” (p. 196). That was 15 years before it happened. And I also wrote, “Egypt will relinquish its northeastern corner of the Sinai, between the Gaza Strip and the Wadi el Arish” (p. 203).
As the Gaza Strip was to Israel, I think this region of the North Sinai now is to Egypt. Thus, Egypt should make a deal with Palestinians, preferably involving Israel, in which Egypt forfeits this region of the North Sinai to the Palestinians. But I think in doing so, it should be a comprehensive settlement involving both Palestinian factions–the Palestinian Authority that controls Palestinians living in the West Bank and Hamas that governs the Gaza Strip. And it would be best for the entities/nations to partake that were be involved in the now dead peace process. The end result should be the creation of a Palestinian state with its center being Gaza. In my book, I call this the New Philistia proposal.
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