The current Israel-Gaza War reveals the necessity of a continuing peace process with the goal of the establishment of a Palestinian state. There is no other way this 70-year old Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ever reach any conceivable goal of being resolved. There must be two states lying side-by-side. And as I have been saying for over forty years, the traditional two-state solution has always been a non-starter. Just look at it. This traditional proposal has existed for so many decades and yet all parties to the conflict agree that the present situation is farther away from that two-state proposal than it has ever been in its history. Does that not show that it is the wrong proposal? Indeed it does! One of the most famous Jews of all time was Albert Einstein. He said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” IMO, the traditional two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict fits that definition of insanity perfectly.
There has been no peace process regarding this conflict since 2014. I believe the US is to be faulted in that, especially the Trump administration which clearly was so pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian that Trump wanted nothing to do with a peace process. And he made it much worse when he moved the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Since WWII, the US has always had a large foreign aid program, and since the 1960s about one third of it went to the State of Israel. I’ve been for doing that except for one thing–it should be contingent on Israel being involved in the peace process. An example is that Israel is a member of the UN, and it very much wants to remain a member. But the UN charter says that when a nation gains territory from another nation due to war, that gain is defined as “occupied territory,” and the UN requires that that gained territory be returned to its prior owner by means of negotiations, which we might call a “peace process.”
The West Bank is by far a larger territory than the Gaza Strip, and Israel gained both of these in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel finally relinquished the Gaza Strip unilaterally to Palestinians in 2005. But it has not done anything like that with the West Bank. Therefore, Israel has always been in violation of UN principles regarding the West Bank. Moreover, Israel has always turned a blind eye to illegal Jewish settlements constantly cropping up in the West Bank to the detriment of Palestinians living there. But the US has never really pressured Israel to put a stop to that. Constantly, the West Bank is now such a Swiss cheese that it would be a horrendous place to establish a Palestinian state. I believe that all that time the US should have required Israel to put a stop to those illegal settlements or else the US would cut off its annual $3 billion in foreign aid to Israel. President George H.W. Bush is the only US president who threatened to do that with Israel, and it produced a positive result.
So, what will be the outcome of this current Israel-Gaza war? It’s anybody’s guess. My take is that it could lead to an enlargement of the Gaza Strip as the beginning of the establishment of a Palestinian state. How so? The Hamas militants were only able to attack nearby cities and villages in Israel, thus there in the coastal plain near where the Gaza Strip is located, on the coast. Hamas’s thousands of rockets landed within a few miles away. And they captured Jewish hostages from nearby. Israeli citizens living in those nearby places will now be more fearful that this might happen again and therefore want to move further away from the Gaza Strip. The result could be that Israeli land near Gaza could become sort of a dead area that is not so useful to Israel. That’s sort of what happened with the Gaza Strip itself before Israel forfeited it to the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon, a former general in the IDF, was Israel’s prime minister back then in 2005. He said the Gaza Strip was absolutely useless to Israel and declared that Israel should remove its eight Jewish settlements from there and unilaterally forfeit the Strip to the Palestinians, which is what happened.
[Half of Kermit’s book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, is available for free reading at his website by clicking here. This book claims that Bible prophecy indicates a Palestinians state will be established in the coastal plain as a very expanded Gaza Strip and Israel with annex all of the West Bank.]
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