he was twelve years old, long before the idea of Zionism would enter his mind. In biblical prophecy the regathering of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is ultimately linked to the coming of the Messiah.
“At the time of Herzl’s death the idea of a reborn Jewish nation was still just a dream. You saw the ram walking through the battlefield . . . the First World War, the Jubilee of 1917, the Balfour Declaration, and the liberation of Jerusalem and the land.”
“And then I followed it through a city of burning buildings, smashed windows, chaos, and violence.”
“That represented what took place in the 1930s,” said the Oracle. “That was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when the Nazi fury against the Jewish people exploded in Germany and before the world. The satanic forces that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party embodied had now overtaken a nation and would soon overtake a continent. The Jewish people were now in danger of annihilation. They needed a refuge. And so it was just before that darkness began to rise in Europe that a homeland was given to them, a refuge, the land of Israel. It all happened at the same time.”
“As if it was known in advance that these things would take place.”
“It was known,” he replied. “Thousands of years before these things took place, as far back as Moses, it was prophesied. The people of Israel would be scattered to the ends of the earth and persecuted. But it was also prophesied that God would gather them back. And it would all be fulfilled, just as it was foretold, on the stage of modern history.
“In the Book of Jeremiah a prophecy was given as to how it would come about. First would come the fishers, and then the hunters. What are fishers?” he asked. “Those who draw in. The Zionists were fishers. They were the ones who called the Jewish people to come back to the land before calamity would overtake them. They fished for them. Then came the hunters. Hunters pursue; they drive away. The Nazis were hunters. They hunted them. They came second. And it was that very persecution that caused thousands upon thousands of Jewish people to return to their homeland in the largest waves of return up to that moment. Even in a modern and secular age, all things, both good and evil, are worked together to fulfill the ancient prophecies.”
“And when the ram walked behind the barbed wire and to the harbor . . . ”
“The Holocaust,” said the Oracle, “and the survivors on their journey back to the Promised Land.”
“Herzl never could have imagined how it would all come about . . . through two world wars and the shaking of the world.”
“No, but he could prophesy it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Herzl founded Zionism at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. A few days after the congress had ended, he penned in his journal a prophecy. He wrote:
At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it. 2
“He gave a deadline to his prophecy—fifty years, the time period of the Jubilee. So Zionism was birthed with a Jubilean prophecy, just as it was a Jubilean movement—the return to the ancestral land.”
“So when was the First Zionist Congress?”
“It happened in 1897 . . . So if we add the fifty years of Herzl’s prophecy, the fifty years of the Jubilee, it takes us to the year . . . ”
“1947 . . . So did anything happen that year linked to the mystery?”
“In the years following the Second World War, the British government turned the issue of Palestine over to the newly formed United Nations. This would lead to the fulfillment of prophecy. It all converged on the year 1947, the fiftieth year, the year of Herzl’s prophecy.
“So the United Nations set up a committee to address the matter: the UN Special Committee on Palestine. The committee worked on the problem for several months. Finally it came up with a solution. The solution would be known as the Partition Plan. It would alter the course of modern history. According to the plan, the British occupation would come to an end and the land would be divided in two—a Jewish state and an Arab state. If approved, it would mean that there would be a Jewish nation in the land of Israel for