Dear Friends,

A newspaper columnist recently said something about the peace process which really set me to thinking. He stated that the Oslo Agreement of 1993 was really a way of deputizing the PLO to call off the Hamas (the terrorists among the Palestinians, we are to believe). Their payment would be land. If the terrorism died down, they would receive some land, and if it reared up again, the land giveaways would stop.

And that is approximately what has happened. In the earlier years of the “peace process,” the terrorists were relatively quiet and then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel was able to brag about how cleverly he had negotiated peace with his former enemies, the PLO. Arafat, for his part, kept “cooperating” as well, and received large parcels of land on a regular basis. The Intifada, the popular rebellion by Palestinian youngsters, was called off, and Israeli businessmen were relieved from having to put on soldier suits and police Palestinian villages. The terrorists, however, were not totally silent. They became particularly active near the end of Peres’ term of office.

Then the Israeli public began to balk. Binyamin Netanyahu was running against Peres in the elections of 1996. The challenger pointed out that it was costing Israel lands given to them in Biblical times and on which there were many Jewish relics, archaeological sites, etc., just to keep the murderers quiet and to promote an illusory peace. (Arafat had never stopped making incendiary speeches in Arabic to his own people about taking all of Jerusalem and all of Israel.)

No one was ever so obvious as to point out that the poor people were being paid to keep quiet, as with welfare, job training, drug programs, etc., in the U.S.

When Netanyahu was elected by a large margin of Jewish voters in Israel (paraded in the American press as a “razor-thin” majority), the PLO began a concerted effort to demonize this perfectly legitimate leader. Everything that went wrong in the world became Netanyahu’s fault, so that the Iranians bemoaned him, the Libyans blamed him, and the reason the Texas Rangers couldn’t win a playoff game against the Yankees was because of Netanyahu. The Palestinians simply could not cope with an Israeli Prime Minister who said, “Unless you absolutely reciprocate with real peace, you will receive no more land, and that’s all there is to that.” The terrorists were restless, after all, and what else does a terrorist have to do in life but kill some people? Arafat, being a lifelong terrorist, was restless himself.

Bill Clinton got into the act along the way, imagining that promoting a real peace agreement would leave us with a better memory of him in office than the one we have now. In the 1999 campaigns of Ehud Barak and Netanyahu, Clinton sent James Carville and others of his henchmen to Israel to throw their election to Barak, and throw it they did. Barak, a rather weak peacenik, was determined in his own right to be the one who signed the great peace agreement and began to give away the land pell-mell in great portions. Obviously, the terrorism died down again.

And now we have reached the uncomfortable impasse of the Prime Minister of Israel promising something almost no Israeli can support—the division of Jerusalem between the Jews and the Arabs of the land. This was the situation between 1948 and 1967, and anyone who lived through that period remembers the folly of it. The city was similar to Berlin in the days of the Wall, and people were literally shot dead for stepping across the line. Jewish people were unable to visit East Jerusalem—their Biblical possession and the location of their most holy site—for any reason. Fifty-eight synagogues were blown up in the Jewish quarter of the Old City by King Hussein of Jordan, a murderous Arab dictator who was later celebrated as a peacemaker and who miraculously died in bed. Christian tourists were obliged to fly into Amman, Jordan, and come in from the east to Jerusalem, as if to subscribe to the myth that there was no Israel and that Jerusalem was an Arab city. A divided city, of course, is a prescription for war.

So Barak is stuck out there on the end of a promise he probably cannot keep, and Arafat, amazed that his counterpart is making him an offer that he can’t refuse, refuses it. Arafat can’t begin to make peace or he’s a dead man, like Anwar Sadat.

And that’s where we stood before the unrest at the beginning of October. Israel had been buying off its poor people, American style, but using land since they don’t have the cash. The have-nots, as they received more and more from the haves, developed a bigger and bigger appetite. In the end, the Israelis will have to cut off the land giveaways, as we Americans have had to cut off welfare. There just has to be an end to blackmail. It usually comes when the haves decide that the have-nots have gotten enough, and it inevitably leads to more problems.

When “hardliner” Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount last month, the terrorists used it as a pretext for an uprising (the Temple Mount is solidly under Israeli sovereignty, and is visited constantly by Jewish people, and our tour groups as well, and no problems have occurred for many years). The unrest was worse than in the past because the Palestinians now have guns — which the Israelis gave them as part of the peace process — instead of stones. As General Sharon himself declared succinctly, “The riots are part of Arafat’s policy of applying pressure on Israel and the Americans when he doesn’t get what he wants.”

It is clear that the peace process equals zero, as the Levitt Letter has insisted for nearly ten years. No progress whatever has been made toward peace. Still and all, our press exaggerates the violence unreasonably. The Dallas Morning News took pains to reach back all the way to 1988 to show an amazing total of people killed and wounded in Israel. But that total is beggared by such events in our own country as bombings at Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center, not to mention our constant school and post office shootings which are unknown in Israel. While Americans shoot Americans on a regular basis, Israelis never shoot Israelis. We are the violent nation, no matter how much we talk about the problems of a sister democracy.

And democracy is the place where such ghetto rioting can easily happen. They don’t have these problems in China, or Cuba, or North Korea, because in those countries the army would shoot the people dead (as in Hamah, Syria, where 20,000 people were murdered by their own army). As we go to press the “popular” uprising, which is actually orchestrated violence, goes on following the pattern of Har Homa, the Tunnel, etc. It’s a little harder to predict the outcome of this one because, as we said above, Israel is running out of prizes to give the dictator, Arafat. Blackmail looses its effect when the payer has nothing more with which to pay.

Here’s the hope for believers: if these are the End Times coming on, then we do understand how it all comes out. The position of Israel will be considered more and more intractable by the unbelieving forces of the world, and the Palestinians will be supported to a point where an actual invasion of Israel might be attempted by an alliance of powers encircling Israel. That will, of course, be the invasion of Gog and Magog described in Ezekiel 38 and 39. The Rapture would come just before that event, and you know the rest (or if not, start using our booklist immediately!).

The hardest part about the business of running tours to Israel is persuading the public that however much the American media prattle on about “widespread violence,” it is generally located in areas that we do not visit and has always been harmless to pilgrims. We had a tour group in Jerusalem during the so-called riots over the opening of the Tunnel near the Temple site, and our people didn’t even know about the event. Another of our tour groups was in Jerusalem during a U.S. rocket attack on Iraq, and we laughed as CNN reported “unrest” in the streets of Jerusalem while we enjoyed an uneventful and very spiritual time in that city, as always. We even had a happy and satisfied group in the Land during the Persian Gulf War, and though missiles were landing on Tel Aviv before we came, God called the whole thing off just as we arrived!

I have never cancelled a tour of Israel.

Why not join us? December is a truly wonderful time to visit the Holy Land. The weather is perfect for touring the sites, with highs in the 60s and 70s, and we’re able to set a less expensive price for the tour because of the savings we receive during the “off season.”

Our Hanukkah/Christmas Tour is December 11–21 for the Deluxe Tour of Israel and December 11–25 for the Grand Tour with the extension to Petra and Eilat. On the Deluxe Tour, you will visit Megiddo (the site of the future battle of Armageddon), Mt. Carmel, Nazareth, the Western Wall, the Mt. of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Upper Room of the Last Supper, the Garden Tomb, Masada, the Dead Sea, and the Golan Heights. You will take a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, view the original Dead Sea Scrolls and the caves of Qumran where the scrolls were found, tour the Old City of Jerusalem, and visit the Holocaust museum. Come with us to the Land of our Lord and see the beauty of the place Jesus called home.

You can add an extension to the Deluxe Tour and visit Petra in Jordan, a city carved out of the red mountains by the ancient Nabataeans. You will stay in a luxurious resort at the southernmost point of Israel, in Eilat on the Red Sea. And if you hesitate to be away from home on Christmas Day, know that, due to time zone differences, you can have it both ways—celebrate Christmas Eve in the Shepherds’ Fields of Bethlehem and spend Christmas Day at home with your family! Call Tony or Becky at 214-696-9760 during office hours for more information, or call 1-800-WONDERS anytime for a full-color brochure. [or click here for an online request form].

I hope you’re enjoying The Holy Days of Our Lord, our series that is presently showing. We filmed our next series, The Rabbi’s Friends, on our September tour to Israel. In it, we teach about the lives of Jesus’ friends and loved ones: His disciples, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, people from all walks of life. It’s in post-production now and will air in the next few months.

And Sha’alu Shalom Yerushalayim! pray for the peace of Jerusalem!

Your messenger,

Zola

P.S. FOX-FAM (formerly FAM and CBN) now broadcasts Zola Levitt Presents on Monday mornings at 12:00 a.m. Central Time and 1:00 a.m. both Eastern Time and Pacific Time. In the Mountain Time zone, FOX-FAM carries our program at either 11:00 p.m. (Sunday) or 2:00 a.m. (Monday), depending on your local affiliate, so please check your TV guide. That’s very late on Sundays or very early on Mondays, depending on where you live.

TBN still airs Zola’s program on Monday mornings at 8:00 ET, 7:00 CT, 6:00 MT and 5:00 PT. TBN will preempt us on both November 6 and 13. Please let us know if you would like one of our free National TV Airing Schedules, or see it online [here].

P.P.S. As we went to press, I had more of a perspective on the situation in Israel. I wonder if ten years of Arafat’s tantalizing his people with false peace promises led to where we are now. And could he be thinking about the recent death of Hafez al-Assad of Syria? Assad’s hostility to Israel never came to anything because his time ran out. Could Arafat, old and ailing, be making one last gamble, Clinton-like, for a legacy among his people? Bible readers are comforted by the prophecy of Amos 9:14–15, “And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel,… and I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God.” Israel will prevail now and always — through the Tribulation, the Thousand-Year Kingdom, and even in Eternity when God will create a new heaven, a new earth and a new Jerusalem.

Zola Levitt Ministries is ECFA approved and has Charity Navigator’s top rating of 4 stars.

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