The Middle East peace process received major boost on Monday night after Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, dropped his long-standing objections to a Palestinian state based on the existing boundaries of the West Bank. There have been some that have been saying the current French president is negotiating a Middle East peace treaty, therefore he must be the Antichrist. There are no doubts that he is doing just that, just are half the world are at the moment, including the U.S; - but does that make Barak Obama the Antichrist? The answer to that is a definite NO!
The facts of the matter are that the Antichrist does not design a seven year peace treaty but simply signs off on what others have already worked out beforehand. Accordingly, we shall not know the Antichrist until he signs off on a treaty and at no time before that shall we know his correct identity. Any other suggestion relative to his correct identity is really nothing much more than speculation at this point in time.
That is not to say that there are wheels that are now moving at an incredible rate towards the fulfillment for the remainder of the Bible prophecies. With the likelihood is that there will be a solution to the current by pass in the Middle East before the end of the year with a two state solution. More than likely that will result in the treaty of Daniel Chapter 9, Verse 27 being confirmed. The result of that is going to be that the correct identity of the man of sin being revealed at last.
Daniel Chapter 9, Verse 27 (KJV)
27 And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make [it] desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
The rest of this article is the result of what has been reformatted from an article by Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem
In a development as dramatic as it was unexpected, Mr Netanyahu appeared to succumb to US pressure by accepting a proposal put forward by the Obama administration that could represent a significant step towards resuming long-stalled peace talks.
Despite having engaged President Barack Obama in a very public argument on the very same point in May, Mr Netanyahu conceded for the first time that he was prepared to accept a Palestinian state that roughly follows the 1967 ceasefire lines demarcating the West Bank and Gaza.
Until now, he has consistently rejected Palestinian demands to state how much of the occupied West Bank he is prepared to cede under a peace deal.
The Obama administration declined to react to the report, while an official at the State
Department said it would wait until Mr Netanyahu or a senior member of his team commented publicly on the claims.
The development will raise hopes that the peace process can be rejuvenated after months of acrimonious stalemate. But while potentially providing much-needed momentum, it is likely to prove more an incremental step than an epoch-making breakthrough.
It could even be rejected flat out, and many of Mr Netanyahu's sceptics are likely to see the offer as ruse, proposed because it is likely to prove unacceptable to the Palestinians.
The offer was couched in terms that, for the moment, appear to cross many of their red lines.
Although Mr Netanyahu has agreed to reopen negotiations based on the contentious 1967 lines, thereby fulfilling one of the Palestinian leadership's principal demands, he has demanded two uncomfortable concessions in return for the resumption of talks.
The Palestinians would be expected to retract their application for statehood, which is to be presented before the United Nations General Assembly next month, an Israeli official told The Daily Telegraph.
They would also have to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, the official added.
Any withdrawal of the statehood bid is likely to prove politically costly for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who would face a domestic backlash were he to cave in.
And while the Palestinians say they are prepared to recognise Israel as a Jewish state once a peace deal has been signed, they insist that to do so sooner would effectively mean having to give up on the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their former homes in the Holy Land.
On Monday night, the Palestinians denied having received any offer from Israel and even officials in Jerusalem appeared wary of predicting an imminent breakthrough.
"The Palestinians have not yet accepted the offer," one said, refusing to be drawn on whether the Palestinians had, in fact, rejected it altogether.
Despite the appearance of deadlock, the Palestinian leadership is now likely to come under pressure to make some kind of counter-offer and it is this fact alone that makes yesterday's announcement highly significant.
For nearly a year, neither side has been prepared to budge, much to the frustration of Mr Obama, who has accused them both if intransigence. Now that the Israelis have blinked, or at least given the appearance of blinking, the Palestinians may well feel that they have to respond in kind.
Some within Mr Abbas's inner circle are said to be looking for a face-saving way in which to drop their statehood bid after the US Congress threatened to cancel aid to the Palestinian Authority if they went ahead.
Yet even if they were prepared to compromise on this issue, it is hard to see the Palestinians also agreeing to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. That would be seen as making two concessions in exchange for one.
For his part, Mr Netanyahu, who has staked his reputation on an uncompromising attitude to the peace process, is likely to face recriminations of his own from the Israeli right, his traditional constituency, which will claim that he has betrayed his principles by wilting under US pressure.
Daniel Levy, a former negotiator for the Israeli government now at the New American Foundation, said: "The language that Netanyahu accepts is both 1967 and not 1967. He appears to show flexibility but the formula he proposes, which has been supported by the Obama administration, shifts the emphasis in Israel's direction to accommodate demographic changes – the settlements."
During his visit to Washington in May, the Israeli leader was involved in an angry contretemps with Mr Obama after his host became the first US president publicly to propose that a Palestinian state should be based on the 1967 lines – essentially the present day West Bank and Gaza Strip, both captured and occupied by Israel in the Six Day War that year.
Mr Obama's proposal was, in fact, only a public iteration of long standing US policy. The president later defused some of the tension by clarifying that the border would also be based on "mutually agreed land swaps", a formula under which Israel would annex its larger settlements in the West Bank in exchange for some of its own territory.
But many on the Israeli right, backed by their powerful supporters in the US, believe that the occupation of most of the West Bank should never be ended.
To their fury, Mr Netanyahu, who only accepted the principle of a Palestinian state for the first time in 2009, has effectively shattered their dream by essentially accepting Mr Obama's framework, despite the storm he kicked up while in Washington.
But even if negotiations do resume, the prime minister is likely to prove less generous than his more centrist predecessors, who offered the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of the West Bank during earlier negotiations.
The emergence of Mr Netanyahu's offer provided the first concrete evidence that informal contacts between Israel and the Palestinians have been taking place.
Formal negotiations between the two sides were suspended last September in a row over
Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu's settlement policy has led to frequent spats with the US. His relationship with the Obama administration, and particularly with Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has suffered as a result. Earlier this year, George Mitchell, Mr Obama's special representative to the peace talks, resigned in frustration at the lack of progress. He is understood to have held the Israelis to be largely responsible for the impasse.
But Monday night's development suggested that the US has remained heavily invested in the peace process. Mediation efforts are likely to have been led by Dennis Ross, a key Middle East adviser at the State Department who is one of the few members of the Obama administration with strong sympathies for Israel.
