To Reverse the Rebirth

By Stan Goodenough, a Christian Zionist:

It will not surprise me at all if, when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returns to Israel next week to invite participants to the Annapolis 'Conference on the Creation of Palestine on Jewish Land,' that the date she has chosen to convene the event turns out to be November 29.

As Rice sees things, the irony of this choice of date would be positive, injecting some sense of hopefulness into the long-hopeless US-pushed pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace.

The State Department could spin November 29 to generate optimism: It would mark a return to the past, they could say; the chance to heal the sore at its source; a reversal of the disastrous decisions that ignited and continue to fuel the unending conflict in the Middle East.

For Bible-believing Christian Zionists, to hold this conference on November 29 would support what many of us already hold to be true: that the real aim of the land-for-peace process (whether Rice and her president know it or not) is the reversal of something different: the rolling back of the process of Israel's physical national restoration which God Himself has ordained and brought about.

As such, it is doubly futile - for who do the Quartet and the UN Security Council think that they are to go against the very will and purpose of the LORD of hosts?

Certainly, if November 29 is the date drawn, it will not be a mere coincidence.

It was on November 29, 60 years ago, that all creation appeared to hold its breath.

On that day in 1947, the nations watched, the Jews prayed, and the Arabs oiled their guns.

On that unprecedented day in the history of nations, the UN voted 33 to 13 (with 10 abstentions) to divide the British-mandated area called "Palestine" between the Jews and the Arabs laying claim to it.

Like a massive final contraction after years of birth pangs, General Assembly Resolution 181 opened the way through which the ancient nation of Israel could finally be reborn on its historic homeland.

Not that the battle for her independence was over. Within hours of the partition vote Israel's enemies began searching for a way to rescind and annul that decision.

But they were wasting their time. Less than six months later, on May 15, 1948, the State of Israel came into being on it's God-given land.

It was as foretold by the prophet Isaiah thousands of years before:

"...Who has heard such a thing?
Who has seen such things?
Shall the earth be made to give birth in one day?
Or shall a nation be born at once?
For as soon as Zion was in labor,
She gave birth to her children..."
(Isaiah 66:8)

From that day to this, those who hate Zion (and in truth they really hate the LORD who has chosen Zion) have sought to destroy her.

The surrounding Arab states have attacked Israel time and time again. The "Palestinian" Arabs have waged a relentless terrorism and propaganda campaign against the Jewish state to demoralize its citizens and delegitimise it in front of the international community. The industrial powers have sided "pragmatically" with the oil-rich Arabs and have pushed Israel into prejudicing its security and surrendering its millennia-old claim to its land.

The currently Christian-led United States is leading the charge and, for the Bush administration, decision day is already past.

Some die-hard Christian Republicans still insist that Bush and Rice are sincerely acting in what they believe to be Israel’s ultimate best interests. Even if they are [which I personally have a hard time hanging on to - Ed] they have gotten into bed with other "western" leaders who long ago ran out of patience with this "shxxty little country".

Leaders like European MP and former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, who reportedly told an audience in Cairo on June 17, 2004, that "the origin of the Palestinian problem is in the promise given by the British to the Jews to establish a nationalist state on the basis of the religious conviction that the Jews have a right to this land… It was an historic error on the part of the British to make such a promise, but this now belongs to history."

Such sentiments have also infected morer "ordinary" men on the street. On July 18, 2006, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote: "...Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now."

Yes, 60 years ago this month, a reluctant gentile world still somewhat shaken up by the horrific sights revealed by the liberation of Hitler's Death Camps, scraped together just enough compassion to support the establishment of a homeland for the Jews.

That compassion has long gone.

Israel is not much more than a nuisance; a thorn in the side of the world. The nation's Jews, then, must be made to pay, compensating the Arabs and mollifying them, so that the threat Israel's policies pose to world peace will be removed.

For the Islamic world, what the US wants to achieve at Annapolis is just phase one of the plan that will excise the Jewish cancer once and for all from their midst.

The creation of Palestine may appear to be more or less the belated implementation of Resolution 181. But not to forget, as Arafat used to say: the Arab world rejected that resolution, rendering it void.

For them, establishing a Palestinian state is not correcting that misstep. It is preparing for the correcting and erasing of the entire "mistake" that enabled Israel's rebirth.

How encouraging then to know beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Shepherd of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps; that He is and will continue to defend her; and that He who brought Israel safely to the time of her physical rebirth nearly has promised to also bring her to her glorious, national, spiritual rebirth, right here in her land.

The only One who is going to be doing any "rolling up" is Israel's God. And it is the self-important and arrogant nations He will gather, to place inside and crush in the wine press of His wrath.

For they have scattered His people and they have divided up His land.