The Modern State of Israel (Part 1)

What Are We to Make of Israel — Steve Gregg

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The Modern State of Israel (Part 2)

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The Modern State of Israel (Part 1)

What Are We to Make of IsraelSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg presents a comprehensive overview of the modern state of Israel, providing a Christian assessment of its historical background and current status. Gregg lays out the facts surrounding Israel's establishment and maintenance in the Middle East, tracing its origins back to the promise made to Abraham. He explores the impact of various empires and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church before delving into the Zionist movement and the Balfour Declaration. Gregg also addresses the complex issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the importance of understanding the historical context when interpreting news and events.

Transcript

The title of the lecture is The Modern State of Israel, A Christian Assessment. Now, when I say a Christian assessment, I mean how would the Bible lead us to assess the things that are going on in the Middle East, which we hear about almost every day in the news. We have to go back and look at the foundation of the modern state of Israel, what forces brought that into being, how that may link or not with scripture, and what has been done, especially in the Palestinian-Israel conflict since that time.

So, the first part of what I want to talk about is going to be historical. It's going to be, I trust, factual. I say I trust.

I've never, I mean I have been to Israel, but I haven't seen what the Israelis have seen, or what Palestinians have seen. What I do know is that there is an ongoing conflict, and you know this too, which seems almost hopeless to resolve between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the land, in the state of Israel. This conflict has a lot to do with the fact that Israel exists as a nation, but it's not entirely about that.

But we need to look at it. I've done my best to find facts. Now, I received an email just this morning from a listener who wrote the following, Steve, I heard you answer a question about Israel being a state, and how the Jews wiped out Palestinians when it became a modern state.

She says, I have, I think it's a she, I have studied the history of it all, and I must say that it is the most blatant lie I ever heard. I am not a dispensationalist, but I know the history of how the state of Israel was formed. The Jews offered peace to the Palestinians, and they could keep their land, farms, or whatever.

They would be under our government now, and actually have a better life. And there are many Palestinians who have attested to this over and over again. The whole thing was the Palestinians, plus five or more other Muslim nations, were and are against Jews, and they attacked them.

Many Palestinians were told by their leaders to leave until they drove them into the sea. You are so wrong in your history here. I have followed the news and all developments for many years.

You must have swallowed a lot of lies and propaganda. Well, that's something I really don't want to do. I don't want to swallow any lies or propaganda, and I don't want to certainly perpetrate any lies or propaganda.

For that reason, I've done my best to read all the sources I can find, and that would include dispensational Christians. That would include Zionist Christians and Zionist Jews. That would include pro-Palestinian Christians and pro-Palestinian Palestinians and pro-Palestinian Jews, believe it or not.

That doesn't guarantee that I have all the facts right, but I've certainly avoided getting all my information from one side of the aisle. I've tried to see what facts are agreed on by all. Now, not all interpret the facts the same, but as far as the facts themselves, I hope that I will not be giving out anything that isn't factual.

Once we look at the facts, we'll also have to say, what is a Christian assessment of the facts? The initial part of these lectures will be devoted to simply summarizing facts that are pertinent to our understanding of what is going on in modern times, in the lifetime of some of you here, with the establishment and maintenance of the nation of Israel in the Middle East. It certainly is a very major factor in geopolitical developments all over the world, and Christians often are called upon to have an opinion about it, and most Christians do. But it's also the case that most American Christians are dispensationalists, and therefore, of course, as is inevitable, their opinions will be based on their theological starting points.

I, myself, was a dispensationalist also for many years, and had the same theological starting points. My theology, as most of you know, has changed. I'm not dispensational anymore.

I have not been for over 30 years. I began teaching in 1970, and by about 1978, I suppose, I was no longer a dispensational teacher. In that time, I've done my best to understand all sides of issues, and those of you familiar with my ministry know that I'm more interested in people having a chance to think for themselves, hear different sides, and make up their own minds.

That's exactly my temperament. That's my intention here, too. The main thing is that Christians in America have not usually heard all sides.

They've heard a great deal, but as near as I can tell, probably 95% or more of Christian evangelicals have only heard one side. And so, if I seem overbalanced toward the other side, I just want to make this clear as a disclaimer at the beginning. I believe that there are wrongs done on both sides.

This is indisputable. I am not anti-Palestinian. I'm not anti-Israeli.

I don't even have a political dog in the fight. I'm not unhappy that Israel has a political nation, and I'm not necessarily in the same place that most dispensationalists are about that political nation, because most dispensationalists believe that Israel was predicted in the Bible to have a nation at this time in the Middle East. I'm not sure where they find the reference to this particular time in the Bible, since I can't find any, but there is nonetheless a body of prophecy interpreted to suggest that we are supposed to be seeing in the end times a reestablishment of the nation of Israel.

This is the dispensational view. It was never held by Christians prior to 1830, but it is held by most evangelicals in America, at least, today. I am no longer of that persuasion, so when I look at the nation of Israel, I'm not looking at it as something that must be justified no matter what.

I feel that much of what Israel does can be justified, and some of what they do probably cannot be justified. I'm not a my-country-right-or-wrong kind of a Christian about America, nor about any other country, including Israel. Now, that, of course, has a lot to do with biblical interpretation, but we'll get to that later.

What I want to talk about now is the historical background. We're talking about a piece of property, very small, about 10,000 square miles or something like that. It's a very small piece of property, really.

And everyone knows where Israel is. It's on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. It's the piece of land sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

And its northern and southern boundaries, as well as some of its eastern boundaries beyond the Jordan, have been disputed at different times in history. But the story, as far as a Christian is concerned, of this land begins back in the Old Testament with a man named Abraham. Abraham was not living in that land.

He was living instead in what we now call Mesopotamia or Babylonia, Ur of the Chaldeans, as it's called in the Bible. The land of Canaan, as it was then called, was not his land, but it was a land that God promised to him and to his seed. God told Abraham if he would leave his father and his family and his homeland to a land that God would show him, that God would bless the nations through him and bless him in the process.

And eventually, in Genesis chapter 12, he told Abraham that he would give the land, and he designated the particular size and shape of the land, to Abraham's seed forever. Now, it is this promise to Abraham, which is found in Genesis chapter 12, that informs most dispensational thinking about the modern state of Israel. Now, when Abraham was promised this land, it was not an empty land.

There were several Canaanite city-states in the land. And they figured they owned the land. God told Abraham it was going to be his, but Abraham never really owned it in his lifetime.

It would be his seed, his offspring, that would possess it. So Abraham lived and died without owning property in the Middle East, except for one little field that had a cave in it. He bought it at a very high price, actually, much higher than the going rate of real estate.

He bought it from the Hittites, one of the Canaanite tribes there. It was called Machpelah, and that's where Abraham was buried, and Sarah was buried, and Isaac, and Rebekah, and Jacob, and Leah. Probably Joseph, too, we don't know.

But that's the only piece of property in the Middle East that Abraham owned in his lifetime. His son Isaac didn't own any more than he did, nor Jacob. But they lived in that land as strangers and sojourners.

And the period we're talking about is from about 2000 to 1700 BC. But in the latter part of that time, Jacob and his 12 sons and their wives migrated into Egypt because there was a famine in Canaan, and they couldn't stay there safely, and they felt they couldn't, and so they moved to Egypt. Things went well for them in Egypt for a while.

Eventually, another pharaoh came along who was hostile toward them and turned them into slaves, and they were slaves for hundreds of years in Egypt. They were not in the promised land. They had lived there as strangers and pilgrims, but they had not possessed it.

But after hundreds of years in Egypt, God appeared to a Hebrew man named Moses and commissioned him to go and confront the pharaoh to release the slaves and let them go to the land that God had promised their ancestors. And so through a process of judgments, through plagues that came on Egypt, Israel, the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with many others, by the way. The Bible says a mixed multitude went out with them.

They left, and they came to Mount Sinai. God made a covenant with them there and made a nation of them. This is the first time Israel became a nation, was at Mount Sinai after the Exodus.

Before that, they were just a family, a father and son and grandson and 12 great-grandsons and then all the kids that came from them. They were not a political unit until God brought them out of Egypt and he made them a nation. And he said, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you'll be a peculiar treasure unto me and a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

And so Israel became a nation under God. But they disobeyed God, and because of that, they didn't get to go to the promised land right away. They were delayed for a full generation.

And the next generation after Moses' generation did go in under a man named Joshua. And in a period of about 25 years, probably, they conquered the land of Canaan and possessed it. That's what it says at the end of the book of Joshua.

They possessed all the land that God promised to their ancestors. It says it just like that. And then began a period after Joshua died of the judges.

And Israel was in the land all that time, too. That was over 300 years. No one knows exactly how long, anywhere between 315 to 380 years, probably, they had the period of the judges.

And in the period of the judges, they were in the land, but they were often oppressed and occupied by foreigners. Because the Israelites would rebel against God, and he would actually send foreigners in there to bring them captive, to judge them. And then Israel, under that captivity, would cry out to God, and he would hear them, and he'd raise up a person who would later be called a judge, who would lead the armies of Israel, which were not a standing army.

They didn't have a standing army, but he'd sort of round up a militia. And they'd drive out the oppressor, and they'd have peace for 40 years, or in the case of Gideon's time, 80 years. And then they'd go away from God again, and the same cycle would repeat.

Another nation would come in and it would oppress them. This went on for, as I said, over three centuries. And finally, Israel got tired of this.

They didn't like not having a king. They only had these judges. And so they came to Samuel, the last of the judges, and said, give us a king to reign over us.

And so Samuel was not pleased with that, and God wasn't either, but God told Samuel, go ahead, give them what they want. It won't work out well for them. Warn them, but let them have what they want.

And he selected Saul to be their king. And when Saul died, David was the king. And under David, Israel, in the land, experienced the only time of supreme prosperity in their history.

David was a great military conqueror. He conquered all the lands around them, brought them under tribute. He ended the centuries-long conflict with the Philistines.

He subjugated the Philistines, the Moabites, and the Edomites, and everyone around. And so Israel was like an empire in the Middle East, a little empire, but an empire still, not big like the Roman Empire. But David was more like an emperor.

And Israel loved that. They still love it when they think about David's time, because that was the golden era of Israel's history. And then Solomon replaced David at his death.

And for a while, that prosperity continued into the age of Solomon. But by the time Solomon died, Israel was impoverished because of Solomon's lavish expenditures and building projects and so forth. And the next generation, after Solomon, under his son Rehoboam, were displeased with the economic situations, and they rebelled against his son Rehoboam.

And this nation split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. Israel in the north, comprised of 10 tribes, and Judah in the south, comprised of two. And these two nations were hostile toward each other most of the time, sometimes a little bit friendly, but mostly hostile.

And they coexisted side by side for a long time, until 722 BC. The northern kingdom, with the 10 tribes, the kingdom called Israel, was then destroyed, invaded by the Assyrians. And the Assyrians destroyed their capital and took the Israelites into captivity.

They have never come back. Where they were is now called the Galilee in Israel. And there has not been a time, unless it has recently come, I'm not sure exactly the demographics of that region right now.

But from 722 BC until now, or at least until recently, and it may be so until now, there has never been a time when that region was primarily occupied by Israelis or Israelites. It's been a pagan land. In fact, in Jesus' day, and in Isaiah's too, it was called Galilee of the Gentiles.

You might remember Isaiah 9, verses 1 and 2 refers to it as Galilee of the Gentiles. And it's quoted in Matthew chapter 4, as referred to as Galilee of the Gentiles. Because there were more Gentiles than Jews there, even in Jesus' day.

The northern tribes went off into captivity. They got assimilated into other lands. Most scholars are agreeing that those tribes don't exist anymore.

There's not some lost tribes, 10 lost tribes, that are going to come back in the last days and shock everyone. Oh, they were hiding underground or something all these thousands of years. No, there's no one who believes that I know of.

There were some representatives of each tribe that had migrated south before the conquest of the north. And therefore, some remnant of Israelites from the northern tribes survived in Judah when the northern kingdom fell. Assyria, after conquering Israel, came down to Judah and sought to do the same thing.

But unlike Israel, Judah had a godly king named Hezekiah who prayed and trusted God. And God slew 185,000 Assyrians outside the gates of Jerusalem one night. And that ended that danger.

And the survivors withdrew. However, the southern kingdom did not always serve God and mostly didn't. And eventually God had to destroy them too.

He sent the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. First in 605 BC. And he took some captives at that time and went away.

And he came back again in 597 BC, took some more. That first captivity included Daniel. That second one in 597 included Ezekiel.

And then again in 586, Nebuchadnezzar came back and totally destroyed the southern kingdom, burned down the temple, deported essentially all the Jews. There were a few peasants and dirt farmers that were left behind. But for the most part, all the Jews were deported mostly to Babylon and its dominions.

And there they were for a few generations. A total of 70 years approximately, if you judge from the first of those dates, 605 to 539. It's almost 70 years that they were in Babylon.

Israel then, from 586 on, was under Babylonian control for about 70 years, a little less than 70. But then came the Persian period and the Persians, the Medes and the Persians, conquered Babylon. This had a positive repercussion for the Israelites who were in Babylon because Cyrus, the conquering general of the Medes and the Persians who conquered Babylon, gave all the captive people that Nebuchadnezzar had taken captive from different lands, gave them permission to go back to their lands.

That included Israel. So the Jews were permitted to go back and rebuild Jerusalem, rebuild the temple. Most of them didn't care to.

Most of them stayed in foreign lands. About 50,000 came back with Zerubbabel. A few more came back with Ezra and a few more with Nehemiah.

And probably over the years after that, a trickle more came in, but it was always just a remnant, a very small number. The vast majority of even Judeans lived and still live today outside of the land of Israel. There's never been a time since 586 BC that the majority of Jews in the world lived in Israel.

To this day, the majority of Jews live outside Israel. So this land and the Jews have had this kind of interesting relationship. They were promised the land.

They possessed it for a while under the judges. They were driven out of it, the northern kingdom in 722 BC and the southern kingdom in 586 BC. And since that time, most of the people of Israel, and that now has been, you know, 2500 years or more, have lived elsewhere, not in Israel.

Now, the Persians who let the Jews go back to their land were conquered by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. And they eventually were conquered by the Romans. And the Romans were in charge of that territory at the time that Jesus was born.

Jesus and his generation lived under Roman rule. That Roman rule actually continued until 330 AD. So the Romans came to power in that region.

Pompey conquered the region of Palestine around 63 BC. And the Roman period lasted until about 330. And that's when Constantine, the emperor, moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium, which came to be called Constantinople, which today is called Istanbul.

And that divided the Roman Empire into a western and eastern empire. The eastern was called the Byzantine Empire. When the empire split west and east, the eastern empire inherited the land of Palestine and controlled it for some time after that until about 632.

What happened at 632? Well, just prior to that, Muhammad lived and started his movement. And in 632 AD, the Muslims, Arabs, invaded Palestine. They conquered it.

They let the Christians and the Jews live and keep their religion, but they had to live under Islamic control. Most of the people in that region learned Arabic and spoke Arabic in later generations. Many of them converted to Islam, though not all.

There were still Jews and Christians there, but there were also a lot of converts to Islam. And the region came to be predominantly Islamic after the 7th century. Now, a lot of these people were Arab people because the Arabs came in and settled there along with those who had been there.

And that is why the Palestinian Arabs today claim that their ancestors have held that land for 1,300 years. It's a true claim. They have.

Much longer than white Europeans have held North America. If we held onto North America for 1,300 years, and then the Native Americans rose up from their reservations and decided to take it back, and said, this is our land, this has always been our land, you guys have just been squatters here for these thousands of years, now we're taking it back and we've got a divine right to it, we would probably find their case not persuasive. And that's exactly where the Palestinians stand.

They don't find Israel's claimed land persuasive. Israel has not been in the land most of the last 2,000 years, but the Palestinians have been there most of that time. And so this is one of the causes of problems, as far as perspective of who owns what land.

The Arabs then controlled the region from 632 to 1071. At that time, the Seljuk Turks came in. They were Turkish people who adopted Persian culture, but they conquered that region and held it for less than 30 years until about 1096.

Then came the period of the Crusaders. You know about the Crusades, or do you? We all have heard of them. What do we know about them? Well, there were several Crusades in the 11th century.

The Roman Church decided it had better take the Holy Land back from these pagans, these Islamic Arab-type people. Now, not all the people in the Holy Land were Arabs, though most of them were Muslims. There were Christians, Christian churches, and there were Jewish synagogues, but it was primarily an Islamic area.

So the Roman Catholic Church thought, well, this is a holy land. It should be in the hands of holy people like, you know, the popes. And so they sent Crusaders, knights, to go down and fight and kill Arabs and Christians and Jews, and they did.

The Crusaders actually slaughtered every inhabitant of Jerusalem when they conquered it, which included Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. It was not a pretty thing. The land then came under the rule of the Crusaders for a while.

The Crusaders controlled it until about 1291 when Saladin came and drove them out. And the Mamluks, which were sort of a race of... they're from the area of Egypt, but they were really slave soldiers of the Arabs for a long time. I'm not really sure what their actual racial composition was, but the Mamluks conquered it and controlled it until 1517.

What happened in 1517 was a game changer. The Ottoman Turks came and conquered it and started what's called the Ottoman Empire, and they held control of Palestine until World War I. From 1517, actually, to 1917, for 400 years, the Ottoman Turks controlled the region. Still, most of the indigenous people in Palestine were Arab and Muslim, though some were Arab and Christian.

There were still lots of Arab Christians there, and this is something many modern Christians don't know, is there's far more Christian Palestinians than there are Christian Israelis. We sometimes wonder, how could the Palestinian Christians not see that Israel has a divine right to the land? And just, why don't they just give up and say, we recognize your divine right to the land, we're leaving. But see, the Palestinian Christians think, why is it that American Christians are more loyal to these unbelieving Jews who reject Jesus Christ than they are to their Christian brothers and sisters in the Palestinian territories? You can see that they would have a different viewpoint on these things.

And it's a question worth asking. I would dare say 90% of people in this room have never asked that question. Why do we support unbelieving Jews more than Christian brothers and sisters who are in the body of Christ with us, living stones in the temple of the Holy Spirit, who are our brothers and sisters who make up a much larger percentage of the Palestinian population than make up a percentage of the Jewish population over there? Just a factor that muddies the waters for us.

Now, under the Ottoman Empire, things developed to the point that they were in World War I. During those 400 years, the Ottoman Turks conquered the region actually in 1516 and ruled it from the next year on. There were about 30 Jewish communities throughout Palestine at that time. Their center was in a town called Safed.

In 1880, the population of the region was 90% Arab and 5% Jewish. The actual numbers in 1880 were about 456,000 Arabs and about 24,000 Jews. That's 95% Arab population, 5% Jewish.

So through all those years, the region was predominantly Arab. You might say, well, but weren't the Arabs and the Jews just always at each other's throats? No, not really. Most of that time, there were Christian Arabs and Jews and Muslim Arabs, and they were living there, and they respected each other's rights to worship, and they didn't burn down each other's churches or synagogues or blow each other up or whatever.

There were obviously some hostilities from time to time, but they were a very pluralistic society at the time. But 95% Arab in their ethnic composition and certainly mostly Muslim. The Jewish settlers began to immigrate to the region in 1881.

And so by 1914, the beginning of World War I, Jews in Palestine numbered about 60,000, which is about two and a half times the number there were 30 years earlier. So immigration into Palestine beginning in 1881 increased the population of Jews in the region considerably, but they were still a very, very small minority. Okay, so that brings us up to modern times.

I would call World War I modern times. What happened in World War I is that British General Edmund Allenby invaded Palestine and conquered it with the help of the French and the Arabs. And they took it from the Turks and the Turks lost control of the region.

It was now under Britain's control. It's interesting because the French and the local Arab population helped the British overthrow the Turks and their condition. Because the British promised the local Arabs that the Arabs would be given their own sovereign state.

If they would help the British remove the Turks, the Arabs would be given their own state, and that appealed to them. That was something that was reneged later on. But nonetheless, they did get the Arab support initially, and they did drive out the Ottomans.

Now, something that happened at that same time, and just before, just before Allenby conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Turks, a development happened in England where Lord Arthur Balfour, who was the British Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs, was persuaded to issue a declaration. He actually wrote it to whoever was the current Rothschild at the time. Officially expressed support for the idea of allowing the Jewish people to go back to the land of their ancestors.

This was not new with Balfour. The Zionist movement, which we'll look at in a moment, had been around since the 1890s. But at this point, this was the first time a European government officially expressed support for the idea of allowing the Jewish people to go back to the land of their ancestors.

I'll read the exact text of the Balfour Declaration as it's called. It's considered to be one of the major beginning points of the modern state of Israel. Quote, His Majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by the Jews in any other country.

Unquote. This is a statement of what would have at that time been called Zionism. It still is called Zionism.

The movement Zionism began in 1897. But this was now 20 years later than that. The British government favored the establishment of a Jewish home.

They didn't say a state, but just a Jewish home in Palestine. But it also said with the condition that the people who are there who are not Jewish, the residents there before them, their rights would not be prejudiced or hindered in any way. And so this is certainly one of the factors that first began to move the geopolitical world in the direction of favoring a reestablishment of the state of Israel.

There was another 30 years after this before it actually came to fruition. What happened was that after World War I ended, there was a formation of nations called the League of Nations. After World War II, this was replaced with what we call the United Nations.

But between World War I and World War II, it was the League of Nations, and they held a peace conference after World War I to try to figure out how to keep peace in the future. And they also had to deliberate some things about the Middle East. Certainly in World War I, the biggest problems were not in the Middle East.

They were in Europe, but the Middle East was involved, as we see, because they were conquered by the British. At this conference in 1922, it was decided officially that Britain would have a mandate to govern Palestine and that France would have a mandate to govern Syria. Britain and France had both been involved in the conquest of that region, and so they divided up the responsibility.

In the case of Britain's mandate, it proved to be a hot potato, much too hot for them to handle. The place was much too volatile. By the way, in biblical times, it was too volatile, too.

When any kind of a foreign power tried to rule the Jews in Israel, it was only trouble, because Jews don't like to be ruled by Gentiles, frankly. But the Jews had been under Gentile rule for thousands of years at this time. They didn't have a Jewish state to be under.

So this was seen as a positive development. At least the Jews who were in that region didn't have to be under an Islamic government. Britain was a Christian government, so they were under a mandate to be governed by Britain.

But they didn't like it. They didn't like it. Let me read you something here.

This comes from Martin Button's book, The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, a very short introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2013. He said, quote, The mandate system was especially problematic in Palestine, the mandate for which incorporated the entire text of the Balfour Declaration, thus placing the small Jewish minority, composing about 10% of the population, in a uniquely privileged position. The mandate also included several articles specifying the obligation of Britain, as the mandatory power, to support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, for example, facilitating Jewish immigration and encouraging Jewish settlement in the land, unquote.

So this is the problem under the British mandate. The text of the Balfour Declaration was included in the written mandate, which means that Britain was supposed to favor the establishment of a Jewish home and encourage Jewish immigration. At that point in time, only 10% of the population of Palestine was Jewish.

The rest were essentially Arab. So this was a mandate that was going to favor the privileges of 10% of the population over 90%. A little bit like, you know, making laws favoring homosexual marriage over the protests of the overwhelming majority of people who don't think that's okay.

Most of us can relate with being a little upset when such a minority position is favored over the position of the vast majority. Well, that's how the Palestinians felt about the mandate. Now, the British, however, found the region too volatile.

And we'll find out why later on. One thing is that there were Jews and Arabs, terrorist groups on both sides, fighting the British, blowing up their buildings with their soldiers in them and hanging their soldiers and things like that. A lot of that was done by Jewish terrorists, and this is not questioned.

Menachem Begin was the leader of a terrorist organization called Irgun before the State of Israel was formed. And they specifically blew up the King David Hotel and killed over 90 British soldiers and others who were in it. And he's proud of it.

Actually, Menachem Begin later was interviewed on American TV. And the interviewer said to him, Mr. Begin, how does it feel to be the founder of terrorism in the Middle East? And Begin said, the Middle East? The world? That was his response. He didn't want to be credited with being the founder of terrorism in the Middle East.

He wanted to take credit for founding terrorism in the whole world. And he knew enough about it to know whether that was a credible credit to give him or not. We will see as we go further.

Because the British couldn't handle things, they decided to give up the mandate. They announced their intention to give it up. And they still didn't have anyone to turn it over to for a while.

I think it was in the 30s that they intended to give it up, but of course it wasn't until 1948 that they actually gave up the mandate, and there was a UN partition that replaced it. But the United Nations figured if Britain wasn't going to rule that territory anymore, they got to do something with it. So they decided to approve of two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state, a Palestinian state in other words.

But the lines they drew up were really pretty strange. For example, remember the Jewish population was a pretty small percentage of the population of the region. But the Jewish state would have 52% of the land.

The Arab state would have 48% of the land. The plan was approved by a two to three majority in the UN General Assembly, and only because of the influence of the United States. This is important.

It comes up later. The United Nations was not favorable toward this plan in general. But the United States was for it.

And Harry Truman threatened certain countries that some favorable diplomatic arrangements we had with them would be ended if their ambassadors did not vote for this plan. There was no way this plan would have succeeded except for America throwing its weight around. Now if this is a good thing, then yay America.

If it's not, boo America. We need to look at this and find out what's good or bad or indifferent about it. It simply is a fact that everybody who studied it knows.

America caused the UN partition plan to take place. And therefore in a sense America caused the State of Israel to come into being. On April 9th, 1948, this is just a month before the State of Israel is considered to have been founded.

Ergin, the Jewish terrorist organization under Menachem Begin at the time, killed about 254 Arab men, women, and children in a village called Deir Yassin. This is a very famous incident. It happened before the Jewish state was established.

In fact, there are 33 Palestinian villages that were destroyed by Jewish terrorists before the State of Israel came into being. Deir Yassin became a very scandalous one because the Palestinians decided to retaliate, which they didn't always do, three days after the destruction of these men, women, and children, which were just lined up and shot by these Jewish soldiers. By the way, Menachem Begin was not present when it happened, but he ordered the attack.

And he congratulated the soldiers when it was done. He was not personally there doing it, but he was the leader of the organization that did it. After Deir Yassin, three days later on April 12, 1948, by way of reprisal, Arabs killed 77 Jewish doctors, nurses, teachers, and university students in a convoy that was traveling to the Hadassah Hospital.

It was a reprisal for slaughter of 250 men, women, and children the day before. Now, does that justify it? Of course not. Terrorism is always wrong.

But many times we've been given the impression that the terrorists are the Arabs. The terrorists are the Palestinians, and they are, some of them. The others are on the other side.

Terrorism actually, if Menachem Begin's claim is to be trusted, began with the Israelis. It'd be nice if the Arabs were Christians, all of them, and could just turn the other cheek and say, well, you killed our men, women, and children, but we're just going to say, God bless you. We will do good to you.

Unfortunately, most of these Arabs were not Christians, and they don't like having their men, women, and children killed, so they went out and killed some innocent people on the Israeli side. And that kind of stuff has been going on just like the Hatfields and the McCoys ever since. There have been atrocities done by Israel, and there have been atrocities done by the Palestinians, none of them justifiable.

I would say this, though. It is justifiable for us to at least consider the context, because we think, why do these Palestinians keep fighting these Israelis? And we see news footage of Palestinians throwing rocks at the Israeli soldiers, and the Israeli soldiers bomb them with tear gas and rubber bullets and so forth and drive them back. We say, why don't those Palestinians just leave those people alone? What we're not usually told on the news is that these confrontations are taking place in what's called the occupied territories.

These are territories that the UN partition gave to the Palestinians, but which the Jews took from them by force, as we shall see in a moment, and the Palestinians and the international community believes this is Palestinian territory. The Israeli soldiers who are having the rocks thrown at them are intruders into territory that the international community recognizes as Palestinian. Israel took it by force through one of its subsequent wars, and they claim it is theirs because they feel they have a biblical mandate to it, but no one else thinks they do except American dispensationalists.

But if you are a Palestinian, you might think it was yours. After all, your ancestors lived there for 1,300 years. You have a farm, a house that you got from your parents, got from their grandparents, your great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, that's been in your family for ages, and even the international community, the United Nations, has partitioned the land off giving you this property, and the Israeli soldiers come and say, but we want it.

And so, Palestinians have done some nasty things because they think some nasty things are happening to them. We don't ever ask ourselves, because we're not told in the news the whole context, we don't ask ourselves, why are these Israeli soldiers in that territory in the first place to have these rocks thrown at them? So we had, before the foundation of the nation of Israel, just before, within a month before, we have the slaughter of a Palestinian village, Dir Yassin, by Israeli terrorists. We have Arab terrorists reprising that three days later by killing a bunch of innocent Jewish doctors and nurses and college students on the way to a hospital.

And so, the atrocities are there. But one thing that we have very seldom been told is that prior to that time, there were 33 Palestinian villages that Israeli paramilitary groups had gone in and simply seized and taken from them, often killing the inhabitants. Britain announced they're going to end their mandate and they're going to withdraw on May 14, 1948.

And they did. And that same day, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, one of the founders of the Zionist movement and who became the first president of Israel, raised the flag of the Star of David, and David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the new state of Israel that day. We call that the birth of the nation of Israel.

Now, what happened then? The Arabs did not agree with the UN partition plan. Why? It only gave them 48% of the land. They were only like 90% of the people.

So they thought it wasn't a good plan, so they didn't agree with it. My critic who wrote to me said, the Jews offered peace to the Palestinians, they could keep their land, farms, and whatever. I'm not sure where she's getting her information, but they didn't like the arrangement.

And I'm not sure you would. You know, if the Mexicans came into California and said, this is our ancestors' land, we have ancestors who lived right here, so we're taking it back, we might feel a little bit like the Palestinians feel, because we'd be in the same position. I'm not saying the Palestinians haven't done wrong things.

I'm saying we are very seldom given the opportunity to see it from their perspective, which is a perspective to be concerned about. As long as we're blinded to it, we'll never understand why the Middle East crisis continues to be a crisis, generation after generation. Why can't these people just get along? Well, if the Mexican government came back and said, we're annexing California, we're annexing the Mexican citizens living under our laws, not United States laws, you might not be real happy with that arrangement either.

Yet you'd be in a very similar situation. You know, I was watching a movie, and I was trying to remember what movie it was. Just in the last year, I watched a movie, one of those many Holocaust movies, and it portrayed the Jews who were in the Warsaw ghettos.

So the Nazis forced the Jews to go into this ghetto, and they put a wall up around it, and they weren't allowed to go out and so forth. And in the movie, there were some Jewish fighters that snuck out at night and killed Nazi soldiers and stuff like that. But it just struck me as I was watching, and I knew less about the Middle East crisis than I know now when I watch this movie.

I remember thinking, it just came to my mind. Now, these Jewish terrorists who are going out and killing Nazis outside the Warsaw ghetto, I don't call them terrorists, I call them freedom fighters. They're fighting for their territory they used to live in.

We root for them when we see them as freedom fighters, but just change the label to terrorists, and they're criminals. Well, no doubt, Menachem Begin and the Irgun, I'm sure some people have seen them, they were freedom fighters from, well, the British mandate. But what they did was terrorism, and they did it against British and Palestinians.

Again, just shifting the perspective a little bit, and I'm not trying to be partisan about this. I'm just saying we aren't often given enough information. We probably need to consider it in a broader context than we usually do.

The Arabs didn't agree with the UN partition plan, so they sought to destroy the Jewish state. Within hours of the proclamation, forces of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq attacked. That's what my critic was saying.

Palestinians plus five other Muslim nations were against the Jews, and they attacked them. True, they did. Only one of them had an organized army.

That was Jordan. Jordan had an organized army. All these other nations, these other Arab nations, they were just totally disorganized.

There was no central command to this war. It was just like Arabs coming from every side. Israel, on the other hand, had a very highly organized military machine.

They'd been buying weapons from America for decades before this. They had modern American weaponry. They had a standing army of 40,000 Jewish soldiers before they even had a nation.

When they were under the British mandate, they were forming this army. They were anticipating this day. The Jews easily conquered the Arabs.

Well, I say easily, but it did take a while. It was several months before they conquered them. But by the end of that conflict, by the time of the ceasefire in January 1949, Israel controlled 77% of the land.

Now, the UN partition was going to give them 52%, but because of this fighting back against the Arabs, they now took 77% of the land and controlled it. And that included Galilee and the Negev, which is in the southern region of Judah. Now, those had been part of the Arab state, those regions had.

So Israel seized Arab territory, which the United Nations had given to the Arabs. During that conflict, 750,000, three-quarters of a million, Palestinians fled from their homes before the British soldiers. 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes where they'd been all their lives and their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, their farms, and they had to flee to safer territory.

When the war was over, they weren't allowed to come back. The Israelis just took their farms over. Now, the common statement we hear, and this person who wrote to me said so too, that they didn't choose to come back.

She says the Palestinians were told by their leaders to leave until they, the Muslim nations who attacked them, drove them to sea. So the line we hear, if we pay attention to what we're allowed to hear in this part of the world, is that the Arab nations told these Palestinians, leave your homes. Once we conquer Israel, you can go back to your homes.

The United States Army monitored every radio signal in the Middle East during that time. No one has found any radio signal where any Arab nations communicated with Palestinians that they should leave their homes. In fact, for the most part, they told them to stay there and to resist the Israelis.

We may have heard some propaganda ourselves. The truth is, even if they had been told by the Arab nations to flee, and they did so, when non-combatants are dispossessed of their property in time of war, when peace comes, they're allowed to come back to their homes. But Israel didn't allow that.

What they did with the Palestinian homes, they either moved Jewish families into them, or bulldozed them to make sure the Palestinians couldn't come back. As a result, there were 750,000 Palestinian refugees, many of them are in refugee camps today, people who were free people, living on their own farms and their own homes, most of them minding their own business. Sure, there's some terrorists among the Arabs, just like there's some terrorists among the Jews.

The average Jew isn't a terrorist. The average Arab isn't. The average Christian doesn't bomb abortion clinics.

Once in a while, someone does that. These are simply people minding their own business, living on their ancestral land, who are now driven out by their enemies and not allowed to come back when the peace has been restored. And they are still driven out.

And that's why there's still bad feelings between them. Jerusalem was divided at that time, with Israel controlling the western side of Jerusalem, and Jordan controlled the eastern sector of Jerusalem. And Jordan annexed the West Bank.

Now the West Bank is the region on the West Bank of the Jordan River, much of which was once Samaria and Judea in biblical times. And Jordan annexed that and controlled the eastern portion of Jerusalem. Israel controlled most of the rest.

Palestinian Arab society was largely destroyed in that war. Palestinians fled their homes and farms, crossing the border into Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. About 200,000 were confined to the Gaza Strip, which is a very small stretch of land, right down by the border of Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean.

A little tiny strip of land, just 139 square miles is the Gaza Strip. It already had 88,000 residents, but 200,000 more Palestinians had to flee there and were confined there. Over the next three years, the new wave of immigration doubled the Jewish population in Israel.

So after Israel became a nation, in three years the Jewish population doubled. Now, how did this founding of Israel occur? What we see is that a people who were scattered throughout the world for most of 2,000 years came together again to be a nation. And many Christians, and perhaps some Jews, believe that this is nothing short of miraculous.

Many Christians, those of the dispensational type, believe that prophecy was fulfilled in this. Not only that prophecy was fulfilled, but that it's one of the most remarkable prophecy fulfillments in modern times. Because dispensationalists believe that the Jews must be back in their land before Jesus comes back, because the Antichrist has to kill two-thirds of them.

That's what dispensationalism teaches. You've got to get all the Jews back to Palestine so that two-thirds of them can be wiped out by the Antichrist. It's interesting how many dispensationalists are actually chartering planes to bring Jews from Russia and Poland and places like that to Palestine so they can be swiped out two-thirds of them by the Antichrist.

This is exactly what their theology teaches. And yet John Hagee says he spent over $6 million flying thousands of Jews from Russia over to Israel. And other Christian groups are doing it.

One has to wonder why. The way I always saw it, even when I was a dispensationalist, was, well, if it's prophesied, it'll happen. I don't have to make it happen, right? I mean, if this is fulfilling some cosmic plan of God, then I don't have to spend money that I could spend evangelizing the world for Jesus Christ to bring Jews across the ocean to a land where prophecy says they're going to get wiped out, two-thirds of them, by the Antichrist.

If that's going to happen, I don't want the blood on my hands, thanks. I'll just do what the Great Commission tells me to do, and that is promote the kingdom of God, make disciples of all nations. Whatever happens in Israel, if God says it's going to happen, I'll watch it happen.

But I'm not going to make it happen. And yet, those who say, and who say most loudly, that the rebirth of the state of Israel in modern times is a miracle, are those of the movement that really did the most to make it happen. Was God in it? I've gone on record many times saying that I don't believe there's any prophecy that God was fulfilled by the rebirth of the nation of Israel.

I've said this for years. But people say, then, do you say God wasn't in it? I think God's in almost everything. That doesn't mean there's prophecy about it.

I believe God was in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but I don't think there's any prophecy about it in the Bible. I think God was in the founding of America, but there's nothing about it in the Bible. I believe God's in everything.

Of course I wouldn't say God was not in the founding of the nation of Israel. He's in everything. The question is, what does he think about it? How does he evaluate what they're doing there? And is it a fulfillment of prophecy? That's really the issue that Christians really have to wonder about.

My former pastor used to say, there's no national people who've been without a homeland for more than three generations and maintained their national identity. He's not quite correct about that, but, for example, the gypsies in Europe have not had a homeland for hundreds of years. They've maintained their ethnic identity, but they're not God's chosen people.

So, is this a miracle that the Jews have been preserved all this time and that they became a nation in the end times? Well, maybe, maybe not. I'll leave it to you to decide, and I won't even try to persuade you of my viewpoint. I'll just tell you what actually happened and what forces made it happen.

And you can evaluate it as a Christian yourself. There are four things we need to consider here. One is Zionism.

Now, Zionism is a term that refers to a belief that Jewish people should have a homeland in the Middle East. Okay? People who believe that the Jews should have a homeland in the Middle East are Zionists. There are a very large number of Christian Zionists.

Perhaps the majority of American Christians are Zionists. Perhaps a majority of Jews are Zionists now, though it took a long time for Zionism to grow among the Jews. There are still many Jews who are not Zionists because they consider it to be unjust.

What is Zionism? Zionism is the view that the Jews from all over the world should be able to go back to Palestine and take it from whoever's there now and own it and control it. Now, if we weren't talking about the Jews, if we're talking about any other nationality, we'd say, that's ridiculous. Zionism began in Europe.

And the birth of the state of Israel happened because European people decided that the people who lived in another part of the world, the Middle East, must surrender their land to another people who are in another part of the world, not in the Middle East. The Jews and Christians often refer to this as the return to their homeland. But the people who are going there are not returning.

Most of them were not born there. Their ancestors, if you go back 2,000 years, once lived there, but they haven't since then. These people who are coming there from anywhere else, they didn't live there.

Their parents and grandparents, great-grandparents. But it's interesting that the same people who are for this return of the Jews' land, if you talk about offering the Palestinians the right to return to their land, they're not open to that at all. Now, Zionism is that movement to bring the Jews from all over the world back to Zion.

Zion is the mountain where Jerusalem is back to Israel. Zionism did not begin with religious Jews. The founder of Zionism, all will agree, if you look it up in any encyclopedia, Zionism was started by Theodor Herzl.

Herzl was a journalist in Europe, a Jewish journalist, not an observant Jew. He didn't circumcise his son. He was not observant of the Jewish religion.

He was not particularly a follower of God in any sense. But he believed that the Jews would be much better off if they had their own country. Why? Well, I mean, think about history.

The Jews have been scattered throughout Gentile lands, and the Gentiles haven't always been friendly to them. There's this thing called anti-Semitism that many Gentiles have as an attitude toward Jewish people. And when those anti-Semites get into power, they sometimes persecute them.

So we had the pogroms in Russia. We had, of course, the Holocaust. There was a mini-Holocaust in Russia during World War I. There's a major Holocaust in Germany and the surrounding regions, of course, in World War II.

And these kinds of things made the Jews in a precarious situation whenever they were in Gentile lands. And therefore, for the Jews to have their own lands seemed a good idea. Herzl started Zionism by calling the First World Zionist Conference.

And this is the beginning of Zionism as a political movement. It's a secular movement, not a Christian or Jewish religious movement. He held the First World Zionist Conference in 1897.

And that's when they began to discuss the idea of choosing a homeland for the Jews. Initially, they weren't even looking at Palestine, not exclusively. Several different countries were considered.

Argentina was seriously considered as a place for the Jews to go and establish a nation. Uganda was on the list. They considered that.

The island of Cyprus was one place they thought might make a good location for a Jewish nation. And even Texas was considered. Honestly, those are four places besides Palestine that were seriously considered as possible places for a Jewish state.

Herzl died at age 44. Most think he died of venereal disease. His son, Hans, who was not circumcised as a baby, was forced to be circumcised after his father's death by the Zionist leadership.

And he was 15 years old at the time. But in 1924, Hans became a Christian. And he was denounced and rejected by the Jewish community after that.

After his sister died of a morphine addiction, he committed suicide. And so it's a tragic story of the Herzl family. And this is the founder of Zionism.

Now, I don't say that to make some kind of guilt by association. Here, the founder didn't really have a very good life. But simply to point out that many Christians think that the restoration of Israel was motivated by Jews who were thinking in biblical terms.

Of this is the land God gave us. We should be there again. That's not the way the Zionists were thinking.

They were thinking strictly politically. And many of the early leaders were not the least bit religious. After Herzl died, the movement was led by Chaim Weizmann.

Weizmann was a European chemist who had helped the Allies a great deal with some of his scientific knowledge during World War II. And he actually became the first president of Israel. He's the one who raised the first Israeli flag there in 1948.

But he was the leader of the Zionist movement after Herzl. Luis de Brandeis, who was the first Jewish justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by Woodrow Wilson, became the leader of Zionism in America. If you look up Brandeis online, you can find out interesting things about him.

There's a book I'd recommend everyone get. It's written by a journalist who was not anti-Israel until she began to go there and research and find out. And she's collected a vast amount of documentation for her things.

And she tells quite a bit about Brandeis. But I won't go into that in detail. The book is called Against Our Better Judgment.

And it's about how America created the Israeli state. But the author's name is Alison Weir. W-E-I-R.

Alison Weir. She has a website called If Americans Knew. Anyway, Brandeis was the leader of world Zionism in America.

Weitzman was the leader in Britain. And these two nations are the ones that brought the U.N. partition to found the state of Israel through the influence of these important men. Of course, there was the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which committed the British government to the Zionist cause.

The League of Nations mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, giving the force of international sanction to Zionism. The plight of the Jews in Russia, the mini-Holocaust of World War I, and the later Holocaust in Europe of World War II, raised awareness of the plight of the Jews and greater international sympathy for the Zionist aspirations. I have a quote here from Winston Churchill's son, Randolph Churchill, quoted in the daily Boston Globe, November 22, 1945.

Right after World War II and prior to the state of Israel being formed, Randolph Churchill said, quote, six million Jews have been murdered in the past six years. And the problem of finding a home for the two or three million European Jews who remain is one of urgent importance, unquote. This is a statement of Zionism, which and seen as a matter of urgent importance, in view of the plight of the Jews who are subject to things like the Holocaust and the pogroms.

I don't see how anyone cannot be sympathetic with these Jews. These Jews in Europe who suffered that, they did not bring this upon themselves. This is a total atrocity done by certain satanically inspired leaders, no question about it.

It, however, led to international sympathy for the idea of a Jewish state. Now, I'm not even thinking that a Jewish state is a bad idea. Maybe they could have it in Argentina or Cyprus or Uganda, maybe a corner of Texas would do.

But the problem is you can't give one group of people the land that belongs to another group of people without causing some kind of a issue. And before Israel became a state, many, many American and British politicians and statesmen were advising against it. They said this is going to cause problems with the people who are already there.

We're going to cause a firestorm of volatility. They were right. It has proved to be such.

But Zionism is that movement that came up in Europe in the late 19th century and basically is responsible for the immigration of Jews to Palestine. And eventually the influence of people like Weizmann and Brandeis had on people like Woodrow Wilson and on Balfour and the Balfour Declaration. Of course, these men were not alive at the time when Israel became a state, but they were the ones who are moving the opinion of the populace favorable toward that.

Now, I mentioned that America's involvement was very important. America has done many things right and no doubt has done some things wrong. How you assess this particular action on America's part will depend on, of course, your evaluation of the whole Zionist enterprise as a good thing or a bad thing.

But there's no question that it was Harry Truman who forced basically the United Nations to come up with the partition plan in 1947, which brought about the State of Israel in 1948. It's an invention of America. Now, Max Nordau, a close associate of Theodor Herzl in the founding of political Zionism, wrote a few years after the Basel Conference, which was the first conference in 1897.

Max Nordau said, quote, Zionism's only hope is the Jews of America, unquote. In other words, because there were more Jews in America than almost anywhere else, if the American Jews couldn't get on board, Zionism would never have a chance. In retrospect, Naomi Cohen of the Jewish Theological Seminary in America wrote in 2003, quote, but for the financial support and political pressure of American Jews, Israel might not have been born in 1948, unquote.

It's actually an understatement. If you actually read the backroom dealings and so forth, what Brandeis was up to and his influence with Woodrow Wilson and then later on, another man, which we'll talk about, was very influential that we don't hear about very often. And that brings us to the next factor here, and that is dispensationalism.