It may seem like “old hat,” but Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are at war again. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “war” today on Hamas. It is the religious-political organization that governs the tiny, heavily populated Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. the reason was that the militantly Islamic Hamas unexpectedly attacked nearby portions of the State of Israel with thousands of rockets beginning early this morning. The New York Times reports that about 250 Israeli Jewish citizens were killed and 1,400 wounded in only a few hours. It was the heaviest loss of population by the modern State of Israel ever from an enemy in one day. Netanyahu declared that Hamas and the Gaza Strip will suffer drastically for it with a response from Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Indeed, it always does.
Everyone is asking why Hamas decided to do this, and how Israel’s intelligence community failed to foreknow this attack was coming. It seems to be prompted by two developments that are going on with the State of Israel. First, Israel and Saudi Arabia are about to sign a historic agreement. Second, as in several democracies around the world including the US, Israeli politics has been moving to the extreme right, thus more and more conservative, and Jews both in Israel and abroad are demonstrating in the streets against it. Hamas may be trying to provoke further reactions against the Netanyahu administration. And some political analysts are saying Hamas is trying to cause other nations to take sides by enlarging this war.
Another result of today’s attack against Israel is that Hamas soldiers invaded Israel, took hostages, and returned to the Gaza Strip with them. Hamas no doubt will use them as bargaining chips with Israel.
This Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for about seventy years. I first got interested in it during the 1973 oil embargo which was caused by the war that year between Arabs states against Israel. Since I have been a keen student of Bible prophecy even since my college days, I began to understand some Bible prophecies indicating a revived state of Philistia existing in the coastal plain of The Levant, thus as a very expanded Gaza Strip. The word Palestine derives from Philistia, and the word Palestinian derives from Philistine. I then wrote a magazine article about this in about 1980 which was never published. Ten years later, in 1990, my book about it was published and entitled Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia.
Half of this book, Palestine Is Coming–the most important part regarding Bible prophecy–is available for free reading at my website kermitzarley.com by clicking here. In this book, I interpret ten Old Testament prophecies to indicate that a Palestinian state will be established in the coastal plain as a very enlarged Gaza Strip, and Israel will annex all of the West Bank. Whether this will happen through negotiation or war is not foretold in scripture. But the result will be that a truly two-state solution will occur. But it will not be the one Palestinians and the international community have been proposing for all of these decades, that the Palestinian state be established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with an adjoining corridor. I doubt that will ever happen because it is a very unworkable solution to which Israel cannot accept largely for security reasons. And it would not be a economically viable solution for the Palestinians either. But this solution I am advocating will be truly two states lying side-by-side, which will be a more workable solution than a Swiss cheese West Bank and separated Gaza Strip joined by a twenty-mile corridor. See ten update articles to this proposal at my website as well.
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