There are a few reasons, actually.

Speaking with Reuters, President Trump touched on the mystical theme of “peace in the Middle East.”

It’s a region of the world where somebody has been hating, enslaving, and killing somebody else for centuries, and the only issue they can seem to coalesce around is an abiding hatred of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.

Trump, however, doesn’t seem to quite grasp the enormity of the situation.

“I want to see peace with Israel and the Palestinians,” Trump told Reuters Thursday. “There is no reason there’s not peace between Israel and the Palestinians — none whatsoever.”

Wut?

Trump has tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but no new peace talks have been announced.

The president is in dire need of a primer on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It has its roots in the political, as well as ideological and spiritual realm.

The Jews consider Israel their historical and spiritual homeland. They were driven out and scattered thousands of years ago, but persecution abroad – most notably in Europe, during the Holocaust – drove them back. With the help of Great Britain and the U.S., they were relocated in what is now the modern state of Israel, reestablishing the homeland in 1948.

Since that time, the tiny nation has undergone war and conflict with their neighbors, who seek to drive them out, or as the president of Iran once said, “into the sea.”

There have been peace deals, Israel has given up territory, to the point the map of Israel’s borders resemble nothing of what they were in 1948.

Palestine, basically a group of nomadic Arabs who dispute Israel’s claims on the land, have allowed the terrorist group, Hamas, to become a legitimate voice in their political landscape, and Hamas have sworn to destroy Israel and the Jewish people.

How do you make peace with a people who harbor that level of hate?

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is set to meet Trump during a visit to Washington next week.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House in February amid promises from Trump to bring peace to the region.

If you want to delve even further, you can look to the Biblical explanation of the conflict.

In Genesis 15, God promised Abraham that he would have heirs, but Abraham was already quite old, and his wife, Sarah (at the time, they were still called Abram and Sarai) was past birthing age.

In Genesis 16, Sarah told Abraham to sleep with her handmaiden, Hagar, to conceive a child, which he did, and Ishmael was born. Abraham was 86 years old.

This was a mistake. God had promised a child to Abraham and Sarah, but rather than wait on God’s promise, they rushed ahead and did their own thing.

God kept His promise, however. Sarah, in her old age, became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac in Genesis 21.

The interesting point for Christians to take note of is the relationship of Ishmael, who was a teenager when Abraham sent he and his mother away, and Isaac.

Genesis 21:12-13 NIV “ But God said to him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring^[b] will be reckoned. ¹³ I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”

Both Ishmael and Isaac were sons of Abraham, but one was a son born from Abraham’s own efforts, rushing ahead of God, while the other was the promise from God that Abraham and his rightful wife, Sarah, would conceive.

Ishmael went on to be the father of the Arab nations, while Isaac became the father of the Hebrews.

Back in Genesis 16, however, we see this ominous message about Ishmael and his descendants, a premonition of what we see today, long before Hamas, Hezbollah, al Quaeda, ISIS, or any other terrorist organization:

“He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” – Genesis 16:12

This was the message to Hagar about the child she was to bear. Emphasis mine.

I can’t think of a more precise and accurate definition for what we see going on with Islam, or with the multiple conflicts in the Middle East, today.

And yes, I know some are reticent to put a Biblical or spiritual spin to every problem in the world, but I think it is at our own peril if we ignore the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thinking that the problem is as easily solved as just getting the right businessmen or politicians involved.

That’s been tried.