JUDGMENT DAY: ISLAM,
ISRAEL, AND
THE NATIONS
Dave Hunt
The
following excerpts are from chapter 4: Palestine?
Under the assertion that they are descended from the "original Palestinians"
who lived in the land of "Palestine"
before the Israelites...invaded and conquered it, the Arab refugees claim the
entire land as theirs. The Jews, they insist, are unlawfully occupying their
hereditary land and must leave....
On October 11, 1949, Egyptian Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Muhammad Saleh el-Din, declared that "the Arabs
intend that they [refugees] shall return as masters....The Arab people will not
be embarrassed to declare: 'We shall not be satisfied except by the final
obliteration of Israel.'" ...And the world blames Israel for not making peace
with such enemies!...
[T]he land into which God brought Abraham some 4,000 years ago,
which He promised by everlasting covenant to him and to his heirs, and in which he and his
descendants through Isaac and Jacob lived for centuries, was
not a nonexistent place called "Palestine." It was the historic land
of Canaan
(1 Chr 9:15-18)....
Around A.D. 132, the Romans, who had decimated Jerusalem
in A.D. 70, began to rebuild it for Roman Emperor Hadrian.... They started
construction of a temple to Jupiter on Temple
Mount at the site of the ancient
Jewish temples. Understandably, there was an uprising of the Jews to prevent
such desecration. It was led by Simon Bar Kochba, whom many at that time
considered to be the Messiah.
At first the revolt was remarkably successful, but...the Romans eventually destroyed
nearly 1,000 villages, killed about 500,000 Jews, and sold thousands into slavery. When the revolt was
finally crushed in A.D. 135, the Roman conquerors angrily renamed
the land of Israel,
Provincia Syria-Palestina, after Israel's
ancient enemies, the Philistines. From that time
forward, all those living there were known as "Palestinians."
Who lived in the newly designated Palestine
and were thus known as "Palestinians"? Jews, of course! Chase them out and they
return to the land God gave to their forebears. At that time, Arabs hadn't even
dreamed that "Palestine" was their
land. That ambition would not take hold for another 500 years until the advent
of Islam--and even then Arabs would not call themselves Palestinians.
In World War II, Britain
had a volunteer brigade known as "The Palestinian Brigade." It was
made up entirely of Jews. The Arabs were fighting on Hitler's side. ...There
was the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra (a Jewish orchestra) and the Palestinian
Post (a Jewish newspaper). As late as the 1950s, Arabs refused to be called
Palestinians and declared that if there were such a people, they were Jews.
To the British Peel Commission in 1937, a local Arab leader
testified, "There is no such country as Palestine.
'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented...." Professor
Philip Hitti, Arab historian, testified to an Anglo-American Committee of
inquiry in 1946, "There is no such thing as Palestine
in history--absolutely not!" To the UN Security Council on May 31, 1956, Ahmed Shukairy declared, "It is
common knowledge that Palestine is
nothing but southern Syria."
Eight years later, in 1964, Shukairy became the founding chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and coined the
infamous slogan, "[W]e'll drive the Jews into the sea." And he wasn't even a
"Palestinian"! Like Arafat, he was born in Cairo.
The Palestine Liberation
Organization was not founded by Palestinians but has been used to exploit these
abused people in Islam's war against Israel.
Today's Arab "Palestinians" are close relatives of the Arabs
living in neighboring countries, from which most of them--or their immediate
ancestors--came.... Arabs claim that they are descended from Ishmael, Abraham's first son,
and that they are therefore the legitimate heirs to the land that God
gave to Abraham. They do have much Ishmaelite blood in
them, but there is no direct genealogy tracing today's Arabs back to Ishmael. They are a mixed
race.
We've already seen that Isaac was the son of promise.
Even if the Arabs were 100 percent Ishmaelites, they would still
not be descended from the land's original inhabitants. God promised the land to
Abraham before Ishmael was born. It already
had many inhabitants. So how could Arab descendants of Ishmael (born to immigrants
centuries after Canaan had been settled)
be at the same time descendants of the "original
inhabitants" of the Promised Land? Impossible!...
It would not be until the seventh century A.D., through the
Islamic jihad invasions, that Arabs would come in any significant numbers into
the land of Israel,
which by that time was erroneously called Palestine....
Yet the world accepts these fantasies as the basis of a
settlement they intend to impose upon Israel,
whose legitimate ancestral claims to the land go back
4,000 years!
If "Palestine"
is so important to the Arabs, why is it not mentioned once in their holy book,
the Qur'an? The word is used four times in the Bible
but never refers either to the land
of Canaan
or to Israel.
The Hebrew word from which it is translated is pelensheth. It referred to a
small region also known as Philistia, the land of the Pelishtee,
or Philistines. Philistia
was in the same location but a bit larger than the Gaza Strip of today, named
after the Philistine city of Gaza....This
is the true history, of which the Qur'an knows nothing.
The Philistines were not a Semitic
people like the Arabs but had invaded Canaan
by sea from across the Mediterranean and occupied that
particular area before the Israelites arrived. They were not the "original
inhabitants of the land" (as today's "Palestinians" claim their ancestors were)
but displaced certain Canaanites just as they were
themselves eventually displaced by Israel.
Arab "Palestinians" (who are Semites living there today) can claim neither
ethnic, linguistic, nor historical relationship to the Philistines, nor can they
justify...calling themselves Palestinians....
Jerusalem was
established as the capital of Israel
by King David 3,000 years ago. It is
not mentioned once in the Qur'an. Even when Muslim empires controlled all
of the Middle East, Jerusalem...was
largely neglected. In the late 1800s, out of a population in Jerusalem of about
40,000, most were Jews, the rest Christians of various shades, and only a few
were Arabs.
Nor is there any reference to Jerusalem
in the Palestine National Covenant of 1964. It was a...complete
turnabout when the Muslim world began to insist that the West Bank,
the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem
itself had always belonged to "Palestinians."
The Islamic terrorist organization Hizballah (Party of Allah), headquartered in Syria,
displays the Dome of the Rock on its promotional materials to
inflame its followers against Israel.
Arafat declared that "Al-Quds [Jerusalem]
is in the innermost of our feeling, the feeling of our people and the feeling
of all Arabs, Muslims, and Christians in the world." Not surprisingly, he left
out the Jews, to whom Jerusalem
means more than to anyone!...
The current Muslim attempt to claim Jerusalem
as an Islamic holy city would shock Muslims from centuries past. It is simply
one more lie and one more ploy in the propaganda campaign to oust Israel.
Its remarkable success will continue until Israelis are desperate enough to cry
out as one voice for the Messiah to rescue them--and He will do so.
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