Netanyahu Is Wrong—”There Will Not Be A Palestinian State”

The: BAS Library—Biblical Archaeological Society

UN Conference on Traditional Two-State Solution

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no prophet. And he either doesn’t know his Bible or he doesn’t believe it, at least about something he said two days ago.

Today is the second and last day of a two-day conference conducted at UN headquarters in New York City to discuss the traditional two-state proposal for solving the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has been prompted by Israel’s devastating, two-year war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip which has killed 65,000 Palestinians. It is Israel’s retaliation against Hamas for its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that resulted in 1,200 Jews being killed and 250 Jews taken hostage. But Israel’s history of retaliation against Palestinians has always been very disproportionate to the infraction. This has resulted in some nations accusing Israel of genocide.

Most experts say this traditional proposal for solving the conflict has been dead for years. The peace process for it certainly has been dead, since about 2015. Netanyahu has contributed to that since he publicly states nowadays that he is against the formation of a Palestinian state. These nations are trying to revive this traditional solution or least keep it on life support. But before we get to that and what Netanyahu said about this conference, we need a little background.

How Israel Became a Nation Again

After over 1,800 years, the nation of Israel became reestablished in 1948 because Jews had begun returned to their ancestors’ homeland in the late 19th century, called Zionism. But there was a problem in that Arabs, later called Palestinians, were already living there. When Israel became a state again, there needed to also be a state for the Palestinians. The fledgling UN tried to do something about it, but many Palestinians weren’t that interested; they just wanted the Jews to leave; and the U.S. didn’t favor it because it had withdrawn to isolation after coming out of the WWII.

Then Israel fought a war against surrounding Arab nations and emerged victorious, possessing four additional parcels of land. As a UN member, it was obligated to return these lands, UN-designated as “occupied territory,” in peace negotiations. Israel eventually did so with the Sinai Peninsula, returning it to Egypt. And decades later, Israel did likewise by giving the Palestinians the Gaza Strip.

Occupied Territories from the 1967 Six-Day War

But Israel has always refused to return the West Bank to the Palestinians, which they also had taken possession of in the 1967 Six-Day War. One important reason they have refused to do so is that the West Bank has been the very heartland of the Jews’ “ancestral land.” Many Jews therefore call it by its biblical (ancient) names “Judea and Samaria.” And Israel’s 1948 Proclamation of Independence—which ignited the war that resulted in the formation of modern Israel—states that Jews’ have a right to possess their “ancestral land,” which this two-page document implicitly defines Eretz Yisrael, which is Hebrew for Land of Israel.

That’s where the problem lies that has resulted in the now 58-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1948-1949 war, Jews never got their “ancestral land;” they only got part of it; and much of what they did get was not their ancestral land. However, you won’t learn that from Mr. Netanyahu. Instead, you will get from him a great big lie. He says Israel’s ancestral land, Eretz Yisrael, is all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River-Dead Sea, which is called the Levant.

Israel Never Possessed the Land of the Philistines

Why do I say “a great big lie”? Just read the Bible and history. Jews during antiquity never possessed “the land of the Philistines,” which was the description of the nation of Philistia that consisted mostly of five city-states that existed in the coastal plain. And God said to the Israelites, in Judges 3.1-7, that he was withholding giving them the land of the Philistines and Lebanon to the north as part of the so-called “promised land” because of their disobedience to him. God has not withdrawn that restriction. Therefore, not only did the Israelites never possess those lands, Jews are not yet divinely entitled to them.

Yet Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday in anticipation of the UN conference about Palestine, “I have a clear message for those leaders who recognize a Palestinian state after a horrific massacre of October 7: You are giving a huge prize to terror. There will not be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan [River].”

There Will Be a Palestinian State West of Jordan

Well, I have a clear message for Mr. Netanyahu, “You are wrong because your Bible predicts that there will be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, and it will exist in the coastal plain just as Philistia did 3,000 years ago.” I tell all about this in my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, published 35 years ago in 1990. I think this thesis of the book is about to emerge as prescient. And it still is the only book ever published with this thesis.

I show in the book that there are several biblical prophecies about the end times which indicate that a Gentile nation will exist in the coastal plain, thus between the Mediterranean Sea and the nation of Israel to the west in what the Bible calls “the latter days” which are still future. The foremost text that does so is Isaiah 11.14. But it cannot be understood apart from the whole context of Isaiah 11. Not only that, when I explain its interpretation, many people, especially Muslims, don’t like what they are hearing.

The Jews are God’s “chosen people.” But that does not mean that God shows partiality to them. On the contrary, it means that God chose them long ago to reveal himself through them to the rest of the world, either through blessing or cursing. That’s right, even cursing! Go read “the blessing and the curse” as part of the law that God gave Moses, in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. But in the end, God will make Israel the head of the nations. He will do this by sending as warrior-king called “the Messiah.”

We read about this Messiah in what religious Jews regard as one of the three most important texts in Torah in Isaiah 11. It begins, “A shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse” (v. 1). Jesse refers to the father of King David, who lived two centuries or more before Isaiah made this prophecy. The Bible often connects this Messiah with David, even calling him “the son of David.”

The prophet Isaiah continues, “and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” This means the Messiah will be a descendant of Jesse and David. Isaiah further states, “The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, … he shall strike the earth with the rod of him mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked” (vv. 2, 4). The refers to the Messiah as a warrior-king who will deliver Jews and the nation of Israel from annihilation by its enemies at the end of the age. Scholars often call this the messianic war or destruction. The word “Armageddon” comes from this idea (Revelation 16.16).

Israel Will Swoop Down on the Philistines

When this happens, Isaiah says of Israel’s military, “they shall swoop down on the backs of the Philistines in the west” (Isaiah 11.14 NRSV). Now, remember, according to the Bible, God’s prophets spoke things like this under the inspiration of God Almighty. It occurred by these people being filled with the Spirit of God, also called the Holy Spirit. What they spoke was true because it came from God Almighty, who does not lie.

Some English Bibles translate Isaiah 11.14a a little differently while meaning the same thing. The NIV has, “they will swoop down on the slopes of Philistia to the west.” The NRSV has the people in focus, whereas the NIV has their nation in focus. “The slopes of Philistia” refer to the Shephelah. It still exists today and is called by that name. It divides the Judean hill country to the east from the coastal plain to the west. The Jewish Bible translation JPS translates similarly, “They shall pounce on the back of Philistia to the west.”

“Shephelah” is mentioned twice in the Old Testament (1 Chronicles 27.28; Obadiah 1.19). Then why didn’t Isaiah say “Shephelah” to be more exact about the location? He didn’t because his focus was the people who the Jews were about to attack. So, he calls them “Philistines” and indicates that the Shephelah belongs to them. This scenario indicates that their nation of Philistia lies to the west and thus below the Shephelah.

Notice that the text says “the Philistines.” This indicates that Philistines will exist in the latter days and that they will have their own nation in the coastal plain. How can this be so, since historians and Bible scholars say Philistines have not existed for about 2,500 years? I suspect that this text indicates that many of today’s Palestinians, whose families lived in the Levant for hundreds of years, have a strong genetic link to the ancient Philistines than to any other people group.

But my main point is that these people, who are not Jews, will have their own nation in the coastal plain to west of Israel, thus “west of the Jordan” as Mr. Netanyahu said. If they are non-Jews, thus Gentiles, who could they possibly be other than Palestinians?