The current rush for Israel to make peace treaties with its neighbors is a highly significant sign. Consider the following verse of Scripture:

When people say, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. 1 Thessalonians 5:3

The current peace proposals are being pushed as "peace and security", even though past history clearly shows that the Arab side has no real intention of keeping them. While we all hope for a real and lasting peace in the Middle East, it won't come until King Jesus is reigning in Jerusalem to enforce peace.

There is going to have to be some agreement to replace the Oslo accords. They obviously didn't go far enough to satisfy anyone in the Middle East, and with the arrival of new leaders replacing the deceased ones, the situation is more unstable than before. The leadership in Iraq is now becoming unstable with a possible turnover there, and Mr. Arafat isn't getting any younger, either.

The Middle East has exploded into violence again. People, many of them Palestinian children, are dying in the streets while their leaders back away from peace talks that seemed to be at the brink of success. Why did everything fall apart right when a workable peace was just within reach?

Mr. Arafat and his colleagues have been saying the right things to their Israeli counterparts and to the world as a whole for the past seven years since the last peace treaty was signed. They've been saying something entirely different to their own people. While they spoke of peace to the world, they spoke of war to the Palestinians.

The warning signs were there, in translated speeches made by the Palestinian leaders in public. The schooling of their children, now in the streets throwing rocks at armed Israeli troops, was in a course of unrelenting hatred towards the Jews and the state of Israel. A people truly interested in peace does not train its children to be soldiers before they are even old enough to stop playing with toys.

Now the children have taken up whatever arms they are given, even if it is only a rock, and taken up their positions in front of the armed mobs. The press takes pictures of the children dying from returned fire from Israeli troops trying to control mob violence which the Palestinian Authority police are not stopping. They publicize Israeli retaliatory strikes against atrocities by the Palestinians, with only the occasional explanation of a particularly brutal provocation, and then focus on the anguish of Palestinian mothers whose children lie dying.

Both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering in this latest outbreak of violence, with no end in sight. Mr. Arafat seems determined to keep the bloodshed going to weaken the Israelis and improve his position until he gets an agreement which would ultimately lead to the total destruction of Israel and the forced flight or death of the Jews living there. He is in essence threatening the genocide of his own people, especially the children, in a bid for even greater political power for himself and his loyal officers.

Mr. Arafat had the most generous peace offer from Mr. Barak that he could have reasonably hoped for, including the creation of a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem. He threw it away in a murderous gamble to get everything he wanted, including the destruction of Israel. As long as he thinks he can continue to lie to the world about his intentions and use the bodies of children as bargaining chips, there will be no true peace in the Middle East until Jesus comes.

The world is looking at the possible beginning of a Middle East war after the recent Israeli elections. A dovish prime minister, Ehud Barak, willing to give the Palestinians practically everything they wanted, has been replaced with a hawkish one, Ariel Sharon, who has flatly told Mr. Arafat that he must stop the violence if he wants to restart peace negotiations.

What makes this all the more tragic is that both sides are closely related, being descended from brothers. They are the sons and daughters of Abraham, the Biblical patriarch. What started as a family feud has grown over the centuries to a war that could destroy the whole human family.

This situation is demonstrating to the world is that it isn't enough to have many people willing to make peace to achieve a lasting peace. It is also necessary to have enough people willing and able to resist the people who aren't willing to let their neighbors live in peace. Many Jews and Palestinians wish to have peace, but not all want it enough to reach a compromise that will allow both sides to live peaceably in the same area of the world.

That is a conflict of wills altogether too common in every race of mankind. America has been in wars from Europe to Southeast Asia to the Middle East when an aggressive group took up arms against its neighbors just within the last century. We have peacekeepers in countries around the world trying to enforce peace where negotiations failed to bring a lasting, just peace. How the doves calling for peace hope to stop the fighting in Israel by negotiation when nothing but military force has ever stopped the Arabs from attacking Israel is a mystery.

The Israeli people faced a hard truth in their elections this time. They don't relish having a hawk like Ariel Sharon to lead their government, but they don't see any viable alternative in further negotiations by a dove who offered the Palestinians practically everything and then had nothing left to bargain with when the predictable violence broke out yet again. The children die, the mothers weep, the politicians make more speeches, and the violence goes on.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem and for the success of peace talks, but don't drop your weapons while the other side refuses to put theirs down. Until there are enough people willing to restrain the terrorists within their groups to stop the violence, there can be no true lasting peace. That is what the Israelis have had to face, and the world must face it as well. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and keep spreading the word about the soon coming of Jesus. He is near, even at the door.