Dear runner
Have you ever heard of a 'self-fulfilling prophecy'? Or perhaps you simply dont have the intelligence to grasp any concept outside the child-frightening medieval rubbish fed into your head from birth? Use your brain just this once - I suspect that it will be a new experience for you.

It could be said that israel and Bushes' America both suffer from the long wornout Promised Land Doctrine in which each believes that they have a right to destroy the unbelievers.

However using Logical Reasoning, the Old Testament if true, seems more like a gradual process of ethical discovery. As if our so-called God our Father is learning too, thus we have the Ten Commandments nullifying the Promised Land murders, and a Great Ethical Awakening in the New Testament with the young Jesus and His Sermon on the Mount which tells us to make peace with our enemies as we would with our brothers.

Therfore we have the two schools of thought as Christians become more materialist, hardheaded politics really taking over with the intervention of the Roman Emperor Constantine who gave Pagan blessings to the new Roman Catholic Church, but was not told that Christ Jesus had never given allowance to take over another's territory.

So well after Constantine's death the more hardheaded Christians got together and drew up the - Donation of Constantine - which unlawfully gave allowance to get on with the unGodly job of not loving our neighbours and taking over their properties forthwith.

And so it goes on....?

GYM FISH

The prophecies relating to Jesus first coming were extremely accurate. Isaiah and others clearly spoke 600 years or more prior to His arrival. You may choose along with others to mock and back the suicide bombers but your discernment of prophecy and ignorance of history will not prevent the God of Israel fulfilling His purposes.

Maybe religion practise started as a reaction to anti-social behaviour?

But funny how things can turn out.

Zionists fencing in/out non-jews. Christian fundamentalists promoting end times. Islamist extremists waging bloody jihad.

Russians spent years opposed to capitalism, only to embrace its worst features.

Howard the small govt champ. pushes for power thru tied grants etc.

The land of the free suppressing free speech for its own etc etc

Seems we get what we oppose.

Passed time to forget this silliness.

Babu has managed to miss the key point, and so miss the bus altogether. He rightly dismisses supposed biblical arguments (tribal tales) for the bases of Zionism, and thus for the founding of Israel, but then proceeds to accept that israel has a right to exist up to the 1967 borders (which in themselves violate longstanding UN resolutions). That is wackiness at its worst. There is no valid argument for the existence of Israel at all - as George Marshall was trying to tell Truman in 1946-48 (and Marshall knew what the consequences would be, including Islamic radicalisation, but Truman had old Zionist buddies).
In essence, whether modern Israel was or wasn't a biblical prophecy is utterly irrelevant. Why be drawn into such nonsense?

Talk about religion messing up international relations. Probably the most troublesome one for philosophers has been the Promised Land doctrinaire which has not only caused millions to be slaughtered by Christians and their lands stolen in the name of a Roman pagan ruler, Constantine, but has more recently caused the Jews in the name of Jehovah and backed by America to have incompetently or even insanely allowed the Promised Land mania to upset the balance of power in the Middle East to the extent it could see the whole Middle East pretty well wiped out in a nuclear fiesto.

Finally, it is well to remind our superior super modern corporate cultists, that it is the so-called left-wing looneys who hold the avant-guarde commonsense formula which will save this world from destruction either by nuclear war or global warming