Matt 24 Watch, 137: Mr Obama's diplomatic time-bomb ticks away . . .

Potential threats to Israel from a
hostile Palestinian Arab state

One of the key questions we need to ask about the sudden push to unilaterally declare a Palestinian Arab -- and, revealingly, Judenrein: "Jew-free" -- State [cf. here and here] is, why now?

[UPDATE: It seems there may be some postponements in the wave of diplomatic moves, due to the US and French initiatives in the UN over the past day, e.g. the French seem to have put on the table a one-year timeline and Mr Obama has underscored to Mr Abbas that the US will veto a Palestinian Arab bid in the Security Council. That, DV, will be followed up; as the dust settles and events become clear. However, the matter is still fundamentally the same, so we need to address the below, for record. (Tracking: here, here.)]

One obvious suggestion is, that many of the Arab states see this as an opportunity to distract attention from their own problems and uprisings or potential uprisings, by attacking the longstanding Jewish bogeyman. 

And that should not be overlooked, as -- again -- we must remind ourselves of the prophesied Gharqad Tree end-times massacre of Jews hadith (saying, example or precedent set by Mohammed)  appealed to in the Hamas covenant, Clause 7:

 . . . The Islamic Resistance [= HAMAS, an Arabic acronym]  Movement aspires to implement Allah's promise, whatever time that may take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until the Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them), until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Oh Muslim! Oh Abdullah! [= servant/slave of Allah, a common Muslim name], there is a Jew behind me, come on and kill him. Only the Gharqad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

That ghastly and murderous religiously motivated ideological, IslamIST aspiration, sadly, is all too typical of a millennium-deep ingrained hostility that dominates the mindset of too many radicalised Muslims. And, while it has been said that the radical fraction is only ten percent, it plainly has utterly disproportionate influence and -- too often, murderous -- impact.

Indeed, such radicalisation easily explains why from the 1929 massacres in Jerusalem and Hebron to today, there has been a consistent pattern of targetting Jewish civilians for murder. It is also the obvious context for the openly declared intent in 1948 and 1967, once an independent Jewish state had been founded,  to drive the Jews into the sea and to massacre them. In 1948, of course, notoriously, the Arab residents of Mandate Palestine had been invited by their fellow Arabs to temporarily evacuate while the Jews were displaced and wiped out. 

Only, Israel survived, and so we have had the intractable Palestinian Arab refugee problem, which has been willfully maintained by artificially discouraging of resettlement [see below for an astonishing revelation on this . . . ], in order to keep a running sore going. 

By contrast to the fate of the Palestinian Arab refugees, 600,000 of the 800,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries in the period from the 1940's - 60's were resettled in Israel and they and their descendants are now the core Jewish population of Israel.

This highlights the pivot of the problem, which is usually not frankly discussed: 

(i) Unless there can be a resolution of the just described exchange of refugees [which was actually favourable to the Arabs, in numbers, lost wealth and lost property . . . ] the Arab-Israeli problem cannot be solved.


(ii) However, there is a stubborn sense of Arab-Muslim entitlement to the Middle East  (and, actually, to the world as a whole . . . from the Black Flag Army Hadith and much more, the end-times Muslim leader, the Mahdi, is predicted to dominate the whole earth; a point we in the Caribbean should particularly note) driven by the cultural-religious expectations based on the Quranic teachings and traditions of Muslim domination of all other peoples.


(iii) This sense of entitlement is compounded by the expectation of a latter-day massacre of Jews upon their defeat, where Jews are specifically identified in Muslim eschatology as principal supporters of the Dajjal who opposes the Mahdi. (It does not help here, that in the Muslim tradition, Mohammed is commonly held to have been poisoned shortly before his death by a Jewish woman.)


(iv) In that context, Arab Muslims are typically unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of national aspirations and religious views of other peoples rooted in the Middle East, whether Kurds, or Copts, or Dinka, or Berbers, or Jews. But, especially, Jews: the dhimmis who have succeeded in rising up and becoming economically and militarily dominant.


(v) So, unless the underlying venomous, religiously and -- oh, yes, it is obviously so -- racially tinged hostility and sense of entitlement to dominate can be exposed before the watching world and made a shameful and renounced attitude of the past, the "obvious" solution -- to build two peaceful communities side by side on the basis of an existing exchange of refugees [there were tens of millions of such in the aftermath of World War II], is infeasible; primarily due to Arab hostility.

This brings us to the time bomb that has been set ticking by Mr Obama a year ago, towards Friday this week. 

As the Washington Times notes in a current editorial:

In his Sept. 23, 2010, speech before the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama waxed eloquent about the goals of the direct Mideast peace talks being held under American auspices. He said he hoped that "when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations - an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel." The talks soon broke down, but the proposed timeline remained. The idea of asking the U.N. to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority from nonvoting "observer entity" to "observer state" was discussed at an Arab League meeting in Libya in October and soon dominated Palestinian strategic thinking.

 The consequences were all too predictable. And, Mr Obama and his advisers plainly knew this, or full well should have known it.

Mr Obama started the time-bomb ticking, and now faces the challenge of defusing it before it blows up.

For, once international momentum to push for a Palestinian state was on the table, that could very conveniently be used to further delegitimise and harass Israel through lawfare.  Not to mention, riots and terrorist attacks, now including rockets with range to reach the Israeli city of Beersheba, where the nuclear research and development centre, Dimona, is located. Dimona is also the home of the open secret, Israeli nuclear weapons programme.

This, while the arsenals of rockets to bombard Israel and the Iranian nukes to back it up are being built up.  Nukes in the hands of a state whole leader has openly declared intent to wipe Israel off the sands of time.

So, while there are legitimate aspirations of a displaced people, the only reasonable way forward, the Oslo process, is in imminent danger of being run over and left behind; with its inconvenient insistence on actually making peace forgotten in the whirling bloody chaos that could easily now dominate events. 

Is that what we really want?

Is the resulting turmoil, bloodshed and upset to the global energy market, with the looming threat of a Middle East nuclear exchange what we really, really want?

For that, even just a UN General Assembly declaration or vote (and given the context, upgrade to observer state status might well be enough to light the match) would predictably be enough. 

Israel would then be pushed into the corner of being perceived as oppressing a legitimate state.

Meanwhile, the nuclear fuze burning in the background runs on down in the Iranian nuclear centres . . . 

Indeed, that policy of running over and forgetting the Oslo principles is exactly what Mr Abbas has implied. For, as the New York Times reports in a September 5th 2011 article, "Abbas Affirms Palestinian Bid for U.N. Membership":

Mr. Abbas said the Palestinians planned to start their membership drive with the Security Council despite a vow by the Obama administration to exercise its veto there. It is expected that the Palestinians’s next step would be in the General Assembly, where there is no veto but which can grant only observer status, not full membership.

He offered an impassioned defense of his approach. 

“Some Israelis complain that this is a unilateral move, but when you address 193 countries, that is not unilateral,” he said. “We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.” 

“We don’t want to isolate Israel but to live with it in peace and security,” he also said. “We don’t want to delegitimize Israel. We want to legitimize ourselves.”

 The dead giveaway lies in that reference to "63 years."

Sixty-three years ago, the Arabs of Palestine could easily have had an internationally recognised state, side by side and living in peace with Israel, and with Jerusalem as a shared International city. The Zionist Movement accepted the UN partition vote, but the Arab League and the Palestinian Arabs rejected it. They declared intent to invade, and to massacre, inviting the Arabs to leave the zone of war for a short time. Thus, we faced the War of Independence.

Only, the intended victim, Israel has survived against all odds, including an even more menacing attempt to wipe it out in 1967. 

Similarly, when in 2000, as the culmination of the Oslo process, the Palestinian Arabs could have had over 90% of the West Bank (with compensating land elsewhere), and 100% of Gaza [which they got in 2005 anyway, and which was then immediately turned into a terrorist rocket platform that now threatens Beersheba], with a connecting highway and a US$ 15 billion development programme, they walked away and found a handy excuse to launch the terrorist war that dominated relations in the past decade.

So, the reference to sixty-three years is a plain reference to the existence of Israel being the "occupation" that the Palestinian Arabs still intend to end. That is, we are right back at the Arab intransigence we have already seen.

The clincher has been highlighted overnight by Israel Matzav blog in a post that deserves full citation and the strong recommendation that we add this blog to our bookmarks:

45% of 'Palestinian' residents would be denied 'Palestinian citizenship'

What kind of state would Palestine be? Here's a clue:45% of the 'Palestinians' who currently live in the area intended for 'Palestine' would not be allowed to live there.

The [PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, in an interview with the Lebanese Daily Star last week] unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state…

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would “absolutely not” be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees…

“When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

The Palestinian Liberation Organization would remain responsible for refugees, and Abdullah says that UNRWA would continue its work as usual.

Read it all. It's not about establishing 'Palestine,' it's about destroying Israel (God forbid).[UPDATE, Sept 23: Original Lebanon Daily Star Interview here, in case that smoking gun article 'disappears':  Google Doc clipping here.]

This whole current exercise in Turtle Bay, in short, is a dangerous and potentially utterly destructive gambit.  (Stronger words come to mind, but they would not be prudent. Let's just say that Eph 4:11 - 14 and 2 Cor 10:4 - 5 are plainly relevant to our duty as Christians to inform ourselves about current events and trends relevant to the church's global mission and to that sound understanding of the signs of our times that should guide us as we consider what we should do.)

And, if the Obama Administration does not know the above facts and issues, it full well should know them. Such negligence of due care would itself be utterly inexcusable.

The timer on the Middle East Bomb is ticking away . . . END