After decades of not deciding a big issue, the UN’s International Court of Justice ruled yesterday that Israel must leave the Occupied Territories, which now are the West Bank on the west side of Israel and the Gaza Strip to its southeast. The ICJ alleged Israel’s “abuse of its status as the occupying power,” rendered its “presence in the occupied territory unlawful,” and demanded it exit as “rapidly as possible.” Some people surely are saying to the ICJ, “What took you so long?” Yeah, it’s been 57 years!
In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel took possession of these two territories and two others—Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to the south and Syria’s Golan Heights to the north. Israel relinquished the Sinai in 1981 in a pact with Egypt, And in 2006, Israel unilaterally abandoned the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. But ever since, Israel has controlled the Strip practically as if it is a prison.
Now, Israel is conducting a brutal war in the Strip. Ever since the Strip’s governing power, Hamas, attacked Israel last October and killed 1,200 Jews in one day, Israel reportedly has killed 38,000 Palestinians in the Strip. As it always happens when Palestinians attack Israel, it just isn’t worth it in terms of human lives lost. But Palestinians have so much pent up anger about the 57 years they have endured Israel’s repression against them and failure of their aspirations to have their state. I don’t condone violence; yet I sympathize with Palestinians about these grievances.
And so does the Court, now. They have ruled that the the Occupied Territories do not belong to Israel and therefore they must give them to the Palestinians. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, as he always has, that there must be two states. But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately denounced the ruling, replying, “The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land, not in our eternal capital Jerusalem and not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” referring to the biblical names of the West Bank. He continued, “No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.” The US denounced the ICJ ruling as well, siding with Israel. I believe that’s unwise.
I wrote a book about the seemingly irresolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Published in 1990, it is entitled Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia. This title and the image of a map on the book’s front cover tell what the book is about. I claim, based on my interpretations of several biblical prophecies, that there eventually will be a Palestinian state; it will be located only in the coastal plain as a very expanded Gaza Strip that will approximate the ancient “land of the Philistines,” from modern Palestinians derive their name; and Israel will annex all of the West Bank.
In the first two chapters of my Palestine book, I treat a very important topic that is fundamental to this conflict which Israeli leaders, including especially Netanyahu, have always tried to ignore. Among Israeli Jews, the biggest debate has always been, “What is a Jew?” I won’t take the space, here, to go into this issue which is irrelevant to this issue. But the second biggest debate among Israeli Jews is relevant, and it has always been, “What is Eretz Yisrael, Hebrew for “Land of Israel”? This question is so fundamental to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ICJ ruling yesterday, and that Netanyahu statement, brings it to the fore, though not many people realize it.
Netanyahu is right in saying the entire West Bank was part of, actually the heartland of, ancient Israel. But much of modern Israel, ever since it came into existence in the 1948-1949 war, was not a part of ancient Israel, and that is the coastal plain south of present Tel Aviv. That was “the land of the Philistines,” from whom the modern Palestinians derive their name. That was the arch-rival nation of Philistia, which consisted mostly of five city-states near or on the Mediterranean coast.
Therefore, I maintain that this Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved by first determining what is Eretz Yisrael, meaning the ancient land of Israel. To quickly get to my point, to heed Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, which calls for the legitimate right of modern Jews to reestablish their ancient homeland in their “ancestral land,” which that document identifies as Eretz Yisrael, there should be a land swap along with a transfer of peoples resulting in Israel annexing all of the West Bank and the State of Palestine being established in the coastal plain as a very expanded Gaza Strip.
This arrangement agrees with neither the ICJ, Israel, nor the Palestinian Authority. But I think it agrees with God in biblical prophecy.
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