Epicenter 2.0
Page 9
That night Spillman made a similar case to Brown and the rest of the assembled congregation, then walked them through a series of Old Testament passages describing God’s ancient promise to unlock enormous wealth and treasures for the children of Israel in the last days.
Genesis 49:1—And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, “Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days.” (KJV, emphasis added)
Genesis 49:25—From the God of your father who helps you, and by the Almighty who blesses you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb. (NASB, emphasis added)
Deuteronomy 33:13—Of Joseph he said, “Blessed of the LORD be his land, with the choice things of heaven, with the dew, and from the deep lying beneath.” (NASB, emphasis added)
Deuteronomy 33:19—They will call peoples to the mountain; there they will offer righteous sacrifices; for they will draw out the abundance of the seas, and the hidden treasures of the sand. (NASB, emphasis added)
Deuteronomy 33:24—Of Asher he said, “More blessed than sons is Asher; may he be favored by his brothers, and may he dip his foot in oil.” (NASB, emphasis added)
Deuteronomy 32:12-13—The LORD alone guided him, and there was no foreign god with him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth, and he ate the produce of the field; and He made him suck honey from the rock, and oil from the flinty rock. (NASB, emphasis added)
Isaiah 45:3—I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden wealth of secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name. (NASB, emphasis added)
As Soltero explained it, John Brown was electrified. He went home and carefully studied these Scriptures and many others Spillman had laid out, asking God to help him understand them and know how, if at all, he could be involved in finding such a treasure. For the next two decades, Brown traveled back and forth to Israel, learning everything about the oil-and-gas business he possibly could, meeting everyone in the industry that he could, studying maps, researching locations, cross-checking with the Scriptures, and praying for wisdom all the while. By April of 2000, he finally felt he knew enough to begin a company. He launched Zion Oil with the help of an Israeli lawyer named Philip Mandelker, using the following mission statement:
Zion Oil & Gas was ordained by G_d94 for the express purpose of discovering oil and gas in the land of Israel and to bless the Jewish people and the nation of Israel and the body of Christ (Isaiah 23:18). I believe that G_d has promised in the Bible to bless Israel with one of the world’s largest oil and gas fields and this will be discovered in the last days before the Messiah returns.95
The company was soon awarded a license by the government of Israel to explore for oil and gas on 28,800 acres in northern Israel, and it was during this time that Gene Soltero joined the company.
“So how is it going?” I asked.
“We were recently awarded an expanded permit to explore some 219,000 acres in northern Israel,” Soltero told me. “We’ve been drilling for the past several months and the initial results are very exciting. For legal reasons, I can’t say more right now. But let’s just say it’s possible that your novels have vastly understated how much oil is out there.”
As he described where they were drilling, I realized it was only a few miles from the Jezreel Valley and the ancient city of Megiddo. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me you think you’ve found oil under Armageddon?”
Soltero smiled. “I wish I could say more, but right now I can’t,” he demurred.
In talking to other oil experts in Israel and the U.S. over the next few months, I was able to confirm that there is, in fact, both oil and natural gas under the region known in the Bible as Armageddon, where the Scriptures say the final cataclysmic conflict of history will occur. Just how much is there remains unclear as I write this. There is more testing to do, and many technical challenges abound before any of it will be commercially viable to pump and refine, challenges that Tovia Luskin and his team are encountering as well, despite having already found a billion barrels of oil not far away.
What intrigues me is that Zion Oil and Givot Olam are not alone in their efforts to examine Israel’s economy and geology through the third lens of Scripture. Philip Mandelker, Zion Oil’s lawyer, told me that their company is one of six whose founders were originally inspired to start drilling because of Old Testament passages.96 And several of them are beginning to see promising results.
Will one of these companies hit the big one? Will they all? Will someone else? The truth is, we cannot know exactly who will tap into the oil reserves believed to be waiting beneath Israel’s soil or exactly when it will happen, because the Bible does not tell us. But the Bible does make it clear that Israel will be wealthy before the Russian-Iranian coalition attacks. That much we can take to the bank. And I believe the Bible’s hints about the existence of oil in Israel present a viable means for the fulfillment of that prophecy. Thus, expect to read future headlines like this one: “Israel Discovers Massive Reserves of Oil, Gas.”
ISRAEL, HOME OF MILLIONAIRES
That said, let’s be clear: Israel has already become enormously wealthy over the last six decades—far wealthier than her immediate neighbors. Finding oil would simply be icing on an already impressive cake.
Despite a population of only 7 million people, for example, Israel is now home to more than 6,600 millionaires. Of these, seventy possess liquid assets of $30 million or more. Of the 500 wealthiest people in the world, six are now Israeli, and all told, Israel’s rich had assets in 2004 of more than $24 billion, up from $20 billion in 2003, according to a report published by Merrill Lynch.97
Today Israel has become an economic powerhouse, one of the world’s high-tech leaders, and a magnet for foreign investment. “Israel is like part of Silicon Valley,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on his first trip to the country in October 2005. “The quality of the people here is fantastic. . . . It’s no exaggeration to say that the kind of innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business. So many great companies have been started here.”
In May 2006, Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man, announced that he was investing $4 billion in a Galilee-based metalworking company. Given that this was the largest investment Buffet had ever made outside the United States, it was widely seen as an enormous vote of confidence in the present vitality and the future potential of the Israeli economy.98
No wonder, then, that more Israeli-based companies and companies started by Israelis are listed on NASDAQ than from any other country. Or that Intel, whose next-generation chip was designed in Israel, broke ground in February 2006 on a new $3.5 billion microchip factory and research-and-development facility in the town of Kiryat Gat and reported that it now has more employees in Israel than in Silicon Valley. Or that Google announced in 2005 that it was opening new research-and-development facilities in Israel. Or that over the past decade, more than $8.7 billion has poured into Israeli venture-capital funds. Or that an Israeli professor, Robert Aumann of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Economics.99
And it is not just high-tech successes that Israelis are experiencing today. Israel now leads the world in exports of industrial oils, fertilizers, and polished diamonds. In 2005 the tiny Jewish state placed eighth worldwide in per capita exports. Tourism, too, is surging, climbing 26 percent in 2005 and up 78 percent in the number of first-time visitors. The list of economic achievements could go on and on.100
That is not to say Israel does not still struggle with poverty, unemployment, and underemployment. It certainly does, and these are challenges its leaders must constantly and compassionately address. But Israel has made extraordinary—some would say miraculous—economic gains since 1948 and has become dramatically wealthier than any of its immediate neighbors.
MIDDLE EAST COUNTRIES GDP
C
OUNTRYGROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT
Israel $123 billion
Egypt $81 billion
Syria $26 billion
Lebanon $21 billion
Jordan $12 billion
Source: CIA World Fact Book, 2005
What’s more, Israel is poised for even more explosive economic growth, quite apart from future oil and gas discoveries. Ben Gurion International Airport has been expanded and modernized. New highways and light railways are being built. Inflation, which raged at 100 percent or more a year in the early 1980s, was a mere 1.2 percent in 2004. Interest rates are historically low. The exchange rate has been stable. And after a serious recession in 2001–2002 due to the global economic downturn combined with the Al-Aksa Intifada (aka Arafat’s War), growth is surging again, hitting 4.4 percent in 2004 and 5 percent in 2005.
In June 2005, I attended a $1,000-a-plate dinner with Benjamin Netanyahu at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. The evening was part of a fund-raising event for Israel’s leading free-market-reform think tank, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, run by Daniel Doron, who has been a friend and mentor of mine on all things Israel since the early 1990s.
That night Netanyahu, who was then serving as Ariel Sharon’s finance minister, talked about the sweeping changes enacted during his tenure—deep tax cuts, privatization of state-owned industries, banking deregulation, and so forth—and the remarkable economic growth that had resulted. But he insisted there was much more to come.
“In ten years, Israel could be one of the ten richest countries in the world,” Netanyahu explained, noting that nine of the ten wealthiest countries in the world are small countries with fewer than 10 million people each and that many of them were not on the list at all a decade or two ago.
Ireland, for example—a country of only about 4 million citizens, roughly two-thirds of Israel’s population—was barely a blip on the global economic radar for most of the twentieth century, Netanyahu observed. By 2005, however, the Emerald Tiger had a roaring, low-tax economy and was ranked the eighth richest country in the world in GDP per capita.
“There is absolutely no reason why Israel can’t soon become one of the most successful countries in the world,” Netanyahu concluded.101
Looking back, I am grateful for the opportunity to attend that night. For whether he meant to or not, Netanyahu had just confirmed that Ezekiel’s promise of a dazzling economic future for Israel in the last days was rapidly coming to pass.
CHAPTER SIX: FUTURE HEADLINE
TREATIES AND TRUCES LEAVE ISRAELIS MORE SECURE THAN EVER BEFORE
None of this remarkable prosperity in Israel would be possible, of course, without a significant degree of calm and stability. Such security has seemed almost impossible until recent years, yet this is precisely what Ezekiel tells us to anticipate.
Note that the Hebrew prophet does not go so far as to say there will be a comprehensive peace treaty between Israel and all of her neighbors, or that all—or even most—hostilities in the Middle East will have ceased. But he does make it clear that in “the last days” (Ezekiel 38:16, NASB) before the Russian-Iranian attack, the Jewish people are “living securely” in “the land that is restored from the sword” (Ezekiel 38:8, NASB).
Some might say this is a bit of a conundrum. How could Israelis possibly feel secure in the last days if an increasingly hostile Russia, Iran, and other once-and-future enemies are looming over the horizon and preparing for the War of Gog and Magog? Moreover, how could this peace prerequisite possibly square with what Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 24:6, that in the last days before his return “you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars”(NASB)?
Which is it? some are tempted to ask. War or peace? You can’t have both.
Maybe you can. I would argue that we are seeing such a conundrum developing in the Middle East at this very hour.
In February 2005, for example, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon said he believed Israel was steadily approaching the point of a “historic breakthrough” with the Palestinians and “a new period of tranquility and hope.”102 Sharon was not a man known for being wildly optimistic about the prospects for peace in the region, so his comments turned a lot of heads. A few days later, I ran into a senior advisor to President Bush at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. He told me the White House was surprisingly optimistic about striking a deal between both sides before the end of the president’s second term. If so, he said, “we’re about to make history.”
In the summer of 2005, I had breakfast at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem with Major General Yaakov Amidror, former head of assessment for Israeli Military Intelligence. We were discussing Prime Minister Sharon’s plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza (which would take place two months later) and how it might affect Israel’s security down the road. In the course of that conversation, I asked Amidror to sum up Israel’s current security situation in light of everything he knew and everything going on in the region. His answer intrigued me.
“Unless or until Iran gets nuclear weapons, Israel today is more strategically secure than at any other point since her birth,” Amidror said unequivocally. By way of explanation, he pointed to a number of specific recent developments:
The Soviet Union has collapsed.
Saddam Hussein and his regime are gone.
Yasser Arafat is dead.
Israel has a formal peace treaty with Egypt.
Israel has a formal peace treaty with Jordan.
The Syrians are withdrawing from Lebanon.
Israel has a strong, well-trained, well-equipped army.
Israel has the most advanced and effective air force not just in the region but in the world.
Israel’s Arrow missile defense system is steadily improving.
Through better intelligence, targeted assassinations of Palestinian terrorist leaders and operatives, the security fence around Gaza, and the partially completed security fence in the West Bank, Israel has become increasingly successful at stopping suicide bombings and other attacks. (Terrorist attacks dropped nearly 70 percent between 2001 and 2005.)103
The U.S. is a strong and steady ally and has a forward strategy against terrorists and state sponsors of terrorism in the Middle East.
Israel’s economy is healthy and growing.
“And when I talk to those who worry about Israel’s security,” Amidror—an observantly religious Jew—told me, “I pull out a copy of the Bible and say, ‘Ultimately, we have security in God.’”104
He was right on all accounts, of course. Looking at Israel’s current security status through geopolitical and economic lenses, the situation is far more favorable than most Westerners realize—until Iran gets the bomb. And looking through the third lens of Scripture, it is clear that the God of Israel is in charge, no matter what happens with Russia, Iran, Hamas, or other current or future enemies.
Anyone who has been to Israel recently can attest to experiencing this conundrum for him- or herself. On one hand, media reports in Israel as well as in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere are often filled with talk of “wars and rumors of wars.” On the other hand, day-to-day life in Israel feels very peaceful. People are not paralyzed by fear of what could be. They are going to work, to the malls, to the movie theaters, to the beaches and the mountains, nearly as anyone in a truly peaceful country would.
What’s more, if you read the headlines carefully, you will spot stories not only about Iran and Hamas but also about historic and often counterintuitive new trends toward peace in the region. Among them:
THE INTIFADA IS FINISHED
Charles Krauthammer, nationally syndicated column, June 21, 2005
EGYPTIAN LEADER PRAISES SHARON
Agence France-Presse, August 9, 2005
ISRAEL AND PAKISTAN HOLD FIRST HIGH-LEVEL MEETING
The New York Times, September 1, 2005
PAKISTAN, ISRAEL IN LANDMARK TALKS
BBC News, September 1, 2005
BAHRAIN, KUWAIT TO MEND
ISRAELI TIES
Associated Press, September 24, 2005
BREACHING A TABOO, KUWAITIS TALK OF SOFTER STAND ON ISRAEL
International Herald Tribune, October 6, 2005
KUWAIT PAPERS PROPOSE NORMAL TIES WITH ISRAEL
Reuters, October 8, 2005
ISRAEL, JORDAN MARK 11 YEARS OF PEACE TWO-WAY TRADE REACHED $185 MILLION LAST YEAR, UP 41% OVER 2003
Associated Press, October 26, 2005
ISRAEL, ARAB WORLD ENGAGE IN HIDDEN TRADE EXPERTS SAY CAMOUFLAGED TRADE BETWEEN ISRAEL, ARAB COUNTRIES HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS
Associated Press, December 26, 2005
On September 10, 2005—just a day before the fourth anniversary of the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington—I posted an item on my weblog noting the historic news that Pakistan had begun to move publicly toward diplomatic ties with Israel, a previously unthinkable development.
First, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister recently met with Israel’s Foreign Minister, another Muslim country with whom Israel has diplomatic ties.
Then came the news in the Islamic world media that Pakistan has been having secret diplomatic contacts with Israel for years.
Then Israel revealed more details about secret diplomatic contact with Pakistan over the years.
Then Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf publicly praised Sharon as “courageous” for withdrawing from Gaza. “I think such actions need courage and boldness,” Musharraf said. “What we have seen on the TV, Israelis not wanting to leave, being forced out, is a courageous thing to do. We hope that he shows [an] equal amount of courage finally in the creation of the Palestinian state.”