Israelites Take Roundabout Sinai Route To Avoid ISIS-Sisi Fighting

Military analysts remain divided over the wisdom of the decision.

Pi Hahiroth, January 16 – When the Children of Israel passed by here on the way to the Sea of Reeds several months ago, their leadership took a strategic turn and led the people not along the coast up to the Promised Land, but into the interior of the Sinai Peninsula, where the Hebrews were less likely to get embroiled in ongoing sectarian violence between the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi and militants affiliated with the Islamic State.

As the Israelite chronicles indicate, God bade Moses to guide them away from a direct route via the Philistine territories along the Mediterranean, lest the freed population encounter the ravages of warfare and return to the relative safety of servitude to Egypt. For years, ISIS-allied fighters have waged a guerrilla war against Egypt, a secular military dictatorship that the Islamist militants seek to overthrow by violent means.

“It was during Pharaoh’s sending away of the people, and God did not guide them along the road toward the land of Philistia, despite it being close, for God said, ‘Lest the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt,'” the chronicle records. Instead, “God turned the people into the wilderness by the Sea of Reeds.” Military analysts remain divided over the wisdom of the decision.

“It makes perfect sense,” explained Omar Suleiman, who has studied militant activity in the Sinai. “Along the coast you have Daesh, you have Hamas, you have all sorts of trouble. It’s a lot to ask of a couple million people with no military experience or understanding to go that way.”

Others questioned the value of the detour. “Is this the God who just crushed the most powerful empire in the region with ten plagues?” wondered Amalek bin Eliphaz, a political activist with a lifelong interest in Hebrew-God relations. “It couldn’t be a big deal for this ostensibly omnipotent God to make short work of whoever gets in the way. Maybe these people aren’t as secure as they could be about their readiness to be liberated. Or about the justice of their cause. You know, it might take just one little war to undo this whole Israel-as-a-viable-people-and-culture enterprise – and does anyone really think there’s no war going in the interior of the Sinai Peninsula? Give me a break. I’ve half as mind to gather a bunch of troops and attack them myself, just to make the point, even if it means we get mauled. Good grief.”

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