Below is an e-mail from David Dolan:

 

SHALOM FROM JERUSA LE M ,

 

I have been receiving requests to comment on this week’s massive upheaval in the Gaza Strip, now also affecting areas around Jerusalem .  I will be submitting a commentary to World Net Daily on this topic, and discussing it at 1:00 PM EST , or 17:00 GMT today on Jimmy De young’s Prophecy Today radio program, http://jimmydeyoung.gospelcom.net/pp/index.php and also this coming Monday on Moody Radio’s Prime Time America program.  But meantime, the main thing I can say is that it signals far more regional trouble ahead—possibly including the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan—and drives the final coffin nail into the imaginary Western-backed Oslo peace process, which was based on the naïve proposition that Arab populations, especially the Palestinians, but later also the Iraqis, are ready for stable, Western style democracy. 

 

The brutal, bloody Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip this week also portends another round of armed attacks upon Israel from Iranian-back forces, including Hamas, Hizbullah and this time probably also Syria .  It is also another serious blow to US foreign policy in the region, which has been off course in my estimation ever since President Bill Clinton pushed a skeptical Yitzhak Rabin to shake hands with the weak Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993, followed by the Bush Administration’s post 9/11 strategic error to widen the justified war against Taliban forces in Afghanistan with an attack upon Saddam Hussein, which could only predictably bring a Shiite-dominated government to that country.  This in turn would predictably further embolden the region’s main threatening Muslim actor, Shiite Iran, and all of its allies, especially Hamas , Syria , and Hizbullah, the Iranian-Syrian puppet Lebanese Shiite force. 

 

I was actually taking a short break on a Tel Aviv beach on Thursday when the main fighting was going on in the nearby Gaza Strip.  I had not heard the news that day, since my radio became the victim of a sudden wave the evening before that thoroughly soaked it (and me) in salt water.  But all day long I could hear something eerily familiar to me—the sound of distant booms signaling major military activity.  It was a sound I frequently heard while living along the Israel i border with war-torn Lebanon in the early 1980s.  I only had my suspicions confirmed later that evening when I was finally able to hear the news on another radio—the distant rumblings were coming from the trauma unfolding in the Gaza Strip, located just 35 miles south of Israel ’s main urban center. 

 

So now we have an Islamic fundamentalist state, Hamastan, backed by Syria and Iran, not far from Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion airport, and Jerusalem.  

 

The sad, disturbing fact is that a majority of Palestinians around Jerusalem also support the radical, banal thugs, as the Palestinian elections showed in early 2006, followed by municipal elections in several cities, and recent opinion polls also demonstrate, meaning the struggle could easily spill over to those areas as well. This in my opinion is clearly Iran ’s hope and intention.  Of course, the Israel i government and military are well aware of this ominous prospect, which partly explains why a new, more experienced Israel i Defense Minister was quickly installed this week—the former army general and former prime minister, Ehud Barak.  Whether he can focus on the explosive crisis instead of trying to undermine the other Ehud—current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—remains to be seen.

 

As some of you know, I was the first Israel -based journalist to focus on what was then a new offshoot of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood, called Hamas.  I did that in my first book, HOLY WAR FOR THE PROMISED LAND, which I began writing just one month after the group was formed in August 1988.  I devoted over seven pages to the extremist group in the first edition, published by Thomas Nelson in January 1991 (the most recent edition is by Broadman & Holman).  

 

Reporting on the first Palestinian uprising that began in December 1987, I began the section on the top of page 169 with the subtitle “ISLAM LE ADS THE REVOT.”  That was followed two pages later by a five page examination of the new Hamas founding charter under the subtitle “AN ISLAMIC COVENANT.”  Then I noted that Hamas represented the true “WILL OF THE PEOP LE ” in my estimation, predicting that PLO chairman Yasser Arafat would not in the end be able to thwart the Iranian-inspired threat that Hamas would eventually pose to his declared intentions to lead his people to a two-state peace solution with Israel .  All that has sadly proved to be correct, as the radical group began blowing up Israel i buses, and thus wrecking the Oslo process, in April 1994, leading to its total collapse in the summer of 2000. 

 

I was heavily criticized by several well-known media colleagues here in Israel for focusing so much attention on Hamas, and especially for predicting that they would be able to crush any peace accord between Israel and the PLO, with the help of Iran and Syria .  Although some of them have won major media prizes over the years, which I have not, they totally missed the mark on this one.  I do not claim this was due to much greater insight on my part.  It was mainly because I took the growing fundamentalist Muslim convictions of the Palestinian people—partly inspired by the Khomeini Islamic revolution—far more seriously than most of my colleagues did.  This was mainly because, unlike most of them, I am a person of strong personal (albeit Christian) faith, and so better understand its potential power in the lives of true believers, for good or evil. 

 

I have been asked by dozens of people over the past couple years if I had read a very popular, award winning novel written by an acquaintance of mine and published in 2005, which I will leave unnamed.  Due mainly to the constant news and current events reading I must do to keep up with the rapidly changing Middle East, I had not done so until this week!  I was just sent a copy in the mail last week, and so was reading the novel while listening on a Tel Aviv beach to the distant blasts coming from the Hamas takeover of Gaza . 

 

I can only say how ironic it was to read the scenario of a durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians, based on the discovery and development of giant oil reserves off of the Israel -Gaza coast, while listening to the distant thunder of the collapsing Palestinian Authority along that same coast!  The novel also postulated a stable, prosperous Iraq —sadly anything but a reality, which in my estimation was predictably the case even before US and British forces entered the country in 2003.

 

Anyway, it is a well written and fast paced novel, so I enjoyed the read despite thinking that those particular aspects were further evidence of a typical world view prevalent in America, even after the 9/11 attacks.  Neither the Palestinians or Iraqis, nor any other regional Arab people group, are even remotely ready for western style democracy in my on-scene estimation.  If we insist that they have a fully “free” vote—as the State Department and others did in 2005, imploring Israel i leaders to allow Hamas to run in the January 2006 PA elections since that was “true democracy,” despite the fact that the elections were set up as part of an Israel -Palestinian peace accord that Hamas totally opposed—radical Muslim groups backed by Iran and Al Qaida will only use such votes as a further tool in their aspirations to strike down all pro-Western regional governments, including in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and of course in Israel .  And if the nations insist that Israel i leaders hand over more territory to her determined enemies, such land will only be used to launch further assaults against the only functional democracy in the turbulent Middle East . 

 

So let’s try to better understand actual regional realities and not dwell in grand fantasies, which can be quite deadly in the end.  Meanwhile please pray for the many innocent Arab victims of this latest chapter in the Islamic jihad war to take back the biblical Promised Land, especially the Gaza Strip’s small Christian community, whose lives are now well and truly in harm’s way.

 

 

  http://www.ddolan.com/