Some American Christian fundamentalists fervently believe and even hope we are living in End Times and that the second coming of Jesus is nearly upon us and will come in the context of the coming battle of Armageddon, believed to be located at Megiddo. All this was recently described in a TV documentary entitled “Praying for Armageddon”, available on YouTube.
They may be a tad disappointed that their political idol, Donald Trump, is now claiming to have brought lasting peace to the Middle East and that Binyamin Netanyahu is nominating Trump for the Nobel peace prize.
It now appears the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz is proposing the Israel Defense Forces will herd all the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip into a camp erected on the site of the ruined city of Rafah at the southern end of the strip, and that they will designate that camp as a “humanitarian city” with no right of exit except by migration to foreign states. Those entering the ghetto camp will be vetted to make sure they are not Hamas activists (in which case they will be dealt with elsewhere).
But the rest of the Gaza Strip will be made Arab-free (with the possible exception perhaps of richer Gulf Arabs who may choose to holiday briefly on the “new riviera” envisaged by Trump, Jared Kushner and the Israeli government, for the rest of Gaza).
READ MORE
Netanyahu openly claims to be in negotiation for the mass clearance of Gaza to neighbouring Arab states; Trump predicts that ‘good things’ will happen in that context
Hand in hand with the ghettoisation of the Arabs in Gaza, the Israeli government is intent on annexing the occupied territories of the West Bank. Increasing pressure on the West Bank’s Palestinian population involves mass displacement of the Arab population. The United Nations reported in June about the extent of this displacement. Forty thousand Palestinians have been displaced from long-established refugee camps in the northern West Bank including Tulkarem and Jenin, and more than 6,000 have had their homes demolished in reprisal actions (a martial law tactic practised and perfected in Ireland by the British in the Irish War of Independence and bequeathed to the Israelis in the aftermath of the ending of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948).
[ Ireland has a proud history of opposing anti-SemitismOpens in new window ]
The latest accelerated Israeli clearance involves removing forcibly the Palestinian population of 1,200 from a chunk of the West Bank known as Masafer Yatta, to create a new military firing range area of 32 square kilometres in the occupied territories.
The Israeli-American plan seems to be nakedly intended to kill off any hope of a two-state solution by the deportation of the population of Gaza. Netanyahu claims the two allies are progressing negotiations with unnamed Arab states to receive the Gazans as migrants from the planned “humanitarian city” at ruined Rafah.
Netanyahu openly claims to be in negotiation for the mass clearance of Gaza to neighbouring Arab states; Trump predicts that “good things” will happen in that context.
At the moment, about six million Arabs live between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. That is demographically unmanageable for the 7.2 million Israeli Jews (including 500,000 West Bank settlers).
By deporting two million Palestinian Arabs from Gaza, and making preparations for ethnically cleansing most of the West Bank, the land described as Greater Israel including Gaza, Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) could all be kept as a majority Jewish state – even in the face of greater fertility rates among its Arab population. That appears to be the US-Israeli long-term strategy – the lasting peace for which the Israelis propose Trump as a Nobel Prize winner.
All this flouts all notions of international law. All this amounts to a programme of war crimes. All this is happening before our eyes.
But what, you ask, about the unforgivable Hamas atrocities of October 7th, 2023? They were and are atrocities. They were and are unforgivable. Hamas, so carefully, consistently and cynically nurtured by right-wing Israeli politicians as an “asset” to weaken the West Bank Palestinian administration’s claim for statehood, does not deserve to survive. Its ideology is poisonous; its agenda is criminal – annihilation of Israel. These alone demand its deposition.
But none of that justifies what has been done – or is planned to be done – to millions of innocent civilian women and children in Gaza and the West Bank. October 7th, 2023, did not justify two years of slaughter. Fifty-seven thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been slaughtered. And unless the two million survivors in the Gaza Strip are now forcibly displaced and deported, Israel apparently has no answer.
In Biblical terms, are we not now back to the absurd notion of the divinely justified and ordained genocide of men, women and children described in the Book of Joshua at chapters six to 11, and the mass exile of entire peoples?
Forget fundamentalism. Is enlightened Christianity preaching love or Armageddon?
