DESPERATELY NEEDED: ETHICS OF CHRIST IN MIDEAST
By Rev. Ted Pike
8 Feb 10
Rahm Emmanuel recently told Israel that Pres. Obama is sick of
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Obama is disappointed with the evident
lack of sincerity on both sides. “This is as intractable a problem
as you get…I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade
them…[to make peace] when their politics ran contrary to that.”
Although Israel has always postured as amenable to a two-state solution,
Israel’s leaders covertly agreed that total expulsion of Arabs
from Palestine is the only practical solution to the conflict. Israel’s
first premier and architect of the state, David Ben-Gurion, and other
Zionist leaders, have publicly confirmed the necessity of exclusion.
Ben-Gurion: “We will expel the Arabs and take their place.” “In
each attack, a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the destruction
of homes and the expulsion of the population.” “We shall
enter the vacated villages and settle in them.” “We must
do everything in our power to ensure that they never return.”
In 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund, the
central Zionist organization acquiring land in Palestine, wrote, “It
must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country…There
is no room for compromise on this point.” [1]
The second reason this problem seems impossible to solve is the "hit
back" mentality of the two primary groups in Israel. Hamas hits
back with suicide bombs and homemade rockets which do nothing but give
Israel justification to retaliate. As the Goldstone Report documents,
Palestinians are not without blame in the present conflict. Yet strife
is just as much perpetuated by Israel’s Talmudic “hit back” mentality – a
reflex thousands of years old and manifested by the government of Israel
for at least the past 60 years.
Israel and the Palestinians desperately need enlightened ethical
intervention that will stop the endless back-and-forth of violence.
How the Mid-East Conflict Began
In 1917, the Arab world was at peace with the West. They despised
the ruling Ottoman Turks and admired America, England and France. They
eagerly cooperated to defeat the Axis powers, responding to Britain's
promise of freedom from the Turks in their own independent Arab state.
The Balfour Declaration, which planned a limited homeland
for Jews in Palestine, promised such freedom: "… nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
What actually happened was that Israel did about everything imaginable
to deprive indigenous Palestinians of both land and rights. In the
spring of 1948, Jewish Irgun terrorists slaughtered over 100 innocent
Palestinians villagers in the sleeping town of Deir Yassin east of
Jerusalem. The Zionists went on rampage, murderously terrorizing 800,000
Palestinians, including tradesmen, farmers, and professionals, driving
them from hundreds of towns and villages throughout Palestine. Any
Arab who returned, attempting to take belongings with him was shot.
[2] The Palestinians were forced to settle in shantytown concentration
camps and settlements, where hordes of their grandchildren remain today.
Israel made the Palestinians its worst enemies. How can these
chronically oppressed people view Israel as anything but an enemy?
Over 90 years, Israel has proven its real objective is to drive the
Arabs from Palestine.
Mandate for Violence
Israel derives its mandate for conquest from a twisted interpretation
of God's covenant with Abraham. Modern Israel says unrighteous Jews
are entitled to the Holy Land, at any cost. This is false. Scripture
repeatedly states that only a nation of holy and obedient Jews can
own and occupy God's Holy Land. [3] This happened under Joshua and
Nehemiah, and the Bible says it will occur again when Jews repent at
Christ's second coming. Today's premature national return is a counterfeit
and not endorsed by God. It lays the foundation for world dominion
by the anti-Christ, not Christ.
Strife in the Mideast stems from Israel's loyalty to the Babylonian
Talmud, the pseudo-Bible created by the ancient Pharisees and now the
official ethical/religious authority for the state of Israel. The Talmud
encourages Jews to remind every generation of the atrocities committed
against them by Gentiles and Christians. The best way to keep bad things
from happening to Jews again is to never forget. An esteemed Talmudic
sage advised that if you know your enemy wants to kill you, kill him
first! (Jesus said the opposite: The best way to keep your enemy from
harming you is to be kind, preferably long before he becomes homicidal.)
Israel believes she must continually crush her critics, demonizing
them as "anti-Semitic" or
they will establish bases of power with one objective: to destroy Israel.
Of course, this rationale can be extended as needed beyond Palestine
to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc. Conceivably, any nation which
strongly criticizes Israel might be seen as a threat worthy of attack.
Tragically, Israel-first evangelical Christians imbibe raw Israeli
propaganda from the Jewish-dominated American big media as well as
evangelical sources such as WorldNetDaily and Trinity Broadcasting
Network. (See Jews
Confirm Big Media Is Jewish). They agree with Israel's values. Denying
the genius of Jesus’ ethics, they say Israel is absolutely correct
in holding to its Talmudic responses.
Yet if evangelicals truly are friends of Israel, they must inform
Israel that her reflexes are woefully misguided. Christians need to
tell Israel that her "hit back" mentality, not the Palestinians,
is her greatest national problem. It's time for Israel to do what is right,
not what is misguidedly considered necessary.
Here’s my proposal: A special Knesset commission should begin an in-depth
study of how turning the other cheek (feeding your enemy, covering him with
the proverbial “cloak” of mercy and kindness, going the “extra
mile” of deference and accommodation) might at last procure peace. Israel
must admit her crimes of violent expropriation of 800,000 Palestinians in 1948
and exile of their descendants to concentration camps. Although it may not
be possible to restore Arabs to their property, Israel should do everything
in its power to make amends. This would include massive financial, economic,
humanitarian, legal, and educational encouragement to Palestinians in the occupied
territories. The intent would be to help create a prosperous state for Palestinians
in place of the homeland Israel stole.
Although Palestinians would be intensely suspicious at first, if
Israel were to actively apply the Golden Rule to all relations with
the Arab world, there is little doubt it would enormously ease, if
not solve, Mideast tensions. It would also diminish the by-product
of Israel's oppression: international Arab terrorism. If this doesn’t
happen and the conflict persists under failed principles, it will only
continue to hemorrhage respect for Israel from the nations. It will
heighten the volatility of the entire Mideast - especially as Zionist
groups now clamor for US involvement in attack on Iran - yet another
futile attempt to make the Mideast safe for Israel.
Could the Golden Rule Prevail?
But will Christians recommend the ethics of Jesus to Israel? Might
Israel respond favorably?
Of course not.
Israel-first evangelicals like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and
Jewish Zionists like Netanyahu, want one thing: Arabs out of Palestine
and control by Israel of all lands promised the nation under Joshua—from
Egypt to Lebanon and from Sinai to Syria. To accomplish this they advocate
filling the Occupied Territories with even more illegal Jewish homes,
further confiscating Arabs' lands and driving them out.
The bizarre and sobering reality is that Christian and Jewish fundamentalists
view two-state harmony between Arabs and Jews as a desecration of God's Holy
Land! This is why the Mideast dilemma remains "as intractable a problem
as you get."
The last thing Christian and Jewish Zionists want is for Jews and
Arabs in Palestine to live happily ever after.
Footnotes
- These statements by Zionist leaders, reflected in many terrorist
acts against the Palestinians in 1948, are found in the Encyclopedia
of the Palestine Problem, p. 261-66. Edited by Palestinian
barrister and diplomat Dr. Issa Nakhleh, it is available in
most university libraries.
- The above source quotes Ze’ev Schiff, the leading military
authority of Ha’aretz, saying Deir Yassin “caused
masses of Arabs to flee in fear of further atrocities…As the
story of the massacre spread among the Arabs, it gathered gruesome
detail…” (p. 255) The encyclopedia says, “Massacre,
murder, rape, robbery, death and destruction propelled the Palestinians
from their homeland. Even Zionist soldiers themselves admit to these
unspeakable crimes, for example, in the village of Duwayma in the
Hebron district: ‘They killed some 80 to 100 Arabs, women and
children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with
clubs…In the village there remained Arab men and women who
were put in the houses without food. Then the sappers came to blow
up the houses.’ One of the survivors of the massacre, Hassan
Mahmud Hodeib, said that on 28 and 29 October 1948, 20 tanks from
Moshe Dayan’s 89 th battalion surrounded the village and committed
mass murder against its civilian inhabitants. Among the victims were
75 elderly people who took refuge in a mosque. Members of 35 families
were found hiding in a cave and were machine-gunned. The Israeli
newspaper Hadashot confirmed the massacre when its correspondent
Yoalla Haarshefi uncovered skeletons in a cistern near the village
36 years later in 1984.”
- God's conditional terms for Jewish occupation of Palestine include:
Lev. 18:28, 26:27-46; Num. 14:23; Deut. 4:26-27, 6:18, 7:12, 8:21,
25, 37, 41, 63, 64, 28:56-64, 29:28, 31:3, 18; Ezek. 13:9; Jer. 7:15,
29:13.
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