Causes of the Gaza War

The current bombing of Gaza is just another development in a long chain of events. I find it remarkable that the longer the chain becomes, the more people forget how the chain got started in the first place.

The chain of events had its modern beginning about a century ago when Zionists decided to return to Palestine without first repenting--as the law demands in Lev. 26:40-42. Essentially, they decided that enough was enough, and that the judgment of God would go on forever unless they did something about it. There was an element of truth in that logic, in view of the fact that they refused to "confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers" (Lev. 26:40). To refuse to repent means that the judgment will simply continue.

They had refused to submit to divine judgment in the days of Jeremiah, and this made them "evil figs" (Jer. 24). Having rejected the wooden yoke, their rebellion against God brought them under an iron yoke (Deut. 28:48; Jer. 28:13). As a result, they spent 70 years off the land in Babylon before God switched the iron yoke for the wooden yoke.

They spent two centuries under the wooden yoke of Persia, followed by a few centuries under the wooden yoke of Greece. Then in 63 B.C. the wooden yoke came under the control of Rome, under whom they chafed, again refusing to submit to divine judgment. The more they rebelled, the worse they were oppressed by Rome. The more they were oppressed, the more they rebelled, instead of repenting. Finally, their rebellion brought the full wrath of Rome upon their heads, even as Jesus had prophesied in Matt. 22:7.

When Rome dispersed the Jews in 70 A.D. and then again in 135 A.D., the Jews switched from a wooden yoke back to an iron yoke. In other words, they had to serve their sentence in foreign lands. This remained their situation until the early 1900's, when once again they decided to rebel against the judgment of God and end their captivity without repenting. They even induced the Church to side with them--a ploy which succeeded only because the Church had forgotten the law.

The Turkish government, which controlled Palestine at the time, had no objection to a few Jews immigrating to Palestine, but soon they discovered that the Zionists were intending to conquer the land by immigration and set up their own state. That is when the conflict began. Then in World War I the British took Palestine from the Turks, and the Zionists were able to exert much more pressure on the British to take the land away from the Palestinian people and give it to the Zionists.

When the British government hesitated, the Zionists turned to TERRORISM in the 1940's until the British were forced to get out and turn the problem over to the United Nations in 1947. The U.N. partitioned the land between them and gave its approval to a "Jewish homeland," not a Jewish STATE. The Arab nations saw it as an injustice to give the Zionists part of their traditional territory, so they fought back.

They have been fighting back ever since. Each time they fight back, the Zionists grab more land. The Israelis believe that the entire land of Palestine all the way from the Nile to the Euphrates (in Iraq) belong to them, and they intend to continue grabbing land until they get it all. Here is a map showing how Palestine has been shrinking steadily.

http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2006/05/10/the-shrinking-map-of-palestine/

In the 1960's, Yassir Arafat decided to imitate the terrorist tactics of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir from the 1940's. He founded the PLO as a resistance movement. In the 1980's, the Israelis helped fund a new organization to counter the PLO and dilute its popularity. This new organization was called Hamas.

In September of 1993 Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Palestinian Chairman Arafat agreed to a two-state solution. This alarmed many Israelis, not for "security" reasons, but because they had laid claim to the entire land and intended to kill or drive out any remaining Palestinians. So Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995. Everyone expressed shock that a Jew would kill a Jew, but privately, many of them were glad to see the end of the peace process.

The peace process was supposed to establish a Palestinian state within seven years (by the end of 2000). It did not happen. The last day of the year (Hebrew time), Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount in order to cause a riot, spark an intifada, and force the Israelis to defend themselves and fully end the pretence of having a peace process. It was Elul 29, the same day by Hebrew time as the peace treaty had been signed in 1993.

With the Palestinians fighting (with stones), it gave the Israelis a good excuse to "defend themselves." Finally, in 2002 the Israelis invaded Palestine and destroyed the infrastructure and police departments of the Palestinian Authority. Yassir Arafat was put under house arrest in Ramallah, and in effect, the Israelis shut down the Palestinian government.

This, of course, created chaos and anarchy. But more importantly, it empowered Hamas, which was the PLO's chief political rival. With the PLO impotent, Hamas filled the void, as the Israelis intended. Eventually, in 2006 Hamas won a majority of the seats in Parliament in free and open elections. But because Hamas was labeled a "terrorist" organization, the Israelis had the perfect excuse to stop the peace negotiations. They continued the land grab on the West Bank, claiming all uninhabited or unused land for themselves. Palestine has now become a land of Palestinian settlements on hostile Israeli territory.

The more the Israelis oppressed them, the more the Palestinians fought back with whatever weapons they had at their disposal. Each stone or rocket gave the Israeli government another excuse to oppress the Palestinians further.

So that brings us to Gaza today. Supposedly, the Israeli bombing is caused by Hamas shooting rockets into Israeli settlements. Yes, no doubt that is the immediate cause. But if I steal your house, and you fight back, does this give me a moral right to shoot you for daring to fight back?

You have to trace the whole chain of events back to its source in order to know what is morally right in this case. One cannot merely claim that God gave the land to the Jews, because even if that statement were true, it completely ignores the fact that God is the One who removed them from the land in the first century. The original problem has not been solved by repentance, according to the very law which the Jews claim to follow.

Evangelicals try to muddy the waters by claiming that the Jews WILL repent at some point in the future. Somehow this is supposed to validate the Zionist claim to Palestine, as well as the Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians. But this view was only a lawless accommodation which was advocated after 1948. Before that time, the Church preached that the Jews would repent, and THEN God would allow them to return. The Church tends to preach whatever pleases the Jews, rather than the Truth of Scripture.

If the Church got its way, and the Zionists were allowed to rule the world in the Age to come, it would soon discover that Christians themselves would be persecuted more intensely than in the early days of the Church. Christians would soon be treated as the Palestinians are today, and they would all be second-class citizens, if they were allowed to live at all.