Many of us have heard the rowdy chant in the streets of our capital cities in the last few weeks – “End the occupation!” The chant has gone up almost like a war cry as has the other chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Both chants have featured in what the media intentionally and falsely label “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations in our capitals. They are actually “anti-Israel” demonstrations when we understand what these chants actually mean.
“End the occupation. Free Palestine” actually refers to the current state of Israel being erased from the map altogether. It does not – and never has meant – that Israel withdraws from Gaza, or the West Bank. It means the absolute erasure of Jewish people from the whole of the Middle East. It has always meant that. In a live interview on Fox News today (Nov. 2nd, 2023, and the link is below for you to check out for yourself), senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, responds to a journalist’s questions by asserting that the current state of Israel itself is illegitimate, it is occupying “Palestinian land” and must be destroyed. The journalist, seeking clarification, asks, “Occupation where? In the Gaza strip?” To which Hamad replies, “No! I am talking about all the Palestinian lands!” Journalist: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?” Hamad: “Yes, of course! The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood and tears. It is Israel, not us – we are the victims of the occupation. Therefore, no one should blame us for the things we do - October 7th, October 10th, October one millionth, everything we do is justified. No one should blame us.”
Everything we do is justified?
The fact is, until ground forces moved into Gaza 2 weeks ago, Israel had not occupied it. Israel does occupy the West Bank region and has done since June 7th, 1967 having successfully defended itself from the simultaneous military attacks of seven Arab state belligerents, with later involvement by several others. By the end of that 6-day war, Israel had captured and occupied the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank (incl. East Jerusalem) from Jordan (which had annexed the West Bank for itself back in 1950, with virtually no protest from anyone else, by the way), and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, both from Egypt. The status of the West Bank, as a militarily occupied territory, has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice. That’s a fact, too. In fact, Jordan has never wanted it back since June 1967 when it signed a ceasefire agreement with Israel. The West Bank area was never part of the modern state of Israel. But when it was captured after counterattacking Jordan along with the other Arab states in the 1967 war, Israel maintained its occupation as a buffer zone between it and Jordan. It has resourced it with humanitarian services ever since.
Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula when a ceasefire agreement with Egypt was signed in June, 1967. In 2005, twenty-one Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip were unilaterally dismantled and Israeli settlers and the IDF evacuated from inside the Gaza Strip following a plan put forward in December, 2003, by Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Sharon saw no future in further actual occupation of Gaza following a relative peace after the 1973 Yom Kippur war (when Israel had again been simultaneously attacked – unprovoked - by several neighbouring Arab states). From then on the Palestinian Authority governed Gaza until 2007 when the terrorist group, Hamas, seized control in a bloody coup. Since then, Hamas as launched thousands of rockets into Israel every year – and this was never about occupation, but destroying the legitimate state of Israel.
With the exception of the western two thirds of the Golan Heights (captured in the 1967 war from Syria), the “occupation” by Israel then, is not by means of some illegal annexation of territories that do not belong to it. The reason for the continued occupation of the Golan following the 1967 war is because, unlike the other Arab states, Syria dismissed any peace negotiations with Israel as part of the Khartoum Resolution at the 1967 Arab League summit. The area has remained under Israeli military administration ever since. The continued occupation of the Golan has been described as an annexation by many including the UN which argued in Resolution 497 that “the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect". That may well be true, however, at the same time Israel maintains it has a right to retain the Golan, citing UN Resolution 242, which calls for “secure and recognised boundaries free from threats or acts of force” towards Israel. The UN has not done anything to broker a peace deal that would allow Israel to withdraw. It is near impossible to guarantee, anyway, with various jihadi terrorist groups (such as al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-affiliated Khalid ibn al-Walid Army) all proving more powerful in the area than the Syrian government. It has only been since July 2018 that the Syrian government has regained any semblance of control over the eastern Golan Heights – and that remains tenuous at best.
In the face of increasing violence in Palestine after World War II, the British handed the issue over to the recently established United Nations. The result was Resolution 181(II), a plan to partition Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish States, and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. To make a long story short, in May 1948, the modern state of Israel was created by the UN as a homeland for the Jewish peoples exiled for centuries from their ancient lands. The remaining territories of geographic Palestine were administered by the British for the Palestinian peoples (Gaza, West Bank etc.). The very day after modern Israel’s establishment, which meant the return of its traditional lands, Israel was attacked by four Arab states. Israel resisted and overcame.
It's a very long story, and this can only be a very brief outline here.
To get back to the point at the start, the chanting of “end the occupation” and, “Free Palestine” and “from the river to the sea”etc. is about the extermination of Israel as a state and the Jewish people - altogether. It is not about the West Bank or Gaza where Palestinian people now live, and it is not about the return of Palestinian lands that were never taken from the Palestinians anyway. That is a fiction. Prior to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and two world wars - decades before the new state of Israel - the internal “borders” of the Arab states in this Middle Eastern area were fluid. They were constantly moving as a result of internal war and conflict; hence the eventual involvement of the United Nations to sort it all out – which was never going to be an easy job. In short, Palestine has lost none of its lands to Israel in any real sense. Israel has not just summarily taken and “occupied” Palestinian lands apart from the results of self-defence in war and military jurisdiction according to the fourth Geneva Convention.
And so, those unthinking and ill-informed Australian supporters of the anti-Israel protests in our cities of late – especially of the green, woke, far left intelligentsia variety, including not a few federal and state politicians - who have jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon, are really shouting out what Ghazi Hamad has now publicly, officially and explicitly stated. Ending “the occupation and freeing Palestine” is propaganda for the annihilation of Israel by any means possible, including murder, rape, torture and terror of others. It is all “justified” because they are Jews. These chants as well as other obscenities like “gas the Jews” are most vile and incite the worst hatred towards other human beings I have ever seen, and every state’s laws and police forces have ample legal imperative to take action, yet they do not. Why? They are intimidated by leftist-woke politics which is aided and abetted by a more than willing media, much of which has so little integrity left that they are blatantly unwilling to correct the disinformation of Hamas (and others), even when presented with incontrovertible proof to the contrary.
This is how principalities and powers in the second heaven realm operate. They seek to influence and deceive people here on earth into a false righteousness stance where sheer evil can be justified in the pursuit of demonic agendas.
1 John 4:1 (NIV)
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
And many are being deceived. Pray for Israel. Pray for Palestine. Pray for principalities and powers in the second heaven realm to be bound and rendered powerless.
Pray into these things – it is the duty of the priests of God who have authority over the real enemy.
Ps Milton
[Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KteIlyTxVM; Wikipedia; Encyclopaedia Brittanica; “Hope of the World Ministries; Council on Foreign Relations website, “World 101”; A History of the Middle East: Fifth Edition (August 2013) by Peter Mansfield & Nicolas Pelham; The Weekend Australian (newspaper), Oct. 38-29th, 2023]