WHAT TO DO WITH 6 MILLION JEWS
Exclusive: Joseph Farah highlights spiritual significance of Israel's rebirth
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Editor’s note: Joseph Farah is traveling in Israel through Nov. 15 with a WND tour group.
JERUSALEM – It’s been 70 years since the end of World War II and, with it, the full realization of the Holocaust of 6 million Jews.
Seventy years is the same length of time the nation of Israel spent in captivity in Babylon and Persia before its return to rebuild in the land.
Today, Israel is a nation of 6 million Jews – and its immediate neighbors and nations all over the world are once again seeking their annihilation.
The sympathy the Jews engendered from around the world in 1948 has dissipated. Today, because the nation of Israel has withstood every existential threat over the last 67 years, it is widely perceived as an aggressor in the region.
But that’s not true.
The Jews are just back home after 1,900 years of refugee status, persecution, genocide, sorrows and grief unparalleled in human history.
There is simply no other people who have faced such challenges for so many thousands of years. And there is no other nation in history that was scattered, regathered or born again in its original land. All the great empires of the world have come and gone – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Ancient Israel saw them all rise and fall. And modern Israel is right back where it started in the Holy Land.
More remarkable is that this is what the Bible said would happen: “The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:8).
The Bible also said this small sliver of land the size of New Jersey would be the most contested piece of real estate in the world – a place of controversy, a cup of trembling. That prophecy, too, has been fulfilled.
Today, the controversy here focuses on a 40-acre site known as the Temple Mount. For Jews it is seen as the holiest site, the place upon which rested the holy temples. Muslims deny this history, though that was not always the case.
Less than 100 years ago, in 1924, the Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled the Temple Mount area, published its first English-language tourist guide, “A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif,” which stated: “The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.”
Muslims now claim the entire land of Israel rightfully belongs to them.
One of the claims to the land is based on the fabrication that so-called “Palestinians” are the direct ethnic descendants of the ancient Canaanites or the Philistines.
Earlier this year, Salwa Hadib, Palestinian Authority deputy minister of Jerusalem affairs and member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, declared on Palestinian TV that Jerusalem “has been a Canaanite city for thousands of years. The Palestinian people has been present in it for thousands of years, whether it was in Babylon, Assyria or Canaan, they [the Palestinians] gathered in the area before anything else, centuries before the Jewish religion….”
Yet, a more precise ethnic description of today’s Arab Palestinians is a people who come from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and even Bosnia, the Balkans and the Caucasus. Most came fairly recently – the last 100 years – to find work.
There was never any Arab identification with “Palestine” as a nation until the 1960s when Yasser Arafat created it as a form of asymmetrical warfare against Israel. In February 1919, Palestinian-Arabs in the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations stated, “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.”
In “Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness,” Khalidi Rashid writes that the Palestinian people read into the history of Palestine “a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern.”
After the Ottoman Empire ended its 400-year rule of the land in 1920, the name “Palestine” emerged as a general geographic term – not a nation state.
Prior to Arafat’s “Palestinian myth,” most Arabs rejected the term Palestine as an invention of the Zionists. Jews were Palestinians before 1948. Arabs were Arabs.
“Leading up to Israel’s independence in 1948, it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate as Palestinians,” writes Jewish Virtual Library. “It was not until years after Israeli independence that the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were called Palestinians.”
The name Palestine was an invention of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, so as to get the world to forget about “Israel” and “Judea,” nations that had proven troublesome to the empire. It was named after the Philistines – an ancient people already extinct by the first century A.D.
Today the Jews are back in in the land after 1,900 years – just as the Bible predicted they would be. In Jeremiah 12:15, we are told: “And it shall come to pass, after that I have plucked them out I will return, and have compassion on them, and will bring them again, every man to his heritage, and every man to his land.”
It’s probably the greatest miracle in the history of the world. In fact, God suggests in Jeremiah 16:14-15 that it is, in fact, a greater miracle than the Exodus: “Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.”
If that’s so, God is not going to permit any force on earth to destroy His children and the land of Israel – no matter how hard those forces may try.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/what-to-do-with-6-million-jews/#VJm9J4cubEX1o0Sw.99
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