Question: Can you explain the current armed conflict between Palestinians and Israelis from an Israeli perspective and how that possibly relates to latter-day scriptures?
Answer: When I lived in Israel five years, the last two as an Israeli citizen, I was informed that it takes two years’ living in Israel to understand this conflict that has been brewing for many years. I found this to be true, and I’m appalled at the way the U.S., the U.N., and the West in general—not to mention the world as a whole—treat Israel and attempt to dictate to it what it needs to do.
At its deepest level, this conflict has its roots in the birthright of Abraham’s sons, which Arabs claim for themselves through Ishmael, the son of Sarah’s handmaiden. In that sense, it resembles the Book of Mormon conflict between the Lamanites and Nephites, in which Laman and his descendants claimed that Nephi had “wronged” and “robbed” them, while the opposite was true.
People often suppose that following the Nazi Holocaust Jews invaded Palestine and tried to force Arabs out. The truth is that Jews have had continuous residence there since biblical times, though the land was so utterly barren that few Arabs or Jews could live there. A major influx of both Jewish and Arab immigrants occurred simultaneously as Jews began returning to their homeland.
In 2006, in an attempt to “promote the peace process,” Israel painfully forced residents of several established Jewish villages out of Gaza to fend for themselves elsewhere. Instead of placating Gazan Arab residents, however, that gesture emboldened them to up their enmity toward Israelis even as they pillaged the deserted Jewish villages and destroyed them instead of living in them.
Today, many leaders in the Islamic world—notably of its Shiite sect that dominates Iran and its proxies—evidence the kind of “everlasting hatred” the Lamanites had for the Nephites, so that in their eyes they feel legitimized to kill Jews and to destroy them as a people. It has thus been their openly declared goal to eliminate the Jewish state and, ultimately, the entire Christian world.
In Israel’s case, we are not talking about a large land where this conflict is raging. For the most part, Israel’s inhabited area is the size of Salt Lake and Utah Counties combined. With countless missiles and rockets sent unprovoked into towns and settlements by Hamas these past ten years, many thousands from Hezbollah this past year, and hundreds from Iran, Israel is under siege.
When, on October 7, 2023, Hamas operatives broke through Gaza’s border fence, slew 1400 Israeli youth and villagers and took 250 hostage, Israel was forced to act. The bloodbath they wrought—beheading men, women, and children, raping and ripping open pregnant women, mutilating private parts, and battering innocent people to death—attests to their utter depravity.
Even as Israel is forced to defend itself against this onslaught, out of regard for innocent civilians it still warns them to evacuate launch sites and military facilities it intends to target. The hundreds of miles of underground tunnels that serve as places of resort and arms depots have been an extraordinary challenge from which to eradicate this highly organized military monster.
Without the regard for life Israelis have, hostile Islamist leaders have despicably embedded many of their command centers and arms depots inside civic buildings such as schools, hospitals, UN facilities, and private dwellings. Then, when Israel destroys these targets to eliminate enemies, this is touted in the world’s media as Israel’s deliberately killing men, women, and children.
Instead of helping their people with billions in aid they receive from the UN and wealthy Arab nations—none of whom want these brainwashed people in their own countries—they spend this on tunnels and military assets for the sole purpose of destroying Israel. Their “eternal hatred” for Israel has reached a point of no return that is a direct fruit of the Islamist religion they espouse.
Unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam wasn’t built on revelation from God but on an “angel” instructing Mohammad. He created a religion of compulsion that gained power pillaging Jewish and Christian communities and caravans. Says Paul, “Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8).
