When Benjamin Netanyahu barely won Israel’s election for prime minister last November 1 for the third time, he had to form a very right-wing, extremist coalition government that included both nationalist and religious political parties that wanted to further legitimatize the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank which comprise nearly 500,000 Jews and that are deemed illegal according to principles of the United Nations, of which Israel is a member and wants to stay a member. But some of these right-wing political parties want to take it step further by unilaterally annexing these Jewish settlements to Israel if not annex the entire West Bank.
Incidentally, for many decades, the Israel has been the primary focus of the U.S. foreign aid program, giving Israel at least $3 billion per year. Yet the U.S. has been strongly opposed to the Jewish settlements in the West Bank because it hinders the peace process between Israel and Palestinians. Palestinians regard the West Bank as their territory which Israel seized during the 1967 Six Days War.
This new direction of an Israeli government further exacerbates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, further alienates Israel from the international community of nations, and even threatens Israel’s democracy. Yet such an annexing the entire West Bank to Israel, probably including the departure of Palestinians therein, is what I predicted in my book entitled Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, which was published 33 years ago, in 1990, and therefore (I believe) was a book before its time.
I didn’t actually predict this; rather, it was my interpretation of several prophecies in the Jewish Bible (Old Testament), beginning especially with Isaiah 11.14. Still, to this day, I know of no book that has been written which adopts this thesis. What is it? As the book’s title suggests, prior to “the end of days”–an expression in the book of Daniel which religious Jews use to refer to the end of this age which will immediately precede the blessed “world to come,” an expression which even Jesus used–a Palestinian state will exist solely in the coastal plain and thus not in the West Bank, which latter Jews refer to as “Judea and Samaria,” the heart of their ancestral land.
However, in my book I suggest that this geopolitical arrangement, wherein Palestinians will achieve their own state, will be the result of a negotiated land swap or war including a transposition of peoples. That is, Jews will move from the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip to Israel, and Palestinians will move from the West Bank to the coastal plain. This Palestinian state will exist approximately in “the land of the Philistines,” which we read about in the histories in the Jewish Bible.
This arrangement should be the result of a negotiated peace process. But the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinians in the West Bank, has been non-existent since 2014. Furthermore, Israel refuses to have contact with the Islamic Hamas, which governs Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
This far-right Israeli government seems to be causing some of the recent increase in violence in the West Bank between Israeli Army and Palestinians. Itamar Ben-Givr, Israel’s new the Minister of National Security, wants to unilaterally annex the entire West Bank to Israel. He has been so religiously extreme that he was always barred from serving in the Israeli Army.
So, the animosity between Israeli Jews and Palestinians has gotten worse than it has ever been since Israel became a nation, in 1948. Thus, the majority of Israeli Jews and Palestinians now conclude that THE two-state solution–a State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip–is “impossible.” But I say the problem is that for all these decades the Palestinians and the world community of nations have had the wrong two-state solution. I believe the only possible solution is to do what Israel’s Proclamation of Independence says, which was never done, that Jews are entitled to their own state in their “ancestral land,” which that document defines as Eretz Yisrael–“the land of Israel.” The coastal plain south of Tel Aviv was NEVER Israel’s ancestral land, meaning the Hebrew/Jewish people never really occupied any of it for any length of time that could make such an occupation serve as a legitimate part of Eretz Yisrael. The main thing that needs to happen in present Israel is for there to be a serious, national discussion answering the question, “What is the land of Israel”?
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