UNDERSTANDING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ISRAEL

We face so many issues in the West at the moment that it is hard for us to form a framework for analysis. The United Nations is seeking to impose a global government and global health framework; various organisations are ferrying “refugees” across national borders and seeking to change nations; the whole idea of gender is being upended, and institutions changed; the media are promoting socialist and collective ideologies and hundreds of left-wing foundations; a hatred of Western culture is being encouraged in the education system; the rule of law is being upended,  and claims of a “climate crisis” are impacting the mental health of children.

Then – there is the horror of the 7^th October attacks by Hamas. This is a terror group with a commitment to destroy Israel. Its own charter denounces the legitimacy of Israel, despite Israel’s foundation in 1948 and ratification as a member of the United Nations. Hamas declares – in its 2017 document :

“Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise (the Balfour Declaration), on recognition of a usurping entity and on imposing a fait accompli by force.”

This language – “racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project” – demonstrates the thinking of this group. It sees that the Jews are not even human.

Thus, it is not surprising that in the vicious attacks on the Jewish communities near Gaza on 7^th October 2023, the peaceful settlers there were regarded as even lower than animals. The attacks have been glossed over by most of the mainstream media. Such is the effectiveness of the propaganda in Gaza, most Gazans, and many Palestinian supporters in the West refuse to believe that any atrocities were committed.

A November 2023 poll undertaken by the Arab World for Research and Development and quoted by JNS showed that:

• 48.2% of the 668 Palestinian adults thought that Hamas’ role was “very positive”;

• 80% regard Hamas’ military wing (The Al-Qassam Brigades) as positive;

• 75% indicated that they supported the Hamas attacks (59.3% indicated that they “extremely supported” and 15.7% “somewhat supported”);

• 98% of respondents reported that the slaughter of Israelis made them feel “prouder of their identity as Palestinians”.

• 75% of those surveyed believed that the Israel-Hamas war would end in a victory for the Palestinians.

Is the moral and spiritual decline of the West linked in any way to the horror of the Hamas attacks on 7^th October 2023?

The noted British journalist Melanie Phillips thinks so.

How Conservatism’s Chickens Came Home to Roost in Gaza

Ms Phillips gave a remarkable lecture at last week’s National Conservatism Conference in Brussels. The Mayor of Brussels tried to shut down the conference because of claims of “right-wing extremism”, but despite the oppression, much of the conference went ahead.

The Brussels police's response to a non-existent threat demonstrated the desire of many bureaucrats in the EU to promote only those ideas that are in alignment with a “progressive” and collectivist philosophy.

I commend the 25-minute talk to Sons of Issachar readers and listeners.

Ms Phillips highlighted the drone and missile attack by Iran on Israel two weeks ago. She noted that Iran had now torn its mask off and demonstrated its main target - Israel - after hiding behind proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

She made a number of important points in her presentation, which demonstrated that the current denunciation of Israel has an important link to those who hate the very idea of a nation-state.

The attack of 7^th October on the Israeli settlements near Gaza involved: “thousands of Hamas stormtroopers who burst across the border fence from Gaza followed by ordinary Gazan people including teenage children to butcher rape torture behead and burn alive some 1200 women children babies and men and kidnap 240 others into Gaza.”

Given this terrible event, she said:

“One would have thought this would elicit from the civilised world a deep understanding of the need to take action to ensure that this atrocity could never ever happen again. And this was particularly urgent since Hamas declared that they would repeat such attacks over and over again until Israel was destroyed and every Jew was killed”.

Rather than revulsion by the world about Hamas’ evil actions, there was a rapid rewriting of history.

“Instead of sympathy for the Jewish people, a tsunami of anti-Semitism started to roll across Britain and the West, even while the slaughter in Israel was continuing. The first exultant Muslim demonstration started up on the streets of British cities and ever since then there have been regular huge demonstrations on the streets screaming for holy war, the destruction of Israel and death to Jews. With shouts of jihad from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and globalise the Intifada. And as soon as the Israeli defense forces started their military operation in Gaza to destroy Hamas … the so-called civilised world turned Israel into the aggressor accusing it of wanton destruction, going “over the top”, killing far too many civilians, targeting hospitals deliberately and deliberately causing starvation by refusing to allow in humanitarian aid.”

The mainstream media demonstrated its antisemitic bias by promoting Hamas’ propaganda, despite the organisation using civilians as human shields in locations such as hospitals and schools, where they had located weapons.

“Israel was causing no starvation; it was allowing in aid, and where there was undeniably hunger, this was caused principally by Hamas stealing the aid supplies for itself to bolster its own activities. Every single hospital in Gaza was being used for terrorist activity (itself a war crime), and many doctors were Hamas operatives or their supporters feeding the media with these lies.”

Melanie Phillips spoke about the shocking fact that the Conservative Party in Britain, and notably the Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, is allowing Palestinian mobs to rule the streets of Britain. Rather than acting against calls by the mob for genocide, the government urged Israel to make peace with terrorists. She asked: how could this be?

The answer links back to the current issues that face the West. Melanie Phillips believes that Israel is representative of everything that the globalists (or what she calls “universalists”) hate. These people assert “human rights” backed up by the weight of international organisations.

“…in human rights law, there is a fundamental flaw. Law gains its moral and political authority from the consent of the people in a democratic society expressed in a nation's democratically elected institutions, which pass laws that reflect that nation’s cultural and moral values. Human rights law doesn't fit that. Human rights law is transnational. It is not anchored in any nation’s culture or jurisprudence. As a result, it's a kind of free-floating entity to be made up as you go along, and it became inevitably a form of politics that actually corrupted law. And by asserting the unchallengeable authority of international law to trump the laws made by national parliaments, it actually targets the nation-state. The nation-state is in the sights of international human rights law. As a result, inevitably, it would and did target Israel because Israel is the paradigm nation-state. It is the place where the land, the religion and the people are fused as one. ….

So Israel as the ultimate nation-state was not surprisingly targeted as absolutely intolerable by the ultimate universalist institution - the United Nations and the whole constellation of human rights humanitarian NGOs. Now that was a project of what we were one might call the universalist idealist progressive left. But the conservatives went along with all this. They either never took human rights seriously, or else they chose to go with the flow on this, as with so much else. And that was because, after the Soviet Union fell, the Conservatives thought their fox had been shot. They thought the enemy had been defeated. They never realised that the revolution was transferring itself to the culture.”

Melanie Phillips has correctly diagnosed the problem in the West. While we were otherwise occupied, the “progressives” and “collectivists” have taken over the culture to such a degree that there is only one acceptable view - theirs. She notes that conservatives have been dragged to the left side of politics without realising it.

The universalists (globalists) find Israel and what it stands for offensive, and now Western society discovers itself in an extraordinary situation where “conservative” globalists, such as Lord Cameron, lecture Israel about war crimes and appear to support Hamas.

“Those who attack Israel on both left and right are those who no longer value the nation and its historic culture. They have no story to tell about their connection to their own country, so they cannot tolerate the story that the Jews tell about themselves, which is rooted in their history in the land that they love so much.”

Ms Phillips believes that universalists in the West have lost their way and forgotten about the foundations of civilisation, religion, and laws that have contributed to the West’s success.

She writes that the idea of “making the world safe for their children isn't worth the ultimate sacrifice for people who are increasingly refusing to have children at all out of despair or indifference or to save the planet. Destroying their past and denying their future, they live only in the moment up against an Islamist enemy which draws its power from living in the 7th century and has correctly sized up the West as a vacuum waiting to be filled. The West will, therefore, lose”.

It is hard to demonstrate that her argument is wrong, and she ends her presentation by contrasting the lack of resolve in the West in dealing with its enemies with that of Israel following the terrorist attacks by Hamas.

“Israelis from all over the world left their jobs left, their studies left their families, and flew to Israel to fight Hamas. The IDF call-up generated an estimated 150% response. Israelis were demanding to serve, even though they were considered too old to fight. …. They valued their nation. They identified with their nation. They were fighting also to honour the sacrifice made by the generations that had come before them in previous pogroms and, slaughters and exterminations. They knew what they were because their identity was rooted in their nation and its history. They knew they were defending civilisation against barbarism.”

Her conclusion is:

“The war in Gaza is an inflection point. Israel is fighting for civilisation against barbarism. Israel will win this whatever it costs, and it may cost a great deal more. Israel will win this because it understands itself to be a nation rooted in its history, of people in its own home. Conservatism is lost at present because it's being dominated by people who no longer understand what being a nation entails.”

Surprisingly, then, Israel and Western society’s response to the current conflict seems to symbolize a broader battle. I believe that we are witnessing a profound spiritual confrontation between good and evil.

It is important to drown out the noise of those who seek the destruction of Israel and focus on the fact that standing for Israel at this hour is a stand for Western civilisation itself.

God’s Purposes for Israel

The nation of Israel has a central role in God’s story, outlined in the Christian Bible
and the Hebrew Tanakh. In the Book of Genesis (Hebrew – בְּרֵאשִׁית – “beginnings”), the patriarch Abraham appears on the scene relatively early after the story of Creation. God tells Abram (God later gave him a new name – Abraham – “father of many”) to leave his home and go to the land of Canaan, where he would make of him a great nation.

Modern Israel is located in the centre of what was ancient Canaan. God says something remarkable to Abraham:

“ I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3).

Abraham obeys God and journeys to what is modern-day Israel. He is then told:

“Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants, I will give this land.” (Genesis 12:7).

The rest of the Old Testament chronicles how the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob fared, and the highs and lows of a nation called by God to be a blessing to humanity.

God’s chosen people haven’t had an easy road because of their rebellion against God and His larger purpose (blessing all families of the earth), which is spiritually and physically contested by the forces of darkness.

However, the Bible states some clear (but spiritually contested) principles:

1.     God Himself gave land to a people – descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -  and reiterated this by bringing them out of Egypt in the miraculous Passover (commemorated this last week) and eventually leading them into the Promised Land, which incorporates modern Israel and the West Bank.

2.     God’s chosen people—the Jews—are to be a blessing to all nations. Jewish innovators and entrepreneurs' have made extraordinary contributions to all areas of society. This is demonstrated by Jewish recipients of Nobel prizes since 1901. People of Jewish ancestry comprise almost one-quarter of all Nobel prizes, despite making up only 0.2 % of the world population.

God established an everlasting covenant with His people, as outlined in Genesis Chapter 17.

In this Chapter, God says:

“And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you. Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” (Genesis 17:7-8).

God has not forgotten His people, and He is at work in mysterious ways that we cannot understand. The apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Roman Christians, written about AD57, that they not:

“…. be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved…” (Romans 11:25-26).

God has a purpose for Israel that blesses all humanity. Furthermore, He will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel. This is an important guiding philosophy for Sons of Issachar readers, who seek to understand the times.

The Ongoing Challenge for Israel and Middle East Peace

The Jews have, over the centuries, been expelled from various lands and targeted for persecution. Still, in 1948, they were finally given a legitimate home as a nation, backed by international law, in part of their historical homeland. Many believed that this could never happen. Those who forged this new nation have been extraordinarily successful there and have attempted on many occasions to come to an accommodation with the Palestinians, who also have a claim on land in the region. Every attempt to find a peaceful solution has been thwarted by hardliners on the Palestinian side who refuse any solutions that legitimise Israel.

The current conflict between Israel and Hamas is just another more brutal event in a series of attacks on Israel since its founding in 1948, and on Jews more generally for thousands of years. The core issue is that those in leadership on the Palestinian side want nothing less than the extermination of the Jews – as they chant, “from the river to the sea”. Negotiation is almost impossible, and Israel has no choice but to defeat the threat from Hamas.

Unfortunately, the Hamas terrorists have strong support in many countries throughout the West because of extensive Muslim immigration. Muslim communities have no desire to assimilate but rather to bring their way of life and law so that the West is forced to submit (the root meaning of Islam).

Thus, we see the current demonstrations, which have now engulfed various universities in the US. Billions of Middle East money have established Middle East Study Centers at more than 50 US universities. This situation has been described in detail in a 2022 report by the US National Association of Scholars, titled Hijacked: The Capture of America’s Middle East Study Centers. There is little transparency in the way these centers operate, and the authors conclude:

“…their lack of financial transparency, and that of their host universities, raises further questions about whose national interests they actually promote.”

As Melanie Phillips says: “The war in Gaza is an inflection point. Israel is fighting for civilisation against barbarism”.

It is important to understand the conflict in Gaza in a wider context and grasp the threat to Western civilization. To help readers and listeners comprehend the situation with more clarity, I spoke to Mr Peter Wertheim yesterday.

Interview with Mr Peter Wertheim AM

Peter Wertheim is the Executive Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the national peak body of the Australian Jewish community. He has also held positions on the Australian government's multicultural advisory bodies.

Peter spoke to me on Australia’s Anzac Day (25^th April) about the history of Israel and the current conflict.

There are tough days ahead for Israel and it is important in the midst of all the challenges to keep a big picture perspective. The Jews are God’s chosen people and they are precious to Him and therefore precious to us. God has a plan for Israel and it is in our self-interest to bless Israel.

As King David prayed and sang around 3,000 years ago, it is good for us to do today:

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
May they prosper who love you.” (Psalm 122:6).