Will Israel Ever Find Peace?
Will Israel Ever Find Peace?
By J.L. Robb
It has been the dream of most US Presidents since the rebirth of Israel as a country, 69 years ago, to bring peace between Israel and Palestine. Most US Presidents have failed miserably.
Thanks to the Balfour Declaration and the work of Christians around the world, May 14, 1948, Israel was reborn as an independent country. The Christians, who a few hundred years earlier hated the Jews, began to realize that if the Jews were the Chosen People as the Bible stated, Christians needed to get on board. God would mete out His own justice on the Jewish people and did not need Christians to help. We helped anyway via the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Holocaust.
Finally, Christians began to understand that had the Jewish folk 2,000 years ago not insisted on the death of Jesus, then Jesus would not be the Messiah. His death at the hands of those Jesus came to save had been predicted hundreds of years before the actual event.
In May, 1948, from Tel Aviv since Jerusalem was not part of the deal, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said this in his speech:
“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”
But Jerusalem, the City of David and capital of ancient Israel, was not part of the deal. Can President Trump, the deal-maker, accomplish the seemingly unachievable?
“Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Let’s see if we can prove them wrong.” President Donald J. Trump
Like other U.S. Presidents before him, the quest for peace in Israel has been somewhat elusive. Their peace treaties have a history of Israeli tolerance toward multiple incursions and rocket attacks from Palestinians. The descendants of Ismael and the descendants of Isaac have been fighting for a long time.
In President Trump’s first foreign visit, he will be in Israel May 22, 2017. President Obama made it to Israel after four years; but President Trump is letting this great ally know that the United States, once again, has her back.
President Trump begins his Religious Tour with a visit to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican. Visiting the House of Saud and then Israel, makes sense according to strategists, at least in the world of Israeli Peace Treaties.
If President Trump, who never says never, should manage a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, it will be a first if successful. It would also be a huge feather in the Trump hat. The key word is successful.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter managed to negotiate the Camp David Accord. In that peace treaty, Israel’s Arab neighbors agreed to stop attacking Israel if Israel would return the Arab land they captured in the previous Arab attack, including Jerusalem. The Arab-Israeli War was fifty years ago. In 1979 the Islamic Revolution was ushered in and Islamism has been different since. Carter was a one-term president.
Then there is the Oslo Accord of 1993 under President Clinton. In this peace treaty, Israel again gave back land, which used to be called “war booty;” and the Arab lands would leave Israel alone. There have been thousands of Palestinian incursions and rocket attacks throughout this treaty.
The Palestinians have had ample opportunities for a peace deal with Israel, but peace is difficult when Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a country with whom they would make peace. That is interesting, because in the real world, Palestine has never in history been a state, a country or had a capital city, though they claim Jerusalem is their capital of… something.
If President Trump can weave a genuine peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, a deal with no incursions, no rocket attacks, no driving-into-Jews attacks and no stabbings, then he will be the Mother of all Wheeler-Dealers.
While Donald Trump was campaigning and everyone seemed to believe he would lose the election, he campaigned that he would move the recognized capital of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would be a first and very controversial. While Trump is a deal maker, that would be a deal breaker.
On April 24, 2017, Trump, who was labeled as an anti-Semite throughout his campaign, had this to say for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“On Yom Hashoah, we look back at the darkest chapter of human history. We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: Never again. I say it, never again.
“The mind cannot fathom the pain, the horror, and the loss. Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide. They were murdered by an evil that words cannot describe, and that the human heart cannot bear.
“’If you will it, it is no dream that Israel is a great nation that has risen from the desert’.
“We cannot let that ever even be thought.”
Most Arabs do not believe Jerusalem was ever a capital of Israel, there was no Holocaust and the Jewish God is really Allah. In the Koranic version, Muhammad replaces Jesus as the savior; though they proclaim to “believe in Jesus.”
Will Trump trump up a deal that is satisfactory for the Palestinians and the Israelis? Will he set up a peace treaty that appears successful? Will he go where others have failed to go?
Probably not.
Two weeks ago, the Palestinian terrorist group that helps run the Palestinian Territory, Hamas, dropped its call for the destruction of Israel, sort of.
No successful peace until after the battle at Armageddon is also predicted. Had the reborn Israel finally accepted their Messiah, things would be much different. But that is not in God’s Magnificent Play. That is why the 144,000 witnesses were predicted.