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Peace Process

Most fateful ever

In three months, Israelis will vote on abandoning the heart of their homeland


By Stan Goodenough
December 26, 2005

The elections set for March 28 are set to be the most fateful in the history of restored Israel.

When they go to the polls, Israel?s nearly six million Jews (and 1.2 million Muslim Arabs) will be casting their ballots on the question of whether or not to irreversibly sever all ties and relinquish all claims to the very heart of their land.

According to reports in the Israeli press Monday this will, after all, be the core voting issue on the day.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?s new and wildly popular Kadima Party has decided to campaign with the slogan: ?Two states for two peoples.?

Whether or not the reports are true, and even if Kadima selects ? to avoid a potential voter backlash ? to go with a slightly lower-profile catchphrase, Sharon and the plurality of politicians that have boarded Kadima from left and right are now openly espousing the so-called Bush Vision.

That vision, which has the weight of the United States and the rest of the world foursquare behind it, sees Israel and ?Palestine? existing side-by-side on the biblical Land of Israel.

If, as today?s surveys indicate will happen, Kadima wins the majority of seats, granting Sharon the final term he needs to complete what he began last August, no-one will be able to gainsay those who insist that the creation of a State of Palestine was the express and democratically declared will of the people of Israel, with the consent of the majority of America?s 5.5 million Jews.

This will be true, no matter whether the citizens of the newly created Arab state (the 23rd state for that one nation) lay down their arms and embrace Israel as a peace partner, or align themselves with the rest of the Arab and Islamic world to deal the coup-de-grace to what will be left of the Jewish state.

Why is this such a critical issue for Israel and for the Christian world?

It is critical because the land Israelis will vote to keep or to relinquish has the following distinguishing features:

  • It is the specific land on which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob established themselves after God gave it exclusively to the descendants in their line (i.e. not to the offspring of Ishmael and Esau), and to all those who embrace their God.
  • It is the land on which lie buried all of Israel?s national forefathers.
  • It is the land on which 99 percent of Bible history is played out.
  • It is the specific land Jews in exile for millennia longed and prayed to return to, and in which endeavor Bible-believing Christians strove to help them.
  • It is the land to which Jews and Christians believe the Messiah ? the Son of David ? will come.

Strategically speaking, ?two-states-for-two-peoples? mortally endangers one of those states:

  • Two of three parts of this land comprise the high ground ? the mountains of Samaria and Judea ? from which Israel?s future national neighbors (if they remain enemies) would be able to fire down upon the Israelis, the majority of whom live on the narrow coastal plain between Jaffa and Haifa.
  • An Arab state in Judea-Samaria would more than half Israel?s current strategic depth, severely curtailing its ability to respond to a military threat.
  • Palestine would create an unbroken chain of Arab states stretching from Israel?s then-narrow nine-mile waist all the way through Jordan and Iraq.
  • Israel?s Mountain (Yarkon-Taninim) Aquifer, one of only three fresh water sources available to the nation, will be lost for good.

And then, as a ?secondary? consideration, the question will arise as to just how much inclination the rest of the once Judeo-Christian world will have left to stick out its neck for the truly tiny scrap of land that will remain.

After decades of untiring international effort to, through diplomacy or terrorism, wrest this territory from Jewish control, the ultimate ownership of these lands could be decisively determined based in what takes place in just three months.

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