Can There Ever Be Peace? (Part 4, Final)

Trying to Understand the Israel Question 

By Khen Lim

PART FOUR/FINAL



Image source: pennlive.com

What more for peace?

To find a stauncher ally for Israel beyond the United States of America is near impossible simply because there are none greater. And America has worked ceaselessly and tirelessly for lasting peace in the region of the Middle East, always by the side of Israel and always looking to be negotiating in their best interests. From Truman to recent times, no American president has slackened off in brokering for territorial stability in a finely tuned balance of power in the Middle East, knowing that being successful in this regard would yield handsome benefits for everyone concerned.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan (Image source: theguardian.com)

America’s strongest display of camaraderie for Israel is best displayed in the Reagan era. Strong Christian values nourished the relationship between the two countries. America was at her best; strong, reliable, consistent and persistently loyal. And Israel could count on all of these American traits, knowing that she would not find a better friend anywhere in the world. In all of this, Israel’s rights were protected. Its boundaries and its existence were both non-negotiable in America’s eyes.

Things began to shift in the time of President G.W. Bush. The iron-clad determination that was an American tradition began to wane. Signalling weakness, Arab powers have seized the initiative to pressure Bush for greater concessions at the expense of their Jewish friends. And the effects were telling because Bush was convinced more so than any other President before him that Israel would have to accede to international demands that would compromise their existence and national security. With that, Bush unwittingly set the precedence for subsequent American presidents to carve out even bolder concessions from their Jewish friends.

From the younger Bush’s era, Israelis found, for the first time, that America would suspend their loan agreements or equipment supplies just so that the Jewish State would deliver what were asked of them. Against this backdrop was of course American naïveté – the sort that the Arabs could fully and gleefully exploit. The Arabs were never going to play their part but Americans felt that if they could get a recalcitrant Israel to play ball, they could achieve lasting peace. It was naturally a typically shallow and ignorant misunderstanding of the real situation in the Middle East.

We saw this with President Clinton who called for the gradual transfer of authority to the Palestinians and the ultimate return of Gaza and the West Bank. In exchange the Palestinian Authority were to officially recognise the existence of Israel. As we know from history, Israel did return Gaza and in the process, evicted their own Jewish settlements from the land. For the Jews to do this, the price was high but in pursuit of an elusive peace, they could not be faulted.

Yitzhak Rabin (left) and Yasser Arafat (right) with President Clinton (middle), Oslo Accords, 1993 (Image source: bbc.co.uk)

In the months that followed the commencement of the Oslo Accords, even the return of Gaza did not silence the attacks against Israel. Instead they only increased in both intensity and frequency for the Arabs view the return not in terms of honouring their part of the deal but as a sign of weakness that they wanted to undermine. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that having foolishly gifted the Arabs Gaza, the Israelis stopped short of handing over the West Bank. And rightly so.

It is all too obvious that the Oslo Accords were, like all efforts in the past, another failure; failure of the world to really understand what was at stake, failure to perceive what it was that the Arabs really wanted and a total inability to rein the petulant Arabs in but instead, blindly march to their tune in abject trance.

Through Clinton’s arrangements, Netanyahu and Arafat met to grind out a peace deal in 1998, culminating in the Wye River Memorandum that also featured special and invaluable mediation coming from Jordan’s King Hussein. The purpose was to articulate Palestinian self-rule with the view to finally attain a full Palestinian statehood.

To achieve this, the Memorandum required that Israel withdraw completely from the West Bank. All the PLO had to do – as was in the past – was simply to change the wording of its charter and in so doing, finally put a halt to their refusal to recognise the Jewish State. Naturally the upshot of this was that Arafat would have to be the first Arab politician-cum-terrorist to do the unthinkable and that was, to recognise Israel and cease all violence and terrorism against the Jewish State.

By now, it was just a very straightforward and predictable script. Arafat would never do what he signed up to do. He had never been a man whose words were, even once, honourable. Therefore the conclusion was foregone for those who knew the man and what was at stake. So, just as Israel was about to withdraw from the West Bank, it became clear that some things would remain unchangeable no matter what. Predictably the Arabs would once more renege on the pact and with that, as always, the Wye River Memorandum was doomed to fail.  

(Image source: americanthinker.com)

Bush in his second term would forever be marked by the horrific 9/11 tragedy. If not for this, Bush would have had spent a lot more time trying his hand on shaping another peace deal between the Arabs and Israel. But with 3,000 lives dead and the complete destruction of the World Trade Centre as well as the massive damage to the Pentagon, the Palestinian debacle continued unabated.

Amidst this humanitarian crisis, the Arab world throughout celebrated the deaths of thousands of American. There were footages of ordinary Arabs shooting live bullets into the air, dancing in the streets and partaking in all kinds of acts of revelry. These were hard scenes for the average American to swallow but the message was emphatically driven home to every living room – that Arabs had little care for American lives no matter what they say on the outside.

Still Bush did try a few things in his second term. He worked diligently to do what his predecessors had failed to and that was to attain two separate but coexisting states – a new and democratic Palestine and the sustenance of a secure Israel. It was unachievable but he didn’t stop to try. The Arab terms remained as unchanged as ever before. It was destruction of Israel and nothing less than that. Everything else was immaterial.

Pain stricken by decades of constant threat and probably a lot of soul searching, a peace-seeking Israel bent backwards once again and reached deep into their hearts to look for that ‘something extra’ to give. With the whole world pointing fingers at the Jewish State for “not doing enough,” Israel finally gave in and surrendered the entire Gaza strip, ending their occupation.

Call it blind hope or a matter for the foolish heart, Israel decided to listen to the world and “do the right thing” (right in their eyes, not necessarily Israel’s). They too hope that to be seen to try was always going to be better than appearing belligerent and obstinate. So the Jewish State indulged in what we now refer to as “land for peace,” the act of giving away land in order to end all wars.

But the Arabs had never seen eye to eye with Western thinking. There was no such thing as “land for peace.” For them, the only option was “destroy Israel or no peace.” Once Gaza was fully returned, the Israelis received relentless barrage of rockets and mortars fired daily into southern Israel. Rather than feeling demoralised by the longstanding Arab deception, they responded with an iron will by launching “Operation Cast Lead” and with that, all hopes of peace evaporated.

A comparison of Israel's boundaries over four different stages in time (Image source: web.international.ucla.edu)

The situation from 2008 onwards became even bleaker. American presidential peacemaking turned on its eye, transforming hope for the Israelis to betrayal unlike ever before. In Obama, Israel faced worsening and demoralising demands. Of the many, the very worst was in May 2011 when he ordered Netanyahu to return the Jewish State to “1967 borders with agreed-upon land swaps.” There is so much that is grievously wrong with Obama’s proposal. Let’s have a quick look at it and find out why.

When Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Six Day War, the U.N. Security Council issued Resolution 242 which clarified that they were not expected to withdraw any bit from all such territories. As far back as 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had stressed that returning to the 1967 borders would render Israel indefensible. By retaining control of territories like the Jordan Valley, which provided for security in the eastern geographic barrier, Israel was a lot less susceptible.

Tel Aviv University’s Prof Gideon Biger from the Department of Geography stated tersely in May 2011 that any land swap that is greater in area than 2.5 percent of the territories could never be possible because of two points. Firstly there would have been insufficient empty land to give and secondly anything larger would have included areas involving Israeli civilian and military infrastructure.

Secondly the idea of “land swaps” is not new. We’ve seen this countless times in decades past. The Palestinians argued that because the Egyptians were given back the entire Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace in the historical treaty between Sadat and Begin, they too should have the right to demand the same compensation.

However, as the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs argued in a 2011 article by Dore Gold (former Israeli ambassador to the U.N.), there is a substantial difference between the Egyptians and the Palestinians. One was desirous of lasting peace; the other simply wages war to annihilate Israel and because of this difference, Begin was prepared to cede the whole of the peninsula back to Egypt.

Thirdly the border between Israel and Egypt had long been recognised to the boundary provided by the Sinai Peninsula. This was an internationally recognised fact since the days of the Ottoman Empire. Israel’s border with the West Bank has no equivalent international precedent. The pre-1967 Israeli boundaries had no account for the West Bank whatsoever. The only vague association with it was that it served as a truce line delineating the point in which all Arab armies were halted when they decided to invade a freshly-independent Israel in 1948.

Fourthly Palestinian demands were completely – and ridiculously – impractical almost to the point where it appeared to be deliberately so. The terms called for land swaps of “comparable value,” meaning anything resembling remote sand dunes or territories that were useless for development were unacceptable. Instead the Palestinians were demanding premium-quality high-value land such as those at the centre of Israel itself. Creating unrealistic demands are often a recipe for rejection before any meaningful discussions can even make headway.


Borders of Israel from 1948 to today (Image source: perceptionasreality.blogspot.com)

In re-clarifying his original proposal, Obama had also made certain points that could sound a little more promising to the Israelis just as when he raised issues concerning “the new demographic realities on the ground.” To the Jewish State, these could relate to Israel’s concern over the large settlement blocs.

Furthermore Obama’s language could use some handy and constructive interpretation via the United Nations’ Resolution 242, such as when he spoke about securing and recognising borders and importantly, he also added that, “Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat.”

If we take all these into relevant context, the proposal might not be as detrimental although it is also fair to take into account Israeli fears whenever talk solely revolves around returning to 1967 borders. Hence the additional qualifying clauses are important without which the Jewish State will have to return to a geography that was not only hardly 8 miles wide but a sheer invitation to repeated wars. The argument therefore goes that when Israel is physically indefensible, it is easy to see why its annihilation would become a widespread principle cause amongst bullying Arab nations.

Given the context of what we are talking about here, we must be mindful that the Six Day War was won not because Israel had matching firepower or boots on the ground. It actually had neither. What the Jewish State had to resort to was to intelligently pre-empt the situation by striking first and striking hard. Only then did it stand a chance of victory. This is not hard to imagine when there are four huge armies converging on its borders everywhere.

Those were very trying times. Israelis had no time to do anything else other than to worry day and night about when the next wave of terror would arrive. It was like living on a very short fuse. No Israelis want to return to this position and therefore there is no question that returning to the pre-1967 borders is unacceptable because they are indefensible especially concerning today’s firepower and military technologies. If viable peace through workable agreements is to be possible, then one cannot resort to ridiculous – often stupidly so – proposals.

Perhaps Israeli’s legendary Prime Minister Golda Meir put it best when she famously said before the National Press Club in Washington in 1957, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

What’s our Christian perspective?

(Image source: unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu)

The most important thing is to have the right perspective. It is very easy to be swayed into thinking that this is a political issue but it is not. For almost sixty years, that’s what the world media has been trying to convince us. Unfortunately, many have fallen into their trap.

The liberal media has been feeding the world public lies about Israel, saying that virtually everything is the fault of the Jews. If your water doesn’t run through your taps, it’s the Jews’ fault. If you lost your job, it’s the Jews’ fault. If your economy defaults, it’s the Jews’ fault. If the sun doesn’t shine, it is the Jews’ fault. And recently someone even blamed the Jews for the recent “Black Lives Matter” riots in Baltimore, U.S.A.

Let us put this one right once and for all. No, this is not a political issue. Instead, from a Christian perspective, it is a spiritual one. The way in which we should understand the goings-on leading to today must be rooted in Scripture, the Word of God. What man tells us is, therefore, immaterial and potentially misleading. The historical conflicts that modern Israel have been weathering are not separate from the Bible. In fact the more we delve into the Word, the more we see God’s Hand in the many miraculous episodes in which Israel was upheld despite many harrowing near-disasters. The reason why God chooses to do all these for Israel is simple:

In Genesis 15:18 (NASB), God made a promise to Abraham that His People will inherit the Land of Israel:

“On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants, I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates…”

What God gives, man cannot remove. What God builds, man cannot tear asunder. God’s Chosen People were given land promised unto them. This land given by God is therefore non-removable because it is a covenanted territory belonging to the Jews now and forever. And that’s not all.

From the verse above, the Land of Israel sounds significantly larger than the modern boundaries that man had forced Israel to accept. If we can draw anything from this, it is that there can neither be any land swaps nor surrendering of territories. What should be in order is that lands still lost must be returned to Israel instead.

God reminds all of us again in Deuteronomy 1:8 (NASB) that, through Moses, the Chosen Land was always going to be for His Chosen People:

“See, I have placed the Land before you; go in and possess the land, which the Lord swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, to them and their descendants after them.”

Never has God ever said that His love for the Jews would be at the expense of everyone else. He did not say anything to the effect that He would, therefore, love us less. There is no credibility behind any claims of the God of Abraham would love the Arabs, Palestinians or Iranians any less.

None of this has anything to do with a sovereign God electing to give this land to the Children of Israel. In other words, Israel is reserved for His Chosen People and yet He loves everyone else at the same time. This one fact is important to know and unequivocally recognise. Israel to the Jews is a holy inheritance. It is a spiritual condition by which we are to be bound by. We are to obey no matter who we are and which country we hail from.

Detractors point to history that the Jews lost Israel. They had their Temple sacked and destroyed. They were disobedient and God’s punishment was just and acceptable. The Jews paid the price for the belligerence. Besides the worldview was that no one else but the Jews who drove Jesus to the cross. He died because the Jews chose Barabbas to live. And through all that the Jews had done to displease God, they were then scattered, by their own doing, across the world.

Most of these are true except that it was our sin, and not the Jews, that drove Jesus to the cross but that’s another subject for another day. Even so, none of these can cancel the fundamental premise that because God gave the Land to the Jews, then that Land is forever tied to them. It is neither for anyone else to occupy nor for others to conquer. It is also not for anyone to give away wilfully or otherwise.

The restoration of Israel and Jerusalem, her holy capital, has been at the spiritual centre of every Christian’s life and for the Jewish People, they represent the core of their hearts and minds. All of this inextricably point us to where Scripture says God will gather His People once more and restore them to the Land that He has given them:

“Then it will happen on that day, that the Lord will again recover the second time with His hand the remnant of His people…” (Isaiah 11:11a, NASB)

Also here:

“If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there, the Lord your God will gather you and from there, He will bring you back” (Deuteronomy 30:4, NASB).

We know that God will not allow man to give away what He has given. In particular where the Chosen Land is meant specifically for His People, He will not tolerate anyone or any nation driving a wedge in between the covenant He has with them. But the painful history of the Jews has revealed that in the 4,000 years of the Chosen Land, they have only lived 1,600 of those years according to God’s design.

The rest was essentially spent in oblivion beginning with the conquest of Judea by the Assyrians and then followed by the demoralising invasion of the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar. We know the rest – Alexander the Great, the Seleucids and then the Romans. All these times the Jews were miserable and the longing for the Chosen Land had only become more pronounced as each year progressed.   

That is why the above verses tell us that God will restore His People back to the Land. This is because God will not have His covenant broken by man no less. It should therefore be seen as the way in which God wants things done His way and ultimately, He wants Israel to be the very best evidence for the world to see His faithfulness to the truth of His Word.

This is the reason why God will regather all His People from the Diaspora back to Israel. Regardless of how faraway they may be in the world, God will fulfil His Word and resettle them to the Chosen Land and He will continue to do this until the End of Time when Christ finally returns.

Our Christian faith calls on us to properly understand this and to embrace God’s promise. We are to know that He will fulfil the prophecy that is to come and because of this, we must be motivated to kneel before Him and pray for Israel as Psalm 122:6 (NASB) so aptly puts it:

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May they prosper who love you. May peace be within your walls, and prosperity within your palaces. For the sake of my brothers and my friends, I will now say, ‘May peace be with you.’ For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.”

Notice that the word ‘peace’ is used three times in the one verse. In Hebrew, the word is Shalom and it is written as:

שָׁלוֹם

Shalom as a word means more than just peace. It can also be translated to mean “completion” or “wholeness.” Given this additional context, when we pray for Israel, take care to include these:

-         Pray not only for the redemption of those mentioned above but also against all the threats of death and destruction levelled maliciously against the Jews that they be averted

-         Pray that God’s plan be quickly completed and brought to fullness for the Land and His People and that this plan will finally reveal Jesus within the hearts of all Jews and Arabs

-         Pray that God will open the eyes of the blinded among world leaders especially those who have been playing their parts in shutting the doors on Israel and for issuing demands and ultimatums that forced her hand

-         Pray that the deaf and blind, those who persecute Israel in all imaginable – and unimaginable – ways, will receive God’s wisdom and insight to change their ways

-         Pray that even the hardest of hearts, those who hate and despise Israel receive God’s salvation and be humbled to understand the errors of their judgement in their persecution of His Chosen People

For each and every one of them, we pray sincerely and in faith that we will hear them one day say:

“Blessed is the One who comes in the Name of the Lord; we have blessed You from the House of the Lord” (Psalm 118:26, NASB).

We now come to the most important point in our conclusion and this is when we must fall upon our diligence to go proclaim the Good News. We are therefore to go and tell the world that Jesus is the Son of God, the Promised Messiah of Israel and the world; that He alone is the light, the truth and the way and that whoever enters through Him will be saved” (John 14:6). Jesus is God’s way to solve this ancient but deeply afflicted conflict that has killed hundreds of millions of His People alone for thousands of years, and as such, He is also the One and Only Guarantee of a successful divine solution.

And for those who believe that God is angered by the Jews and that He has hence forsaken them entirely, listen to the words of Paul in Romans 11:1-5 (NASB) and be properly advised:

“I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? ‘Lord, they have killed Your prophets, they have torn down Your altars and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.’

“But what is the divine response to him? ‘I have kept for Myself seven-thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time, a remnant according to God’s gracious choice. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.”

Paul goes on a little further (vv.26-27, NASB)

“For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery – so that you will not be wise in your own estimation – that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in; and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.’ ‘This is My Covenant with them, when I take away their sins’.”

Epilogue

Image source: freetips4travel.com

Israel today is at a crossroad of meeting the needs of the Jewish Diaspora while at the same time, she herself is in need of help. There are physical needs that Israel is encountering today that it had not a decade ago. In recent years, over 1 million Russian-speaking Jews and around 130,000 Ethiopian Jews have arrived at her doorstep and the economic cost to Israel has been crippling.

Many of them, including innumerable survivors of the Holocaust, live in abject poverty are hurting, desperately clinging to any hope to survive. If not for help coming from outside Christian benefactors and charitable organisations, many lives might have had succumbed.

The Bible clearly tells us that God is far from finished with His Chosen People, the Jews. And contrary to what many believe, He has not and will never reject them. From the days of Abram till today, God has remained steadfast and faithful to us.

He has told us that the day will come, beckoning the return of His Son, Jesus, when the blindness that has shielded the eyes of His People for almost 2,000 years shall finally be uncovered. And when that day comes, all glory will be upon Israel for she will be saved (Romans 11:26).

Set against this backdrop is therefore a nation awaiting the promised Messiah. He is the solution though many Jews aren’t yet aware, which is why we must all gather to pray with all our heart and soul and in all our might, that they may be revealed the Gospel and to prepare in earnest for that blessed day of light when they open their arms to welcome Jesus and thence proclaim Him, once and forever, their Messiah.

May God bless Israel.