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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.

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/biden-regime-wont-stop-pro-hamas-protests-in-u-s-but-demands-israel-stop-hostage-families-from-blocking-hamas-aid

 

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://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/02/aaron-bushnell-who-burned-himself-alive-cheered-murder-of-u-s-soldiers

 

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?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#:~:text=Russia%20repeatedly%20violated%20international%20humanitarian,weapons%20such%20as%20cluster%20bombs.

 

 

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).”

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/switzerland-15-year-old-muslim-screaming-death-to-the-jews-stabs-orthodox-jew-in-zurich

 

 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.

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/05/dhimmi-palestinian-christians-demonize-israel-at-memorial-liturgy-for-journalist-likely-slain-by-palestinians

 

Here we find Christians are being attacked by Muslims in Bethlehem:

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/11/muslims-attack-christians-in-bethlehem-rabbi-calls-upon-israel-to-intervene

 

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.

 

https://news.yahoo.com/hamas-member-says-repeat-attacks-065643206.html#:~:text=Ghazi%20Hamad%2C%20a%20senior%20member,future%20until%20it%20destroyed%20Israel.

 

 

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.

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/michigan-islamic-scholar-says-there-can-never-be-a-permanent-treaty-with-infidels-because-it-cancels-out-jihad

 

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/2008/09/over-one-million-european-christians-kidnapped-and-enslaved-by-muslims

 

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.

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/freed-hostage-nurses-at-gaza-hospital-were-cheering-that-hamas-came-back-with-prey-with-israeli-jewish-prey

 

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."

 

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286

 

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? 

 

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/04/the-most-successful-settler-colonialists-in-the-world-were-muslims

 

 

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.)

 

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2024/04/19/are-irans-nine-lives-nearing-an-end-n2638009

 

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

www.lionofjudah1.org

 

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