You may be interested, or not, but politics in Scotland are somehow tied to the Middle East, and to the nation of Israel. The United Kingdom, commonly the U.K. is a union of England and Scotland that started in 1703. If you ever read a poem about the “Lion and the Unicorn”, the poem is about those two countries, and their union.

There is a parliament in Scotland, and the national government is dominated by a group that wants complete independence for Scotland. That Party is the SNP, the Scottish National Party.

I hope you’re not bored yet; this story is about to expand far beyond the boundaries of one country in the British Isles. The SNP had adopted a policy that the Jewish Israelis are committing “genocide” against the Arabs, mostly Muslims, in Gaza.

“Genocide” is an extreme word, and most governments, in most countries don’t use it when they describe the recent war in the Middle East. That includes most Muslim governments.

I think I can explain what is happening in Scotland. There are many Muslim immigrants in modern Britain, and many of them are involved in democratic politics. Muslims who support the SNP, and who have strong opinions about the war between Israel and Hamas, are expressing their political will.

I think that is what’s happening.

If you want a full report:

• READ: Mason happy to repeat ‘no genocide’ claim after SNP expulsion

This is interesting.

I am sure there are many important issues for the SNP in Scotland, but strangely, things happening in Israel have claimed their attention. That is true in many parts of the world; the Middle East, including Israel, seem to claim everyone’s attention.

Somehow, one small part of the world is at the center of a whirlpool causing more arguments than other things.

We may be used to this, and miss the fact that this is quite strange, and quite biblical. Why is the whole world focused on that small area, just like the old stories in the Bible?

Imagine that you are an Atheist and you don’t believe in God and other spiritual beings like angels, demons, and the Devil, and the Bible.

The Bible is centered on a small place in the Middle East and until 1948, that place was a note in history, and it did not exist anymore. Just before 1948, there was an indisputable genocide, the Nazi Holocaust. There were about eleven million Jewish people in the world, and the Nazis killed about six million of them. The Jewish nation of Israel emerged from less that nothing, against all odds.

If we take a no-God position, it is impossible to explain miracles, and the re-appearance and survival of that one small country in the Middle East is a strange coincidence. It is also strange that things happening in that small country are causing stress and arguments in the whole world, including places like Scotland.

Now, it seems like world politics have a whirlpool that every country spins around, and Israel and the nearby Middle East is at the center. A century ago, Israel was something that we read about in the Bible. Some old stories included that ancient country, and the stories were almost like fairy tales. We had that old religious book, and we also had reality.

Christians often believed in “British Israelism” which is the idea that the new people of God were Christians, especially English speakers, and all the old promises in the Bible were now about them. That was a common idea in many churches.

Those ideas have mostly disappeared from our churches, with the new reality.

That old book, the Bible, told us about our future. We call that prophecy, and it was easy for educated people to ignore that. One reality was that there was no nation of Israel, and people thought there never would be.

Things have changed, since those days.

Now there is an Israel, and things that were promised in the Bible have returned. At one of the worst times in their history, God made a promise through the prophet Jeremiah that Israel would be restored as a nation:

Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, ‘He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock.’ (Jeremiah 31: 10)

That old book, as the voice of God, promised us the impossible thing that is happening now. The promise was “gather” and “keep” and somehow, that has happened. It’s almost like history is telling us that there really is a God who keeps promises.

Christians say that Jesus is coming again, and we are in the “end times” that were promised in the Bible. With modern politics, it seems that the stage is being set for the final act, and all the props are being assembled on the world stage.

We are also promised that the whole world will begin to understand this spiritual reality:

Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. (Matthew 24: 30)