Friends and Foes
The Jewish people and the Land of Israel divide the World. Who is a true friend? Who are their enemies? Most importantly, what is their standing before God?
“America, America, God shed His grace on thee…” This line from a song we used to sing as children in America is the only answer to the division and destruction there today. It starts with God, as society and its laws cannot change people, but God can – and that often leads to a change in society. For the US, or any nation, to survive, it needs God’s saving grace.
Today, an anti-Israel spirit runs amok in the US Democratic Party which should terrify American believers who want their nation shielded from God’s judgments. While we thank God for President Trump, November’s elections could suddenly change the US from a strong Israeli ally to an anti-God, anti-Israel foe. Remember, it is not what people think that makes a nation a friend of Israel, but it is as a nation supports Israel when Israel fulfils what God decrees. As Israel possesses its God-given land, and defends itself against enemies, then a nation’s true friendship is revealed. Just repeating, as most EU nations do, that they are Israel’s friends is blasphemous, if at the same time like most EU nations, they push Israel to divide God’s land, submit to Islam’s deceptive “peace,” and in the process ignore God’s Word.
“For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you [Israel as God restores it] shall perish. Yes, those nations shall be utterly wasted.” (Isa. 60:12; see also Zech. 12:9)
Trump has restrained God’s judgment, at least for a season. As US Att. Dr. Sheyin-Stevens noted, since President Truman first recognized the State of Israel in 1948, all presidents have accepted Israel’s existence but not its Jewishness. They saw Israel as a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing anti-Semitism, but did not see the modern nation as the prophesied re-born biblical Israel.
But when Trump became president, “He said Israel is a light to the nations, the land of Israel is the Promised Land, the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” He remade US policy to affirm “that the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel,” recognized Jerusalem as its capital, moved the US embassy there, and stated that “Jewish settlements in the “Disputed Territories (aka the West Bank)” were consistent with international law.” (“Israeli voters, the elections are a referendum on national sovereignty,” Dr. A. Sheyin-Stevens, Arutz 7 Op-ed, 2 Mar. 2020)
There never was a Palestinian “Peace” partner
On May 15th, “Palestinians observed Nakba [Catastrophe] Day,” the date on the Gregorian calendar of Israel’s rebirth. JP’s Liat Collins said for them “the greatest tragedy is Israel’s creation and its survival despite repeated wars launched against it by the Arab world. The Arab rejection of the UN partition plan of 1947 and the expulsion of some 800,000 Jews from Arab lands play no part in the narrative of the Palestinian as perpetual victims.” (“Para-meters of Israeli independence,” L. Collins, JP Op-ed, 15 May 2020)
Yoram Ettinger said most “Western foreign policy and national security establishments” look to a “future track record of the proposed Palestinian state,” but ignores their “past track record.” Yet major decisions are usually based “on well-documented past track records,” not on an uncertain future. This is vital in “responsible foreign policy-making,” which tries to ensure future “national security by avoiding past mistakes.”
He says, “Western governments, media and academia,” err in thinking that by creating a Palestine “the intensity of the Arab-Israeli conflict” would be solved and “stability, moderation, peace and possibly democracy,” advanced in the Middle East. But this ignores the Palestinians’ well-documented past track record.
Ettinger lists a long series of Palestinian involvement in terror attacks, both against Israel and globally, their ties with the Nazis, Arab dictators, the Muslim Brotherhood, North Korea, and Iran, their Holocaust denial, attacks against Christian Arabs, and their war crimes against Israeli civilians. Today many Arab nations are against the rise of a Palestine as they have learned not to trust Palestinian leaders because of their past track record. Yet Western leaders seem blind to this! (“Palestinian Arab state track record: Impact on US interests,” Amb. (ret.) Y. Ettinger, Arutz 7 Op-ed, 1 June 2020)
The continual rise of Jew-hatred
In February, Melanie Phillips wrote, “While anti-Jewish attacks are coming from the far-Right, the Left and Muslim community, the greatest threat comes from the progressive side of politics,” as its worldview “dominates Western cultural and political institutions; it harbors profound anti-Jewish views within its ranks;” and it legitimizes anti-Semitic attitudes that had recently been seen as despicable and unacceptable.
Much of this comes from Israel-hatred, based on the erroneous “belief that Jews displaced the indigenous people of the land and behave” cruelly with the Palestinian remnant. These lies created “the surreal irrationality of the anti-Israel discourse” that is “the signature cause of the Western progressive…”
On top of that, “anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism constitute an irrational belief, like a cult,” where facts do not matter. French sociology Prof. S. Trigano says we have entered “a new age of Jew-hatred,” which resists arguments and “is part of the Left’s broader reconfiguration of the West.” Anti-Zionism was birthed from “post-modernism” and its offspring, “post-colonialism, multiculturalism and gender doctrine,” all of which aim at “de-constructing” Western society. Viewing Israeli Jewish nationalism negatively fits with “European postmodernists’ war against their own cultures and nation-states.” This was written months before the George Floyd riots proved Trigano correct.
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Yet Phillips says that even this “doesn’t explain this eruption of obsessive, primitive Jew-hatred.” For not only is anti-Zionism a modern “mutation of anti-Semitism,” the ageless anti-Semitism is still alive – an “open hatred of Jews as Jews.”
The foundation of modern “anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hatred is secular liberalism,” based on the cultural fissure it opened up in 18th century Enlightenment thinking, which “proclaimed the death of God” and the rise of a humanity “freed from biblical moral codes. This led to the destruction of hierarchies of values without which there can be no morality, the replacement of duty by man-made, highly contingent human rights, and the collapse of truth and reason.” The result is “the moral and philosophical carnage” we see exploding all around us today.
“Better advocacy for Israel…will not address this anti-Jewish derangement. That’s because what’s driving it is the repudiation of the Jewish precepts at the heart of the Christian West.” (“From Aalst to America: The post-modern, anti-Jewish reconfiguration of the West,” M. Phillips, Israel Hayom Op-ed, 1 Mar. 2020)
Researchers at the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University found that “the coronavirus pandemic” has spawned “an intense and exceptional wave of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist propaganda,” containing many libels with a “common element: The Jews, the Zionists and/or the state of Israel are to blame for the pandemic and/or stand to gain from it.” This is just one of many studies exposing a corona-caused explosion of anti-Semitism. (“Covid-19 fueling worldwide wave of anti-Semitism, researchers find,” TOI, 23 June 2020)
The war vs. Covid-19
When tackling Covid-19, “Israel took a different approach” since unlike “the pampered West, Israel permanently lives in a state of potential emergency and existential threat. From its experience of fending off attacks from physical enemies, Israel is geared to be proactive against threats to national security.” Despite its dysfunctional politics, “it doesn’t flinch from taking desperately difficult decisions in order to save lives – like shutting down much of its economy.”
As Israel is wired to be “proactive” against all national security threats, “the public understands from bitter and tragic experience that restrictions on everyday freedoms are sometimes unavoidable to save lives…” (“For Israel, recognizing another enemy is 2nd nature,” M. Phillips, Israel Hayom Op-ed, 3 Apr. 2020)
The insanity of Iran’s leadership
Harvard-educated scholar, Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, president of the International American Council on the ME, watches Iran closely. In May he said “the ruling mullahs” were focused on “their anti-Semitic agenda,” and not their people’s welfare. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had called Israel a “cancerous tumor to be destroyed,” promised support for “any nation or group” fighting Israel, and urged Palestinian terrorists to work together to wage “jihad in all Palestinian lands.” Recently he said, “The Zionist regime [will]…be uprooted and destroyed.”
Rafizadeh said the Iranian regime must “be held accountable by the international community for threatening to annihilate a fellow-member of the UN,” yet the lack of response is “a sign of the UN and international community’s double-standard which remains silent in the face of Iran’s threats against Israeli citizens – not to mention Iran’s malign actions against its own citizens.” (“Iran: The Ayatollah, amid Coronavirus, calls for Jihad against the Jewish State,” M. Rafizadeh, Gatestone Institute, 26 May 2020)
Prophetic musings
The demise of the world cop: Italian journalist Giulio Meotti sees Western “post-colonial guilt” as having major effects, such as not speaking about persecution of Christians and a dangerous “retreat from the world’s stage.” (“When everyone kneels, who will stand up for Western history and culture?” G. Meotti, Gatestone Institute, 21 June 2020)
As we see the USA’s global role decrease, we recall Lance Lambert saying that he saw the US as the only hindrance to the rise of the Anti-Christ. Are we that close?
Increase of aliyah: The global effects of Covid-19 have resulted in “crippled economies, decimated industries and skyrocketing unemployment figures,” yet there is also an answer to prayer – a “wave of ‘post-coronavirus’ immigration” that could see up to 250,000 Jews coming to Israel over the next three to five years.
Nefesh b’Nefesh who works in North America, “announced an unprecedented upsurge in interest among US Jews to make Israel their home.” In France, “home to the world’s third largest Jewish population,” the Jewish Agency has had “three times the number of requests for aliyah” since the Covid-19 outbreak. (“Israel readies for post-pandemic wave of immigration,”
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IIse Strauss, BFP Israel Prayer Update, 26 June 2020) We do see this pandemic as one of the “hunters” God is using to drive His people home (Jer. 16:16).
All Israel will be saved: David Weinberg, a non-Messianic Jew, says Israel has become “a nation of believers,” not in Yeshua yet, but in the God of Israel. There is a revival “of Jewish identity … which can be heard in verses of prayer in popular music, seen in outdoor [erev] Shabbat celebrations at public entertainment spaces, and felt in all-night Torah study sessions on Shavuot – even in Tel Aviv.”
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics shows 80% of “secular” Israelis [40% of the population], “believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…in Divine providence over the Jewish People and a Divine presence in Jewish history.” Add the 20% who are Orthodox, and 40% who are traditionally observant and Israel is “a deeply believing nation”.
Most Israelis do not follow Rabbinic Judaism, yet most sense “that this nation is on a grand meta-historic journey…connected to spiritual powers and moral heritage invested in the Jewish People. These assets have sustained Jews through the centuries” and brought them home to the Land.
This outlook, “animated by ancient faith explains much about Israel today,” such as why Israelis “sacrifice for independence,” and share advances in science, medicine, hi-tech, and more, with the world. It sheds light on their firm “attachment to Jerusalem” and why they can “shake-off bleak and sinister prognostications” pushed on them by friends and enemies.
This also explains why those who see “history only in terms of national politics and international relations underestimate or misjudge Israel.” They do not see the Hand at work behind the world’s affairs, so Israel’s sense of historical mission eludes them.
Ambassador Rabbi Dr. Y. Herzog (1921-1972) said, “History knows no parallel to the prophecies of the Bible, which foretold the break-up of a people into a thousand pieces across the world yet destined to persevere for centuries and return to their indigenous homeland. This is a defy-all-odds saga of metaphysical union spanning centuries between a people, their G-d, and a land. This is the celebration of a nation who, at the moment of ultimate nadir, of devastating Holocaust, rose from the ashes, armed with little more than conviction and historical conscious-ness that promised renewal, to stake claim to their ancestry. This is redemption, providential consolation.” (“Truly at home,” D. M. Weinberg, Israel Hayom Op-ed, 11 May 2010)
“For all the land that you [Abraham] see, I [YHWH] give it to you and to your seed forever.” (Gen 13:15).