In this first episode of a two-part series, Pastors Derek and Cliff discuss the history and theology behind recent events unfolding in Israel.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to the With All Wisdom podcast. My name is Derek Brown and I’m here today with Cliff McManis. We are both pastors and elders at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California. And we are both professors of theology at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in Vallejo, California, where we have the opportunity to train pastors. And today we want to take up an important topic—one that is featured in the news right now as we speak—and that is the issue of what’s happening in Israel and how Christians should think about that particular issue that’s going on, and the particular unfolding of events that are happening there. But before we do, we want to point you towards withallwisdom.org. If you haven’t checked out our website prior to today, we encourage you to do that. There are lots of resources there, even resources that pertain specifically to this topic.
And I also want to encourage you, if you haven’t checked out Cliff’s book on Israel, that you check that out. You can find that on the website very easily. Just go click on the tab that says “books” and you’ll be able to find it. And we have free PDF copies of all of our books there, including that one. So we encourage you to check that out. If you want to buy a physical copy, there’s also a link to Amazon. Well, let’s get back to our topic. Now, as many of you, I’m sure, already know, there have been some serious unfolding events in the land of Israel. As of Friday of last week, Israel was attacked by Hamas in a calculated terrorist attack on Friday, taking the lives of many innocent Israeli civilians, and it was full of violence. In fact, it started by Hamas terrorists attacking a concert.
Concert goers were ambushed and chased. And if you’ve watched any of the video footage from that or from the other attacks, you can see that this has been exceedingly violent. It’s been calculated. Some of the things that you see are absolutely horrific. And so we need to talk about this from a biblical perspective. We want to be clear in what scripture says. We also want to be clear on the history of this conflict. This didn’t happen starting this week. There’s a history to this conflict, so we want to talk about that as well. And so actually I want to hand it right over to you, Cliff, so you could give us some background and help us think clearly about what is happening in Israel right now.
Cliff: Yeah, thanks, Derek. Yeah, it was just recently, about a week ago on October 7th, 2023, early in the morning, sometime around 6:30 AM, when Hamas, as you mentioned, from their base in the Gaza Strip down there in the south next to the Mediterranean Sea, launched an unprovoked attack against Israel and Israeli citizens as well as soldiers, including citizens of all ages—children, babies, and women. And it has rocked the world. Everyone’s been talking about it for the last seven days. It’s been on the headline of the news of all news outlets every single day for the last seven days. And so it’s only been seven days since it happened. It is such a historic event from Israel’s point of view. Anyway, because the prime minister of Israel right now is Benjamin Netanyahu, and he has likened this event to 9/11 of the United States or even Pearl Harbor. Because of the surprise nature of the attack, the fact that it was completely unprovoked and because of the number of people who were slaughtered, particularly civilians.
And so this date, he says, we’ll go down in infamy for the nation of Israel for who knows how long. Just like that famous recording of our president back on December 7th, 1941, at that time when the President of the United States announced how this date of Pearl Harbor’s attack would go down in infamy, never to be forgotten. So that’s just a quick recap of what happened seven days ago. Since then, I’ve received phone calls and probably, Derek, as a pastor, you’ve received questions from fellow believers asking questions about this. What does this mean? This vicious attack on Israel at an almost unprecedented level. It’s been decades since it’s reached this level. And so naturally, from a Christian point of view, Christians believe in prophecy, and we know how the world is going to end.
There are many books in the Bible that speak on it. So naturally from a Christian’s point of view, they connect sometimes these geopolitical tragic events with prophecy in the Bible. And so those are some of the questions that I’ve gotten. There are Christians out there who are making podcasts and writing articles, and probably somebody’s writing a book right now to explain this in light of end times prophecy that will probably become a bestseller, unfortunately. But anyway, what I wanted to do up front here is just answer questions, but I just want to clarify things. As I’ve been reading the news articles from all the outlets across the board, some of them are reporting pretty objectively in communicating the facts, but many of them are muddying the waters because of a lack of precision in their terms, phrases, and even history that’s been promoted and propagated that isn’t quite accurate, that I think in the end just confuses people. So I want to start up front just trying to clarify what is really a very complicated issue. You and I both agree, Derek, that this whole matter of Israel and the Middle East and all those nations fighting is very confusing because it’s very complicated. One of the reasons it’s complicated is because it has such a long history. When you’re talking about Israel, you’re talking about going back in history for 4,000 years.
So to actually properly diagnose it, you’ve got to be kind of a well-informed historian, even if you’re a lay historian, you have to know the Bible. And that really hampers a lot of people, including those purporting to be mouthpieces on trying to interpret what’s going on. Your average news anchor, who’s probably not a Christian, is trying to give us what this means, they’re trying to interpret this for us, and they just don’t have the wherewithal to do that. They probably don’t know the Bible. So this is different than if you and I were doing a podcast on trying to interpret the war between Russia and Ukraine, because I would not feel comfortable doing that because I don’t know anything about Ukrainian history, nor do I know a whole lot about Russian history. So I would definitely be a novice, and there’s a lot I would be ignorant about.
I can only kind of assess what’s going on in my lifetime in recent history. But if there’s something going on with Israel in the world, you and I, of all people, as pastors and as Bible teachers, we should feel comfortable talking about that because that’s what the Bible is all about. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is about Israel. Christians [might] say, well, the Bible’s about Jesus. Well, who was Jesus? He was a Jew. He lived in Israel his entire ministry and virtually all of his life. So the Bible is about Israel. Our Savior was a Jew. When he was here, he was an Israelite. The church began in Jerusalem, in Israel. All the first Christians of the church for the first five years were entirely Jewish in Israel, and our Savior who we look forward to coming back at any time will return to the land of Israel. He will not return to Missouri, as the Mormons tell us. He will not return to some other state in the United States. He’s coming back to Israel; he’s returning to Jerusalem. He is returning. And that is described to us in explicit detail in books of the Bible, like Zechariah 12 through 14, and pretty much the whole book of Revelation: chapter six, and specifically Revelation 19, and many other places like Ezekiel 38 and 39. They tell us where the Messiah is going to come, and he’s coming to Israel. That’s literally going to happen. It is the future. He’s going to land in Jerusalem and he’s coming back to wage war. He’s not coming back as a nice guy. He’s not coming back as a peacemaker. He is coming to shed blood and obliterate his enemies. And that’s what it says clearly in Revelation 19. A lot of people don’t think about that when they think, oh, it’s going to be so lovely when Jesus returns. Well, not for a lot of people, because he’s coming back as a conquering king and a warrior. So we need to keep that in mind. Point being, I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about and giving diagnosis and analysis on the Ukrainian-Russian war, but we can definitely talk, I think authoritatively, about what’s going on with Israel and Hamas right now. We can talk authoritatively and clearly because the Bible is our authority on that, and the Bible’s clear on the most fundamental issues. So with that in mind, I’d like to clear away some of the fog. But first an illustration. This happened not too long ago. This was at our church, Derek. We had a visitor. We have visitors all the time at our church. But there was a visitor that the stayed for a while, and in a conversation they told me that they were Palestinian.
First they told me they were Christian, and then at some point they told me they were Palestinian. I said the same thing you did. I said, oh, really? I can’t remember the last time I’ve met a Palestinian at church. So that was unique, and I didn’t say this out loud, but my first thought when they said they were Palestinian was, no, you’re not. I immediately thought, well, they’ve been told they’re Palestinian. They identify as Palestinian. They think they’re Palestinian. Maybe their parents told them that, but they’re really not technically. And this person probably doesn’t understand why I think that. I wasn’t trying to insult them. This is just according to history and the facts. So we ended up talking about that. I just asked a few basic questions.
Oh, you’re Palestinian. So my first question was, were you born in Palestine? The answer was no. I was born right here in San Jose, California. I was like, oh, okay. What’s your native language? Do you speak Arabic? No, I only know English. Oh, okay. California English as a matter of fact. Oh, okay. So you’re a Palestinian, but you were born in San Jose and you only speak English. What’s your religion? Oh, I’m a Christian. Oh, okay, okay. So you’re not a Muslim. And they were Greek Orthodox, a committed Greek Orthodox Christian, this person that was visiting. And then finally they revealed that their ancestors come from Egypt, and that they’re Egyptian by ethnicity. So this person speaks only English, was born in California, is Greek Orthodox in religion and is Egyptian by race and blood. Therefore, there is no connection whatsoever for that person to Palestine.
So I just thought it was interesting. Why do you identify as a Palestinian? And that’s because they were raised to believe that, and they were told that by their parents, because historically there were ancestors who actually lived in the land of Israel in Palestine. So the connection isn’t even in their generation, and is strictly based on geographic location. So that was enlightening, and that was a good reminder that this person is confused about what constitutes a Palestinian and that you would identify yourself above all else—above being Egyptian (because that’s what they were), before being a Greek Orthodox Christian (because that’s what they were), before being an American. That’s what they were. Even in terms of their citizenship and status, they were a US citizen, and before all that they identified as a Palestinian. And that is strictly based on that somebody in their history lived in Palestine.
So that is really representative of a lot of the confusion that we have. A lot of people identify with being Palestinian when in fact they’re not. And there are others who are defending Palestinians and they don’t even know what a Palestinian is. This isn’t the perfect illustration, but it’s kind of like someone who says, so what are you? What race are you? What ethnicity? What’s your nationality? And they say, I’m a Texan. And it sounds funny, but Texans do that. They think they’re their own nation sometimes. I know I used to live in Texas, but that would be an appropriate illustration because Texas is just simply a place. It’s not America, it’s not a nation. There’s no ethnicity, there’s no Texan religion. There ain’t no Texan language, despite what they think. Although they do have that accent. They done got that accent. Y’all know what I’m talking about. But being Texan, that’s just what a lot of people think about being a Palestinian. So there you go. I just want to give that illustration because this person was totally ignorant and confused. Well, they weren’t confused until I talked to them. I confused them by sharing all that. I just said, well, in light of everything you said, I don’t think you’re Palestinian. Oh, really? Yeah. I think you’re a Christian, first and foremost, made in the image of God. And I also think you’re Egyptian. That’s what you told me—that your parents are Egyptian by blood and ancestry and race and ethnicity and DNA, and you weren’t born and you have no attachment to the land of Palestine whatsoever. So I would say you’re not. And then I actually gave them my book on Israel, and I told them to read chapter seven, “What is a Palestinian?” They actually read the whole book. Came back a couple weeks later and said, Pastor Cliff, you’re right. I am not a Palestinian.
Derek: You’re kidding. Wow.
Cliff: No. I was a little nervous. I didn’t know how they would react. But they felt it was liberating. It’s like, wow, this is good. This history, knowing the facts and history just set me free in my thinking. Thank you for that. So it was good. So we’ll see how fast I can go clarifying terms, even vocabulary, that I think are confusing people that’s in the headlines right now on this conflict between Israel. As a matter of fact, some of the news outlets are saying there’s a conflict right now between Israelis and Palestinians, and even that is wrong,
Derek: Right? That’s misleading,
Cliff: It is misleading. It’s between Israel and Hamas, which are totally different. So let me just go through these misconceptions in order. The first one is that people say that Israel became a nation in 1948. I know you know this one. Derek, what’s your initial thought or reaction or comment on that one?
Derek: Well, that just shows an ignorance of biblical history or a willingness to give biblical history its due, because God made Israel a nation when he liberated them from Egypt, I mean, when he planted them in the land, liberating them from Egypt and planting them in the land. Depends on when you want to date the Exodus, but we would date it around 1400 BC. That’s when Israel became a nation, at least in terms of bringing them together and planting them in a place.
Cliff: So that’s probably one of the most misleading things you could possibly say that convolutes this whole scenario of understanding it—to say that Israel became a nation in 1948. Or sometimes they’ll say Israel became a state in 1948, and they’re painting them as a Johnny-come-lately. They haven’t been around. And long before Israel was around in 1948, there were Arab Muslim Palestinians already living in the land. And that land was known as Palestine, and it’s been known as Palestine in perpetuity in times past. And then the occupying Israelites came along in 1948 and they displaced them through aggression, and pushed out the Arab Muslim Palestinians who were already living in the land, and the Israelis are intruders. And that all happened formally in 1948. And so, therefore, everybody knows that the Palestinians actually, what they mean are the Arab Muslim Palestinians have rights to the land. Israel has no right whatsoever to the land, and they need to be eradicated from the land, pushed out of the land, relocated somewhere else, or preferably pushed into the Mediterranean Sea in the words of Yasser Arafat and many who have followed in his leadership. So that’s falsehood number one.
Derek: And that’s a foundational point. Because, I mean, granted, if it is 1948 and that’s how you believe it came about, then you could view Israel as the intruder, if that in fact is true. So I can understand if you believe that then the way you read and understand the news right now, you do see Israel as the intruder rather than the other way around, which is why that’s a foundational point. You have to go back into biblical history and recognize that Israel is a nation established by God himself in 1400 BC.
Cliff: And just a couple bullet points on the history. So God appears to Abraham and about 2100 BC, and he makes a promise to Abraham and says, I’m going to make you a nation. So that was the promise to create him a nation. That nation would be Israel. And then in Genesis 12:7, God tells Abraham, I’m going to give you the land. I’m going to give your descendants the land. And then in chapter 15 and chapter 17 of Genesis, God further says to Abraham, I’m going to give you the land forever, a perpetual abiding promise to your descendants. So that’s in 2000 BC. In Genesis 15, God warns Abraham and says, oh, by the way, you’ll have descendants, you’ll have many, but your descendants will be basically prisoners for 400 years in Egypt—he predicted that. And they went from 70 of the offspring of Abraham over the course of 400 years to probably two million plus while they were in Egypt.
And so then we fast forward to the days of Moses, where God raises up Moses, who is a Jew or Israelite or a Hebrew, and calls Moses to set those 2 million plus Israelites free, liberating them from Egypt. And so he brings them out, they cross into the desert, and then finally Joshua leads them into the promised land in about 1400 BC, and they inherit the land that God had promised them. That’s when the Jews or the Israelites entered the land for the first time, in 1400 BC. God owned the land. He gave it to them. They were to be stewards of it. They were to be perpetual, ongoing stewards forever. God would never renege on his promise, even when they were disobedient, they would be chastised and removed and judged, but never totally dislocated from the land. As a matter of fact, a historical fact is that there has always been a Jewish-Israeli presence in the land of Israel since the days of Joshua in 1400 BC, which would be 3,400 years. There have always been Jews in the land of promise. Some people think there were times when Jews were eradicated, pushed out, and didn’t live there at all.
Derek: That’s never been the case.
Cliff: That has never been the case. Yasser Arafat, who basically started the state of Palestine, was famous for saying that the Jews never owned Jerusalem and they never had a temple there. There was never a Jewish temple that existed in Jerusalem. And he developed curriculum that Palestinian students would use in their schools. And there were maps in there—you can still find them—maps of the land of Palestine. And there’s never any historical recognition of Jews or temples being in Jerusalem at all.
Derek: Wow. That is some historical revisionism right there.
Cliff: That is formal, blatant, ongoing historical revisionism. But God gave them the land and he has not reneged on his promise. So Israel became was promised to become a nation in 2100 BC, and then they inherited the land actually in 1400 BC. So very important point. Next misleading statement is that this is an ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians. And as you said earlier, Derek, no, it’s a conflict right now between Israel and Hamas. And Hamas is a terrorist organization. In your introduction, you used the word terrorist with Hamas.
Derek: I did do that.
Cliff: As opposed to militants or nationalists. And did you do that deliberately? And can you explain why.
Derek: I did do that deliberately. Because Hamas is not a sovereign state. They are a militant group, and they’ve been set specifically, in their history, against Israel. And so it’s misleading to suggest that they are some sort of sovereign nation that has some sort of sovereign validity in their existence. And so historically, they have been a group that has been set against Israel. They’ve engaged Israel, they’ve attacked Israel, and yet they haven’t done this as a sovereign nation. They’ve done it as a group of militants. So that’s why I said that. And it is interesting, currently on the news, to find even certain news sources that aren’t typically friendly towards Israel, admitting and conceding that this is a terrorist attack, and that those were terrorist attacks that happened last Friday. So this isn’t just me blurting those words out in that way—it’s actually acknowledging what is really happening and what this group is really about.
Cliff: Yeah, that’s a good point. The Secretary of State of the United States right now was sent over to Israel. I think he’s in Israel right now, but he came out with a public statement saying that Hamas basically is a terrorist organization. And so Hamas is not a nation, like you said, it’s a formal terrorist organization. Started around 1987, inspired by, again, Yasser Arafat, as a terrorist organization. He was a lifelong terrorist. He started terrorism against Jews when he was as a teenager. So for over 50 years, he was a known terrorist, and he started many different radical terrorist organizations. But Hamas is one of them that came out of one that he was affiliated with. It was called the Muslim Brotherhood that started around 1928, I think. And then that morphed over time. They were always violent and they always hated the Jews, and they were always located around the Promised Land, the land of Israel.
So Hamas are known as terrorists, and their ethnicity is a combination—they could be Egyptian; they can be Jordanian. So they actually represent a lot of different nations. The common denominator of being a member of Hamas is that you’re committed to the cause in the charter of 1987 that says, we exist as an organization to eradicate Israel and all Jews and to, in its place, establish submission to Allah everywhere around the world. That’s their charter. That’s their goal. That’s why they seek to exist. That would be the words of the spokesman of Hamas. In the last week, they have a spokesman and are officially a terrorist organization with the spokesman, and he talked to CNN and all the news outlets that’ll listen to him. And he says this openly. He literally said last week, this is not a war about the land. This is about the existence of Israel and their eradication. And Elon Musk has been noting this and posting this on X—that this guy’s a crazy terrorist. Hamas. They don’t represent the Palestinians. They’re a terrorist organization.
The other one that maybe a lot of people don’t think about, but Palestine—I’ll just say this. Palestine technically right now is not a nation. They call it a state. And even that’s questionable, right? Their history goes back, again, to Yasser Arafat, the terrorist. And he started many terrorist organizations. One he called the Palestinian Liberation Organization that he came up with after the 1967 six day war, because he was trying to unite Muslims against the Jews in the land of Israel, but he couldn’t unite all of the Arab Muslim nations successfully. And so eventually he came up with this term—an old term that was used geographically, and that was the land of Palestine or historically Philistia, who were the enemies of Israel. And he used it in a way that had never been used in history.
And he said, you know what? I’m going to just create a nation, and I’ll call it Palestine, since nobody else is using that term right now. And it’s shown up in the Middle East at times throughout history, depending upon who was ruling there. And our common denominator can be that we’re Muslims and we hate the Jews. There’s a uniting cause that is the origin of the state of Palestine from Yasser. That’s what it comes from. So it started out as a terrorist organization, changes its name at least three times from the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the Palestinian Authority to now the state of Palestine. And then for short, it’s Palestine, and people think it’s a nation, but it’s actually not. So that’s a misnomer. Before World War I, the land of Palestine was actually called Syria. Syria, that’s what it was designated as. Another one. It is not the Arab-Israeli conflict that’s been going on for a hundred plus years, but the Muslim-Israeli conflict or the Muslim-Jew conflict, but if you look on Google or Wikipedia, they call it the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. And the problem with that is you can be an Arab Jew. You can be an Arab Christian. And the reason people don’t understand that, is because Arab doesn’t refer to a race. Arab is not a race—that’s a linguistic term. And so it primarily has to do with the fact that you speak Arabic. So they call it linguistic, and then that’s carried over. It’s become a cultural term as well, but it’s not ethnicity and it’s not religion. Like I said, there are plenty of wonderful Arab Christians—Bible believing Christians who happen to be Arab. And even those committed to the Jewish religion who are Arabic, meaning they’re Jews who maybe were born and raised in some of these Arab countries, and their native language was Arabic, but they’re Jewish, so they also know Hebrew. So technically that’s a terrible moniker to give it—the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Derek: Yeah, excellent point.
Cliff: It should be the Muslim-Israeli conflict, because a hundred percent of the enemies that Israel’s fighting in all these conflicts are Muslim. That’s their cause. It’s Allah that they represent.
Derek: Yeah. And by calling it the Arab-Israeli conflict, it’s masking the deeper underlying theological spiritual realities that are actually occurring and giving rise to this.
Cliff: Yeah, that’s probably the most important point. It’s a spiritual battle of religion. Another thing they’re also doing is they’re including people in that conflict to be enemies of Israel that aren’t. If you’re an Arab Christian, you’re probably pro-Israel. But no, everybody’s against Israel—this is what they’re doing.
Derek: That’s a good point.
Cliff: Another basic fact: Israelis are not occupiers. So if you read the news, a lot of these news articles are saying that Israel are occupiers, meaning they are occupying the land. In other words, they’re living in Palestine and they don’t belong there. So that’s actually formal terminology, and you find it everywhere, and people are saying it unwittingly, and they’re calling the Jews or the Israelites occupiers who don’t belong there. If you’re an occupier, you don’t belong there. You usurped that land. You need to get out. You’re an occupier. It’s like one of the kids sitting in dad’s chair—you’re occupying my chair. Sorry, get out.
Derek: And you can only be there for so long, and then you must leave.
Cliff: You must. So this terminology actually comes from after the six day war in 1967, when Israel had to fight off five different hostile Arab Muslim countries that were attacking them at the same time from Egypt down there in the south, and Jordan and Lebanon up there. And that war only lasted six days, but after the war, the United Nations—do you have any thoughts on the United Nations, Derek, or do you know anything about them?
Derek: Probably not enough to give an educated comment.
Cliff: So yeah, all I can say is they rarely support Israel.
Derek: Oh, sure. Yeah, I could affirm that.
Cliff: So the majority of the nations don’t like Israel. So there’s a part of the United Nations—they have their different branches. One of the parts they have is called the United Nations Security Council. So in 1967, they came up with a resolution, I think it’s called Resolution 242. And in there the Security Council of the United Nations officially designated Israel as occupiers. That’s the term that they gave them. And they have been considered occupiers ever since 1967, meaning you don’t really belong there. And at the time, Israel had people living in the Gaza Strip, which is down there by the Mediterranean Sea down south and east. And that’s part of the land that they were so-called occupying. And they didn’t belong there because Egypt had rights to that land not long ago, but historically it belonged to Israel because God gave it to Israel. But since 2005, Israel decided to pull out of the Gaza Strip. So they’re not even there. They don’t have a presence there anymore. They’re not occupying the Gaza Strip anymore since 2005, and yet they’re still being called occupiers.
So that’s totally illegitimate. Israelis are not occupiers. They’re actually indigenous to the land. They’re the rightful stewards and owners of the land because God gave it to them. Have they been lousy stewards? Yes, most of their history. And God knows that. He’s in charge and he chastens and disciplines them accordingly. He has a plan, and it will be successful because he will bring them to repentance in the future, at the end of the age, and then they will be reinstated rightfully as an entire nation into their land. But that’s not going to happen until God determines that in the future. Another note here, just for the record, Yasser Arafat who started the PLO that turned into the Palestinian authority that turned into the state of Palestine—he was not a man of peace. Even though he got the Nobel Peace Prize in like 1994 or 92, he was a deceiver, and he was a terrorist. Another fact that people should be aware of is that Islam is a totalitarian religion. Thoughts on totalitarianism, Derek?
Derek: The aim of Islam is to bring all people and all nations under political submission to Allah. And so you can view Islam, as you mentioned, as totalitarian—both the religion and its vision for the state are intertwined so that the aim is to bring all people under political submission to Allah. And that is often through violence and military conquest. And hence, that would explain a lot of what you see even today in Islamic history. So that’s the aim. That’s the goal of Islam. Despite the claims that it’s a peaceful religion, when you get down to what is taught in the Quran and the Hadiths and so on, that is the aim of Islam.
Cliff: Yeah, that came home to me when—I have a friend who, for 30 some odd years now, has been living in Albania since the 1990s, doing ministry, and there are a lot of Muslims there. And he told me when I saw him not long ago, he said, Cliff, did you know that Islam means submit? I was like, no. At the time I didn’t know that. And that tells you everything you need to know, because it’s a totalitarian religion, meaning it is all-consuming. Allah wants control of your entire life. Like you said, it’s not just a religion, it’s political, it’s social, it’s cultural, it’s linguistic. It has zero tolerance for different views. They’re not into coexisting with other people that aren’t Muslim, at least according to Allah, Muhammad and the Quran. That’s their goal—to take control of everything and make everything Islam. Islam means submit. So this is true. Islam—it’s totalitarian; it’s all consuming. So it didn’t go well with the United States of America, the melting pot of mixing all these ethnicities and everybody living peacefully together while you retain your own ethnic religious identity. Islam wants nothing to do with that. So it’s strictly totalitarian.
That’s why there can never be a two state solution over there in the Middle East, trying to make peace and get the Muslims and the Jews to shake hands. The Jews continued to concede and give up land and rights, and they want to be peaceful. And all the while Islam knows they can’t do that. They’re not committed to doing that. So that’s why you’ve got every United States president since Jimmy Carter saying, oh, I’m going to come up with a political plan to make peace between the Palestinians and the Jews. And the answer is, no, you’re not. Carter failed. Reagan failed. Clinton failed. Obama failed. Biden has failing. Trump tried, and failed. It’s beyond them.
Derek: It’s beyond them because, like you’ve already said, this is a Muslim versus Jew conflict. And unless you know and understand Islam, then you will continue to seek some sort of peace accord between the two. But Islam itself can’t allow that in its theology, and in its view of the overall conquest of the whole world.
Cliff: Yeah. And there have been accords. You mentioned accords, like the Oslo Accords and the Abraham Accords and all that, and they sign a piece of paper that’s just a temporary time of peace to reload until there’s an uprising, an Intifada, by the Muslims who hate the Jews. That’s basically what happens time and time again. So I just want to hone in on this again, that we should properly call Hamas, not Palestinians, not militants, not resistance fighters, not freedom fighters. Some of the newspapers are calling them that. As you said, they’re terrorists, and they’re actually Muslim terrorists. There are different kinds of terrorists. There’s some guy that blew up the building in Oklahoma City. He wasn’t a Muslim. He was an American, so he’s not a Muslim terrorist. But Hamas are specifically Islamic terrorists, or you could call them murderers. Butchers. Definitely antisemites. And they’re also anti-US. They say that Israel is the little Satan and the United States is the big Satan.
Derek: I’ve heard that.
Cliff: And they burn United States flags just as much as they burn Israeli flags. And they’re also violently anti-Christian and anti-Bible. So Christians need to be aware of this and who they truly are. And then just here’s a little historical summary, Derek, just for people to maybe hang their thoughts on, because this is really complicated and hard to figure out, and requires a lot of research and reading. You’ve got to remember all this stuff, which is hard to do. It’s complicated. But regarding Palestine and the proper understanding of Palestine, I just want to make three observations on the term Palestine. It might help people. In 135 AD, the Roman Emperor Hadrian was ruling at the time. There were Jews living in the land of Promise, the land of Israel, but there was an uprising. Rome had a presence, and then the Jews rose up and were basically trying to displace the Romans, even by violence. So that was not good. So then Hadrian, the emperor, said, enough of that, I’m going to snuff these people out—the Jews. And so he brought in his armies and was successful and just devastated southern Israel, and literally destroyed Jerusalem. I mean, it was already destroyed in 70 AD, then it was rebuilt, and then he destroyed it again in 135 AD. And this time he banished all Jews from the city of Jerusalem. It was illegal to be a Jew, and that had never happened. Even in the days when Nebuchadnezzar came in, he left some Jews in Israel. Or in Jerusalem, I should say. But Hadrian banished all Jews from Jerusalem, slaughtered all the rabbis that existed, burned all the Torah and books that were there, killed thousands of Jews and banished every single Jew from the city of Jerusalem. And then he changed the name.
It was known as Judea, and he changed the name formally to Philistine, or Palestina, actually, I think is the Latin or Italian word, which comes from the Hebrew word. And which takes us back to the Bible. It was the Philistines that were the ongoing, perpetual enemy and nemesis of Israel. And Hadrian knew that and said, let’s see, I hate the Jews. Who else in history hated the Jews? The Philistines. I’m going to call Jerusalem or Judea, Palestine because Palestine literally is the same word as Philistia. And so in 135 AD, Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea to Palestine out of spite—let’s be clear—out of sheer spite. And that was true from 135 AD, pretty much with a few exceptions, as different people came in and conquered the land because the Romans, they only lasted another 250 years. Then they got displaced. And then people came in and the Byzantines came, and then they changed the name. And then the Ottoman Empire came in and they changed the name. And then before World War I, it was changed to Syria. So it kept changing its name, but it was always Israel. God gave that land to Israel. But from 135 AD, just to be clear, all the way up until 1967, the word Palestine was a geographical term, a term strictly related to geography, and the land of the land of Palestine. So in 200 AD, what was a Palestinian? It was a pagan, probably white guy, or Roman, living in the land of Israel, but he was known as a Palestinian because of where he lived, right? In 1917, the typical Palestinian was actually a Jew. They had a newspaper called the Palestinian Times, and it was a Jewish newspaper. So that’s the irony. A hundred years ago, a Palestinian was a Jew. Fast forward a hundred years, a Palestinian is the opposite of a Jew, or somebody who hates a Jew. So that just shows you how that term is so fluid and has been manipulated to serve different purposes many times. By Hadrian, and then again by Yasser, doing the same thing. So from 135 AD to 1967, Palestine was strictly a geographical term. Prior to 135 AD, Palestine referred strictly to the Philistines as a nation and as people. So there you go. And then since 1967 and Yasser Arafat, the term Palestine has been manipulated and used primarily as a political and nationalistic term, meaning a non-Jew. Those are three radical different usages of that term. And no wonder so many people are confused.
Derek: Exactly. I mean, just that short, brief history of the word is incredibly enlightening and would really, if you took that seriously, would change your outlook. And the points that you made in terms of the myths about this conflict, if you took those seriously, it would totally change your outlook on this whole conflict right now, and you’d interpret it differently. Well, Cliff, this has been really, really helpful for me, and I hope it’s been helpful for our listeners to have clarity on this conflict in Israel. What Cliff is talking about is about getting to the truth of words, of history, and getting past all the oftentimes ignorant bluster that you hear on the media, and understanding the Bible and understanding the history of Israel. And we’re going to come back in another episode, where we’re actually going to do a little Q and A. We have questions that Cliff has received from our church members and from others about this particular issue about Israel, broadly speaking. And we want to answer some of those questions when we return for a second episode. And we’d also encourage you to check out withallwisdom.org. You’ll find resources. We have podcasts. We have an earlier podcast on Israel. You can check that out. [We have] articles on Israel. I want to point you towards those. I already mentioned Cliff’s book. We took two articles out of that book when we adapted them. They’re both called, “Who are the Palestinians?”, Part One and Part Two. This last week, we’ve gotten a huge uptick in views on those articles precisely because of what’s happening over in Israel. So I encourage you to check out those resources as well. And until next time, keep seeking the Lord in his Word.