History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Introduction

Response to this religion, a religion that has increasingly had an effect upon the times in which we live and the culture in which we live. I’m so grateful that you’ve joined us for this study. This is a little bit different subject because we’re going to just veer off to a sidetrack this morning and look at a subject that maybe some people on the surface doesn’t have that much of a connection to understanding Islam, but it really does. It has a great connection to those who would be religious in our age and how to look at not only Islam but also Christianity and also Judaism. If you take a wire that is exposed and is connected to an electric source, there is electricity there, but it really is contained within that wire.

But if you take the wire and you bring it to a piece of metal, that electricity will actually, as it gets close enough to that metal, will jump, will arc. Sparks will fly. Because that is a connecting point, a linking point. And at that point of connection of that electricity connecting the wire to the metal, the sparks fly, and there is energy and there is something that is popping there. But when it comes to the Middle East, the point of electrical contact where the sparks fly is Palestine. Because there have been so many things happened in Palestine in the last half century or more that has created a lot of focus and a lot of concern and controversy, even for the whole world. The entire Middle East is vested in the conflict there, as well as other nations around the world.

And it’s where there have been clashes constantly, and unfortunately, very violent clashes. And you understand that it has a religious connection. Palestine, today, what we call Palestine or Israel, that land was home to the ancient people called the Hebrews who formed into the Israel, uh Israel, uh the Israelite nation in the Old Testament, and their story is just all through the Old Testament. Jesus lived in this region and did a lot of his teaching and work around Jerusalem and was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem. And there’s also a connection to Muslim people. Muslims believe and they teach that during his lifetime, Mohammed was miraculously transported to the site of the Old Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which also was the general vicinity where they believe Ishmael was offered up by Abraham, and there he was translated into heaven, where he had a heavenly vision.

1. The History of Israel Through the New Testament

As a result, Muslims believe that they have three holy sites: Mecca, Medina, and you should know why after what we’ve done the last few days, and then Jerusalem. And so this place of contact, of controversy, has religious connotations to it. And as a result, we have seen develop over the last half century something that is commonly called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How should a Christian, how should a person who is a student of the Bible, how should they look at this and respond to this? That’s what we’re going to look at this morning. We start really with the history of Israel since the close of the New Testament. The Old Testament tells us about the rise and the glory age of Israel under the kings of David and Solomon, but then their division after Solomon and their demise because of invasions of foreign lands.

And the Old Testament prophets explained to us that God allowed these foreign powers to invade them and to cripple them because of their idolatry, because of their immorality, because they turned their backs from the true and living God. They are, though, at the end of the Old Testament restored to their land in a very small number. Such a small number is restored. They are no longer referred to as Israel, but Judea. Okay? Or Judah, because most of them were of the tribe of Judea or of Judah, and so it’s Judea, and they are commonly called Jews. They are just a just a skeleton of what they were earlier in the Old Testament, as far as numbers, as far as power, and everything else. And from that point on, at the close of the Old Testament, through the New Testament.

Though they have some local authority, they are governed and they are occupied by a foreign power, whether it be the Greeks or later on the Romans. And so in the New Testament, you read about the Jewish nation in which Jesus grew up, which was concentrated there in Judea and the capital there was Jerusalem. They had some governing authority, their leaders did. But over them was the Roman Empire that really controlled what was going on. And that’s why when Jesus was crucified, though it was the Jewish Sanhedrin that found him guilty by their standards, they had to bring him to the Roman governor to be put to death. And the New Testament closes. But before it closes, Jesus utters a prophecy that Jerusalem would be overthrown. And history tells us very plainly, it’s very documented that in A.D.

70 that Jerusalem was overthrown by the Romans, that what government structure the Jews had then was just completely dismantled. And the New Testament era ends with this about to happen, and history tells us that it did happen. And so once again, the Jewish nation is dispersed from this area. But you know, the situation’s different today. You watch the news, you read a magazine, you look at a newspaper, and you hear about the modern state of Israel that occupies part of this territory. Well, what is that? Is it like what was in the Old Testament? Is this nation like what was in the New Testament? And is this sort of a revival, a resurrection of something that you read about in the Bible? What is modern Israel?

2. Jews Dispersed Into Europe and Muslim Lands

Well, before we understand what it is today, we need to understand what has happened from the close of the New Testament and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 to today. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning. Really soon after the destruction of Jerusalem, you begin to see the Jewish people that were concentrated in Palestine, although we know that there were Jews living in other places of the Roman Empire. But the ones that were living in Palestine were dispersed. And they began to migrate and live in many places. And really over the centuries, they kept migrating. And large numbers of them began to reside in Europe. And so by the time you get to the modern era, around the time of Columbus and the discovery of the New World and all the things that make up the modern world that led to the creation of our culture here in the United States of America, you have a lot of Jews living in Europe.

Usually they were segregated. Oftentimes they had a lower standard of living than others around them. And so they lived in communities that oftentimes they suffered great poverty. There were also times when they were oppressed, that there would be flare-ups of persecution against Jewish people. You may have heard about the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition actually started to weed out those who were false converts from Judaism. That the same Spanish monarchs that sent Columbus across the Atlantic issued an edict around the same time of Columbus that said that all Jews had to leave Spain, unless they converted to Roman Catholicism. And so some did convert instead of leave Spain. And the Inquisition was set up to investigate whether that Jewish convert was truly now a follower of the instructions of the Roman Catholicism system, Roman Catholic system.

And that’s how the Inquisition set up. And they expanded the Inquisition and began to investigate all kinds of other heretics that they considered to be a threat to the Roman Catholic Church and so forth. But long, long time ago, Jewish people in Europe were struggling with having relations with those who lived around them. And it’s important to note also that wherever Jewish people lived in Muslim-controlled lands. We mentioned this the other day, but I want to go back and just hit this once more. That wherever Jews lived in areas, whether it be North Africa or those who still remained in Palestine, though few in number, that usually they were protected by the Muslim government. If they paid the tribute, they paid the tax, generally they lived in peace with the Muslim commanders, the Muslim civil government.

Sometimes you hear this controversy and this conflict between Jews and Arabs described as an ancient conflict that is all the way back to Bible times. That’s not an entirely accurate statement. Because ever since Bible times, there have been periods and places where Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims also lived in relative peace.

And that’s where we’re headed.

3. A Hope to Return to Zion

One of the reasons why they did this is they had a hope in two things. One is because they had rejected, their people had rejected that Jesus was the Messiah, many of them were still anticipating that a Messiah would come, as the Old Testament prophesied. And he would be their savior and their ruler and their deliverer. And in conjunction with that, they had a hope that one day they would return to Jerusalem, live back on their homeland there in Judea or Israel, and live there in Zion, as it was referred to. Sometimes Zion is a reference to the Jerusalem area. But I want you to understand the nature of this hope. In a large book, it’s a big book, so if you want to look at it sometime, maybe check it out of the library.

It’s just a great book just to look at a few references in it. It’s really a big book to tackle to read. But a great and thorough work on the history of the Jewish people is a book called A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. And this is a published, I think, by Indiana University. And the scholar Mark Tessler says this.

But most Jews, nonetheless, did not believe it was appropriate to initiate steps toward the reconstruction of their national home in Palestine. What he’s saying here is that generally they hope to go back to Zion. They hoped to go back to Israel one day, but they didn’t think that it was their responsibility to initiate that action. He continues, and he says, on the contrary, such action would indicate a loss of faith. And the absence of a willingness to wait for the Creator’s plan to unfold in its own divinely ordained fashion. Much like the Israelites in the land of Egypt who were in slavery, who waited over 400 years for God to fulfill the promise of bringing them to the Canaan land, these European Jews, though they were suffering in many cases, believed in keeping their hope that one day God, in his own time, in his own way, would bring them back to this land.

4. The Zionist Movement and the Enlightenment

It’s important to note that. Because what arises in the 1800s is something called the Zionist movement. And it’s not hard to see a connection to this Zionist movement, to something that was occurring about a hundred years before this in the 1700s. It’s called the Enlightenment. You may remember this from school. Sometimes called the Age of Reason. This was an intellectual movement that swept across Europe, especially in Western Europe, places like France and England. And it spilled over the shores of this new land, the colonies, which about the time of the Enlightenment was really cranked up, the United States of America was formed. And many of the founding fathers were greatly affected by this. And it was a movement which said that human reasoning could find out all the answers that we need to find out.

That it was an emphasis not on looking to God to reveal to us, especially in his word, the guidance that we need, but rather God had put within man human reasoning, and with that reasoning, pretty much alone, man can find his way.

But this movement got traction. And eventually the movement became an attempt to explain the world, to explain mankind through natural means, not by divine origin. And as this kind of thinking blossomed and went into the 19th century, you see the theory of general evolution as advocated by Charles Darwin that said, here’s how we can figure out how human life, how all life now exists, how it came to be. And it was by observing nature and then using human reasoning, you could understand how life got here and how life got to be what it is today. Theory of evolution, the general theory of evolution is a product of enlightenment thinking. That human beings can use their own thoughts and their own skills and powers to come up with the answers they need.

They don’t have to have divine help to do that. And this intellectual movement was sweeping across Europe and swept into the American culture too. And there were some Jews in Europe that began to embrace it. Because something had happened. During the 1800s, European culture became the zenith of human civilization. They had the most advanced technology, transportation, communication, great prosperity in general. And there were some Jews who were able, living across Europe, to participate in that progress. And so some Jews, not all, but some Jews became better educated. They increased their economic status. Some of them got important positions in government. And among those who were more educated and higher up in social status, they began to be affected by enlightenment thinking. And instead of depending upon a divine source to give them answers and guidance, they began to look to human sources for guidance and for answers.

5. Persecution of Jews in Russia and Germany

But not all Jews prospered during the 1800s. There were still many Jews who lived in just terrible situations, in poverty. And there were still occasions where Jews in the 1800s were persecuted. And there were two places where persecution of Jews would flare up. Russia and Germany.

And usually it’s because of some crisis in the community, some economic crisis, maybe some kind of bank collapse or something like that would happen, and people looked for a scapegoat. And they would blame Jews. And so, even though some Jews were advanced.