For fifty years now, I have been in support of both the existence of the State of Israel and the right of Palestinians to have their own state alongside Israel. In my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, I show from end times Bible prophecy that there is going to be a Palestinian state. It will be located in the coastal plain as a very expanded Gaza Strip, and Israel will annex all of the West Bank. Obviously, this arrangement will require a transfer of peoples.
The present Israel-Hamas War in the Gaza Strip has a historical context that many supporters of Israel don’t know or ignore in their discussions. It is that following WWII and the immediate creation of the United Nations as a replacement for the League of Nations, in 1947 the UN addressed the conflict between Jews and Arabs in what the League of Nations had called “Palestine,” thereby reviving the name for it, actually, that the Romans had reapplied to it (actually Palaestina, first applied by the Greeks in the 5th c. BC.). After WWI, the League had given the British government authority to administer this dispute in an effort to create either one or two nations in Palestine.
In 1947, the UN established the UN Partition Plan to divide Palestine into two separate states–one for Jews and one for the native Arabs, who later named themselves Palestinians. The UN plan was not definitive in that it left the decision about boundaries to the participants to agree upon. But the Arabs hurt themselves by not accepting the proposal of a Jewish state, declaring that Jews only starting living there in recent decades and that they should leave Palestine and go live somewhere else. Especially Western nations disagreed with this, acknowledging that Jews living in the land where their ancestors had lived 3,000 years ago or more made sense as a solution to what was now called “the Jewish problem” due to the Holocaust of WWII, meaning that Jews should have a nation of their own as a way of helping to alleviate the history of antisemitism.
Early in 1948, after twenty-five years of the Brits administering the Palestine Mandate, they admitted their utter failure in solving this conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and announced that they would be ending this commitment and begin withdrawing their troops from Palestine on May 15, 1948. It then became obvious that war would ensue between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. It did and the Jews won 17 months later even though Arab neighboring states tried to help them.
Ever since, Israel generally has opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. This position contrasts strongly with justice as understood by most people in the world and, most shockingly, the Jewish Bible. For, one of the most important statements Jesus of Nazareth made was his answer to the question, “‘Which is the greatest commandment” in the Torah? “Jesus answered, ‘The first is, ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself;’ there is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12.28-31 NRSV). That second commandment Jesus quoted from Leviticus 19.18.
It has been pretty obvious during the past two decades that present Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. Some former Israeli government officials have now been saying lately that they have heard him say so and that he has said that he has approved of Qatar funneling money to the radical Islamic organization Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip ever since 2006 because strengthening Hamas continues the division between it and the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinians in the West Bank, and this division between them lessens the possibility of there ever being a Palestinian state.
Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 this year, and Israel engaged it in war in the Gaza Strip. Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis Jews on that one day and captured about 240 whom it took back to the tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Israel reportedly has now killed about 18,000 Palestinians in there and destroyed half of the homes. About 2.3 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip. Last week, the UN Security Council called for Israel to ceasefire, and only the U.S. among the fifteen members voted against ceasefire. The U.S. supplies Israel with most of its weapons and ammunition. The whole situation is causing the U.S., especially its President Biden, to look pretty bad in the eyes of the world.
President Biden is changing his position for the better. He acknowledges that Israel has a right to defend itself, and that at least the military wing of Hamas needs to be destroyed, especially since Hamas demands the annihilation of the State of Israel. But Biden now is asking what’s next, that is, after this war? Israel has not been answering. Both the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan have declared in the past week that Israel plans to completely destroy all of the Gaza Strip, drive all Palestinians out of there, and unilaterally annex it to Israel and thus settle Jews there. Netanyahu denied this over the weekend.
President Biden is also answering his own question by saying Israel must go along with there being the creation of a Palestinian state after this war is finished. Netanyahu continues to be opposed to that. The two men have now clashed, whereas when this war started, President Biden flew to Israel and did a photo-op of hugging Prime Minister Netanyahu, demonstrating his long, long friendship with the man and his firm support of Israel without mentioning in his statements at that time anything about the decades-old disenfranchisement and therefore suffering of the Palestinian people due solely to Israel and the U.S. support of Israel. IMO, at least President Joe Biden now appears to be on the right track.
[To learn more about my book and its proposal for solving this conflict, with updates of it, go to kermitzarley.com and click on Theology and On Palestine.]
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