Israel Desk – July 2020

• Annexation on hold?
• Jews Worldwide Now Moving to Israel
• LGBT 'new normal' - a danger to Israel?

Annexation on hold?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his fellow Likud party members that planned to annex strategic parts of the West Bank beginning on July 1. Netanyahu’s planned initially to annex the Jordan Valley area, but now it looks like he is considering annexing Israeli settlements in the West Bank / Judea-Samaria as well. An opinion poll put 42% of Israelis approving such a plan in some form, 28% against and 30% ‘don’t knows.’ In the event nothing happened on July 1, and it looks like the project may be on hold for the moment, although it certainly has not been ruled out.

The Palestinians, with international backing, seek the entire West Bank as the heartland of a future independent state. Annexing large chunks of this territory would all but destroy their remaining hopes of achieving this. Many analysts speculate the move could result in a violent Palestinian uprising. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Abbas announced in Ramallah that he was nullifying all past agreements signed between the PA and Israel and suspending security cooperation between his forces and the IDF. The official PA newspaper ‘Al Hayat’ warned on June 21st of a coming violent struggle ‘because our people will not agree to the annexation of one centimetre of its land’. Jordanian King Abdullah also warned of a “massive conflict” in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel and appealed to European countries and the international community to prevent the move by Israel.

Israel is most worried about Iran, which IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi described as the most dangerous country in the Middle East. He said “It’s made significant progress with its nuclear program, but the nuclear threat is no longer the only threat. Iran also possesses conventional weapons.” Israel has admitted to hundreds of airstrikes as part of its “war-between-wars” campaign to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the entrenchment of Iranian forces in Syria from where they could easily act against Israel. 

With more active and explosive fronts on Israel’s borders, with enemy arsenals turning groups like Hezbollah in terror armies, the guiding principle for the IDF’s Momentum multi-year plan is to win any future war as quickly as possible. Hezbollah’s Nasrallah warned that any Israeli attack on Lebanon would be met with “the great war that will open all fronts at once,” saying that it would be “the end of Israel.”

Turkey has also become involved declaring that Israel’s plan to extend its sovereignty to the Jordan Valley, and parts of Judea and Samaria, will “destroy all hopes” for lasting peace in the Middle East.  “If the occupying power [Israel] crosses the red line, we [Muslim countries] must show that this will have consequences,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said during a special meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Executive Committee, according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. In the past people in Turkey close to President Erdogan have spoken of gathering together an Islamic army from the OIC to attack Israel.

It appears that Netanyahu is determined to move forward with his annexation programme, and it also appears that Israel’s neighbours are prepared to respond forcefully. If he does go ahead with it the Middle East could erupt again. If so this will add one more calamity to 2020’s list of end time events.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. And read Ezekiel 38-9, Zechariah 12-14. 

Jews Worldwide Now Moving to Israel.

The latest forecast from Jerusalem says that Israel is expecting 90,000 Jews from the diaspora to emigrate to Israel by the end of 2021. The process of Jewish people worldwide naturalising in Israel is called ‘Aliyah’. Aliyah Integration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata said on Wednesday that the latest estimates reveal that 90,000 Jews worldwide (Olim) will move to Israel from around the world in the next 18 months according to reports in the Jerusalem Post.

Meanwhile, Nefesh b’Nefesh, a non-profit organization that facilitates the Aliyah process, reported that more American Jews applied to immigrate to Israel or inquired about it in May than in any single month over the last two decades. The organization experienced nearly double the amount of Aliyah applications in May 2020 than in the same month last year. More than 800 households applied to make Aliyah online, compared to just 424 in May 2019.

The Jewish Orthodox website ‘Breaking Israel News’ claims a fulfilment of prophecy from the book of Jeremiah is now taking place. ‘And there is hope for your future —declares the Lord: Your children shall return to their country.’ (Jeremiah 31:13).

What’s causing the sudden surge? “With the combination of corona, financial instability, widespread unrest and antisemitism, Jews are shaken to their core for the first time and are looking for alternative places to live” says Josh Wander, founder of the ‘Bring them Home’ organization which educates Jews on the spiritual importance of making Aliyah. ‘What better place to live than their ancestral homeland in Israel? Echoing Wander’s sentiments, spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron Rabbbi Yishai Fleisher released an “invitation” for Jews worldwide to move back to Israel hinting that the comfort they enjoyed in America could be coming to an end.

LGBT ‘new normal’ – a danger to Israel?

Under Israeli law marriages in Israel are performed only through religious institutions. Jewish couples must marry through the Chief Rabbinate, whereas Catholics, Druze and Muslims all marry through their own state-sanctioned and publicly funded religious legal systems. This has created a problem for Jewish believers in Jesus who wish to be married in their Messianic congregations, but may not be legally married there because they are not recognised by the Rabbinate. It also creates a problem for homosexuals wishing to have civil partnerships or marriages legally recognised.

The Tel Aviv Municipality has challenged the government by announcing recognition of ‘civil partnerships’, which will allow couples to declare their relationship, and to enjoy all the benefits provided to married couples by the municipality. Any couple will be able to register in the couples registry, including LGBTQ couples; couples of different religions, who cannot marry according to state laws; and secular couples who don’t want to marry in the rabbinate. “In honour of gay pride week, we decided to challenge the government and enable partnership registration based on a declaration,” said Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai.

The move by the Tel Aviv authority is part of a general move by the liberal left in Israel to change the values of society to accept ‘the new normal.’ In an article in Israel Today on ‘Transgenderism and the new normal in Israeli society’ Tsvi Sadan, shows how the radical agenda at work in the USA for a ‘new normal’ is now at work in Israel also. He says this is aimed not only at ‘the eradication of racism: ‘It means the eradication of all forms of “bigotry and unequal treatment” and all forms of sexism. This hides a much broader agenda that also includes turning upside down the “old normal,” which among other things spoke about sexes instead of gender, of human beings instead of species and generally accepted hetero-sexual marriage as the normal way of expressing human sexuality. And it looks as if that normal, which from the dawn of history has preserved human societies from extinction, will soon become illegal.’

He writes, ‘The new normal owes much to Jews who have been at the leading edge of social and political changes since Baruch Spinoza’s “biblical criticism” that ended up with “the death of God.” Jews were on the cutting edge of the Communist revolution, and they were on the cutting edge of the Feminist revolution, and they are now marching with the vanguard that is breaking down the remaining barricades erected by the old normal.

And since many Jews are living in Israel, it is not surprising that Israel itself is fast becoming the vanguard of this new normal, that if allowed to become the normal will break the Jewish nation into nine million individual pieces and dissolve Jewish identity altogether. By design or not, the new normal therefore means the demise of Israel, the Jewish people and ultimately to the downfall of the world, if one takes the Bible and history seriously.’

He goes on to show how the left wing daily ‘Haaretz’ and Channel 12 news are teaming up to promote new kinds of social “heroes” for the new normal:

‘They celebrated the 11 most influential Israeli LGTBQ figures for 2020. Among those highlighted was Rina Nudelman, described by the official Israeli LGBTQ Facebook page as “a 9-year-old transgender girl with a courage most of us have much to learn from…presented in a Haaretz article where she told about her life, the gender transformation process she went through, and her acceptance by her immediate social circle.” A transgender clinic at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital has gone from treating just three children in 2013 to treating 200 today, the youngest being just four-and-a-half. 

Tsvi Sadan concludes his article: ‘Under the old normal what happens next would be considered child abuse. Children who wish to change sex are subjected to horrendous abuse in the form of medical-hormonal intervention. This intervention makes the immature decision of these children into an irreversible fact. If “she” continues on this path, by the time Rina reaches the age of 18, she’ll no longer be free to choose her own gender, which will be fixed for good in the name of the new normal. Turning 9-year-old Rina into a social hero in an effort to manipulate Israelis to accept the new normal means that Israeli society will disintegrate into millions of sexual identities. This is bad enough without external enemies, and downright suicidal in a country that’s surrounded by enemies waiting for any opportunity to destroy it.’

‘Allowing this new normal to become Israel’s normal, therefore, becomes an existential threat. This is particularly true given that Israel’s enemies refuse to be stupefied by the vapour of the new normal, and therefore see it for what it is – the solvent that will dissolve the hopes and values that so far have enabled Israel to be unbeatable.’

Information from Israel Today.