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Jan Willem van der Hoeven , a native of The Netherlands, has been living in the Middle East for over 30 years. He is the founder of The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem and is today the director of The International Christian Zionist Center.
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By Jan Willem van der Hoeven
August 20, 2006
"Out of the north calamity shall break forth" - Jeremiah 1:14
O my soul, my soul!
I am pained in my very heart!
My heart makes a noise in me;
I cannot hold my peace,
Because you have heard, O my soul,
The sound of the trumpet,
The alarm of war. (Jeremiah 4:19)
Terrible destruction is set to come upon Israel. Syria plans a surprise attack, emboldened by the success of the Hezbollah fighters against Israel. Bashar el-Assad openly calls for the destruction of Israel and puts his army on the highest alert possible. Syrian pilots sit in their jets on their runways, ready to take off. Nearly all sections of the Syrian population side emotionally with Hezbollah, calling for the re-entry of Syrian troops into Lebanon to join their fight against Israel.
Totally blind to what is cooking in Syria, leftist circles in Israel immorally call yet again for constructive dialogue with a regime of murderers. Syria has murdered people both inside that country (more than 20 000 of its own citizens in Hama) as well as outside of it, among them various politicians and journalists in Lebanon. Nonetheless, many on Israel's left persist in parroting the defunct line: that to achieve peace with Syria it is best to talk to these killers, even if doing so will result in the complete surrender to them of the Golan Heights, and all this for not even a real peace. For Assad will never give up his dream, and his father?s dream, of a greater Syria that one day will include all of Lebanon through a Syrian-dependent Hezbollah, and via the Syrian-faithful Khaled Meshal and his Hamas-directed Palestinians they one day intend to roll into Israel.
Israel is sleeping, many content that the very costly war just fought by courageous Israeli soldiers in Lebanon has for the time being come to a kind of precarious but ominous halt. And the world -- mostly biased and/or anti-Semitic -- is as usual applying more pressure on Israel to keep this fragile ceasefire than it is willing to apply on the Lebanese government, still afraid to rein in the Hezbollah which, by its blatant attack and naked aggression, brought all this death and destruction upon that beautiful, Swiss-like country.
Israel must wake up and brace for a new round of hostilities -- this time led by the arch-terrorist -- and Hezbollah-supporting nation of Syria who, together with that other patron of Hezbollah and Hamas, namely Iran, shares the same eventual, eagerly-longed-for goal: the destruction of the Jewish state!
This time it will not be just Katyushas that Israel has to face, but the extremely dangerous, longer-range SCUD missiles tipped with Syria?s already-manufactured lethal VX nerve gas. Instead of dozens, tens of thousands of Israelis could lose their lives. Israel must wake up now! She must not make the same mistake as was made on the eve of Yom Kippur, 1973 when, as some in Israel do now, Israel?s Military Intelligence personnel scoffed at the possibility of an imminent attack, and were found to have been totally wrong.
Carolyn Glick spelled it out so clearly in The Jerusalem Post (August 18, 2006):
Then there is Syria. Syrian President Bashar Assad's address Tuesday was a watershed event. After 14 years of beating around the bush, Syria finally came clean. Peace, Assad said, is dead. We hate Israel and we want to destroy it. If not us, then our children will destroy it. All the Arabs that want peace with Israel are traitors. Long live Hizb?allah and we're going to war to conquer the Golan Heights as a first step towards destroying Israel.
So Syria is planning to attack us?
Like the Palestinians, the Syrians will be following the Hezbollah model. Assad knows that his antiquated conventional forces are incapable of conquering and holding the Golan Heights. But, if Israel fights Syria the same way it just fought Hezbollah, then that doesn't matter. Syria, with its arsenal of Scud missiles whose range covers the entire country and armed with its chemical and biological arsenals that can act in the best case as a deterrent force, will be able to kill thousands if not tens of thousands of Israeli civilians and soldiers in the coming battle and cause property and economic damage to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
Syria believes that it will be able to cause sufficient damage to make Israel sue for a cease-fire as we just did with Hizb?allah. So like Hezbollah, Syria expects to gain at the UN Security Council what it could never hope to achieve on the battlefield.
This time, we all pray, may Israel?s political and military leaders be prepared for the horrendous danger that is looming from the north over this little nation and cry out to G-d, for His mercy, wisdom and deliverance at such a time as this.
May we as believers do our part as well and may G-d so cause Israel to be victorious for His Name?s sake.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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