yedida said:
Now, we need to see one little speck of property restored to Jerusalem and Israel - the very most important piece of property......
Do you mean we need to see the Temple Mount restored to Jerusalem and Israel in the sense of the Jews taking back religious control of it?
For Revelation 11:1-2, Matthew 24:15, Daniel 11:31,36, and 2 Thessalonians 2:4 require a third Jewish temple in Jerusalem during the coming tribulation. It will coexist with the church like the second Jewish temple did (Luke 24:53) and like the temple building in heaven does (Revelation 11:19). It could be built on the Temple Mount by the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel after they clear the site by destroying the Muslim Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
A third Jewish temple hasn't been built already on the Temple Mount because the current, secular government of Israel has been very careful to protect the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque ever since Israel took military control of the Temple Mount back in 1967. For the Israeli government knows that if the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel were to destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest sites in Islam, right after those in Mecca and Medina), this could mean the end of the state of Israel, because Muslim armies and militias could in their total rage descend on Israel en masse in an all-out jihad, attacking Israel simultaneously from three directions, overwhelming its defenses and quickly overrunning its tiny territory, defeating it completely.
While the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are no doubt aware of this danger to Israel should the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque ever be destroyed, they believe that the third Jewish temple must nonetheless be built exactly where the first and second Jewish temples stood: right over the Rock of Sacrifice (the Rock of the Dome of the Rock) on which Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. And the ultra-Orthodox Jews could eventually be brought to the point where they will even desire to see the end of the current, secular state of Israel, believing that only in its demise will God make it possible for them to establish a new, perfectly ultra-Orthodox theocratic state of Israel with its capital in the walled Old City of Jerusalem (which contains the Temple Mount), and to build on the Temple Mount a third Jewish temple before which they can restart the daily Mosaic animal sacrifices and perfectly keep every jot and tittle of the Mosaic law.
(This could point to another reason that the current, secular government of Israel doesn't want to let the ultra-Orthodox Jews build a third temple: out of fear that the secular authority of the Israeli government could subsequently get undermined. For once temple practices resumed and a priesthood came into power, a creep toward theocracy could ensue in Israel, where priests and rabbis would become powerful enough to replace the secular leaders in Israel. So the secular leaders could want to simply place a hold on any drift in that direction by forbidding the building of a third temple.)
The ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are currently very well-armed, for they're allowed by Israel to even have machine guns for self-defense against the Palestinians. If the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel start to get squeezed out of their settlements in Samaria and Judaea (also called the West Bank) and East Jerusalem, because of some "peace deal" handing the whole kit and caboodle over to a Palestinian "state", the ultra-Orthodox Jews in their rage could resort to violence, for they (rightly) see Samaria, Judaea and Jerusalem as being the historically most important and most holy parts of the land of Israel promised by God to the Jews since the time of Abraham.
A fear of the ultra-Orthodox Jews resorting to violence could be one of the reasons that the Israeli government refuses to hinder Jewish settlement activity in Samaria, Judaea and East Jerusalem. It could also be one of the reasons that the U.S. government has been convinced by Israel to back off from requiring any such hindrance. But if down the road pressure from the Arab masses for a Palestinian state becomes so extreme that it begins to threaten to overthrow U.S. hegemony over the Arab world, the U.S. could decide to force Israel to surrender all the Jewish settlements to a Palestinian state.
If the IDF then starts forcing the evacuation of all the settlements, this could so enrage the ultra-Orthodox Jews they could suddenly mass in their tens of thousands, all armed with machine guns, and led by three huge bulldozers they could march as a great army to the Old City of Jerusalem and go up onto the Temple Mount and completely destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque. They could then begin to build a third Jewish temple and declare the walled Old City of Jerusalem to be the capital of a new, purely ultra-Orthodox state of Israel, where the Mosaic law will be the law, and where no non-kosher person or thing will be allowed within Old Jerusalem's "Holy walls".
Besides getting squeezed out of their settlements, something else that could help tip the scales so that the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel will become violent is the rising up of a false, miracle-working ultra-Orthodox Jewish "Messiah" in Israel. He could rise up and say something like:
"God says that now is the time for us to take religious control of the Holy Temple Mount and rid it of all the vile abominations which the heathen have placed upon it. We are to sanctify it in the name of our God so that we might rebuild His Holy Temple there. Listen, my brethren, fear not the reaction of the heathen when we retake religious control of the Holy Temple Mount. For God Himself is with us. He will protect us perfectly. Have I not shown you His mighty Power working through Me? Fear not any men, but fear only our Mighty God, who now commands us to rebuild His Holy Temple at the place He determined from the time of our father Abraham.
"Our God gave us back the Temple Mount way back in 1967 C.E. But what have we done with it over all the time since then? Nothing! How can this be? How can we have allowed some merely-secular, so-called 'Israeli' government invented by sinful men to keep us, God's holy people, from even setting foot back on the Temple Mount? Let us rise up, my brethren! Let us all rise up, in the name of our God, and let us do mighty exploits to the Glory of His Holy Name!"
With such rhetoric, accompanied by his working of amazing miracles (cf. Matthew 24:24), a false ultra-Orthodox Jewish "Messiah" in Israel could whip up the ultra-Orthodox Jews there into a religious frenzy, so that they will all with great zeal, and without any fear, march in their tens of thousands upon the Temple Mount, and take total control of it, and then rejoice there and dance and sing holy hymns to God "for His great and mighty Victory".
Something else that could help tip the scales with regard to the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel becoming violent is the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant. It could be found, for example, buried under an ancient ruined fort in the desert east of Jerusalem. The Copper Scroll could contain the clues as to where the Ark's buried in the fort (e.g. "under the third step").
The Ark could have been located there already with ground-penetrating radar by some non-religious treasure hunters, but the secular Israeli government could be holding up a digging permit to retrieve the Ark because the government is afraid that the ultra-Orthodox Jews could see the discovery of the Ark as (in their words) "an unmistakable sign from God that now is the time for us to rebuild His Holy Temple". So the Israeli government has a strong motive to keep the location of the buried Ark top secret.
Fearing that some ultra-Orthodox Jews could nonetheless somehow discover the top secret location of the buried Ark, and go there in the dead of night and dig it up without a permit from, or any notification to, the Israeli government, the government could have placed armed guards and surveillance cameras to watch over the buried Ark's location day and night.
But if the buried Ark's location is found out by some ultra-Orthodox Jews, they could round up tens of thousands of their fellows, all armed with machine guns, and they could suddenly swarm the location, overwhelm any armed guards there, and hold off any subsequently-arrived IDF troops long enough to get the Ark out of the ground. Once it's out and the IDF troops actually see it, it's unlikely that they're going to try to stop the ultra-Orthodox Jews from parading it to the Temple Mount; they'll be in such awe.
Also, once the ultra-Orthodox Jews make it to the Temple Mount and begin destroying the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, it's unlikely that the IDF troops are going to open fire, whether with lead bullets or rubber bullets, on their fellow Jews, slaughtering or injuring hundreds or thousands of them. Also, increasing numbers of IDF officers are very religious, so they could even order their troops to stand down. And if some non-religious officers convince their troops to employ tear gas in an attempt to simply disperse the ultra-Orthodox Jews without harming them, this could be thwarted by the ultra-Orthodox Jews having brought along gas masks (which, ironically, could have been issued to them by the Israeli government itself, back when there was a fear that Saddam Hussein would send Scud missiles into Israel with chemical-weapons payloads).
So the Israeli government could be unable to prevent the complete destruction of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque at the hands of the ultra-Orthodox Jews. And so the Israeli government could be unable to prevent the subsequent, retaliatory destruction of the state of Israel at the hands of enraged Muslim armies and militias.
One way that the defeat of Israel by Muslims could even become possible is that the U.S. could build up the (Muslim) Iraqi Army until it's huge enough and well-equipped enough to serve as a proxy army (for the U.S. and Israel) for an all-out ground invasion of Iran (to end Iran's nuclear weapons program and extremist regime). As part of the buildup of the Iraqi Army, the U.S. could reinstall some of the former Baathist military hierarchy to run the Iraqi Army more efficiently and ruthlessly. And if the current Shiite-dominated government of Iraq balks at any invasion of fellow-Shiite Iran, the CIA and the Mossad could then help the Baathists (who see non-Arab Iran as an enemy of Arab autonomy) to take back complete control of Iraq via a coup d'etat.
But then, right when Iraq is all ready to invade Iran, the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel could destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque. This could so enrage Muslims worldwide, including the Iraqi Army, that the Iraqi Baathist Generals could see it as a perfect excuse to abandon the plan to invade huge Iran and instead turn and send their huge army against tiny Israel, completely defeating it (Daniel 11:15-17; in verse 17, the Hebrew word translated as "daughter" is "bath").
But this would not be the ultimate reason for the Baathist attack, which could continue on south to also defeat Egypt (Daniel 11:15), the regime of which (even if there's some ostensible change in Egypt) the Baathists could see as still being a puppet of the U.S., just as the Baathists could see Israel as being a colony of the U.S. The ultimate aim of Baathism is to unite all Arab lands from Oman to Morocco into one massive, powerful United Arab States free of all foreign hegemony.
The all-out Iraqi attack on Israel could be joined by the Baathist Syrian Army (with all of its missiles, many tipped with nerve agents), as well as by all of Iran's long-range missiles and all of Hizballah's and Hamas' missiles and guerrillas. Tiny Israel could find itself suddenly attacked from three directions at the same time, with thousands of missiles raining down all at once on all of its cities and military bases, and hundreds of Iraqi tanks (meant to occupy huge Iran) pouring across its borders. As Israel starts to see its tiny sliver of land completely overrun, and sees its defeat as imminent, in retaliation it could drop nuclear bombs on Baghdad, Damascus (Isaiah 17:1), Tehran, and all the other major cities of Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
There could be so many nuclear explosions sending so much radioactive dust and ash so high into the atmosphere that it could be blown eastward and fall on hugely-populated South Asia, ruining so many crop fields and immune systems there with radiation that a fourth of the world could end up dying from the war and its aftermath of famines and epidemics. This could fulfill the horrible war which will begin the coming tribulation, which war will, with its aftermath of famines and epidemics, end up killing a fourth of the world (Revelation 6:4-8). The "great sword" of this war (Revelation 6:4) could be Israel's nuclear weapons.
