Israel, Islam and the Bible

There are only 15 million Jews in the entire world.

Almost half of them live in Israel on a tiny strip of earth that for much of history nobody cared much about.

There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.

I continue to find it astounding how it is that 1.8 billion Muslims (and a great number of non-Muslims) cannot get along with a mere 15 million Jews on our big, beautiful, diverse planet?

Why is that?

What is also further befuddling is how a group of people (Palestinians) that almost no one ever heard anything about until the last few generations can cause so much disruption and noise about a small strip of land on the northern coast of Africa?

Compare that to the history of Israel, the Jewish people and the meaning that this land has in the birth of Christianity and the central role that the geography of this area has in stories throughout the entire Bible.

For example, consider this map that details the twelve tribes of Israel dating to 1300 B.C.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Tribes_of_Israel#/media/File:12_Tribes_of_Israel_Map.svg

This map is based on the Book of Joshua (Chapters 13-19 in the Bible).

Some Middle Eastern scholars dispute the historical accuracy of this map. It is true that the Bible indicates that not all of these areas were under the total control of these tribes. There were continual battles and wars for control of these areas over the years.

However, balance this history against the fact that the religion of Islam did not even surface until 610 AD when the prophet Muhammad had his first revelation.

That is almost 2000 years AFTER the  lineage of these tribes of Israel are referred to in the Bible.

What is really at play here?

You cannot understand why Israel matters in geopolitical terms alone.

In geopolitical terms, the Palestinians are not happy with the British for their control of the Middle East after World I, or the United Nations for its resolution establishing the Israel state after World War II, or the United States for its support of Israel over the years.

It might explain some of why Islamists have the obsession they do in eliminating Israel, the Jews and Zionists. 

However, it is only in a spiritual realm that any of the conflict makes sense. After all, Palestine has been offered its own state at least five times over the years including by Great Britain, the United Nations, and even the United States and Israel, in brokered peace negotiations.

The Palestinians have rejected the opportunity to have its own state every time it was offered.

Why? Because they refuse to consider coexisting with Israel.

Why is it so important to Hamas and extreme Islam to remove Israel from the map?

Bat Ye'or wrote a book that was published a decade ago that attempts to explain all of this titled, "Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate".

I learned about Ye'or's book from an article I read by Diane West in 2011.

Ye'Or was a young Jewish woman who was forced by Islamists to leave her native Egypt and a Jewish community that had existed for 2,600 years before it came to end.

Her scholarly and literary work during her career has been focused on the treatment of non-Muslims in countries under Islamic rule and on the nature and impact of that Islamic rule. 

She makes an interesting argument in her book about why Islam has the obsession it has with Israel.

Why Israel? Ye'or asks. 

Why is it that a little sliver of land in which just 7.1  million Jewish people live is so alarming when balanced against 1.8 billion Muslims in the world?

She argues that Israel is so threateningto Muslim nations because Israel possesses the Bible.

Who would not be surprised by the relentless determination of Arab and Muslim countries to appropriate a tiny piece of land in which no town, village, or hamlet is mentioned in the Koran or in the biographies of Muhammad, who spent his whole life in Arabia? Given the immense territories conquered and Islamized over thirteen centuries of expansion and war, marked like all wars by genocide, large-scale massacre, expropriation, enslavement and deportation of the vanquished, why would Muslim countries keep plotting to destroy Israel?

Ye'or concludes that it is because Israel and the Bible puts the entire foundation of Islam at risk.

"What Israel possesses is the Bible; the book that Muhammad claims was the unaltered version of the Koran uncreated and consubstantial with Allah, before Jews and Christians falsified it. The history of the Hebrews, according to the Koran, is the history of the Muslims before Muhammad. The Prophet maintained that the biblical characters are Muslim prophets, and that the Bible--both First and Second Testaments--is simply a falsification of the story of these biblical prophets who, in the Koran, were Muslim and preached Islam. They appear in the Koran, like Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus, with Arabized names. But they are flimsy, disembodied figures floating in fragments of undefined space-time, and featured in homilies."

What is the crime of Israel and its people according to the Islamists?

The crime of the people of Israel is the creation of a compilation of books written over a period of centuries recounting the vagaries of their history, faith, legislation and aspirations---completed more than a thousand years before the Koran was written and excoriated by Muslim orthodoxy as a falsification of the Koran.

How do Christians also figure into all of this?

As for Christians, Islam teaches that they have gone astray by placing themselves in the lineage of the Hebrew Bible, because their real origin is with Islam, with Isa, the Muslim Jesus mentioned in the Koran and the Sunna. Christians who betray Isa by rejecting his Koranic message, inventing the concept of the Trinity, are as diabolical as the Jews.

By destroying Israel and eliminating the Jewish people, Islam could thus eliminate the Bible and bring Christianity back to its Islamic origin. The destruction of Christianity's sustaining Jewish roots will facilitate its Islamization.

These  observations about Israel, Islam and the Bible are profound and disturbing.

If accurate, Ye'or's views on all of this underscore the depths of the spiritual battle that underlies everything that is transpiring around us. 

It should cause everyone to ask if what we are witnessing right now all over the world is really just about Israel and the Palestinian people.

Or are we in the midst of a much larger war of which the battlefield is not just a tiny strip of land called Gaza or the West Bank of the Jordan river?

This war is most likely about YOUR WORLD.

It ultimately could determine who is going to control it and who is going to control you.

For that reason, everyone needs to pay very close attention to what is going on and make sure your friends and neighbors are educated on it as well.

Make sure they know the facts and not be taken in by falsehoods and fantasies.

In other words, make sure they are not like the people in the video below.

This is a video of various people who eagerly state they will sign a petition supporting Hamas and Palestine until they are read a "terms and conditions" sheet that details the mission, methods and objectives of Hamas. 

https://twitter.com/jacklanger/status/1719881217598730388