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Is Zionism Evil?
Eric V. Snow
What Biblical verses say
that the Jews are God’s chosen people and/or have land promised to them by
God? Has God used the modern-day
Zionist movement for His own purposes?
Here as a Christian I’ll make a moderate case for Zionism, since I’m a
pacifist who doesn’t believe wars are ever right in this age.
Let’s first consider God’s
unconditional promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which included the
creation of a special spiritual relationship between God and certain
descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
After Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, the word “IF” didn’t appear. Notice God’s promise in Genesis 22:16-18: “By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah,
because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only
son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy
seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore.
And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in thy seed shall all
the nations of the earth be blessed. Because thou hast obeyed my voice.” Let’s examine the meaning of the word “gate”
here, when it has a national context.
It’s not just “cities” here, which “gates” symbolized since they let
people enter through the walls, but it’s a control or bottleneck issue. Notice the use of the singular “gate.” Also notice the beginning of the
birthright/scepter distinction appears here.
The “birthright” represents the promises of material prosperity, but the
“scepter” refers to the promises of a descendant who would be both the Messiah,
the Savior, and the king of Israel, which were fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Similarly, the blessing
given to Rebekah confirms that this covenant existed (Genesis 24:60): “And they blessed Rebekah and said to her,
‘May you, our sister, become thousands of ten thousands, and may your descendants
possesses the gate of those who hate them.”
Isaac received confirmation
of this blessing and the related birthright, as recorded in Gen. 26:3-5: “Stay in this land, and I will be with you
and bless you. For to you and to your seed I will give all these lands; and I will
establish the oath, which I swore to Abraham your father. And I will make your seed to multiply as the
stars of the heavens, and will give to your seed all these lands. And in your
seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because Abraham obeyed My
voice and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws.”
Then Isaac passed this
blessing and birthright onto Jacob.
Consider also the implications of last part of verse for those who are
steadily anti-Semitic (i.e., present dispute in Middle East). “And he came near and kissed him. And he
smelled the smell of his clothing, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of
my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD has blessed. And may God give
you of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and
wine. Let people serve you, and let nations bow down to you. Be lord over your
brothers, and let your mother's sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone that
curses you, and blessed be he that blesses you.” (Genesis 27:27-29)
If Abraham to be the father
of many nations, needs to be more than the small embattled nation of 6 million
in Middle East. The birthright and
scepter promises didn’t go to the Arabs via Hagar and Ishmael either, although
they are related to Abraham as well.
Notice the mentions of a “company” of nations here. “And may God almighty bless you, and make
you fruitful, and multiply you, so that you may be a multitude of peoples.
(Genesis 28:3 MKJV). And behold! The
LORD stood above it, and said, I am Jehovah, the God of Abraham your father,
and the God of Isaac! The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your
seed. And your seed shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread
abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in
you and in your seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And,
behold, I am with you, and will keep you in every place where you go, and will
bring you again into this land. For I will not leave you until I have done that
which I have spoken of to you. (Genesis 28:13-15 MKJV)
The church didn’t fulfill
this, since it isn’t a company or group of nations. Jacob’s descendants included the northern ten tribes, which are
considered “lost,” not just the Jews.
“And God said to him, I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply. A
nation and a company of nations shall be from you, and kings shall come out of
your loins. And the land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac, I will give to you,
and to your seed after you I will give the land.” (Genesis 35:11-12 MKJV)
Manasseh and Ephraim have
Israel/Jacob’s nation placed on them also.
Manasseh the first-born, yet gets the subordinate blessing to what
Ephraim receives. The latter is to become
the company or group of nations, the first the single great nation. “The
Messenger [who is God as well] who redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads.
And let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,
and let them grow like the fishes into a multitude in the midst of the earth.
And Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, and
it was evil in his eyes. And he held up his father's hand to remove it from
Ephraim's head to Manasseh's head. And Joseph said to his father, Not so, my
father. For this is the first-born. Put your right hand on his head. And his
father refused and said, I know, my son, I know. He also shall become a people,
and he also shall be great, but truly his younger brother shall be greater than
he is, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations. (Genesis 48:16-19
MKJV)
Before he died, Jacob
prophesied in Genesis 49 about his sons and their descendants. Notice the reference to “latter days” or
equivalent in v. 1. It isn’t about
period of the divided monarchy (when Judah and Israel were separate kingdoms)
millennia ago. When he discussed Judah,
he said: “Judah, may your brothers
praise you. May your hand be in the neck of your enemies. May your father's
sons bow before you. Judah is a lion's whelp. My son, you have gone up from the
prey. He stooped, he crouched like a lion; and like a lioness, who shall rouse
him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a Lawgiver from between his
feet, until Shiloh come. And the obedience of the peoples to him. (Genesis
49:8-10). This shows that the promise
of the Messiah as well as royal rulers who would rule Israel would be fulfilled
through Judah’s descendants.
By contrast, Joseph received
the birthright blessing, which included the promises of material
prosperity. “Joseph is a fruitful son,
a fruitful son by a well, whose branches run over the wall. The archers have
sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and an archer lurks for him. But his bow
abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of
the mighty God of Jacob (from the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel); by the God of
your father, who shall help you. And may the Almighty bless you with blessings
of Heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the
breasts and of the womb. The blessings of your father are above the blessings
of my ancestors, to the utmost bound of the everlasting hills. They shall be on
the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him, the ruler, the leader
of his brothers.” (Genesis 49:22-26 MKJV)
A comparison of verses 8-10
vs. verses 22-26 show how the promise of the Messiah (the scepter), Judah’s,
got divided from the promise of material wealth (the birthright),
Joseph’s. Why Judah won’t become
wealthy, or especially so.
These verses confirms that
the birthright of material prosperity went to Joseph (Chron. 5:1-2): And the sons of Reuben, the first-born of
Israel (for he was the first-born; but since he defiled his father's bed, his
birthright was given to the sons of Joseph the son of Israel, and the genealogy
is not to be counted according to the birthright; For Judah prevailed among his
brothers, and from him came the chief ruler, but the birthright was Joseph's).
The nation of Israel chose,
under the old covenant, to become God’s chosen people. The basic agreement was that God would give
to His people His laws and a closer spiritual relationship along with material
prosperity in return for their faith and obedience. Before the Ten Commandments were given, God told Moses to tell to
the children of Israel: “And now if you
will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then you shall be a peculiar
treasure to Me above all the nations; for all the earth is Mine. And you shall
be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you
shall speak to the sons of Israel. And Moses came and called for the elders of
the people, and laid before their faces all these words which the LORD
commanded him. And all the people answered together and said, All that the LORD
has spoken we will do. And Moses returned the words of the people to the LORD.”
(Exodus 19:5-8 MKJV)
The final ratification, the
signing of the contract, occurred officially just after God proclaimed to them
the Ten Commandments from Mt. Sinai:
“And Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD, and all
the judgments. And all the people answered with one voice and said, All the
words which the LORD has said, we will do. (Exodus 24:3). This point is repeated in verse 8: “And Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on
the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD has made
with you concerning all these words.” (Exodus 24:8) Thus the promises made to the Patriarchs were passed down to the
descendants of Israel after Israel left Egypt.
(Notice that the blessings promised in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28
are distinctly materialistic in nature, not spiritual). However, these promises weren’t fulfilled in
the time of the kings of Israel, even under King Solomon. The Jews didn’t become a “company of
nations,” but eventually became one small independent nation in the Middle
East.
Now, having
reviewed much of the evidence from Genesis concerning the special material and
material blessings that the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob would
receive, let’s consider some broad questions: Is it unfair for God
to protect or specially select Israel as opposed to other
nations? Does He give it special treatment? What did Paul
write? “As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I
hated.’ What shall we say then? Is there injustice on
God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, ‘I will
have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have
compassion.’ So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon
God’s mercy”(Romans 9:14-16). The
chosen people have some special privileges but also some special burdens, since
they needed to obey God more. God gave
them more, but demands more from them as well since He imparted more of His
truth to them. This is in agreement
with the principle that Jesus proclaimed (Luke 12:48): “And from everyone who has been given much,
shall much be required.”
God has a plan
that he works out in ways we don’t always find pleasant until it’s finished.
Consider
what Numbers 24:9 says concerning Israel: “Blessed is everyone who
blesses you, and cursed is everyone who curses you.” Similarly, as part
of the Abrahamic covenant being passed down, Isaac blessed Jacob by saying,
“Cursed be those who curse you, and blessed be those who bless you” (Gen.
27:29). To spend a generation cursing
Israel still has divine consequences that didn’t expire with the old covenant
(which is separate from the Abrahamic covenant, cf. Gal. 3:16-19). Paul wrote that Israel (not just the Jews,
but all the tribes living elsewhere) are still God’s chosen people (Romans
11:2): “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.” Furthermore, when
did this covenant end that God made with Abraham?: "To your
descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great
river, the river Euphrates" (Genesis 15:18). Romans 11:26
proclaims: "And so all Israel will be saved." Because
Paul spent much of this chapter contrasting gentiles with Israel, I don't agree
with the interpretation of some Bible commentators that it's a reference to
spiritual Israel, i.e., the church, which is composed of saved Christians.
Let’s consider
how these promises were to be fulfilled in the past century. For example, Zechariah 12:9-14; 14:14 could
only be fulfilled by having a lot of Arabs displaced somehow by some means
after they had occupied the Promised Land in the centuries after Rome threw out
most of the (surviving) Jews from the Holy Land, thus creating the Diaspora as
we know it today.
Zechariah.
14:6-10 declares that Judah would fight their enemies effectively:
"In that day I will make the governors of Judah like a firepan in the
woodpile, and like a fiery torch in the sheaves; they shall devour all the
surrounding peoples on the right hand and on the left, but Jerusalem shall be
inhabited again in her own place--Jerusalem. The Lord will save the tents
of Judah first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the
inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not become greater than that of Judah. In
that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is
feeble among them in that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall
be like God, like the Angel of the Lord before them. It shall be in that
day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against
Jerusalem. And I will pour o the house of David and on the inhabitants of
Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom
they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him [Jesus Christ] as one mourns
for his only son, and grieve for Him as ones grieves for a
firstborn." How could this text be fulfilled without some
Muslim Arabs eventually being displaced?
To fulfill
these texts, a critical mass of self-governing Jews have to live where these
Arabs were. A would-be independent Arab Palestine would never have
allowed so many Jews to immigrate there, had it been free from Turkish (before
1917) or British control (after 1917). A couple of hundred thousand Jews,
a small minority of the local population (or of the world's Jews as a whole),
couldn’t fulfill these prophecies that portray Judah being there already when
the Second Coming occurs. Apparently God used the Zionist movement
(including its British and American supporters) despite most of its main
leaders were irreligious Jews to get this goal accomplished, much like He used
Rahab’s lie to protect the spies visiting Jericho. (Correspondingly, President
Harry Truman ultimately saw himself as a modern-day Cyrus! Likewise,
the British prime ministers Lloyd George and Balfour (despite his own skeptical
tendencies), also had religious, not just imperial, motives for supporting the
Zionist cause.
True, replacement theology, under which the
Church has totally replaced Israel as God's chosen people, will object to a
dispensationalist interpretation, under which God isn't yet done with Israel as
God's chosen people (as per Romans 11:1). Dispensationalists
normally reject what's called "replacement theology" concerning the
nation of Israel: They believe the Jews, or even Israelites in
general (including the other tribes normally said to be lost), are still God's
chosen people, not just the church, which can have people of any race or
national origin in it. They will say God is continuing to work with the
Jews (despite the rejected Jesus as Messiah and Savior), and will continue to
do so up until the Second Coming or (in some versions) during the millennium
when Christ rules the earth directly. What’s the Scriptural evidence
for this viewpoint? There are many statements about Israel's restoration
and thus remaining in the land in Scripture: The Arabs will not return,
the effects of 1948-49 aren't going to be permanently reversed in future
centuries.
It's
fine to observe that God's calling of Abraham, his obedient response, and
the working out of God's revelation with his descendants was a
spiritually exogenous event of grace manifesting God's sovereignty that
isn't to the moral or intellectual credit of his physical or spiritual descendants. Moses said it wasn't because of their
moral superiority that He chosen Israel (Deut. 9:6): "Know,
then, it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving
you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people."
Nor was Israel was made the chosen people for physical reasons (Deut.
7:7-8): "The Lord did not set His love on your nor choose you
because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the
fewest of all peoples, but because the Lord loved you and kept the oath
which He swore to your forefathers, the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand,
and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of
Egypt." Similarly, Jehovah knew Israel would be disobedient despite
having made them the chosen people (Deut. 31:20): "For when I bring
them into the land flowing with milk and honey, which I swore to their fathers,
and they have eaten and are satisfied and become prosperous, then they will
turn to other gods and serve them, and spurn Me and break my covenant."
Let’s consider some texts
that prophesy the house of Israel’s defeat or captivity in the latter days, or
at least at some time other than the eighth century b.c. These texts show that God is still working
with His physical chosen people, not just the church. The end of the old covenant when Jesus was crucified didn’t end
God’s promises to His Chosen people.
However, as per the principle of the curses listed in Deuteronomy 28 and
Leviticus 23, God expects more from His chosen people than from other
nations. If they disobey, they will be
punished more, sooner or later. Notice
what Isaiah 10:20-22 reads:
“Now it will come about in
that day that the remnant of Israel, and those of the house of Jacob who have
escaped, will never again rely on the one who struck them [Assyria, vs. 5-12,
15)] but will truly rely on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel. A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob,
to the mighty God. For though your
people, O Israel, may be like the sand of the sea, only a remnant within them
will return; a destruction is determined, overflowing with righteousness.”
Now did a remnant return (v.
22) after the captivity of the house of Israel in the eighth century? None that’s recorded (although Anna was of
Asher, Luke 3:36). The Ten Lost Tribes
indeed did stay lost, so far as most of the world perceives. Therefore, this text’s prophecy has to be
fulfilled in the future, in the events surrounding the Second Coming. Additional evidence for the same time
setting comes from the statement that Israel never again relies on
Assyria/Germany, which would be after a disastrous dependence in the end times,
not before. There’s no way the largely
apostate northern kingdom after going into captivity learned back then to
depend on “the Lord, the Holy One of Israel” instead of just as the millennium
began. Furthermore, in a section that
may well have a dual fulfillment (vs. 24-27), notice that God warns Israel not
to be afraid of Assyria despite the damage it inflicts on His chosen people (vs.
24-25): “O My people who dwell in Zion,
do not fear the Assyrian who strikes you with the rod and lifts up his staff
against you, the way Egypt did. For in
a very little while My indignation against you will be spent, and My anger will
be directed to their destruction.” God
then will break the yoke of slavery off Israel’s back: “So it will be in that day, that his burden
will be removed from your shoulders and his yoke from your neck, and the yoke
will be broken because of fatness” (Isa. 10:27). Since Assyria anciently never enslaved Judah, this has to be a
reference to Israel.
THE MILLENNIAL SETTING OF
ISRAEL’S RETURN FROM EXILE
Isaiah 11:11-13, 15-16
predicts Israel will return from living in many nations, including
Assyria. The time setting here plainly
is millennial, not the sixth century b.c. or even (mainly?) the twentieth
century A.D.:
Then it will happen on that
day [when Jesus returns, v. 10] that the Lord will again recover the second
time with His hand the remnant of His people, who will remain, from
Assyria, Egypt, Pathros, Cush, Elam, Shinar, Hamath, and from the island of the
sea. And He will lift up a standard for
the nations, and will assemble the banished ones of Israel, and will gather the
dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. Then the jealousy of Ephraim will depart,
and those who harass Judah will be cut off; Ephraim will not be jealous of
Judah, and Judah will not harass Ephraim. . . . And the Lord will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt;
and He will wave His hand over the River with His scorching wind; and He will
strike into seven streams, and make men walk over dry-shod. And there will be a highway from Assyria for
the remnant of His people who will be left, just as there was for Israel in the
day that they came up out of the land of Egypt.
Since those who harass Judah
haven’t been cut off (i.e., eliminated and/or conquered, as per v. 14)
decisively in the past century, it’s hard to see this as mainly applying to the
regathering resulting from the Zionist movement in the twentieth century. Notice that for v. 11, the word the NASB
translates “recover” means, according to the Brown-Drivers-Briggs
Hebrew-English lexicon, that God here was “victorious redeeming his
people.” If someone is in need of
redemption, that implies they’re under someone else’s power, like a servant to
a master or a debtor to a creditor.
Verse 16 is particularly interesting, since it makes a comparison
between when Israel came up out of Egypt (and slavery) to when they’ll come up
out of Assyria. But, of course, the
return of the exiles from the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth and fifth
centuries b.c. concerned Judah’s return from Babylon, not the house of Israel’s
return from Assyria. The defeat of Israel and Judah’s enemies described in
verse 14 only takes place after the return from exile, not before, so it
renders little service to Mr. Collins’ cause.
Although Isa. 11:11-16 doesn’t explicitly mention Israel’s deliverance
from national captivity and slavery as the millennium dawns, it still shows
Israel’s disadvantageous, non-controlling position at that time, which hardly
fits an Israel that God helps to win on the battlefield when the Great
Tribulation begins.
WILL ISRAEL END UP IN
SLAVERY?
Another text pointing to Israel’s rescue from a disastrous
state as the millennium gets underway is Isaiah 27:12-13:
“And it will come about in
that day, that the Lord will start His threshing from the flowing stream of the
Euphrates to the brook of Egypt; and you will be gathered up one by one, O sons
of Israel. It will come about also in
that day that a great trumpet will be blown; and those who were perishing in
the land of Assyria and who were scattered in the land of Egypt will come and
worship the Lord in the holy mountain at Jerusalem.”
This hasn’t happened to
date, since Israel never returned from Assyrian captivity as a people. Those “perishing” in Assyria can’t be seen
as successful conquerors of their enemies.
Nor could Israel be “perishing” in Germany if we were allied to them, as
in Mr. Collins’ scenario. Mr. Collins
(ANLAP, p. 7) maintains those “perishing” in Assyria and “scattered” in Egypt
are the Assyrians and Egyptians themselves.
But if the previous verse mentions Israel being “gathered up one by
one,” in order to “come and worship the Lord” in the next verse, those
“scattered” in verse 13 logically aren’t Egyptians but Israelites. In the immediately following context (Isa.
28:1-8) the unrighteousness of Ephraim is described and the Second Coming (v.
5) occurs. So it’s no surprise to
deduce that Israel and Judah are the ones suffering in the immediately
preceding verse (i.e., Isa. 28:13).
ISRAEL RETURNS FROM ASSYRIAN
CAPTIVITY AFTER CHRIST RETURNS
Zechariah 10:6-11 is yet
another Scripture that portrays Israel’s return from Assyria at the
millennium’s inauguration:
‘And I shall strengthen the
house of Judah, and I shall save the house of Joseph and I shall bring them
back, because I have had compassion on them; and they will be as though I
had not rejected them, for I am the Lord their God, and I will answer them. . .
. I will whistle for them to gather them together, for I have redeemed them;
and they will be a numerous as they were before. When I scatter them among the peoples, they will remember Me in
far countries, and they with their children will live and come back. I will bring them back from the land of
Egypt and gather them from Assyria; and I will bring them into the land of
Gilead and Lebanon, until no room can be found for them. And He will pass through the sea of
distress, and strike the waves in the sea, so that all the depths of the Nile
will dry up and the pride of Assyria will be brought down, and the scepter of
Egypt will depart.
The context of this return
is obviously millennial. Modern-day
Israel could only end up in Assyria (i.e., Germany) or Egypt
involuntarily. If it were voluntary
(how?), it wouldn’t be necessary for Jehovah to (v. 6) “save the house of
Joseph.” Furthermore, the Ten Tribes
never ended up in Egypt because the eighth century b.c. Assyrian deportations
took them to the north, not to the west or south of the Holy Land. Therefore, the mentions of Israel returning
from Egypt, such as Isa. 27:12-13, Zech 10:10; Hosea 11:9-11; cf. Hosea 9:3;
Micah 7:12, can’t be about what has happened historically, but must refer to
events that will shake the earth in the future. Since Egypt was a place of slavery for Israel before the Exodus,
the principle of duality supports the view that bondage will come Israel’s way
again according to these texts saying Israel would end up there again (in part)
before the millennium.
The texts that refer to a
second regathering of Israel and/or Judah from exile show God is working with
His Chosen People still. He will rescue
them after punishing them. For example,
is Jeremiah 16:14-16 only about Judah?:
“Therefore behold, days are
coming,” declares the Lord, “when it will no longer be said, ‘As the Lord
lives, who brought up the sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but, ‘As
the Lord lives, who brought up the sons of Israel from the land of the North and
from all the countries where He had banished them.’ For I will restore them to their own land
which I gave to their fathers.”
Was verse 15’s affirmation
proverbially ever said of the Jews after returning from the Babylonian
Captivity? I think not. Verse 16 shows that God mounts a determined
operation to find all of His chosen people:
“’Behold, I am going to send for many fishermen,’ declares the Lord,
‘and they will fish for them; and afterwards I shall send for many hunters, and
they will hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and from the clefts of
the rocks.’” Amidst such a
single-minded effort, would He neglect hunting down the Ten Tribes? Furthermore, much of Judah never returned
from the Babylonian Captivity anyway; only the most zealous went back to
rebuild the Temple, Jerusalem, and other cities in the Promised Land. This promise overall apparently can only be
fulfilled in the future. Therefore,
verses 17-18 gain still more significance, since they (Israel/Judah) will be
punished for its sin, not protected in the end time as Mr. Collins hopes:
“For My eyes are on all
their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity concealed
from My eyes. And I will first doubly
repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted My land; they
have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable idols and
with their abominations.”
A similar return from exile,
which is plainly millennial, appears in Jer. 23:5-8:
“Behold the days are
coming,” declares the Lord, “when I shall raise up for David a righteous
Branch; and He will reign as king [which wasn’t fulfilled by Christ in the
first century A.D.] and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the
land. In His days Judah will be saved,
and Israel will dwell securely; and this is His name by which He will be
called, ‘The Lord our righteousness.’
Therefore behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when they
will no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives, who brought up the sons of Israel [both
Judah and Israel, judging from verse 6] from the land of Egypt,’ but, ‘As the
Lord lives, who brought up and led back the descendants of the household of
Israel from the north land and from all the countries where I had driven
them.’ Then they will live on their
own soil.”
The context of verse 8
points to Israel’s return from exile happening shortly after the millennium
begins, after a time when God had punished Israel. The end of the Babylonian Captivity and the return of Judah to
the promised land under Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel simply don’t fit such a
statement as “from all the countries where I had driven them.” Therefore, this statement’s prophetic
fulfillment should lie in the years ahead.
Obviously, if Judah and Israel return from exile just as the millennium
begins, God didn’t save them from military defeat during the Great
Tribulation. God will punish His chosen
people by letting them go into exile after losing disastrously in war.
Although this is a big
subject, I have gone over some basic texts showing that God promised to Israel
that they would have the Messiah as their king as well as a set of physical
monarchs because of the “Scepter” promise.
The tribe of Joseph also received the birthright promises of material
prosperity. All the tribes were
promised land, which today the descendants mainly of Judah occupy in the Middle
East today. Although God still has a
relationship with His chosen people outside of the church, He expects more of
them than from the other nations of the world.
Because they have disobeyed Him more despite having the Bible
distributed and preached about in their lands more than most other nations do,
they are destined for greater punishments.
Ignorance is less of an excuse for them compared to other nations.
Clearly from a scriptural viewpoint, God
isn't done with His physical people. The promises to Abraham haven't ended yet,
such as this one in Genesis 15:18: "On that day the Lord made a covenant
with Abram, saying, 'To your descendants I have given this land, from the river
of Egypt as far as the great rive Euphrates." Jeremiah 30-31 have a number
of texts about the restoration of Israel to the Holy Land that couldn't
possibly have been fulfilled when the Babylonian Captivity of Nebuchadnezzar
ended under the Persians. Their sins haven't caused God to permanently cast
them off, such as in Jeremiah 31:36-37: "Thus says the LORD, Who gives the
sun for a light by day, The ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by
night, Who disturbs the sea, And its waves roar (The LORD of hosts is His
name): "If those ordinances depart From before Me, says the LORD, Then the
seed of Israel shall also cease From being a nation before Me forever."
Thus says the LORD: "If heaven above can be measured, And the foundations
of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel
For all that they have done, says the LORD. (NKJV) Zechariah 12:6-8 shows that
a sufficiently large group of Jews are going to be in the Holy Land when Jesus
returns, so in this regard, the Zionist movement didn't "jump the
gun" by coming back too early: "In that day I will make the governors
of Judah like a firepan in the woodpile, and like a fiery torch in the sheaves;
they shall devour all the surrounding peoples on the right hand and on the
left, but Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place-Jerusalem.
"The LORD will save the tents of Judah first, so that the glory of the
house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not become
greater than that of Judah. "In that day the LORD will defend the
inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is feeble among them in that day shall be
like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the Angel of the
LORD before them. (NKJV)
None of this analysis refutes the meanings of
the texts that I just cited. It's necessary to make a distinction between the
physical promises and the spiritual promises, the birthright and the scepter.
So in this regard, the physical promises haven't yet been nullified
completely, since they aren't based on performance/behavior only, even though
God may withdraw those when He wishes. Here's another text that will be
fulfilled as well, which shows that the Arabs will indeed be evicted eventually
from Gaza as well: (Zephaniah 2:4-7) For Gaza shall be forsaken, And Ashkelon
desolate; They shall drive out Ashdod at noonday, And Ekron shall be uprooted.
Woe to the inhabitants of the seacoast, The nation of the Cherethites! The word
of the LORD is against you, O Canaan, land of the Philistines: "I will
destroy you; So there shall be no inhabitant." The seacoast shall be
pastures, With shelters for shepherds and folds for flocks. The coast shall be
for the remnant of the house of Judah; They shall feed their flocks there; In
the houses of Ashkelon they shall lie down at evening. For the LORD their God
will intervene for them, And return their captives. (NKJV)
The context of verse 8
points to Israel’s return from exile happening shortly after the millennium
begins, after a time when God had punished Israel. The end of the Babylonian Captivity and the return of Judah to
the promised land under Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel simply don’t fit such a
statement as “from all the countries where I had driven them.”
Paul
wrote that Israel (not just the Jews, but all the tribes living elsewhere) are
still God’s chosen people (Romans 11:2): “God has not rejected his people whom
he foreknew.” Furthermore,
when did this covenant end that God made with Abraham?: "To
your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the
great river, the river Euphrates" (Genesis 15:18). Romans 11:26 proclaims: "And so all Israel will be
saved." Because Paul spent much of this chapter contrasting gentiles
with Israel, I don't agree with the interpretation of some Bible commentators
that it's a reference to spiritual Israel, i.e., the church, which is composed
of saved Christians.
Let’s consider
how these promises were to be fulfilled in the past century. For example, Zechariah 12:9-14; 14:14 could
only be fulfilled by having a lot of Arabs displaced somehow by some means
after they had occupied the Promised Land in the centuries after Rome threw out
most of the (surviving) Jews from the Holy Land, thus creating the Diaspora as
we know it today.
Zechariah.
14:6-10 declares that Judah would fight their enemies effectively:
"In that day I will make the governors of Judah like a firepan in the
woodpile, and like a fiery torch in the sheaves; they shall devour all the
surrounding peoples on the right hand and on the left, but Jerusalem shall be
inhabited again in her own place--Jerusalem. The Lord will save the tents
of Judah first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the
inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not become greater than that of Judah. In
that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is
feeble among them in that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall
be like God, like the Angel of the Lord before them. It shall be in that
day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against
Jerusalem. And I will pour o the house of David and on the inhabitants of
Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom
they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him [Jesus Christ] as one mourns
for his only son, and grieve for Him as ones grieves for a
firstborn." How could this text be fulfilled without some
Muslim Arabs eventually being displaced?
To fulfill
these texts, a critical mass of self-governing Jews have to live where these
Arabs were. A would-be independent Arab Palestine would never have
allowed so many Jews to immigrate there, had it been free from Turkish (before
1917) or British control (after 1917). A couple of hundred thousand Jews,
a small minority of the local population (or of the world's Jews as a whole),
couldn’t fulfill these prophecies that portray Judah being there already when
the Second Coming occurs. Apparently God used the Zionist movement
(including its British and American supporters) despite most of its main
leaders were irreligious Jews to get this goal accomplished, much like He used
Rahab’s lie to protect the spies visiting Jericho. (Correspondingly, President
Harry Truman ultimately saw himself as a modern-day Cyrus! Likewise,
the British prime ministers Lloyd George and Balfour (despite his own skeptical
tendencies), also had religious, not just imperial, motives for supporting the
Zionist cause.
True, replacement theology, which many Christian
critics of Zionism support, maintains the Church has totally replaced Israel as
God's chosen people, will object to a dispensationalist interpretation, under
which God isn't yet done with Israel as God's chosen people (as per Romans
11:1). Dispensationalists normally reject what's called
"replacement theology" concerning the nation of Israel: They
believe the Jews, or even Israelites in general (including the other
tribes normally said to be lost), are still God's chosen people, not just the
church, which can have people of any race or national origin in it. They
will say God is continuing to work with the Jews (despite the rejected Jesus as
Messiah and Savior), and will continue to do so up until the Second Coming or (in
some versions) during the millennium when Christ rules the earth directly. So I’m a dispensationalist in this
regard: God isn’t done yet with his
physical people, even during this age before Christ’s return at the beginning
(not the end) of the millennium.
Gaza hadn't been occupied since 2005, when Ariel
Sharon unilaterally pulled Israel's forces out of Gaza. The restrictions on
exports/imports out of Gaza as well as the building of walls were designed to
hinder and to prevent terrorist attacks like what happened on October 7.
Israel's current war merely aims to wipe out the command structure of Hamas;
Netanyahu has publicly said that he will let the Arabs in Gaza run their own
domestic affairs. The legal cases against Netanyahu are about as bogus as those
against Trump, as far as I am concerned. They are simply attempts by his
leftist enemies to keep him out of power by "lawfare." If we are
going to grind the details of how Israel ended up in possession of its land,
then we have the League of Nations' mandate that originally gave the Jews a
homeland, which later the British divided and gave around 80% to the Hashemite
monarchy that runs Jordan today. For decades, although they don't say this
today, the rulers of Jordan said that Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is
Palestine. Israel ended up running the Gaza strip after the 1967 war. Egypt
refused to take it back despite Israel offered it to them when making peace
with Sadat. If we grind the details behind UN resolution 242, we'll find that
actually Israel doesn't have to withdraw from the territories it took during
the 1967 war. Jimmy Carter's interpretation of this resolution is contradicted
by Lord Caradon's view of it, who was the main drafter of it. Here I'll copy
and paste what he said about it: "The chief drafter of Resolution 242 was
Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot), the permanent representative of the United Kingdom
to the United Nations from 1964-1970. At the time of the Resolution’s
discussion and subsequent unanimous passage, and on many occasions since, Lord
Caradon always insisted that the phrase “from the territories” quite
deliberately did not mean “all the territories,” but merely some of the
territories:
Much play has been made of the fact that we
didn’t say “the” territories or “all the” territories. But that was deliberate.
I myself knew very well the 1967 boundaries and if we had put in the “the” or
“all the” that could only have meant that we wished to see the 1967 boundaries
perpetuated in the form of a permanent frontier. This I was certainly not
prepared to recommend.
On another occasion, to an interviewer from the
Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring-Summer 1976), he again insisted on the
deliberateness of the wording. He was asked:
The basis for any settlement will be United
Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would
you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that
stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that
which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from
“the occupied territories”?
Nota bene: “from territories occupied” is not the
same thing as “from occupied territories” – the first is neutral, the second a
loaded description. Lord Caradon answered:
I defend the resolution as it stands. What it
states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the
acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto
territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go
back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You
couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where
the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to
the needs of the situation.
“Had we said that you must go back to the 1967
line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the
occupied territories, we would have been wrong.”
Note how Lord Caradon says that “you can’t
justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” with that
“merely” applying to Jordan, but not to Israel, because of the Mandate’s
explicit provisions allocating the territory known now as the “West Bank” to
the Jewish state. Note, too, the firmness of his dismissal of the 1967 lines as
nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,”
that is, nothing more than armistice lines and not internationally recognized
borders." https://www.jihadwatch.org/.../jimmy-carter-lord-caradon...#
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/why-it-is-wrong-to-call-israeli-settlement-construction-in-judea-and-samaria-illega
This
can't be deemed responsible rhetoric to compare anything that has happened to
the Palestinians with the systematic extermination of Jews under Hitler's
"Final Solution" in its death camps. During the time Israel actually
occupied Gaza, it's population increased from 410,000 to 1.3 million, and for
the West Bank it has increased from 600,000 in 1967 to 3 million today. The
word "genocide" simply doesn't describe a population that's rapidly
growing. The ratio between civilian dead and armed soldiers of some kind in the
Gaza strip is evidently lower than 2 to 1, which is much better than America's
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the ratios were more like 3 to 1 and 3 to 5
to 1 respectively. Furthermore, the blockade on Gaza is designed to keep out
weapons and materials for waging war, such as the rockets that Gaza had long
aimed at Israeli civilians, which is also a war crime. Are there any tactics of
war of Hamas that should be condemned? Is the massacre of some 1,200 Jews, most
of whom were civilians, somewhat moral or permitted because Gaza is supposed
"occupied"? Hamas is clearly guilty of many, many war crimes itself
in targeting Israeli civilians and in using its own civilians as human shields.
Should
a nation at work with another nation send it supplies? Of course, as a pacifist
Christian, I agree that all wars are sinful. However, granted that wars do
occur, is there really a moral difference between starving out the enemy and
shooting to kill the enemy? And much like what has happened so many times in
history, the civilians are along for the ride when soldiers stay within a
besieged city, whether it be Atlanta and Vicksburg during the Civil War,
Ladysmith during the Boer War, the denizens of Tyre when Alexander the Great
and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon besieged the leading Phoenician port, when the
Germans were surrounded and starved out at Stalingrad, and the Russians
suffered during the dreadful siege of Leningrad by the Germans. That is, this
is a standard tactic that's been almost endlessly employed during major wars,
including (on a nationa scale) what the Germans tried to do to the British
during two world Wars and America did success in doing to Japan during World
War II through unrestricted submarine warfare. So I question the whole idea
that nations at work can't starve out their enemies in besieged cities and
encircled areas, since it is a standard war tactic. So it's fine to say it is
"wrong" from a Christian viewpoint, since all wars are wrong, but
granted nations at war end up surrounding enemy areas with both soldiers and
civilians in them, one shouldn't use the latter as a reason to avoid any injury
to the former. Otherwise, one could declare a potential area of siege as an
open, i.e., undefended city, such as Paris ended up being in 1944 during the
Allied invasion of France; the Germans didn't try to seriously defend the
capital of France. But granted that humanitarians want to "elevate"
an intrinsically evil situation, notice that Israel has allowed large amounts
of aid into Gaza during this whole war. In this one interesting case, however,
Israeli protesters who demanded the return of the hostages that Hamas had taken
were saying that no supplies should be sent to the enemy until the Israeli
hostages were returned. They were blocking roads and causing ironically the
same kinds of problems that pro-Hamas protesters have caused in the West.
There's also a great deal of evidence that Hamas takes the aid for themselves
in many cases and doesn't give it to their civilian population, which is
documented in one link in this opinion piece here.
Here's
yet more documentation that Hamas is taking the humanitarian aid that should go
to Hamas' civilians instead. So why should Israel send in aid that goes to
people who wish to exterminate all Jews? They certainly are the kind of people
who will bite the hand of those who feed them, sooner or later.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/biden-promised-gaza-aid-wouldnt-go-to-hamas-he-lied
This
is now a somewhat dated piece, but notice that Israel wasn't trying to starve
out people in Gaza in general:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/11/there-is-no-food-water-or-medicine-shortage-in-gaza
Frankly, what war that
involved sieges hasn't had "collective punishment"? The solution is
that (defending, losing) armies should never stay in places with their own
civilians and thus declare all cities "open" or any other area with
civilians in it. That's Hamas' war crime to be using their own civilians as
human shields. But of course, as I have already documented, most of the
civilians in Gaza are completely sympathetic and in bed with Hamas' viewpoint.
A number of them actually participated in the October 7 attacks. They are like
the loyal Germans in Germany during World War II who earnestly supported Hitler
and had voted for him in 1932 to try to make him their chancellor. Are they
without guilt? Should they be shielded from the consequences of voting for
Hamas in 2006? It's dangerous, as I have thought about this in general terms,
to vote for rulers who believe in an aggressive foreign policy. The ancient
Athenians who supported Pericles and Alcibiades eventually suffered a totally
crushing defeat at the hands of the Spartan-led coalition that opposed Athenian
imperialism. Somewhat similarly, we have the case of Imperial Germany before
World War I, despite the growth of the prime peace party of the SDP, in the
decade before the war’s start. Hamas' civilians in this regard could be
compared to the German civilians who suffered through Allied bombing raids.
It's fine to say that they shouldn't suffer since all wars are wrong, but in
the practical real world, those who vote for those who will use the sword may
end up dying from it.
Here we are faced with the
problem of the intrinsic immorality of war, if we are to be good followers of
Jesus and to love our enemies. However, if we are going to step away from
simply condemning all violence for any and all reasons, we have to make a
distinction between terrorist attacks aimed at civilians and the IDF's
counter-attack, which uses regular army soldiers and warns civilians to move out
of the away from northern Gaza, where it had planned to move its ground forces
into. Not all violence is equally morally culpable. Hamas has long used
civilians and facilities, such as its hospitals and mosques, to protect its
fighters and weapons stashes with human shields. That is, Hamas has long
intentionally aimed to create as many (Arab) civilian casualties as possible in
order to then accuse Israel of killing them, instead of trying to minimize
deaths of its own civilians. At the present time, their leading HQ is carefully
concealed under a major hospital in tunnels by intention. To use civilians as
human shields is a war crime also; they even have tried to frustrate the
movement of civilians from the north to the south of Gaza during the current
conflict, when the Arabs were heeding the IDF's warnings. Furthermore, as we
look back at the long history of war, sieges and cutting off the supply of food
to cities is simply par for the course; it's been endlessly done, and it hasn't
been called any kind of war crime as a tactic. Another problem here, and here's
a harsh analogy, but it has to be kept in mind. A good majority of the
civilians under the rule of Hamas have long been in utter agreement with the
ideology of Hamas and would readily vote them or an more extreme group into
power if a free election were to be held. They are much like those Germans who
voted for Hitler in the early 1930s who later suffered the consequences for
those votes when the Allies moved in from both fronts and were routinely bombing
German cities far more indiscriminately than the IDF does its airstrikes. Their
votes and moral support for their rulers are having consequences. So it's fine
to have sympathy for the civilians in Gaza, but given the long history of
warfare, sieges that cut off supplies from enemy cites can't be deemed to be
some kind of unique war crime that should be singled out and condemned.
Otherwise, one would have to condemn all the tactics that the U.S. used during
World War II that cut off supplies to various islands in the Pacific Ocean to
the Japanese there, and for that matter, the submarine campaign that aimed to
starve the home islands of Japan into submission. American submarines managed
to do to Japan what the Germans tried to do to Britain in two world wars, but
(narrowly) failed. Also, we can't trust any statistics out of Hamas about
civilian deaths. They have a long record of lying. This recent case in which
they claimed that a hospital was destroyed by an IDF airstrike and 500 died was
an utter falsehood, and this is typical of them. That hospital still stands
completely intact, since the rocket, launched by the Arabs themselves, went
awry and hit the hospital's parking lot. It's doubtful that ten died as a
result. And this kind of exaggerated or false propaganda is typical of them
going back years and years. We also have to remember a key insight: If the
Arabs put down their guns unilaterally, there would be peace, but if the Jews
put down theirs unconditionally, they would be an immediate mass slaughter and
genocide. This opinion piece simply documents how Hamas unlawfully uses
hospitals as shields for acts of war and to protect their military personnel
The basic theological issue
is whether the Jews are still God's chosen people physically and whether the
church has displaced them completely. If that's true, then all the standard
arguments about imperialism/colonialism arise, but with the key problem in this
case in which the supposed "colonizers" of the Zionist movement took
back what they had lost to the Romans and (later) to Arab and Turkish Muslims.
That is, what's the statute of limitations on imperialism? Do we only get upset
with the last set of people to engage in aggressive conquest, and then ignore
that the prior set of people had also taken the last they later lost by
aggressive conquest also. That makes everyone "morally equivalent" in
this regard, especially given Islam's manifest historical record of aggressive
warfare for spreading their faith against Christians, Jews, Hindus, and pagans.
In any war fought in urban
areas filled with civilians, unlike (say) the largely empty deserts of Egypt
and Libya where the British 8th Army sparred with Rommel's Afrika Korps for
over two years during World War II, it's hard to avoid civilian casualties.
Furthermore, Hamas has a policy of trying to maximize the deaths of its own
civilians by using them as human shields, which is also a war crime. That's why
time and time again the IDF has been able to find the militants, the weapons,
and their munitions hidden in and under civilian structures. "Collective
punishment" simply can't be avoided; if you think all sieges are
intrinsically immoral, there is simply thousands of years of sieges of cities
with both civilians and soldiers in them by enemy armies. What's going on in
Gaza is a very porous "siege" indeed, since huge amounts of supplies
are still being trucked in. This isn't exactly like the siege of Leningrad
during World War II, or even that of Ladysmith during the Boer War. So if you
are maintaining that all sieges are intrinsically immoral, which really only a
pacifist upholding the literal wording of the Sermon on the Mount could
reasonably uphold (like I do), then no defending armies should ever enter a
city to defend it. All cities should be declared "open" during any
war. So then, define what you mean by "collective punishment" and how
it is any different from any "dime-a-dozen" sieges done during any
wars that could be named. What war doesn't have "collective punishment"?
Give me several examples of ones that didn't have civilians also suffering with
combatants of their side. Furthermore, the civilians of Gaza are almost
completely in bed with Hamas ideologically; most of them voted for that regime,
and public opinion polls indicate that the great majority of the Palestinians
agree with the atrocities committed on October 7 last year. They are in the
same position as the Germans who voted for Hitler, who pledged that he would
have an aggressive foreign policy (despite a couple of "peace speeches"
in the Reichstag deceitfully saying otherwise) who find Allied bombs falling on
their homes, stores, and factories a little over a decade later. There are
consequences for voting for a group that is dominated by the intrinsically
aggressive Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. So it's fine to say
that all wars are immoral; there's no reason to believe that this war in Gaza,
as conducted by the IDF after Israel was attacked by surprise in a manner
resembling Pearl Harbor, is any worse than (say) what's been going on in Yemen
and Syria for years, and nobody hardly cares by comparison despite far more
have died. In Syria, around 600,000 have died and perhaps 380,000 have died in
Yemen. So the question is why does this particular war in Gaza get you more upset
than any other war that has killed far more people? Furthermore, which
contradicts this "collective punishment" nonsense, the IDF has done a
lot to reduce deaths during its operations in Gaza, such as by warning the
local Arab civilians of its operation in advance, which means it loses the
element of surprise, which is always of value in military operations. As Hugh
Fitzgerald has noted, "And what is also unprecedented is the extraordinary
effort the IDF makes to minimize the civilian casualties in its enemy
population. It does this by an elaborate system of warning civilians to leave
certain areas (e.g. northern Gaza) it is about to target, and then to warn they
away from individual buildings soon to be hit. The IDF has dropped 14 million
leaflets, made two million prerecorded calls, and 72,000 personal calls, and in
some cases used the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, to warn civilians away from
certain buildings. Did the Nazis warn a single Jew to “escape” a roundup in the
ghettos?" This Nazi-Zionist comparison is simply nonsense; it would be
like comparison a pond of sin for a ocean of atrocities. One needs to have some
kind of accuracy in making condemnations of people one doesn't like in
political rhetoric, or else others (less committed) will remember the
exaggerations and then blow off the same rhetoric when it does fit, much like
Aesop's fable of the boy who cried wolf. This happened, incidentally, when
reports about the Germans' atrocities during War War II were reported; many
didn't believe them, because they remembered all the exaggerated stories about
German atrocities during World War I.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/02/brazils-president-likens-idf-war-in-gaza-to-the-nazi-holocaust
Perhaps Christian critics of
Zionism may agree with a number of Bushnell's stated beliefs here, but they
show decisively that he had the standard weakness of modern intellectuals,
which is to put ideas over people. Paul Johnson discusses this issue in his
book, "Intellectuals." To give an example of this that Dennis Prager
has mentioned, he knows of many, many cases in which the liberal children of
conservative parents won't let them see their grandchildren. Should people be
mistreated, injured, or killed because they have beliefs others don't agree
with, when they haven't begun the individual use of force themselves? When
should the Golden Rule and the Second of the two Great Commandments be
suspended for others that we don't like? Should they be applied to
"Zionists" or Jews? Or are there exceptions to when these overriding
biblical principles should be practiced? For example, when some 364 people were
slaughtered and apparently dozens more kidnapped at the Nova music festival on
October 7 last year, what were they doing, as mere Jewish civilians, that
deserved death from armed Arabs, who were acting like an Einsatzgruppen killing
squad in this case?
https://time.com/6565186/october-7-hamas-attack-footage-film/
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/hamas-on-october-7th-the-teachings-of-islam-on-display-part-2
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/hamas-on-october-7th-the-teachings-of-islam-on-display-part-1
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/hamas-on-october-7th-the-teachings-of-islam-on-display-part-3
Do Christian Critics of
Zionism ever support Putin's acts of aggression in invading the Ukraine? There
have been many, many reports of awful atrocities committed by the Russian
invaders as well. I agree that we should try to press Zelensky to settle for a
compromise peace that would (say) keep the Ukraine out of the EU and NATO for
50 years, but on the other hand, all the Russian troops have to be withdrawn
and all the proxy wars need to end on the Ukraine's frontiers. I would let
Putin keep the Crimea, which he took earlier. I have very little enthusiasm for
America's support of the Ukraine, mainly because it costs way too much
financially and it raises the risks of a possible nuclear war. Our foreign
policy has made the mistake of driving Putin into the arms of China, although
I'm not sure how we could have avoided that outcome since Putin is such a
Russian nationalist who is using Hitler's irredentist playbook to find areas
inhabited by Russians to join with the Russian Motherland. He inevitably was
going to be aggressive towards neighbors with Russian-speaking minorities in
them, given this worldview. Many Russians see Ukraine as an ersatz country, but
the events of this war show otherwise; a majority of the Ukrainians don't want
to be ruled from Moscow anymore. If you care about civilians being killed in
Gaza by an invading army, why don't you care about their being killed in the
Ukraine by an invading army as well? What's the essential moral difference?
Many Christian critics of
Zionism have a very inaccurate view of the history of the Zionist movement in
Israel. For example, the British Mandate promised the Jews a homeland in the
Middle East; a certain portion of the land, often of poor quality was also
purchased by the Jews at very high prices from Arab landlords during the years
of the Mandate. Furthermore, many Arabs moved into the Mandate because of the
economic activity and growth caused by the Jewish settlers. While there are
ethnic troubles between Jews of different backgrounds, they may well be lower
than (say) those that Arab Muslim views have of fellow believers who don't
speak Arabic and who have other ethnic backgrounds. Keep in mind that Jews have
been driven out of most of the rest of the Middle East over the past hundred
years by Muslims. These Sephardic Jews settled in Israel as their new homeland
in order to escape discrimination and outright acts of violence. A Jew or
Christian under the Muslim Sharia law is treated much like blacks were under
legal segregation in the United States were; there are endless petty acts of
public humiliation inflicted on them, over and above the periodic acts of
violence. Irshad Manji, the liberal Muslim who wrote, "The Trouble with
Islam Today," explains that fellow Muslims would dismiss her (liberal)
views by referring to her ethnic background, which is East Indian by the way of
Africa, not by (say) quoting the Quran or the Hadith. I would suggest looking
carefully at what Efraim Karsh has written in "Islamic Imperialism: A
History" and his "Fabricating Israeli History The New
Historians" in order to get a much more accurate view of the Arab/Jewish
conflict in the Middle East. The Israeli-Arab conflict is really simply a microcosm
of the general conflict between the West and Islam. I deal with some of this
history in Israel itself in this essay here. Simply scan over the headings of
the table of contents to find the relevant section of interest.
According to Robert
Spencer: “The Jews in the Qur’an are
called the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they
fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they
claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41);
they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are disputing
and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging
rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being
hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the
teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead
them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being
arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s
wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by
Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless
(2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being
unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being
miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath
(2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and
Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under Islamic hegemony
(9:29).”
Putin's reasoning here
is really no different than that of Hitler in the 1930s as he pursued an
aggressive foreign policy to unite all Germans under his rule. By the presumed
standards that you have upheld in other conflicts, is trying to take over
the entire Ukraine, which was certainly Putin's goal when he first invaded the
Ukraine, "proportionate"? Isn't it "imperialism" and
"colonialism" when clearly a majority of the people who remain in the
Ukraine aren't wanting to be ruled by Moscow? Do those who remain in the
Ukraine have that supposed "right to self-determination"? Aren't all
of these atrocities documented in Wikipedia that the Russians have committed in
the Ukraine worth of the same passionate outrage that you have about what's
going on in Gaza, but only more so? Where's the outrage about Putin's methods
of warfare? The Russians are plainly far more careless than the IDF has been in
Gaza about killing civilians. Putin wants all of the Ukraine, not just those
areas dominated by Russian speakers, just like Hitler wanted all of
Czechoslovakia, not just those areas in the border area of the Sudetenland
where Germans predominated. He wants to make Russia an EMPIRE again, like the
Soviet Union was (around half of its people weren't Russians), which plainly
isn't a pacifist goal or one of merely self-defense. Putin really fears
democracy above all, as this author explains here. He's a dictator, even though
(yes) he has a certain level of popular support.
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/what-putin-fears-most/
Actually, the analogy here
to what Putin is doing would be if the United States invaded and took over Cuba
to make it a possession like Puerto Rico is. That's plainly his goal; at the
barest minimum, he wants to rule the Ukraine in the same way that Moscow ruled
the Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War. I'm not sure if he wants to keep
that fig leaf even, however, since he annexed the Crimea.
\
Here I think I should try to
document the mistreatment of Christians by Muslims in Israel and the
Palestinian territories, including Gaza. This opinion piece says that when
Israel left Gaza in 2005, the number of Christians was 5,000; today it is under
1,000. However, Gaza's overall population has significantly increased during
that time (despite a supposed "genocide.") They obviously left
because of persecution by Muslims, as this opinion piece explains. Notice also
that Hezbollah deliberately hit a church in northern Israel with a missile.
Under the Sharia law, Christians and Jews were "dhimmis," which meant
that they had second-class citizenship on a par with the kinds of regulations
imposed on blacks under Jim Crow. That aspect of Islamic law is not a dead
letter.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/hamas-and-hezbollah-attacks-on-christians-being-ignored
This opinion piece does a
good job of explaining the "false consciousness" of Palestinian
Christians as they are under the Islamic yoke. They are suffering from a
version of "Stockholm syndrome." Ironically, as it appears in this
case, one of the leading appeasers still got killed by the Muslims anyway. All
these acts of abasement didn't save her.
Here we find Christians are
being attacked by Muslims in Bethlehem:
The fundamental error in
liberal/libertarian analyses is the failure to recognize that Islamic
opposition to the West isn't fundamentally rooted in how "nice" or
"mean" Christians, Jews, or other kinds of infidels are to Muslims.
Instead, anyone who isn't a Muslim and who hasn't surrendered to be ruled
over by Sharia law as administered by Muslims is to be opposed by (serious)
Muslims as part of "the House of War," since they aren't part of the
Muslims' "House of Peace." That is, it's a matter of identity, not
behavior. So even if Biden did exactly what Lew Rockwell said here, and the
whole U.S. foreign policy/military establishment did as well, there would still
be an enormous number of Muslims who would hate Christians and any other
infidels not under their rule.
Since Israel may be able to
destroy Hamas' leadership and as an organization in a couple more months of
war, all of this about a broader war is nonsense. I would maintain that
Hezbollah could be easily defeated if it chose to invade Israel proper itself,
since Arab armies have proven themselves to be very brittle against Western
ones in practice, which includes Israel's. For example, I remember the stories
that Saddam's battle-hardened veterans would give the U.S. army a lot of grief
before Desert Storm began, but it was all nonsense. Despite all of the recent
experience Iraq's army had had against Iran, they were crushingly and quickly
defeated by the U.S. military in 1991. (Some time ago, I posted an opinion
piece on that general subject, in order to show potentially that the "King
of the North" need not have a huge army to defeat the "King of the
South.") Furthermore, it's very hard to coerce a nuclear power, as the
case of North Korea shows. Who wants to march to Pyongyang? The South Koreans
and the Japanese sure don't, despite their much greater economic power. Israel
sits on atomic bombs that it likely would use if it were seriously losing a war
within its present borders. Here we have another case of "MAD" at
work, even if the Muslims had their own atomic bombs ready at hand, which Iran may
get in a few years. The other problem here is that Israel is dealing with an
enemy who has vowed to attack again. Such threats are fully creditable, based
on past experience. So it wouldn't be a good idea to leave Hamas intact.
Netanyahu may be hoping that eventually the voters of Gaza may elect a
government that's not part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is certainly
hardcore Islamist in its ideology, Qutb and all.
Notice that this
contemporary Islamic scholar, right here in Michigan, has a viewpoint that's
much like as the Muslim negotiator for the Tripoli pirates had with America
back in 1786. Islamic law simply doesn't change on such matters. Islam is an
intrinsically aggressive ideology. In the case of this Islamic scholar, notice
that his reasoning dooms any idea that Muslims could accept a permanent
two-state solution with Israel, because as soon as the Muslims feel that they
are strong enough and could win a war, they have a right to break treaties with
infidels. According to Ahmad Musa Jibril, “There can never be a permanent
[peace] treaty with the infidels because it cancels out jihad." Notice that how mean or nice the infidels are
doesn't matter.
Has Islam's views of
treaties with infidels changed any over the past 250 years? Consider this
response from the ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, in 1786 to the
American negotiators, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who reported the views
to John Jay, who was in charge of the negotiations. The all-caps aren't mine,
but apparently are the way that Jefferson and Adams emphasized what Abdrahaman
told them: “We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the Grounds
of their pretensions to make war upon a Nation who had done them no Injury, and
observed that we considered all mankind as our Friends who had done us no
wrong, nor had given us any provocation. THE AMBASSADOR ANSWERED US THAT IT WAS
FOUNDED ON THE LAWS OF THEIR PROPHET, THAT IT WAS WRITTEN IN THEIR KORAN, THAT
ALL NATIONS WHO SHOULD NOT HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED THEIR AUTHORITY WERE SINNERS, THAT
IT WAS THEIR RIGHT AND DUTY TO MAKE WAR UPON THEM WHEREVER THEY COULD BE FOUND,
AND TO MAKE SLAVES OF ALL THEY COULD TAKE AS PRISONERS, AND THAT EVERY
MUSSELMAN WHO SHOULD BE SLAIN IN BATTLE WAS SURE TO GO TO PARADISE.” Notice
that this can't be "blowback." That is, America hadn't waged war
against any Muslim nations at this point in 1786, which is long before even the
war by Jefferson against the Tripoli pirates when he was president. America
hadn't been "mean" to the Muslims in question. Instead, the Muslim
ambassador asserted Muslims had a religious duty and right to wage war on
infidels who hadn't chosen to become subjected to Muslim rule. It's been
estimated, incidentally, that the Barbary pirates may have taken some 2 million
people into slavery during their years of operation before the French shut them
down by (well) colonizing Algeria and Tunisia. There's some more "blow
back," in the reverse direction that liberals don't like to talk about,
but it's because of what the Muslims had been doing to the French and others
for centuries; the French weren't content any more with paying tribute (or
having French men taken into slavery during such raids), but decided to end the
problem for good.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/john-quincy-adams-and-his-essay-on-turks
Here, incidentally, is the
source for the estimated number of Europeans taken into slavery by the Barbary
pirates in the general 1500-1800 period.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/11/fitzgerald-pirates-hooligans-and-self-immolation
Does Russia in general and
Putin in particular, care about the hatred of 1.8 billion Muslims against his
nation when they killed, between the two wars in Chechnya (1994-1996,
1999-2000), around 250,000 people who are mostly Muslims? Obviously
not. That then leads to the next question: Do Muslims simply hate Jews
more than Christians (or agnostics/atheists) when the former do the killing
instead of the latter?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War#External_links
Hmm. Apparently 5,000 to
8,000 people were killed by the Russian army during its siege (i.e.,
"collective punishment") of the generally Muslim population of Grozny
in 1999-2000. There was an indiscriminate World War I or II style
artillery bombardment of the city as well as an aerial bombardment.
Although most of the civilians had fled, there were still around 40,000 who
suffered through the siege. So now, are the military tactics of the
"civilizational state" of Russia against its Muslim enemies really
all that commendable? They didn't respect their "right to self
determination," now did they? Putin was in charge during much of this war
as well, including when working as the "acting president." How much
hatred by 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide was created by these tactics? Does
Putin care? Do the Russian people in general care? For that matter, how much do
most Muslims care? The difference with Gaza in the (purported) worldwide Muslim
reaction is a prime illustration of Muslim antisemitism, not in the actions of
the "Zionist entity" compared to Russia's in Chechnya, which killed
perhaps 250,000 Muslims in two different wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1999%E2%80%932000)
I don't see any particular
reason why I should believe this particular anti-Zionist woman has any more
authority than what I said on my own Web site. Her blog isn't even separate
from Facebook; at least Robert Spencer has a stand alone Web site like I do. I
have given a great deal of evidence against many of her assertions here on
my own Facebook page as well as on my own Web site. So then, there's plenty of
evidence that she's repeatedly wrong about almost everything she asserts,
especially when apparently she simply has no idea about the intrinsically
aggressive nature of Islam, which Hamas exemplifies since it is part of the
Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist ideology of Sayid Qutb is determinative in
this situation, which makes what Hamas will do totally predictable regardless
of how "nice" or "mean" the Jews/Zionists are. The latter's
identity alone condemns them to being violently attacked, not merely any mean
or nasty things that they did to the Arabs/Palestinians. The Quran is full of
anti-Jewish statements and on top of that there's the personal behavior of
Muhammad towards the Jews, in which he slaughtered around 700 of adult male
Jews in Medina. This behavior remains relevant to Muslims today because of the
principle of the Sunnah, which maintains that the behavior and actions of their
prophet is a source of religious authority, much like conscientious Christians
will ask "WWJD?" There's plenty of evidence that anti-Semitism of the
worst type is rife among the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in
particular, which is why (say) what the Jews do angers Arabs/Muslims much more
than say what Putin did in Chechnya, which killed perhaps six or seven times
more Muslims than during this current war in Gaza. So in order to make this
stick, it's necessary to explain in detail why all these people are wrong,
including Robert Spencer. I've already made a lot of my case in various
postings on Facebook, including in my detailed rebuttals against Lew Rockwell's
piece. The (alleged) rage of 1.8 billion Muslims hardly matters to Putin or to
Xi as they have killed and/or oppressed far more Muslims in Chechnya and
Xinjiang than "the Zionist entity" has done during this war in Gaza,
yet of course, the United Nations, and apparently Caitlin J. don't care about
that any. And once again, we've got a disastrous mess in the Sudan that's far
worse than anything going on in Gaza. So then, it can't be the lack of
"self-determination," the body count, or the levels of political
oppression and/or mistreatment that explain why what Israel does gets far, far,
far more attention than what these other acts of oppression against Muslims
receive. And, of course, there have been far more Muslims killed by Muslims in
both Syria and Yemen in recent years than by the Jews in Gaza, yet almost no
one cares by comparison. It seems the main problem to Caitlin is that Jews are
doing the killing instead of other kinds of infidels or Muslims. Here's a good
exercise in "whataboutism," when the Sudan's present situation is
compared with Gaza's during the current war. Give me a good explanation about
why there's a difference in coverage here.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/gaza-sudan-and-the-medias-selective-sympathies
There's a 43-minute video
assembled by Israel about what Hamas' militants did on October 7. They were
proud about what they did in killing Jews so savagely and were happy to report
it to others at home in a number of cases. Even if they were mistreated to
X degree, does that justify raping men and women, cutting off women's breasts,
mutilating victims, inserting things into women's vaginas, etc. of people were
were civilians, not soldiers of the IDF, in a surprise attack that (well) broke
a cease fire? Does the Geneva Convention apply to the actions of Hamas'
militants or not?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-video-of-hamas-terror-attacks-war-in-gaza/
How would Caitlin justify,
excuse, rationalize, "explain" the attitude of these nurses at this
Gaza hospital, which called the Jews "prey"? There's a lesson to be
learned from Paul Johnson's book, "Intellectuals," which maintain
that modern intellectuals have treated people as abstractions to be
disposed of as their ideologies dictate instead of treating them as
flesh-and-blood humans who are entitled to not be slaughtered even when one
doesn't agree with them. The Golden Rule, the Second of the Great Commandments,
even the command of Jesus to love one's enemies, should be determinative
instead of "the end justifies the means," which Christians especially
should reject.
Here we find the likes of
Hamas and Al Jazeera admitting implicitly that claims that the IDF's soldiers
raped women in Gaza to be false because they removed online postings claiming
this to be true.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-793560
Here's a good, detailed
piece for Caitlin Johnstone to try to rebut in detail, which comes from an
opinion piece published in Newsweek. John Spencer, who is the Chair of urban
warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point (so at least we know
he has some kind of credentials/expertise) also admits that Israel is doing a
better job at protecting civilians than the United States did in Iraq and
Afghanistan during its recent wars there: "Israel gave warning, in some
cases for weeks, for civilians to evacuate the major urban areas of northern
Gaza before it launched its ground campaign in the fall. The IDF reported
dropping over 7 million flyers, but it also deployed technologies never used
anywhere in the world, as I witness firsthand on a recent trip to Gaza and
southern Israel.
Israel has made over 70,000
direct phones calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15
million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave
combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take. They
deployed drones with speakers and dropped giant speakers by parachute that
began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the
ground. They announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow
any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.
These measures were
effective. Israel was able to evacuate upwards of 85 percent of the urban areas
in northern Gaza before the heaviest fighting began. This is actually
consistent with my research on urban warfare history that shows that no matter
the effort, about 10 percent of populations stay."
Is Israel hated by Muslims
for its purported history of human rights violations of Arabs? Or is it hated
because the Quran and other sources of religious authority within Islam tell
Muslims to hate Jews in general? Notice that in many of protests around the
world against Israel that Jews in general are targeted by the crowds, not
Israelis in particular. So what explains such behavior by Muslims? After all,
Russia during two recent wars in Chechnya, mostly done while Putin was
president or acting president, killed around 200,000 to 250,000 Muslims; Moscow
didn't grant these Muslims "self-determination" (i.e., an independent
state) either. Yet how many Muslims spend a lot of time hating Russia these
days compared to Jews in general and Israel in particular?
So to understand why
antisemitism is so rife among Muslims compared to Hindus, Buddhists,
Christians, and agnostics/atheists, it would be useful to review the research
of Andrew Bostom on this matter, which is relatively briefly summarized in this
interview. Notice in particular that the opening chapter (sura) of the Koran
actually attacks Jews and Christians without naming them explicitly, in verse
7: "Not those upon whom wrath is brought down, nor those who go
astray." The ones subjected to God's wrath are the Jews; Christians are
the ones who are going astray. A sincere, devout Muslim will repeat this entire
surah 17 times during five prayers each day. A reliable hadith (saying or
teaching of Muhammad) explains 1:7 this way and a veritable ocean of Islamic
commentaries affirms this interpretation as well. There are many, many places
in which the Jews are insulted or criticized in the Koran, not merely their
leadership (as occurs in the Gospels).
A particularly striking
important conference of high level Islamic scholars occurred in Egypt a year
after the 1967 War with Israel at Sunni Islam's leading global academic
institution, Al-Azhar in Cairo. This conference's views of Jews, which were
published in a tome of 935 pages after being translated to English, were
summarized as follows by the historian David Littman in these six point about
the recurring themes of the conference:
"1) “Jews are
frequently denoted as the ‘Enemies of Allah’”
2) “Jews manifest in
themselves an historical continuity of evil qualities … as described in the
Qur’an”
3) “The Jews do not
constitute a true people or nation”
4) “The State of Israel is
the culmination of the historical and cultural depravity of the Jews …It has to
be destroyed by a Jihad”
5) “The superiority of Islam
over all other religions is brandished as a guarantee that the Arabs will
ultimately triumph”
6) “It is outrageous for the
Jews, traditionally kept by Arab Islam in a humiliated, inferior status, and
characterized as cowardly, to defeat the Arabs, have their own State, and cause
the contraction of the ‘abode of Islam’”"
The sixth point is
particularly striking; Muslims can't accept Jews as rulers of their own state
on territory that jihad (i.e., violent conquest) had taken in prior centuries.
It's a complete novelty to them, unlike the kingdoms of (professing) Christians
that Muslims had struggled with for many centuries.
So the hatred we see today
of Israel isn't because of this or that human rights violation of Arabs or even
because of supposed acts of colonialism, genocide, etc. Instead, it's about
their identity as Jews who don't accept Muhammad as a prophet and whom haven't
become submissive dhimmis under Muslim rule (i.e., discriminatory, oppressive
sharia law, which treats Christians and Jews as second class citizens, in the
manner that Jim Crow treated American blacks before 1964).
This is a long piece, since
it has a lot of detail to back its viewpoint, including its interesting
comparison with how the Catholic Church worked to reduce and eliminate
anti-Semitic teachings in the wake of the Vatican II Council.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/interviews/an-interview-with-andrew-bostom/
I find the arguments of the
writer of this opinion piece to be particularly salient compared to other
efforts at "settlement" and "colonization." There was no
"mother country" sponsoring and protecting the Jews who left Europe
(or wherever) for Israel. Furthermore, the comparison with the Reconquista of
the Spanish against the invading Muslims is particularly provocative: So when
did the Arab Muslim invasion of the Holy Land become "irreversible"?
Why is their imperialism/colonialization/"apartheid state" (keep in
mind the discriminatory provisions of the Sharia law against the conquered
People of the Book are like how blacks were treated under Jim Crow in the South
before 1964) A-OK, but not the modern state of Israel? When does the statute of
limitations run out on prior acts of imperialism? Or is the outrage very
selective, and only aimed at the last people to (allegedly) steal this or that
piece of land, and all the prior conquerors are let off scot free from any
condemnations, criticisms, etc.? When has any Arab or Turkish or Iranian Muslim
ever felt guilty publicly about any of the many violent jihads waged in Islam's
name over the past 1400 years? So how can Crusades (i.e., a strategic
counter-attack) be bad, but jihads (i.e., the original acts of aggression)
good?
Years ago I had a good
friend of mine in the COG who could give easily a passionate 90 minute
indictment of the Zionist movement and the creation and actions of the State of
Israel off the top of his head. It’s
all very impressive, until one learns “the rest of the story.” I was deceived for years as a result, until
I did more research on my own, which revealed that I had been subjected to
one-sided propaganda. It was a series
of at best half-truths and the citation of atrocity story(s) committed by one
side while ignoring that committed by the other. I would encourage you to do more research to get “the rest of the
story” that the Muslim Arab apologists cover up or deny.
Let’s make some general
points to rebut the view that Zionism was a general exercise in ethnic
cleansing of the native inhabitants of the land by using terrorism or
violence. It’s a mistake to equate
those Zionists who eschewed terrorism with those who did; it would be like
blaming Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP for the actions of the 1960s race
rioters and the Black Panthers. The Jewish
Zionists were generally entering an ill-cultivated, sparsely populated
land. The descriptions of Mark Twain,
the famed author of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” from 1867 are
particularly well-known in this regard:
“[A] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over
wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse. . . . A desolation is here that not
even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. . . . We never saw
a human being on the whole route. . . .
There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive and cactus, those fast friends of the worthless
soil, had almost deserted the country.”
Let’s consider other witnesses,
which indicates there was plenty of space for all comers originally along with
the original inhabitants. In 1880, the
American consul in Jerusalem, which was when the Turkish Ottoman Empire ruled
the Holy Land and not the Arabs, reported the area continued in a historic
decline: “The population and wealth of
Palestine has not increased during the last forty years.” In 1913, before World War I (1914-1918), the
Palestine Royal Commission quoted an account of the general Maritime Plain,
which includes where Tel Aviv is today:
“The road leading from Gaza to the North was only a summer track
suitable for transport by camels and carts . . . . no orange groves, orchards,
or vineyards were to be seen until one reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna
[Yavne] . . . The western part, towards the sea, was almost a desert. . . . The
villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to
the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their
inhabitants.” Lewis French, the British
Director of Development, described Palestine this way around the same time in
the same report: “We found it inhabited
by fellahin [poor Arab peasants] who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely
from the prevalent malaria. . . . Large areas . . . were uncultivated. . . . the
Fallahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these
and other criminals. The individual
plots . . . changed hands annually.
There was little public security, and the feallhin’s lot was an
alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the [nomadic] Bedouin.”
Chaim Weizmann, one of the
great leaders of Zionism, worked to explain the Zionist movement’s goals to
Arabs. When visiting Cairo in Egypt in
March 1918, he met with leading Syrian Arab nationalists. His diplomacy bore fruit: One of these Arab leaders (Suleiman Bey
Nassif) said in response, “there was room in Palestine for another million
inhabitants without affecting the osition of those already there.” As it worked out, during the interwar period
while the British ruled the Palestine Mandate, the Jewish population rose by
470,000 while the non-Jewish population went up by 588,000. If conditions had been so bad for the Muslim
Arabs in Palestine, they wouldn’t have immigrated from elsewhere to live with
the Jewish immigrants in the same general area. About 37% of this increase was due to immigration; the rest
resulted from improved living conditions for the Arabs as the Zionists drained
the malaria swamps and improved sanitation conditions. So the Muslim infant mortality rate
(1925-1945) fell to 94 per thousand from 201 per thousand; the life expectancy
rose to 49 in 1943 from 37 in 1926. The
Arab population increased the fastest in areas with a high number of Zionist
settlers. In the 1922 to 1947 period,
the non-Jewish population in Haifa increased 290%, in Jaffa 158%, and in
Jerusalem 131%. Obviously, if the
Zionists were casually using terrorism against the Arabs, none of such
increased could have occurred during the period of British rule.
So then, were the Arabs
displaced by the Zionist settlers as the latter bought land in what became
Israel? Much of this land was of poor
quality and it was brought at excessively high prices from the absentee
landlords who lived in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, all major cities outside of
the Mandate’s area. (To give a point of
comparison, in 1944, the Jews were paying around $1,000 to $1,100 per acre
there, when good farmland in Iowa was being sold for $110 per acre). About 80% of the land of Palestine was owned
by such landlords as opposed to the local inhabitants, who were often mired
deep in debt. The Jewish settlers often
went out of their way to buy land that was swampy, mostly uncultivated,
relatively cheap, and without any tenants on it already. In 1920, the Labor Zionist leader David
Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister in 1948, was
concerned about the Arab fellahin, being “the most important assert of the
native population.” Ben-Gurion said,
“under no circumstances msut we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by
them.” He even said that they should
try to free them from their oppressors:
“Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement,” Ben-Gurion said,
“should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.” After Jews had bought so much of the
uncultivated land did they begin to buy cultivated land. Interestingly enough, many Arabs were
willing to sell, because they were migrating to the coastal towns and/or needed
capital to invest in citrus fruit cultivation. After John Hope Simpson came to Palestine in the May of 1930, he
found out that “They [the Jews] paid high prices for the land, and in addition
they paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount of
money which they were not legally bound to pay.” In 1931, Lewis French developed a program to discover the level
of landlessness among the Arabs and he offered to them new plots of land if
they had been “dispossessed.” The
British officials got over 3000 applications, but 80 percent were deemed
invalid because they weren’t Arabs without land. Of the 600 left, 100 took the land offered to them by the British
government. The Peel Commission’s
report discovered that so many of the Arab complaints about being displaced by
Jewish land purchases were bogus: “Much
of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated
when it was purchased. . . . there was at the time of the earlier sales little
evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to
develop the land.” This same report
observed the perceived land shortage was “due less to the amount of land
acquired by Jews than to the increase in Arab population.” Again, this kind of development couldn’t
have occurred if the Zionists were frightening away all the Arabs through
terrorism.
Now it’s easy to cite case
in which the Muslims/Arabs engaged in violence or terrorism against the Jews in
the Holy Land before the 1948-1949 War of Independence ended. For example, in April 1936, the Arab
Liberation Army, a guerrilla group led by a Syrian named Fawzi al-Qawukii,
started attacks that killed 89 Jews and over 300 more by November. Earlier on, in 1921, Haj Amin el-Husseini
organized Arabs to attack and to terrorize Jews. He hoped to copy what the Turkish leader and ruler Mustapha Kemal
Ataturk had done in Turkey, who had driven out the Greeks from the Turkish
mainland. A standard approach of the
Arabs in Palestine was to engage in riots against the Jews. For example, one British official in 1920
even told el-Husseini about a convenient time to attack the Jews in Jerusalem
near the Easter holiday. The British
intentionally withdrew their troops in order to allow the Arab mob to rob
Jewish-owned stores and to attack the Jews personally. This British official, Waters-Taylor, even
explained that the Zionist project could be ended only by violence committed by
the Arabs. A series of Arab riots in
May 1921 was investigated after the British failed to protect the Jewish
minority. The Haycraft Commission that
investigated them believed the Arabs were the aggressors, but tried to
rationalize the violence in favor of the Arabs. In 1929, Arab provocateurs
succeeded in persuading others that the Jews sought control of the Temple Mount
after the latter had organized a religious ceremony at the Western “Wailing”
Wall area. After six days of rioting,
during which the British hadn’t stopped the Arabs from attacking, almost the
entire Jewish population of Hebron had been driven out and 133 Jews were killed
and 399 wounded in what was functionally an Arab pogrom. Ironically, during the 1938 Arab revolt
against British rule, a number of Arab landowners were terrorized by the rebels
such that they chose to leave Palestine and then sold their land to the Jews,
not to the Arabs!
Critics of Zionism will cite
the case of the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel. Interestingly enough, much like what the IRA
would do in many cases during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Irgun
issued repeated warnings of what they were going to do, which was in response
to a raid by British troops on the Jewish Agency on June 29, 1946 and the
arrest of some 2,500 Jews in the mandate.
Menachem Begin placed warning phone calls to the hotel, to the French
consulate, and to the Palestine Post.
When the hotel itself was called, the British official who picked up the
phone reportedly told Begin, “We don’t take order from the Jews,” when refusing
to evacuate the hotel. So it’s fine to
call this terrorism, but the death toll could have been greatly reduced had the
British chosen to heed the warning that they had received. By contrast, how often do Muslim terrorists
warn their targets in response?
Well, I wouldn't build up
Hezbollah so much relative to the IDF. That is, we've heard before about (for
example) the battle hardened military that Saddam Hussein had in 1989-90
because of all the experienced gained in an eight year war with Iran, yet it
was easily defeated by the U.S. I've posted before a review of an interesting
book that describes why the Arab world's armies are intrinsically weak compared
to the West's. (Kenneth M. Pollack, "Armies of Sand: The Past, Present,
and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.") This explains why the King of
the North's army and navy need not be so totally awesome in size compared to
the King of the South's, and could be smaller than the forces America used in
Iraq, in order for the former to win against the latter, as described in Daniel
11:40-43. Another practical problem is this, which Victor Davis Hanson mentions
in this opinion piece, which is whether the Arabs of Hezbollah really want to
be a proxy army for Iran when their neighborhoods would be easily blasted by
the IDF's air power. Iran also has deep internal divisions (hmm . . . like the
USA), thus making its regime rather shaky on a popular level. It is also
acutely vulnerable to losing almost all ability to maintain a modern economy if
its oil exporting facilities are destroyed or disabled by military strikes.
Iran has had a long record in attacking diplomatic posts, which Davis describes
here, by using its surrogates (how clever of the mullahs!), such as by bombing
the U.S. embassy in 1983 in Lebanon, over and above what it did in 1979-81 with
the U.S. embassy in Tehran. There's a great deal of appalling hypocrisy for
Iran to pretend that the diplomatic sanctity of their diplomatic post was
violated when they have for so many years and in so many cases that nation's
rulers have targeted the embassies or consulates of other nations they hate.
The facility that the IDF attacked in Syria had no diplomatic personnel in it,
but only members of the military. It was an "embassy" in name only.
So then to send 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into
Israel, which plainly were meant to kill hundreds of people (ah, including
civilians, right?), but resulted in one girl being serious injured and
minimally damaging an IDF airbase, shows the effectiveness of Israel's ABM
defenses, at least when bolstered by the U.S. It became less than
"proportional" in results, but wasn't originally so in intent. The
fact that Saudi Arabia actually decided to actively help "the little
Satan," instead of standing aside as a pure neutral, shows that the Muslim
world in the Middle East isn't united; the Sunni Arabs of the Gulf see Shiite
Iran's desire to get an atomic bomb as a real danger over and above its
attempts to be a regional hegemon through its proxies (Hamas, Houthis,
Hezbollah, etc.)
The term
"genocide" should be reserved for when a large number of people of a
particular race, ethnicity, or religion in percentage terms are being summarily
killed because of their identity alone, not because they are guilty of waging
war against another country, etc. So by using "genocide" in this
way to refer to a routine, boring, utterly normal war, except for the IDF's
extraordinary efforts to reduce civilian casualties by constantly warning the
Arabs in Gaza to evacuate here or there as the IDF's military operations
require, it's a gross exaggeration and slander. Otherwise, in any ordinary,
boring, ho-hum war, any killing of one soldier by another soldier, or accident
killing of civilians, could be called "genocide." It's not wise to
empty the term of its real meaning by hurling it against anyone that one
doesn't like. That's one of the key problems with the left's use of the term
"racism" these days, in which almost everything a leftist doesn't
like it called "racism," thus making it their functional equivalent
of the f-bomb. Furthermore, October 7 was indeed a mass, indiscriminate
slaughter of Israelis (who ironically were disproportionately of the liberal
"peace party" political viewpoint, and not supporters of Likud)
without warning, i.e., in the manner of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor or Port
Arthur. So they did indeed attack and start a major war with Israel when Israel
had nearly two decades earlier had abandoned the Gaza strip and evacuated its
settlers. I've already made the Scriptural case before that a number of Jews
would be in the Holy Land even before Jesus' return, so I'll do that again.
(The copy and paste is supplied below). Please try to focus on these texts and
explain why they are inapplicable. The Israeli government is no more
illegitimate, at a minimum, than any other government on earth; nearly every
piece of land has been stolen from someone else in the past before the present
possessors took it or stole it. The Arab and Turkish jihadists are among the
worst offenders in this regard historically; if you say Israelis stole the land
from the Arabs, which is false for several reasons, then the Arabs were guilty
of stealing it from others before them. Here we have moral equivalency; Islam
has a simply awful record in causing religiously motivated imperialism and
violence historically since its inception. The works of Robert Spencer are
publicly available for your perusal if you doubt that. So do any of the 22
other Arab states have a right to exist either? Do the governments of France,
Britain, Russia have a "right to exist" as well? Was Russia guilty of
"genocide" in killing around 250,000 Chechans during its two wars
that occurred (mostly) under Putin? Why isn't the answer "yes" by the
same standards being used against the IDF here? The Russians were far more
indifferent to the lives of civilians in those two wars and are arr current war
against the Ukraine than the IDF has been.
I'm a pacifist Christian, so
I agree that all wars are sinful and that no soldiers should fight for any
cause any time. However, if we are going to judge things by the world's
standards, could Israel have responded by doing nothing, knowing that Hamas'
leadership has made it very clear that they will attack again and again without
mercy? It would be like America doing nothing after Pearl Harbor; the attacks
on October 7, 2023 were almost as unexpected as what happened on December 7, 1941.
Only by permanently eliminating Hamas could Israel have any peace by hoping
some other less aggressive leadership replaces them, which is admittedly
unlikely, given the religious and political beliefs of average Palestinian
Arabs. In my own case, my experience had been the opposite of yours. I had
heard the case made for the Muslim and Arab/Palestinian viewpoint from
academics and someone influenced heavily by academics, and then found out how
biased and distorted their case was. I have outlined that in responses on my
"wall" on this subject. The main book I would suggest for you to
read, if you ever have any time to do such things given your family and work
responsibilities, is this one by Robert Spencer, which opened my eyes to what a
distorted bill of goods I had been sold about Islamic history by academics and
those influenced by them about Islam's history of tolerance, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Onward-Muslim-Soldiers-Threatens-America/dp/0895261006
But, there's another problem
here with this kind of reasoning, which is the ability of gentiles to convert
to Judaism (or the Israelite religion), thus bringing themselves under the old
covenant (when it was in force). For example, consider the law for keeping the
Passover (Exodus 12:48-49): "And when a stranger dwells with you and wants
to keep the Passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then
let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as a native of the land. For no
uncircumcised person shall eat it. "One law shall be for the native-born
and for the stranger who dwells among you." Here's a rebuttal against the
Khazar conversion thesis, which one anti-Zionist Christian seems to be
defending by citing Sand's book here.
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/untangling-false-claims-about-ashkenazi-jews-khazars-and-israel
Eric Snow
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