JUDGMENT DAY: ISLAM, ISRAEL, AND THE NATIONS

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.