As Israel was fighting this weekend to degrade Iran’s Gaza-embedded proxy army, the EU was forecasting Tehran’s soon return to the nuclear deal for which it will garner a massive financial reward. And who was sitting in Iran through it all?
Author - Stan Goodenough
Stan is a South African gentile who for three decades has called Israel home. He is married to a Czech national, Frantiska, and the couple have seven Jerusalem-born children, three of whom were granted Israeli citizenship after completing their service in the IDF. The rest of the family are permanent residents.
A news journalist by profession, Stan has worked as an accredited tour guide for the last 11 years, using Scripture and the geography and history of the Land and People of Israel to teach Christians about the ever-relevant centrality of this nation to the Bible and to our faith.
Before moving to Israel, Stan was a political reporter for the South African newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, during the final years of the apartheid era. In 1991 he joined the staff of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), serving as editor of the monthly Middle East Intelligence Digest and helping launch the online ICEJ News Service in the earliest days of the Internet age. In this capacity, he was in Madrid, Spain to cover the first international Middle East Peace Conference, and since then has extensively reported on the “land-for-peace process” as it has passed through its stages, from Oslo to Annapolis and beyond.
“Whether writing or guiding,” says Stan, “my prayerful purpose is to communicate primarily to Christians a Bible-based understanding of how the LORD works in and through the realm of politics to restore Israel and prepare the way for the Messiah’s reign.”
More articles from Stan Goodenough
While the century-old struggle is mostly cast as a conflict over land, the Biblical viewpoint discloses something deeper: That it is a battle over whose god is truly God – YHWH of Israel or Allah of Arabia?
As we publish this, rockets are still being fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza, and reports are circulating that Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad have agreed to an Egypt-mediated ceasefire. The coming hours will tell.
For two millennia the Jews have mourned – on Tisha b’Av and on many other occasions every year – over the destruction of the Temples and the exile of the nation. Christians give very little thought to these calamities, much less weep over them. Why?
Conditions are ripe, on the eve of a Temple-centred Jewish commemorative day, for an eruption of violence from Islamist terrorist groups, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad
The Biden administration says the US, and the world, is much safer, now that the Al-Qaeda terror chief has been taken out. They would surely agree then, would they not, that Israel and the world would be much safer if the Hamas terror chief were taken out too?
Reports that Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold are proliferating, even as Tehran maintains that it has no intention of doing so. Tehran held the world for fools, and fooled the world.
On November 1, for the fifth time in 3.5 years, Israel will vote for a new government. That’s still months away, but Israel-aware Christians following the polls and predictions might find the following helpful in guiding their prayers.
In this third installment of our series on “Guiding God’s Land,” tour guide Stan Goodenough takes us to Shiloh – the first national capital of Israel.
In an act of pure Zionism called “the largest civil disobedience in years” thousands of Jews stake their nation’s claim to its own land. Tell me this isn’t a formidable act of combat in the realm of the Divine.
