Israel May Be Flunking a Test of Biblical Proportions

 

Is God Testing Israel?

Maybe God really did give the land of Israel to the Jews as its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claims. But He would have done so as a test. Will they earn the moral right to keep it?

What we have now is Israel being  "infected by the seeds of fascism," according to former prime minister and defense minister, Ehud Barak, who made the statement during a TV interview last May.  The beleaguered nation has decided to build even more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land after suffering a humiliating censure by the United Nations Security Council. Of course their self-destructive anger, fueled by the stresses of living in a zone of habitual conflict is justified. But its rightful target is Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and even  the nations of the West (including the U.S. -- read the saga of the S.S. St. Louis) for slamming their borders shut to European Jews fleeing German genocide.  These survivors of the Holocaust were given no other option than to resettle in Israel.

As for the relationship of these displaced people and their descendants to the Arabs, therein lies the Biblical test.  Any rational human being would resist being pushed out of an ancestral homeland by a group migrating from another continent, who insist that their Deity expressly gave the land to them, even though they've been living elsewhere for the past 2,000 years. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not a difficult story to tell. The complexity lies in the moral test laid out before them.  Can the Jews, who are in this situation, the interlopers, make peace with their Arab neighbors? Could any group of human beings, given a similar history do so?  After almost seven decades, the Israelis get a failing grade as the rage and animosity on both sides intensifies.