theTrumpet.com

In his Cairo speech last week, President Obama said the historic bond between the U.S. and Israel was based on Jewish aspirations for a homeland that were “rooted” in the tragedy of the Holocaust. In fact, Jewish aspirations for statehood not only predate the Adolf Hitler era, they predate the Zionist movement.

In 1879, ten years before Adolf Hitler was even born and nearly two decades before Theodore Herzl published The Jewish State, the venerable New York Times made this prediction: “So much has been said for generations of the Jews regaining possession of Jerusalem that it is agreeable to think that they are likely to do so at last. They certainly deserve Jerusalem” (emphasis mine throughout). Much had been said, of course, because of the Jews’ millennia-old roots that run through Jerusalem and the surrounding hills of Judea and Samaria.

Palestinians, of course, have reinvented this history, claiming the Jews are without legal or historic right to their homeland and that modern-day Israel exists only because of the guilt left hanging over Europe after the Holocaust.

Last week, the president of the United States legitimized this bit of Arab propaganda.

And in the very same speech, he delegitimized the “natural growth” of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Jerusalem suburbs, by demanding, “It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Even Democrats on Capitol Hill were alarmed. “I do not support a settlement freeze that calls on Israeli families not to grow, get married, or forces them to throw away their grandparents. Telling people not to have children is unthinkable and inhumane,” said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, a New York Democrat.

Charles Krauthammer, who made a similar point in his column last week, also noted how farcical it was to blame the moribund peace process on settlement growth.

Nine years ago, President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 94 percent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and unrestricted control of the Temple Mount. Added to that, in exchange for the most densely populated Jewish settlements, Barak offered a land swap that amounted to about half the territory Israel would retain to keep its largest settlements intact.

In swift response to the generous offer, Nobel Prize winner Yasser Arafat unleashed a bloody five-year campaign of rockets, sniper fire and suicide bombings aimed primarily at civilians. The second intifada resulted in the murder of more than 1,000 Jews.

In response to a particularly bloody month in 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield into Judea and Samaria and later constructed a 465-mile fence to separate the West Bank from Israel proper.

Last year, largely relying upon the boundaries established by the security fence, lame duck Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians 93 percent of the West Bank, a one-for-one land swap for the larger Jewish settlements, including territory adjacent to the Gaza Strip and a checkpoint-free passageway connecting the Strip to the West Bank, a luxury Palestinians never had even before 1967.

Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman called the Israeli proposal a “waste of time” and said it demonstrated a “lack of seriousness” on Israel’s part. But in comparing the most recent offer with the Camp David proposal in 2000, the landmass offered to Palestinians was actually a bit larger this time around, even after a decade of natural growth in Israeli settlements.

Clearly, then, it’s not settlement activity that’s obstructing the process for peace. It’s the presence of Jews. As Abbas’s spokesman told the Palestine News Agency, “The Palestinian side will only accept a Palestinian state with territorial continuity, with holy Jerusalem as its capital, without settlements, and on the June 4, 1967, boundaries”—meaning hundreds of thousands of Jews would have to be removed from Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.

Even then, assuming Israel would ever agree to a massive evacuation that would dwarf the Gaza pullout of 2005, it’s difficult to imagine Fatah accepting such an offer, given its stubborn refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Then there is Hamas, which grabbed hold of Gaza less than two years after Israel completely evacuated all of its settlements, and remains adamantly opposed to any Palestinian state coexisting with Israel as its next-door neighbor.

Hamas and Fatah, if truth be told, remain steadfast in their aspirations for a homeland that includes all of “Palestine”—from the banks of the Jordan River to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea—being ethnically cleansed of any Jewish presence.

Which brings us back to President Obama’s unreasonable demand for Israel to freeze settlement growth. Of all the “road map” issues that need settling before the establishment of a Palestinian state, why would the United States now elevate the marginal issue of settlement growth to the top of its Middle East peace agenda? Calling for a settlement freeze only applies intense pressure on an already fractured relationship between Washington and Jerusalem.

This, as several commentators have noted, is exactly what the new American government wants. In creating this crisis, Stratfor explains, Obama wins no matter what Israel’s response might be. “If Netanyahu gives in, then [Obama] has established the principle that the United States can demand concessions from a Likud-controlled government in Israel and get them” (June 8).

And if Netanyahu doesn’t give in, which is much more likely when viewing the collision from a prophetic standpoint, Obama can drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel and then “use that split as a lever with Islamic states,” Stratfor notes.

The United States, in other words, is renouncing its special relationship with Israel in order to boost its standing in the Muslim world.

We’ve been predicting this U.S.-Israeli division for many years, thanks to two specific prophecies found in Hosea 5:13 and Zechariah 11:14. In the latter verse, God said He would “break the brotherhood between Judah [modern-day Israel] and Israel [primarily the United States and Britain].”

This is why in Hosea, God says that Judah, after being mortally wounded by the peace process, would seek help from Germany, rather than the United States.

President Obama went to Cairo last week in search of a “new beginning” in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. In doing so, the U.S. effectively ended its brotherly friendship and strategically critical alliance with Israel.

That “unbreakable” bond between America and Israel, the president’s assurances notwithstanding, is now broken. •