Sid: Now, my guest Shira Sorka-Ram is red hot for the Messiah, I’m speaking to her at Tel-Aviv Israel where she has been a citizen and lived in Israel for over forty years. And Shira, I remember many many years ago and you just refreshed my memory that was back in 1973 just before the Yom Kippur War; you had your own Yom Kippur War tell me what happened.
Shira: Well, I was living in Jerusalem and there was a gal, a Jewish gal from Britain who had come to know the Lord in Britain, so her parents sent her to Israel trusting that she would forget all this stuff about Yeshua if she lived in Israel. So she came here and somehow, I don’t remember how I met her and she moved in with me and lived with me for some time. Meanwhile, I went for a trip to the states and when I came back I found that she was engaged to young man also a Messianic Jew. Well, when her family heard that their daughter was engaged to a Messianic Jew they absolutely blew their top. And there were other relatives of her, aunts and uncles that were already in Israel besides her own family in Britain. And so they went to the orthodox newspapers and they said, we have a missionary on the street and she is taking tracks to the western wall and passing them out there, she taking tracks to the University and passing out tracks there to the university students and that she’s got to be stopped. Well, that appeared in one of the orthodox newspapers and it was an incitement to violence and a couple of days later I heard a big explosion, I was on the third floor of a building where I lived and I opened the door and the whole stairwell was very very badly on fire and I immediately thought I wonder if the place is going to burn down and that was the only way I could get out was through that stair well. So I called the police and they got there very quickly and there happened to be a newspaper man that was walking by or in his car going by and he stopped. And after they put the fire out he came up in the stairs and said, “What in the world’s going on?” And I said, “Well, I believe this has happened because of my faith in Yeshua the Messiah.” Well, the next day in Yediah Denote, which is the #1 newspaper on the back of it it said, showed my picture and said, “I believe in the God of Israel and he speaks to me.” I don’t where he got that from, but something in my conversation and here it was you know that God is speaking to me, but it went from newspaper to newspaper. I had not actually been to the Western Wall passing out tracks nor had I been to the university, but it got a lot of publicity; in fact it actually went all around the world.
Sid: I know, I read about it in the United States, it made the major newspapers, but “How in the world did your parents put up with their daughter in Israel and a bomb is put in her house to kill her; how could they let you stay there Shira?”
Shira: Well, listen Sid; I was twenty-seven years old.
Sid: I don’t care my daughters older than that right now and I want her, if someone’s trying to bomb her.
Shira: Well, I don’t know I just felt that God would protect me; I felt I was there in His will, and I was there for a purpose. I began to see this purpose little by little as I stayed in Israel, I certainly didn’t know it at the beginning. But I simply felt that I was where I was supposed to be and that was it.
Sid: Shira, you have been in Israel for forty years, but there are many people listening to us that don’t know the history of Israel from just a little bit just before you even got there, I wonder if you’d give us a synopsis?
Shira: Well, the Holy Land is a Holy Land, everybody knows the Holy Land is a place that God gave to the Jewish people through Abraham, He says “ I give it to you and your descendants forever,” and so Israel had it, but Israel sinned and so the Lord said, “If you sin Israel you will be scattered throughout the whole world, but when you come back to the Lord then I will gather you from the four winds and I will bring you back to your own land.” Well, if anybody ever wanted to know whether God could keep His promises, here after two thousand years of the Jewish people being tossed out of their own land, even though there were a few Jews always in the Holy Land, most were not here they were scattered around the world. Now, the Turkish Empire had this land, it was called the Ottoman Empire; had it from 1453 to 1917, that’s over four hundred years. They ruled all this area, they ruled Egypt, they ruled the Mediterranean area; they ruled all of this area. But in World War I, Britain and as you know the allies won and so the Ottoman Empire disappeared and the Middle East was divided up between England and France. And so we have the whole area of the Holy Land, so in 1922 the British wrote a letter to the Jewish people and said, we favor having the Holy Land as a homeland for the Jews, 1922. However, it wasn’t long before those that came to power in Britain decided not to do that and they divided seventy-six percent of Jordan, of this Holy Land into an area called Jordan. And then in 1946 folks, 1946 that the year after World War II Jordan became a nation taking seventy-six percent of the whole Holy Land leaving twenty-four percent and so Israel was hoping that the Jews were hoping that they would get land, but then the British decided that they would divide it up again and it became a very nasty messy place because the Arabs were saying we don’t want any Jews here. The Jew were saying yes, but this is the land that God promises and that you promised it. So in 1947 the British handed it over to the United Nations, the United Nations divided it up between Israel and the Arabs. Israel accepted it, the Arabs did not accept it and that is when the wars started; 1948 Israel declared its Independence and we do accept what the United Nations said, the Arabs said “We do not accept what the United Nations said,” and from that time on there has been war over this area of the Holy Land.
Sid: How in your mind will the Palestinian problem be settled? In the mind of most of the people in the west, the only way it can be settled is a two state solution of the tiny sliver of land that Israel current has.
Shira: Right, Sid I don’t think that there is any any solution to this; I just don’t see a solution coming. I think that it’s going to go on and on and get worse and worse for Israel. If you want to know what Israel is most afraid of besides Iran, it’s the United Nations because the United Nations pounds away at Israel.
Sid: Why do they pound away at Israel? It’s obvious they do it why?
Shira: Well, it’s very simple. Around, somewhere around fifty nations are in the Arab League, it’s not exactly that number but around that in the Arab league and they all vote as one group. And there’s the Muslim countries that are another great huge group and when you put those two together; the Arab League and the Muslim countries they have in almost every situation a majority in the United Nations and they simply run the United Nations.
Sid: So what is going to happen in your opinion?
Shira: Well, this September the Palestinians in the West Bank say that they are going to demand the country of their own country without negotiating with Israel. Now what that means is their saying, were going to have our own country but we will not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. We will not accept Israel’s claim of defenses that she needs, like certain borders where she can defend herself and so we’re just going to declare our own state and then you know what can happen. If Hamas takes over the West Bank, which it very likely will, then we will have rockets coming out of the West Bank, just like we have rockets coming out of Gaza all the time.
Sid: So what is going to happen, will the world just then legislate a two state solution to avoid this? I mean the UN looks to me like they really want that state, a Palestinian State.
Shira: The only person, the only country that could stop this is the United States.
Sid: But with our current administration, I see that as little likelihood.
