Are the events taking place in Israel today in fulfillment of Bible prophecy?

Ezek. 37:21, 22, JP: “Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king to them all.” (Israel today is not a nation under a king of the royal line of David. Theirs is a republic.)

Isa. 2:2-4, JP: “It shall come to pass in the end of days, that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many peoples shall go and say: ‘Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.’ . . . And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (In Jerusalem today, where the temple was formerly located there is no “house of the God of Jacob,” but, instead, an Islamic shrine. And there is no move on the part of Israel or its neighbors to “beat their swords into plowshares.” They depend for survival on military preparedness.)

Isa. 35:1, 2, JP: “The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice, even with joy and singing; the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the LORD, the excellency of our God.” (Remarkable reforestation and irrigation projects have been successfully undertaken in Israel. But its leaders do not give credit to the Lord God. As a former premier, David Ben-Gurion, said: “Israel is determined . . . to conquer the desert and make it flourish by the power of science and the pioneering spirit, and to transform the country into a bastion of democracy.”)

Zech. 8:23, JP: “In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, shall even take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying: We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (To what God does the prophecy refer? In the Hebrew language his name [יהוה, commonly translated Jehovah] appears over 130 times in this one book of the Holy Scriptures. Today when someone uses that name, do people conclude that the person must be a Jew? No; for many centuries, superstition has caused the Jewish people as a whole to refrain from ever uttering God’s personal name. The upsurge of religious interest concerning natural Israel today does not fit this prophecy.)

How, then, are events in modern-day Israel to be viewed? Merely as part of global developments foretold in the Bible. These include war, lawlessness, cooling off of love for God, and the love of money.—Matt. 24:7, 12; 2 Tim. 3:1-5.