Are the California wildfires just the latest example of Divine Providence intervening against those who conspire to weaken Jewish Israel? Stan Goodenough addresses the connection in Jerusalem Watchman.
He points out the storms which ravaged the Bush family compound in 1991 when President George Herbert Walker Bush and Secretary of State James Baker coerced Israel into attending an international Middle East peace conference in Madrid.
"That 1991 storm was by no means the only disaster to strike America at a time when its leaders were revealing their readiness to betray Israel by putting the tiny Jewish homeland and its small population on the altar for the “greater good” of the United States.
On August 14, 2005, 14,000 Israeli soldiers and policemen moved into the Gaza Strip and began to order, threaten, push, and then drive thousands of Jews from their homes.
The “Disengagement,” as it was officially known, was carried out by the Israeli government under the leadership of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Notwithstanding its antiseptic title, it was the vicious uprooting and turning into refugees of men, women and children, and the wholesale destruction of their communities, towns and villages.
It amounted to nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of one group of people from a piece of territory in order to appease another group of people who hated Jews and rejected their right to live there.
For eight days we watched, and many of us wept, until all the Jews were gone. Hundreds of buses drove them out of Gaza and away. After they left, police went from house to house, marking each one with a special symbol to show that it had been checked, was empty, and could now be demolished. Beautiful houses people had built with their own hands and turned into homes filled with memories were bulldozed into piles of ugly rubble. The action was cruel, heartless, criminal.
Sharon cannot be acquitted for what he ordered his forces to do - and more than a few people believe he fell ill and succumbed to the coma that imprisons him to this day because of his actions.
But the real blame for this atrocity lies squarely at the door of the administration in Washington DC.
While paying a whole lot of lip service to plucky little independent Israel, president after US president has sat in the White House and directed a foreign policy in the Middle East that has slowly but surely pushed Israel’s governments into surrendering their national patrimony for empty promises of peace the Israelis KNOW will never be honored.
God, I believe, answered the crime of the hitnatkut in a way that was breathtakingly obviously His doing.
On August 22 of that year, the Jews of Netzarim, the last of Gush Katif’s 17 communities, were expelled. Their departure officially marked the end of the 38-year-long Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.
On the very next day, a hurricane began forming over the Bahamas from where it would head directly for the United States. When it dissipated on August 31, eight days after it began, at least 1,836 people had lost their lives. More than $81 billion worth of damage had been done, making Katrina the costliest natural disaster in American history.
Again, many people watched and wept at the tragic site of hundreds of thousands of people being driven from their homes. Thousands of buses took them out of New Orleans and away. Policemen went from house to house, marking each one with a special symbol to show it had been checked for bodies or occupants, and was now empty.
It was so obvious it was almost bizarre, the way CNN interspersed its around-the-clock coverage of the evacuation from Louisiana with programming announcements about follow-up reports on the Gaza uprooting. We literally watched scenes of Israelis being made homeless in accordance with the wishes of the American government following scenes of Americans being made homeless by Katrina.
Many American Christians, among them some who lost their homes and all their possessions, recognized in the monster hurricane God’s judgment for what the US – as chief sponsor of the process that is robbing the Jews of their land – was responsible for.
The California wildfires, which are slowly being brought under control as I write this, began on October 20, two days after Secretary of State Rice completed a four-day visit to the Middle East.
Bush and Rice are squeezing Israel into making more concessions to please the Palestinian Arabs so that they will go to Annapolis next month.
There the plans are meant to be formulated that will lead to the uprooting of tens of thousands of Jews from their Judean and Samarian homes, the destruction of their property, and the final and irreversible handing over of that territory to the murderous and antisemitic PLO.
As Washington pushes, California burns, and a million Americans have had to flee their homes.
For the Bible believer who takes God at His Word when He promises to deal severely with the nations that hurt His people, it’s legitimate to ask:
Has God allowed the fires that have burned up 700 square miles of American land as a warning to the Bush administration to stop pushing Israel towards a peace that can bring no peace?
And if Rice goes ahead, turns the screws and forces Israel to the negotiating table in Maryland, will something even more devastating come upon the United States?"
