For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
-Hebrews 4:12
(Standard KJV, this one time)
At this point in time, the "peace process" is moving ahead in Israel. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres is hatching out the details of passing sovereignty over to the Palestinians with Yasser Arafat. Who is Yasser Arafat and what is he about, for our purposes? This is a man who represents the Palestinian people. He does not claim to represent them specifically as Moslems, because there are Christian Palestinians, and to this end he has been known to carry the Bible and the Qur'an. What is his agenda in dealing with the Israelis? Let's take a look at a telling exchange during the peace negotiations. The Palestinian leader, with an eye to autonomy in the Gaza Strip on Israel's western border and on the West Bank of the Jordan River, on Israel's eastern border, wanted to ensure that the initial negotiation would not stop at Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, so Jericho was worked in. This excerpt is from Battling For Peace by Shimon Peres (1995, Random House, NY, pp 286-287):
In Oslo in May [1993], Abu Ala'a [Palestinian representative with whom initial contacts were made in Norway] suggested that a joint Israeli-Palestinian police force could patrol the Allenby Bridge [over the Jordan River linking the West Bank with Jordan], adding that "real control" of the bridge would stay in Israel's hands. My initial instruction to Uri Savir was to reject the whole Jericho idea since I felt I must first coordinate our position fully and clearly with [Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin. Savir, in his report, stressed the major importance of the idea for the Palestinians. Their internal opposition, he reported, was gnawing at Arafat with the skeptical assertion that "Gaza first" would become "Gaza first and last."
Arafat himself was to make this same point to Johan Holst when the two men met in Tunis in July, at a critical and delicate stage of the negotiations. Gaza, the PLO leader observed, has no religious significance for the Israelis. To withdraw solely from Gaza would be construed, he said, as signifying that Israel intended to hold on to all the areas that do have religious significance for Judaism- in other words, the entire West Bank [italics his]. Holst felt that what Arafat was saying was that even if the true import of "Gaza first" was not "Gaza first and last," the PLO chairman would find it impossible to convince his people of that. "He would be confronted," Holst advised me, "with an impossible sales problem."
Obviously, the very existence of the Palestinian entity is at variance with the promise of the land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The current sticking point is no longer Jericho, it now (September 1995) is Hebron, where Isaac, Sarah, Rebekah, Abraham, Leah and Israel were buried. We all know about the terrible incident at the Mosque in Hebron by an expatriated American Jew. That event fueled all of the Palestinians' fears and suspicions and provided all the justification which Hamas and other currently working terrorist groups need to continue wreaking havoc on Israeli citizens, and they are certainly taking advantage of it- terrorist activity in Israel is on an upswing and has been so since before the Hebron massacre- it began right after the signing of the treaty in Washington in September 1993- fires were set at Jewish sites in New York City, and an attack came in Argentina within the first weeks. Attacks by Hamas and other militants have claimed 130 Jewish lives in Israel to date, many more than were massacred in Hebron. Being Jewish is definitely dangerous to one's health in this century. I hope my Christianity is not seen as a disguise- my mother is Jewish and that makes me Jewish by blood. The debate over Who is a Jew? is a joke as far as I'm concerned: being a Jew means you would have been murdered by the Nazis and any other definition is beside the point. So what's the significance of all this?