I met a man recently who is visiting Israel, and is doing some research on the opinion of Christian Arabs in the Holy Land. This man is an academic with a Ph.D., and tells me that people in the academic club are those who do their research and only talk about what they are certain about. I don’t agree. Just because you think you are an academic it does not necessarily mean your research is accurate.
Everyone has a world-view and looks at the world through the glasses of their own world view. In my humble opinion the Christian is the one who has been liberated to see the world as it really is and sees reality and all the information and facts that agree with the Christian world-view. Let me prove my point that we are all biased and are all world-view influenced . I went out into the streets of Jerusalem and asked people who is the most famous Jew. By the way if you don’t know who the most famous Jew is you have a problem. Is it Karl Marks? Moses? Einstein? or Jesus? Yes, it is the Lord Jesus! So I asked people in the streets and most people knew it was Jesus and tried to avoid the answer, why? Because it went against their world-view .
Getting back to the man doing research, I took him to the old city to meet some Arabs and to see what they think about Israel. We are told that most Christian Arabs believe in the destruction of Israel. I think it is not true at all. We went to one man who is a relative of the late terrorist and communist leader , George Habash, who died recently in Amman, Jordan . He had a picture of Mr. Habash on his shop door. Does he hate Israel and want the destruction of Israel? No. Does he think Israel is better than the Arab countries? Yes. While we were in the shop a man who was drunk and had a problem with alcohol entered and called George a freedom fighter, I then began to talk about how it is wrong to kill. I asked where is George today? He is in hell because he was an unrepentant sinner whose hands were full of blood. If you die where will you be? No one has ever come back from the dead! He said, you are wrong, I know someone who died and on the third day He rose from the dead, and if you follow Him you will love your enemies. The relative of Mr. Habash said that if we were in an Arab country and asked and talked freely like in Israel then we would be going down to the police station. His brother is disabled and receives a car and social benefits from the state, if he was living in an Arab country he would get nothing at all!
We then went to visit another family. The husband is from Baghdad and the wife is from Shekem. The husband is a believer in the bible and said that the land according to the Bible belongs to the Jewish people and if anyone thinks otherwise they are ignorant of what is written in the Bible. The wife also came out in a positive way toward Israel. I asked another man I know, he and his brother own a shop and both of them support Israel. I know a few evangelical Christians who are very political and even have a map of Palestine in their church, in their unconverted days they were doing things against Israel and even went to prison. They speak out against the wall and talk about checkpoints and the suffering of the Palestinian people, and I think they are hypocrites because they have taken up Israeli citizenship and have all the medical insurance and hospitalization and unemployment benefits that come with it. I think if you receive citizenship from a country, you should be loyal to that country or leave immediately!
In the old city of Jerusalem I met the son of the late Mufti of Jerusalem who every Friday called for the destruction of Israel but when sick and dying he went to an Israeli hospital for treatment. His son had in his shop a political picture against the USA, and when he told me he agreed with terror attacks within Israel I never went to change money with him again. Sadly many people change money in his shop. In conclusion Israel with all its faults and size is one of the best countries in the middle-east and maybe the world.
