Today, and for the first time, the Houthis in Yemen fired a surface-to-surface hypersonic ballistic missile into Israel. Israel intercepted it in the air by fragmenting it, but not completely destroying it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then declared Israel is in a “a multi-front campaign against Iran’s axis of evil, which is striving for our destruction.” He added that the Houthis “should have known by now that we exact a heavy price for any attempt to harm us.” What does he mean?
The Middle East is pretty much divided religiously and ideologically between the Muslim Shiites/Shia in the north (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) and the Muslim Sunnis in the south, which is all the other states headed by Saudi Arabia. Yemen is located on the southwestern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. Therefore, the Houthis being aligned with Iran’s Shiites is an oddity in the southern Middle Eastern nations.
The Houthis are backed by Iran in a civil war in Yemen. They have for many months been targeting ships in the Red Sea—sinking some of them, and killing sailors—that are in some way connected to Israel or its #1 ally, the U.S. The Houthis have made it very clear why they oppose Israel and the U.S. in this way. It is because they side with the Palestinian people in their struggle to have their own state. So, the Houthis are attacking Israel and perhaps its allies only due to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the Palestinian people.
This Israel war in Gaza has been threatening to expand by also involving the Hezbollah in Lebanon if not Syria as well. The Hezbollah, also backed by Iran, is a more substantial, and thus more dangerous, enemy of Israel than is Hamas in Gaza.
This new development, the Houthis targeting Israel, is just another reason why the U.S. should strenuously seek to not only get a cease fire in Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, as the Biden administration has been trying to do, but also pressure Israel to work towards a two-state solution, which the Biden administration has not done.
Another development is the Jewish settlers in the West Bank becoming more violent towards Palestinians there. The U.S. is now calling for an Israel investigation of the settler killing of an American, Jewish woman demonstrator there who was shot in the head by a Jewish settler. Compare that to the nearly 40,000 Palestinians the Israel Defense Forces have killed in the Gaza Strip during what will soon be, on October 7, one full year of this war.
Many evangelical Christians have a very unbalanced viewpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by being what are called Christian Zionists. They think the Bible says the present State of Israel is entitled to now possess all of the so-called promised land. They are quite wrong. Yes, the Jews are God’s chosen people, but that does not mean God favor
There must be a two-state solution as I state in my book. Published way back in 1990, it is entitled Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia. But as my title reveals, and the map-image on its front cover shows, there will be a Palestinian state, according to Bible prophecy, especially Isaiah 11.14. But it will not be located in the West Bank. Rather, it will be in the coastal plain as a very expanded Gaza Strip.
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