OPINION:
Two years ago today, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 Jews and took 251 hostages back to hell on earth: tunnels under the Gaza Strip.
Why would they do such a dastardly deed?
According to Genesis, (the only truth you can believe), in about 1700 B.C., God promised Abraham and all his descendants the land known as Canaan, which today is called Israel. It included all of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and a part of today’s surrounding countries.
In 1004 B.C., King David established Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, where King Solomon later built the first temple. In 931 B.C., Israel was divided into two nations: the Kingdom of Israel in the north, with Samaria as its capital, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, ruled by Davidic kings with Jerusalem as its capital.
In the centuries that followed, the Jews were persecuted by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Greeks and the Romans, who renamed the land Palestine. After they had been run out of their homeland and spent 70 years in captivity, Cyrus the Great returned the Jewish people to Israel. They lived without a king while rebuilding Jerusalem’s temple and walls.
In 636 A.D., they saw Islam spread to the region by a series of Arab conquests. A Muslim shrine, called the Dome of the Rock, was built in Jerusalem on the site of the ruins of the second temple. Jerusalem had become a “Holy City” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The post-World War I era found Britain taking Palestine and renaming it the “British Mandate of Palestine.” Britain pushed out the Ottoman Turks and split the land with the Arabs and Jews.
World War II brought the Holocaust to the Jews, and many tried to flee to Palestine. After the war, with tensions rising between the Arabs and Jews, Britain decided to pull out of the area and leave the region guarded by the newly formed United Nations. In 1947, Jews made up one-third of the population. The United Nations proposed a two-state solution with a Jewish state receiving 56% of the land and the Palestinian Arabs receiving the rest.
By 2013, Israel had faced and won multiple wars with Arab countries, as well as the Camp David Accords, the First Intifada, the Oslo Accords and several Gaza wars.
In the end, the Jews will win their land. God has surveyed the boundaries, and the Jews will live in Israel again.
ED HUBER
Copperhill, Tennessee
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