The Book of Esther

An Ancient Evil – Anti-Semitism in Persia

 

I just returned from Washington, DC.  I was there for the AIPAC Conference (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which is one of the strongest lobbying organizations in Washington – I think maybe only the NRA is probably larger.  On Tuesday of the week that the event begins, from 8-10,000 delegates from the AIPAC Conference descend on Capitol Hill to lobby their congressmen for specific legislation in relation to supporting Israel.  It is a bipartisan operation, although AIPAC probably leans to the right.  They always have for every Republican speaker there is a Democrat speaker, so you get quite an interesting spectrum.  President Obama spoke last Sunday morning and preceding him was President of Israel, Shimon Peres.  You can go to www.aipac.org for a lot of good information.

 

It was there I was introduced to Rep. Louie Gohmert from the first congressional district in Texas which is basically east Dallas, down through Nacogdoches and Lufkin.  He was the first Republican to hold that seat since Reconstruction.  I told him about our Chafer Seminary Bible Conference, which was going to be on a Christian’s responsibility in a nation.  He will be here next Sunday morning to help kick off the conference.  He was born in Tyler, is a year younger than I am, went to Texas A&M and then Baylor.  He served in the Army JAG Corps, has served as a judge in Texas, and is now in the US Congress.  He also loves to speak at Texas churches.

 

We are going to do a run-through in the book of Esther because coincidentally according to the Jewish calendar, starting at sundown last night, the Jewish people observe a feast called the Feast of Purim.  The Feast of Purim is a secondary feast – not a biblical feast or a biblically-mandated feast – that comes out of events that occurred in the book of Esther.  It is a reminder for the Jews that God provided and protected them during the time of Esther.

 

The time period for the book of Esther is in the middle to early part of the 5^th century BC.  We don’t know precisely the time period or the date, but it is around 480 BC.  The name of this feast day, Purim, is from the Hebrew or Aramaic word pur, which refers to the casting of lots.  Historically, this occurs during the time when the Persian Empire is in its ascendancy under King Xerxes, who was know as Ahasuerus in the book of Esther. 

 

The empire of Persia extended all the way from Thrace (Northern Greece), across Turkey, along the eastern Mediterranean down to Egypt, all across what is now Syria, Iraq, Iran and over to Afghanistan, almost to India.  The Persian Empire had defeated the previous Babylonian Empire and would in turn be defeated by Alexander the Great.

 

If you remember from your biblical history, in 586 BC the Jewish people were defeated by the Babylonians, and Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and the temple.  Many of the Jews were taken as captives and deported from Judea.  The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been deported in 722 BC when they were defeated by the Assyrian Empire.  We have the stories of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, and others that occurred during the Babylonian captivity in the time of the neo-Chaldean empire.  When the Babylonians were defeated in approximately 538 BC under Cyrus who lead the Medes and the Persians against the Babylonians, that established the Persian Empire.  It was under Cyrus that the decree when out to allow the Jewish people to return to their historic homeland under Zerubbabel.  Approimxately 45,000 Jews returned with him back to Judea and began to rebuild the temple and to reestablish themselves in their national homeland.

 

Some Jews had been left in the land during this period of time, so there never has been a time in history including the modern period when there was not a remnant that lived in the land and were not at least 15-20,000 Jews left within the land that God had promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

There is a return to the land; they rebuild the temple and it is dedicated about 516.  You have at this time three basic concentrations of Jewish population:  1) One down in Egypt because after 586 BC, there was a group that went down with Jeremiah.  2) There was a main group in Babylon.  3) Then the group that returned to Judea.  There are also many Jews who are scattered throughout Persia, areas under Greek control, and throughout the Middle East known as the diaspora or the dispersion.

 

Biblically, theologically according to what Jesus talks about later, this is known as the times of the Gentiles.  It is the period of history covered by the visions and dreams that Nebuchadnezzar had.  He had the dream of the great statue that depicted the flow of history for the Gentile empire.  This is the time known prophetically from Old Testament Scripture when Gentile nations would dominate and control Jerusalem and Jewish politics.  That does not end until we believe the Messiah, Jesus Christ, returns at His second coming at the end of the tribulation period.

 

When we look at the books that are written in the postexilic period after the Babylonian exile, there are certain doctrinal themes that are emphasized for the comfort of God’s people.  In Nehemiah and Ezra, the focus is on those who returned and how provided for and protected them.  In Nehemiah, God protected them with the leadership of Nehemiah as they were being attacked by an early form of terrorists.  The Samaritans were a mixed breed population and developed during the time that the Jews were out of the land, not unlike the modern, so-called Palestinian people, who are just the descendants of not just Arabs but a mixed breed of people.  They are descendants of Serbians, Croats, Turks, Egyptians, and numerous other people, especially who are brought in as immigrant labor during the late 19^th century in the Ottoman Empire.  (If you do not have a good immigration policy and are not dealing with your migrant workers correctly, look at the kind of problem you have.)

 

That is who the Palestinians are.  They do not have an historic claim to the land; they are just the latest group of people, descendants from all these migrant workers from the late 19^th century and early 20^th century.  A lot of lies and myths have been built up around them.

 

Esther fits within this period of time and has a unique characteristic.  No other book has this characteristic – the name of God is not mentioned.  What is significant about that is because this really is indicative of the normative circumstance throughout the time of the Gentiles.  God is not revealing Himself – there are no theophanies or Christophanies that occur during the times of the Gentiles, aside from the period of time that Jesus was on the earth.  It is a time when there is no revelation, and God is not working overtly through His people.  But He is behind the scenes covertly protecting His people, specifically the Jewish people and the Christians.  He is guiding and directing through His invisible influence the affairs of history.

 

What we see in Esther is that no matter how dangerous things look, no matter how chaotic things look, no matter how extreme the threat appears; God is still in control.  That is the important message you take from this because we live in a time which is just a modern revival of this same period.  You have the ancient evil of anti-Semitism in Persia rearing its head again in the person of Ahmadinejad and the imams in Tehran, who want to have nuclear weapons and continue to voice threats against Israel.  They want to wipe the “Zionist entity” off the face of the earth.

 

This is a very real and very dangerous threat.  One of the more amusing lines that came out of the AIPAC Conference was when Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke on Monday night.  He came out after several other people had spoken and said, “I want to talk to you about, guess what – Iran.”  Everybody talked about Iran throughout the entire conference and what was going on.  Nobody could reveal anything that was top secret or classified.  Many people who spoke were experts in the field and working in various think tanks, but they gave a lot of information about what was transpiring and what the various options were.

It is a dire situation.  It is incredibly serious, and yet we have a president who does not give confidence to people.  I have been asked by a number of people how was the response?  That is really hard to judge for a couple of reasons.  Number one, you are in the midst of a crowd of approximately 13,000 people.  That is larger than most small towns in Texas.  As you know, most small towns in Texas are divided between conservatives and liberals and those who do not care.

 

We had a wide spectrum of folks, and it is very hard to tell how many people responded.  A lot of the people that I know were very skeptical of what our president said.  I think that has been backed up in recent events because yesterday the White House put out the press release information that based on the president’s desires and wishes, he wanted to fast track the provision of up-to-date weaponry to Israel, especially bunker busting bombs.  What got leaked today is that there is a condition attached to that.  The condition is that if Netanyahu will promise to postpone any attack on Iran until after the US presidential election.  I think Prime Minister Netanyahu is smart enough to recognize just what it is – it has been politicized by this president.  It shows that he really does not have Israel’s back despite what he says.

 

I was talking to one of the men in the leadership of the Houston AIPAC, and he said that he hoped people understand that the President is lying, that Leon Panetta is lying.  This administration comes out in public and gives out 5 things.  They keep touting that as a sign of support.  This is a pattern whether we are talking about oil or Israel or jobs.  He gives 5 things in public which they continue to tout and then goes into the back room and takes away 10 things and threatens with other negative consequences if it is revealed that he has taken these 10 things away.  He has not shown himself to be a serious, hardcore supporter of Israel.  He does not put his action where his mouth is.  But he has to talk this way because he has a huge support base in the American Jewish community, and he does not want to lose that.  If there is an attack prior to November and the presidential election, he will be forced, in order to maintain his political base, to support Israel in an attack against Iran.  But if he is reelected and that attack does not come until after the election, then he no longer has a political reason to support Israel – he can do whatever he wants to do and back away from it.

 

This is extremely serious for Israel and for the Jewish people because it is a genuine existential threat.  But it is not just for Israel and the Jewish people.  A nuclear Iran is a threat to every person on this planet because if they get nuclear weapons, they can easily be given to terrorist organizations, even if they are not Hamas, and Hezbollah will be emboldened, because they are backed by Iran, to do whatever it is they want to do.  This modern anti-Semitic threat is just a new manifestation of this ancient evil that comes up again and again.

 

Let me just review for you briefly what happens in the book of Esther.  The King Xerxes has this enormous party that went on for an extremely long period of time and was to celebrate his reign.  He has suffered a couple of defeats, so this is really building up his confidence again.  He has been defeated by the Greeks and is back home nursing his wounds.  This party goes on for probably six months or so, according to some extra-biblical information.

 

Then he calls for his wife Queen Vashti to come out.  According to Jewish tradition, he instructed her to come out unclothed before the audience.  The scripture does not say that, but it does indicate that whatever he asked her to do and how he wanted her to appear would have embarrassed her, so she refused to come according to Esther 1:12.  “Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command…”  The king was angry and banished her from the marriage and from the empire.  There is some tradition that says that she not only lost her crown but lost her life.  Jewish tradition says that she was executed.

 

Sometime after that, it is likely that Xerxes went back to Greece and had the battle of Salamis where he was defeated.  He then has this beauty contest.  They are looking for someone to replace the queen, and the one who is put forth is Esther, otherwise know by her Hebrew name Hadassah.  She has been raised by her cousin because she is an orphan.  Mordecai encourages her to go and be examined to see if she would be queen.  You see the hand of God working behind the scenes in all this.  At the same time, we are told at the end of Esther 2 that Mordecai, who would come outside of the kings’ gate, overheard some conspirators who wanted to assassinate the king.

 

That was a real problem in the Persian Empire.  There were several kings who were assassinated by court intrigues and replaced by servants.  When it talks about calling them servants, they would be upper level bureaucrats.  They were not just low level like you see in “Upstairs, Downstairs.”  These were not the downstairs scullery maids that were plotting.  They had tremendous power within the regime.

 

Mordecai tells Esther, who was by this time chosen queen, and she informs the King Xerxes in Mordecai’s name, based on Esther 2:22.  When they confirm this, they arrest and execute those who are part of the conspiracy.  All of this information is written down in the king’s chronicles and then forgotten.   But we see the hand of God working in this.

 

There is this individual Haman, who is promoted to fill this vacuum.  He becomes like a chief of staff for Xerxes, but he is an extremely jealous and vindictive individual and very vain and proud.  He wants everybody to bow and scrape whenever he is around.  The one person who refuses to pay him homage, according to Esther 3:5-6, is Mordecai.  Every time Haman comes into his presence, and Mordecai does not bow down and just ignores him, it makes him angrier and angrier.

 

By this time, he has devised a plot against Mordecai and the Jewish people.  In Esther 3:6-7, we read “But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone, for they had told him of the people of Mordecai.  Instead, Haman sought to destroy all the Jews who were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus – the people of Mordecai.  In the first month, which is the month of Nisan [spring time], in the twelfth year of King Ahasuerus, they cast Pur (that is, the lot) [where we get Purim], before Haman to determine the day and the month, until it fell on the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar.”

 

Then Haman goes in to talk to the king.  This is typical of all anti-Semitism.  We saw this with Hitler, we saw it in Europe in the 19^th century, we saw it in Russia under the czars and the pogroms.  There are always lies and outlandish charges of conspiracy against the Jewish people, such as a conspiracy to take over the world.  The only thing that truly explains why you have anti-Semitism – there are no other people on earth who have had such consistent, historical assault – is what the Bible says.  They are God’s chosen people, and there is an angel by the name of Satan or Lucifer, who seeks to destroy God’s people because if he can destroy God’s people, then he wins in this war against God.  He needs to prove that God is not powerful enough to keep His promises.  God has promised that the Jewish people will have a future kingdom, and that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will actually finally possess and enjoy the land that God promised them.

 

Satan wants to destroy the Jewish people to prove that God cannot truly be God, and only Satan can be God.  That is the only explanation.  It goes beyond what we observe empirically in history and through reason and can only be explained by God’s revelation of this war, which is what we have in the Scripture.

 

We see Haman coming to lie about the Jewish people.  Esther 3:8-9 “Then Haman said to King Ahasuerus, ‘There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from all other people’s, and they do not keep the king’s laws.  Therefore it is not fitting for the king to let them remain.  If it pleases the king, let a decree be written that they be destroyed, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver into the hands of those who do the work, to bring it into the king’s treasuries.”  There is that bribery: if you let me kill all the Jewish people, then we will confiscate all of their goods, all the wealth that they have accumulated, and I will put a huge amount of money into your treasury which will help to pay off the deficit from the war against the Greeks, which you lost.

              

The king did not ask any questions or say who are these people.  He just trusted Haman and let him have his way.  Then only later was it discovered who those people would be.  This is followed up in Es. 3:13 “And the letters were sent by couriers into all the king’s provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all the Jews , both young and old, little children and women, on one day, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their possessions.”  This is genocide – one of the first historic examples of an organized attempt to eradicate all of the Jewish people from the face of the earth. 

 

It is at this time that Mordecai is going to go to Esther because of her position and say this is why God has put you where you are so you can stand up for your people, although he does not use the name God.  One of the most significant statements made in the Scripture is Esther 4:14 “For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.  Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this.”  God will protect them whether Esther participates or not, but if she participates, she would get the glory, honor and privilege of being used by God to protect her people.

 

This is a verse that we should make a primary verse in terms of our Chafer Bible Conference (2012) coming up because for too long the evangelical community, which is firmly grounded on a Judeo-Christian ethic that has dominated western civilization (as we will learn from lectures from John Eidsmoe at the Conference) going back into the early Middle Ages (7^th-8^th centuries).  Christian missionaries took the Mosaic Law and the 10 Commandments into northern Europe, what is now Germany, France, England and that influenced the Celts, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Franks to change their laws.  [The 10 Commandments have more than 10 commandments; there are 14 imperatives.]

 

Historically, the evangelical community has been silent.  We have been busy living our lives and enjoying the prosperity and blessing that God has given this nation.  We are seeing that heritage, the foundation that produced this wealth and prosperity attacked and assaulted, and it is being eroded.  If it is God’s will for us to prosper and recover, then God will provide the solution some other way.  But we have this opportunity at such a time as this to be involved, and we need to be involved in the political process from the precinct level all the way up to national politics however we can.  Our voices need to be heard.

 

What happened as a result of Mordecai’s challenge is that Esther went through a fascinating strategy.  She decided to go in and invite Xerxes and Haman to a private banquet.  She ran a tremendous risk of her life by going into his presence.  Xerxes recognized her and allowed her to invite him and Haman back to her chambers for a private meal.  Haman was so impressed with himself that he was at this meal all by himself with the queen and the king.  He just knew he was in a position for tremendous reward.  Rather than springing the trap at that meeting and informing Xerxes about Haman’s plot, she was wise and invited them back for the next day.

 

That gave Haman time to get enough rope to hang himself as it turned out.  The next day his wife encouraged him to go in and present a plan to Xerxes to execute Mordecai because he was the source of all the ills in the kingdom.  Before he can get any of that out the next day, the king has been an insomniac that night and has been having the chronicles of his kingdom read to him.  He is reminded of Mordecai’s actions in saving his life.  He asks what was done to reward Mordecai?  The answer is nothing.  He is mulling this question over when Haman came into his presence the next day.  He asks Haman what he should do for someone who has protected the crown and done so many things for him.  Hama is so self-absorbed, he thinks the king is talking about him.

 

He says you need to have a great parade for him announcing all the things he has done and shower him with riches, power and prestige.  The king said that was a good idea, and Haman was to be the announcer and lead Mordecai through the streets of the city.  That just angered him even more.  When they went to dinner with Esther later on that day, Esther informs Xerxes of Haman’s plot to kill the Jews.  Everything comes back on Haman, and he is hanged on the gallows that he had built for Mordecai. 

 

We see God is in control.  Man comes up with all these plans.  You see Hitler, Ahmadinejab, the czars in Russia, and many others who have sought the destruction of the Jewish people.  But God has made a promise that He will fulfill, and He will protect them.  God has also promised that He will bless those who bless the Jewish people. 

 

That is the foundation for what is known as Christian Zionism and is not what a lot of people misrepresent it to be.  It is simply the belief on the part of Christians that the Jewish people have an historic, biblical, and legal right to the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a right to establish themselves as a nation, and a right to self-defense.  It does not mean that we approve of everything that is done by the Israeli government or approve who their politicians are and who gets elected.  That has nothing to do with it.  It simply means that we are going to support them and their right to exist and to have their enemies held to the same standards that they are held to.

 

We know the end of the story in Esther.  God protected the Jewish people.  Xerxes could not rescind the law because we know from our studies in Daniel, the laws of the Medes and the Persians could not be rescinded.  This is why Darius had to put Daniel in the lions’ den.  Xerxes came up with an alternative solution – there is always a wise way to work around things.  He said they would pass a decree that on the day that all the Jewish people were to be attacked and killed by the Persians, they would have the right to defend themselves and to take all their possessions.

 

What is interesting is that there were very few instances when the Jewish people had to defend themselves.  It was obvious here that the king had changed his mind and was now supporting the Jews.  But even in the instances where they had to protect themselves, they did not take advantage of the king’s law to confiscate the property and the wealth of those who had been their enemies and sought their harm.  It shows the integrity they had that they recognized that no matter what happens, the government does not have the right to enact legislation that takes money legitimately earned from one group of people and give it to someone else in order to bring about a leveling of responsibility, e.g., socialism.  As a result, the Jews had a great party celebrating God’s gracious provision and deliverance.

 

Esther 8:16-17 gives a conclusion that “the Jews had light and gladness, joy and honor.”  That is the focus of the Purim celebration – a time of happiness and joy, having a celebration.  This becomes the basis then for this annual feast of Purim that occurs at this time of year.  It is not a biblical feast and does not foreshadow anything in relation to the Messiah or the messianic kingdom but is a feast that is a reminder that God controls history and is the protector of the Jewish people, even though there are times in history when God has brought judgment upon the Jewish people for various reasons and purposes.  In the Old Testament we have a number of stories related to this:  the Syrian invasion in 722 and the Chaldean invasion.  Later on there were other things that occurred, for example under the Greeks with Antiochus Epiphanes.  Nevertheless, God protected them from the schemes of those who would annihilate them.

 

Today we have the revival of that ancient evil, not just in Iran but also in the world.  Ahmadinejab and the imans in Persia are the same group that brought us the American hostage crisis back in 1979 and 1980 when we had an arguably equal anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist president, who was one of the worst presidents this country ever had because of his weak policies.  We have the same thing going on today.  We have a president who gave off the signals of weakness towards the radical Islamic community from the very beginning of his administration, so now when he wants to talk tough, it is not taken seriously because it is not backed by anything substantive.

 

We have lies, myths, and distortions that continue to play in the world media and among many of the nations in the world about Israel.  There is so much misinformation and lies and myths that I want to go over a little bit of this.

 

Jose Saramago, a Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer, is now dead.  Harold Bloom, an American academic, said that Saramago is a permanent part of the Western canon.  But Saramago stated regarding Israel that “what is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz” accusing the Jewish people of doing to the Arabs in Palestine the same thing that the Nazis had done to them.

 

Jostein Gaarder, who is the author of Sophie’s World and a Norwegian intellectual stated “We call child murderers ‘child murderers’…  We do not recognize the state of Israel [right to exist].”

 

Clare Short, former minister in the Tony Blair government, the British Labor party, has made a number of outlandish statements.  For example, she said “The oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.”  All the problems in the world are the result of the Jews who do not let the Palestinians have their land!  She blames the Jews for all the ills in the world.  She also said, “Israel undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”  It is not just that they are for violence, but we cannot solve the global warming problem because the Jews will not get out of the land!  Also according to her, the Middle East conflict distracts the world from dealing with this real problem of man-made climate change [which you know is a myth anyway].  Thus, Israel’s crimes might contribute to the “end of the human race!”

 

Arun Ghandi, the grandson of India’s legendary leader Mahatma Gandhi, said regarding the Israel/Arab conflict, “We have created a culture of violence [by that he means Israel and the Jews are the biggest players] and that culture of violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.”

 

It is not just Gentiles who are making these kinds of outlandish statements about the Jews.  You also have a number of liberal Jews, who are referred to as self-hating Jews or self-loathing Jews and have this guilt complex about the fact that they have legally taken this land, purchased much of it, and been given it by right of international law.

 

You have writers like Yitzhak Laor, who is a regular contributor to one of the more liberal newspapers in Israel, Haaretz, and who said, “Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation.  It is enough to starve dozens of villages, to develop high rates of infant mortality.”  He is accusing Israel of this kind of activity towards the Arabs.

 

It does not fit the facts at all.  In fact, I have a friend, who is the head of the Jewish Studies department at Moody Bible Institute and whose son is fighting in the IDF now.  His son wrote back to him after five months in a special operations outfit serving down in the Sinai area and said that this was the most moral, ethical army in the history of humanity.  He said they would rather lose a company of their soldiers than do one thing that is in violation of any ethical principle towards our enemy.  We have, unfortunately, too many of these self-loathing Jews who are against that.

 

The Independent, a British newspaper, said, “They shoot at the Palestinians, straight at the head, on a daily basis.”

 

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, said, “Israel is threatening global peace.”

 

In Germany, the University of Bielefeld in a 2004 poll reveals that more than 50% of the Germans equate Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians with the Nazi treatment of the Jews.  68% of the Germans specifically believe that Israel is waging a “war of extermination” against the Palestinian people.

 

In Italy, close to 40% agreed with the statement that “the Israeli government is perpetrating a full-fledged genocide and is acting with the Palestinians the way the Nazis did with the Jews.”  This is what is put out in much of the world press.

 

In this slide, a BBC poll indicates a majority of people in the world believe that Israel has the most negative influence in the world.  This came out in 2008.  According to this chart, 54% of the people polled in the world have a mainly positive view of Canada and 14% have a negative view.  30% have a mainly positive view of the U.S. and 51% have a negative view.  17% of those polled have a mainly positive view of Israel and 56% have a negative view.

 

The survey was done again in 2011.  19% had positive view of Israel and 50% held negative views.  The world is anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist and has been influenced by the world press. 

 

There is indeed a genocide going on, but it is not the genocide of the Palestinian people.  Thousands of publications include the words “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” when they talk about the Israel/Arab problem.  Much fewer publications deal with the internal, continuing and much greater genocide, which is taking place in the Arab and/or Muslim world.  While intellectuals, journalists, and academics put all the blame on Israel, Muslims and Arabs kill mainly, and almost only, their fellow Muslims and Arabs.  The numbers are astonishing.

 

Algeria (1954–1962)                               400,000–1,000,000

Yemen Civil War (1962–1975)               100,000–150,000

Bangladesh (1971)                                 1,400,000–3,000,000

Chechnya Wars (1995, 1999)                 80,000–130,000

Sudan Genocide (Nuba 1983–2003)      1,900,000

Algeria Civil War                                     100,000–200,000

Iraq-Iran War (1980–1989)                      900,000–1,400,000

Somalia Civil war (since 1977)                400,000

Lebanon Civil War (1975–1990)             130,000

Afghanistan Wars (1979–2001)              2,500,000

Darfur Genocide (2003–2008)                200,000–400,000

Total                                                        12,000,000

 

We see on this next chart that there have been fewer than 8,000 Arab casualties during the time of the existence of the state of Israel and the so-called occupation of the West Bank.  You never hear about all these others; all you hear is whining and crying about the Palestinians.  It is sad and unfortunate for those people who died, but this is not the major event.  That is 8,000 over the last 64 years of the existence of the state of Israel.

 

Let’s understand this proportionally.  The number of Palestinians or Arabs who lived in Israel who were killed during more than 40 years of occupation (since 1967) is less than the number of Palestinians killed by King Hussein of Jordan in the Black September revolt in 1970.  He killed 10,000-25,000 of his own people.  The number of Palestinians killed in Israel was less than the 25,000 who were killed in the 1982 Hama massacre in Syria carried out against Muslims by Hafez al-Assad, father of the present ruler of Syria.  The number is less than the number of Bosnian Muslims killed in a single massacre perpetrated by Serbs in 1991 at Srebrenica, in which over 8,000 murders were committed.

 

Another lie has to do with the whole idea of ethnic cleansing.  The word nakba is a word the Arabs use to speak of that horrible day when Israel received their independence.  When you see the celebration among the Jewish people for Israel’s independence day in May, that is nakba.  Last year I was with a group called Bridge Houston, standing quietly at Westheimer and Post Oak in support of Israel.  We were quiet, laughing, and having a good time.  People on the opposite corner were screaming all kinds of nasty and profane epithets at us and making obscene hand gestures.  If anyone had any sense to watch the behavior of the two sides, they would understand the issues.

 

You have two agencies that the UN has for dealing with refugees.  One is the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) and the other is UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency).

 

The UNHCR is mandated to protect and support refugees all over the world and has been in existence since the end of World War 2.  They handle all refugees except one group – the so-called Palestinian refugees.  That comes under the responsibility of UNRWA.

 

UNHCR deals with every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.  UNRWA only deals with Palestinian refugees, who are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948…  At that time, it was not very many people.  Now it is 5 million. 

 

UNHCR helps people to get out of their refugee status.  UNRWA helps people preserve their status.

Under UNHCR, the status of refugee is not given to all offspring, so if they have children, they are not refugees.  UNRWA gives refugee status to the children of the so-called Palestinian Arabs.  Under UNHCR, refugee status is dependent on economic condition but not dependent on economic condition under UNRWA.

 

UNHCR has helped 50 million people restart their lives, and they are not refugees anymore.  According to the official numbers, 650,000 Arabs left Israel in 1948 with their war for independence.  950,000 registered themselves as refugees, so there is a little bit of discrepancy there.  Now there is almost 5 million Palestinian refugees, and their numbers increase.  This is part of the problem in solving the issue in the Middle East because the Palestinians keep insisting on the right of return for all these 5 million refugees to come back and live in the West Bank.  The Jews say not on your life.

 

650,000 Arabs left Israel.  We will compare these to other refugees.  In the Balkans with all the unrest there from 1912-1995, there were 7 million refugees.  In the war in Finland in 1941-1943, there were 600,000 refugees.  In 1948 in the India-Pakistan war, there were 14 million refugees.  In 1974 in Cyprus, there were 250,000.  In 1984-1994 Azerbaijan wars, there were over a million refugees.  There were a tremendous number of transfers in Europe after World War 2; about 20 million people were resettled and lived someplace differently.  This is part of world history.

 

At the time of the Israeli war for independence, there were 711,000 Arabs who left Israel mostly of their own volition to settle in Arab countries.  What we never hear about is the fact that all the Arab/Islamic  countries that surrounded Israel expelled 850,000 Jews, and these Jews were not allowed to take anything with them.  At least theoretically, the Palestinians that left Israel could take whatever they wanted to with them.

 

There is a big lie that goes on in all of this, and everybody succumbs to this.  If you are going to Israel with me this summer (2012), the foremost legal expert in the world who uncovered all this when he went through the British Library back in the late 1980s and resurrected all the legal documents related to the San Remo Resolution of 1920 is going to speak to us one night. 

 

This slide is a picture of the Ottoman territory, in what is now Israel, during the time of the Ottoman Empire before its breakup at the end of World War 1.  There is no country there called Palestine.  We have these sanjaks or administrative territories.  You had the Independent Sanjak of Jerusalem that covered part of the area of Samaria and Judea, the Sanjak of Nablus in the north in Galilee, north of that is the Sanjak of Acre on the east side of the Jordan River, the Sanjak of Haran and the Sanjak of Maan.  All of this was administered out of Damascus, which oversaw this area.  You do not see the name Palestine anywhere.

 

What happened at the end of World War 1 was with the defeat of the Germans and the Axis powers in Europe, the four victorious powers all came together at the Treaty of Versailles and were given the international authority to redraw and reestablish the borders of Europe.  But they did not have time to deal with reestablishing the borders in the Middle East with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, so that was put off until 1920 when the four great powers plus the U.S. as a witness came together in San Remo in Italy.

 

It was there that they did three things.  They redrew the borders of these different nations in the Middle East.  The San Remo Resolution established the borders for Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, what becomes part of the borders of the modern kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and Arabia.  The second thing the San Remo Resolution did was they incorporated verbatim every word in the Balfour Declaration, which up to that point was only a statement of British wishes and policy.  But once it was incorporated in the San Remo Resolution and was signed off on by more than 50 nations, it became international law.

 

The verbiage in San Remo was that all of the land west of the Jordan River was given to the Jewish people as a national homeland.  They were to protect the civil and religious rights of the indigenous population, but notice it did not say the political rights.  Only the Jewish people according to San Remo were given political rights in their historic homeland.  All of the other countries were given to the Arabs, but this little piece of real estate, which actually included all of the modern Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, was given to the Jewish people as their national homeland.

 

The French never could manage Syria very well, so in 1922 Abdullah, one of the Hashemites, was put in charge of Syria.  They revolted against him.  The British had promised him a kingdom if he would help them during World War 1, so much against all of his beliefs, Winston Churchill had to sign off on giving the territory east of the Jordan River to the Kingdom of Jordan.  That became the territory of the Trans-Jordan in 1922.  It was always referred to as the Trans-Jordan until 1948 when they captured territory which was supposed to be Israel’s on the west side, which became known as the West Bank.  That became part of the territory of Jordan.  It was not Palestine.  It was under the authority of the Kingdom of Jordan and was taken as the spoils of war.  No international countries recognized the right to rule, but they did.  From that point forward in 1948, it became known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan because it was not just across the Jordan anymore.

 

At that point, the armistice signing established what was known as the Green Line or the truce line.  It was never intended to be a border.  The Arabs insisted that it be put in writing that this would never be considered as a border.  Why?  They wanted all of Israel.  We have a president and other politicians and presidents who have not read the language of the 1948-49 armistice with Jordan.  So they keep wanting to go back to this Green Line, but the reality is that since the 1930s, the Western European powers and the United States have ignored and forgotten San Remo.

 

Every decision from the UN resolution in November 1947, to allow for the partition of the land, all the way up through the Oslo Accords and the agreements that Clinton tried to get Ehud Barak and Arafat to agree to in 2001 and up to the present has ignored international law.  My view is that if you are going to try to do anything, and you ignore what is agreed upon in international law, whatever you try to do is doomed to failure.  You may not like the law, but then you need to admit that that is the law and change it.  But the UN was not empowered with the ability to change San Remo.  Moving into the era of the UN after World War 2, in their charter, they were supposed to recognize and affirm all of the laws that were established under the League of Nations.  All of this discussion that we have today is illegal according to international law.

 

Israel has its hands full because all these green countries (on the slide) are the Arab countries.  That little red sliver is Israel.  The Arabs could have all that territory, but they want that little bit of land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

 

There are many other lies and myths that Israel is accused of, such as apartheid.  According to the International Criminal Court, apartheid is recognized as a “crime against humanity,” where there is official murder, extermination, enslavement, or deportation.  But in Israel, you have, for example, Omar Barghouti, an Arab getting his PhD at Tel Aviv University.  You have an Arab, Salim Joubran, sitting on the Israel Supreme Court.  You have a former Miss Israel, Rana Raslan, who is Arab.  You have soccer

players, actresses, many others who are Arabs and very successful in Israel.  You have Moshe Katsav, the 8^th president of Israel, was sentenced to seven years in jail by an Arab presiding judge.  This is not indicative of apartheid at all. 

 

According to the Israeli Democracy Index of 2011, 53% of Israeli Arabs are “proud to be Israelis.”  The Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 42% of Jerusalem Arabs say they would try to move to Israel if their neighborhood became part of a new Palestinian state.  They do not want to go live in an Arab neighborhood.

 

There is a tremendous recognition of human rights.  Recently with the flotilla that came down to Gaza a couple of years ago, after the UN had investigated, Richard Goldstone issued a report where he blamed the Israelis.  Somebody said, “What about the US Army; they have done much the same thing?” Goldstone said he had not investigated the US Army.  He came back later and said the US Army has gone to extremes to protect innocent civilians, but the Jews do not do that.  But then approximately a year ago in the Washington Post, he wrote an editorial and recanted the entire report.  He is a Jewish South African and blamed Israel for all these horrible things.  In his recantation, he said, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different report.”

 

Everybody is dependent on Israel for so much technology:

o  Cell phone technology, Intel chips

o  The  bandage that they developed that stops blood loss and prevents infection.  When there was a shooting last year in Tucson, one of the EMT guys applied it to Gabrielle Giffords’ head, and it was credited with saving her life.  All US servicemen carry it on the battlefield to protect them from wounds, and it saves their lives.

o  Tremendous technology in their desalinization plant

o  Unmanned aerial vehicles.  The Hunter can fly up to 52 hours as high as 35,000 feet.

o  MAX Pro vehicle which has all kinds of armament on it to protect US soldiers from IEDs.

o  Electric cars and a nationwide network of battery switching and car charging stations.  They want to be the first nation that is going to go all-electric with their cars.

o  Arrow Missile Defense System which allows a sort of intermediate range defense against incoming missiles. 

o  Iron Dome

 

We have to wake up the American people to the fact that this is not an issue between Israel and Iran.  This is an issue between the US, Western European civilization, and Iran, and the radicals who seek to destroy everything that we hold dear.  The question comes back to us is what are we going to do?  Are we going to keep silent or are we going to recognize that maybe God has given us an opportunity for such a time as this that we can get involved?  We need to be involved, and we need to communicate with congressmen, to be informed, to read.  The greatest thing that can benefit those who would destroy us is for us to be ignorant of what is actually going on.  We all have our lives to live and things we want to do, but if we lose our freedom, then what are we going to do?  It is not part of our tradition for pastors to be involved politically, but there are times like in the War of American Independence when pastors recognized they must lead the charge.  The reason is if pastors do not lead the charge, then in two or three years, pastors will be in prison, and nobody will be fed the Word of God.

 

There are times when we have to stop what we are doing in a normal day-to-day life in order to protect our freedoms and the freedom of the world, so that we can return to normality and continue to execute the objective that God has given us.  Unfortunately, there are always evil people who seek to destroy that.  The only thing that is necessary for evil to succeed is for us to do nothing.