I'm going to attempt today to briefly discuss the modern state of Israel, and hopefully apply Christian principles to our understanding. Because we're doing this after church, I'm very sensitive to the fact that we've all been sitting through a full church service. I’m going to make my remarks brief. The points that will follow are worthy of book-length treatments, and so I want to, at the front end, suggest several books for those of you who are readers and want to dig more deeply into this subject.
I. Book Recommendations
First of all, if you're looking for a history of Israel and Zionism from a pro-Israeli perspective and you want to read just one book, I would recommend Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis. Second, If you're considering the issues that are raised by contemporary critics of Israel - for example that Jewish people have no historic claim on that strip of land that now is called Israel, that Palestinians ought to control the land as the chant says “from the river to the sea,” that Israel is an illegitimate state, that Israel has been guilty of genocide, that Israel is an apartheid state, and that Israel controlled Gaza like an open air prison - if you're interested in the merit of those arguments, I would recommend the book Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law by a U.S. federal district court judge named Roy Altman. Third, if you are looking for a more pro-Palestinian perspective, and also want to assess the issues of biblical prophecy and the current state of Israel, I would recommend the book. Whose Promised Land: The Continual Crisis over Israel and Palestine by Colin Chapman.
Those are some book-length treatments. Let me just share with you a brief summary of where I'm going in this talk.
II. The basic principles
III. Let me begin with the first principle. I don't believe that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. We read in the Bible that the strip of land that we currently call Israel, along with much of the rest of the Middle East, was promised to the descendants of Abraham. So we read, for example, in Genesis 15:18-19 these words:
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, [Genesis 15:18-19, NIV]
So we see that there is a promise of the land that stretches from the Nile River in Egypt to include all the Sinai Peninsula, to parts of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, all the way to the Euphrates River in modern day Iraq. And this promise was repeated a number of times throughout the Old Testament. So we read in Exodus 23:31:
“I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you.” [Exodus 23:31, NIV]
I would say as an initial matter that even among the most zealous promoters of the idea that the land of Israel was promised to the Jewish people 4000 years ago, and that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, I've not met anyone who believes that the Jewish people today should control the property that has these biblical boundaries. So when someone says that Israel or the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a legitimate question to ask would be, “All right, what are the boundaries of this promised land? Should the Jewish people control all of Jordan and Syrian parts of Iraq? What should be those boundaries?”
Further, it appears according to Old Testament writers, that the promise to Abraham was fulfilled 2900 years ago during the reign of the third Israelite king, King Solomon.
Here's what we read in 2 Chronicles 9.26.
He [Solomon] ruled over all the kings from the Euphrates River to the land of the Philistines, as far as the border of Egypt. [2 Chronicles 9:26, NIV]
Now, for New Testament believers, it is interesting that nowhere in the New Testament is there any repetition by Jesus or Paul or any other New Testament writer of the Old Testament promise of a particular geographic land for the Jewish people. The Old Testament promise of a piece of land in this world and an earthly temple in Jerusalem doesn’t seem to be a concern for the New Testament writers whatsoever. The Old Testament promise of a restored temple (other than Jesus himself) is also not repeated in the New Testament. What is mentioned is a reworking of the promise to Abraham, not by way of a particular piece of ground in the Middle East. Rather, what we read in Romans 4:13 is:
It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. [Romans 4:13, NIV]
Notice that Romans 4:13 doesn't say that the descendants of Abraham are entitled to a strip of land in the Middle East and that the current state of Israel fulfills that promise. Rather, Abraham's descendants were to be heirs of the world. The promise of a particular plot of land is extended out to the whole world. In Paul's thinking, the divine promises, in one way or another, find their fulfillment to the heirs of Abraham, both Jews and Gentiles who have trusted in Jesus. These heirs have been given the whole world.
So, unlike a group of people known as dispensationalists, who point to certain Old Testament promises to the Jewish people and say, “Based upon these promises, the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy”, there are strong arguments to the contrary. Moreover, it's very clear that the promise of a return to the land was conditioned upon Israel repenting and turning back to the Lord. Certainly, those of us, both Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus, do not believe that the majority of non-Messianic Jews in the current state of Israel have repented. Indeed, many Jews in the state of Israel today are secular. They not only don't believe in Jesus, but many don’t believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and are not Torah-observant. In sum, I don't think the conditions for any restoration, even on Hebrew Bible grounds, much less on New Testament grounds, are fulfilled. So my first principle in considering the question of Israel is this - I don't believe the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
IV. The second principle is this: I do believe that the modern state of Israel governed by the Jewish people is a fulfillment of biblical justice. Why do I say that? I say that because (A) the Jewish people have been in control of the geographical location of the modern state of Israel going back, according to archaeologists, to somewhere around either 1400 or 1200 BC. There is tremendous archaeological evidence of the presence of Jewish people in the place that we call Israel going back 3200 years at least. And this is not just a modern Israeli claim. This claim can be found in archaeological artifacts that are in museums in Cairo, in the Louvre in France, and in the British Museum (among other places). The Jewish people are indigenous to the land that we currently call Israel. There has been a consistent Jewish presence on this piece of ground, even following the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and the expulsion of Jews by the Romans under the Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135 AD after the second Jewish revolt.
It was Hadrian who renamed Judea Palestina, after the Philistines, a Greek people who invaded the area around Gaza in ancient times. Palestina was a made-up name that Hadrian concocted as a way of punishing the Jews for rebelling against Rome. It was Hadrian who tried to get the world to forget the Jews' ancient connection to this piece of ground in the Middle East.
But (B) there was still a Jewish presence even after Hadrian massacred tens of thousands of Jews in Judea and Samaria. And for 1800 years, there was a Jewish presence in Jerusalem, as well as many other cities in the current state of Israel.
But let me give you another reason why I believe that the current state of Israel is a matter of biblical justice. As I said, the historical case for Jewish presence and governance establishes continuity of Jews in that particular place. But, if you ask what makes a country legitimate, we might turn to international law. (C) International law asks four questions in assessing the legitimacy of a people's claim to statehood. First, (1) does the state have a permanent population? Second, (2) does it have a defined territory? Third, (3) is it governed by a single effective government? And finally, (4) does it have the capacity to conduct foreign relations?
The basic idea is that a nation doesn't become a state simply by declaring its statehood. There are thousands of different ethnic groups around the world today, but only 193 nation states are represented at the United Nations. At the time of Israel's founding in 1948, Israel had a permanent population, so it meets criteria number one. Second, it had a defined territory. In fact, the territory was supported by a vote of the United Nations, and it was one of those rare times of Russian-United States agreement during the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union voted to recognize Israel's foundation and the borders of the state of Israel.
(D) The United Nations voted 37 to 12 to accept Israel as its 59th member state in 1949. Criterion number two is met. Third, is the nation governed by a single effective government? The answer is, in 1948, at the time of its Declaration of Independence, Israel had an effective central government, headed by an executive committee, which was led by David Ben-Gurion, who would become the country's first prime minister. The new country had an independent court system overseen by a Supreme Court, and a legislature, which still governs the country today. Fourth and finally, Israel, in 1948, had an entire infrastructure dedicated to the conduct of foreign relations. So, Israel satisfied all the four elements of international law that governs the creation of nation states. Again, it's really important, at a time when Israel's legitimacy is being questioned, to remember that the United Nations voted on Israel's right to be a nation state, and the UN Security Council, with both the United States and the Soviet Union, along with its General Assembly in agreement, supported the creation of the state of Israel. Israel, governed by the Jewish people, meets every criteria for nationhood, more thoroughly than most nations . whose legitimacy is uncontested.
Regarding peoplehood, the Jewish people in Israel also have a unified identity. Jews in Israel share a common language that was revived from ancient times called Hebrew. They have a shared legal and narrative tradition running from Sinai, through the Talmud, to modern religious, secular Jewish life. They've had a physical presence in the land, under the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Ottomans, and they have a common self-identification, wherever the people came from in returning to their ancestral homeland.
Now, understand that (E) the Arabs did not arrive from the Arabian Peninsula into the place that we call Israel until, at best as we can determine, 636 AD, a minimum of 1800 years after the Jews settled there. In other words, Israel was a kingdom in the geographical location of the modern state of Israel governed by the Jews more than 1800 years before Islam arrived in the Middle East. The idea that Jews are colonialists in the land of Israel is absolutely insane. We have no other example anywhere in the world of a colonialist government whose roots in the colonized land preceded the supposedly indigenous population by thousands of years. It would be like here in America, if Cherokee tribes who were displaced by European colonists on their land in what's now the state of Georgia, returned to Georgia, established a state there, and then the Europeans said to the Cherokees, “Listen, you're settler colonialists. We're the indigenous people here.” Yet that's the claim made against Jews in the state of Israel.
V. How did modern Zionism arise, and how did so many Jews return to the state of Israel from around the world? Let me give you just a very quick overview of what is modern Zionism, the push by Jewish people, primarily in Europe, to have a reestablished homeland where Jews would be able to protect themselves and determine their own destiny in the place from which a majority of Jews had been exiled beginning with the Roman expulsion under Hadrian. You may know that Jewish people had experienced a history of antisemitism in Europe after their dispersion from the state of Israel.
A. A Brief History of European Antisemitism
1. Jewish Expulsion - You may not know that Jews were expelled from virtually every European country at one time or another. For example, Jews were kicked out of England for 400 years from the 1200s to the 1600s. Spain kicked the Jews out in 1492, the year that Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus out on his voyage that discovered the New World. France expelled their Jewish population of over 100,000, and expropriated all Jewish property for several hundred years.
2. Ghettos - But the persecution against the Jews in Christian Europe went well beyond expulsion. Jews that were allowed to remain in various countries were forced into ghettos that were walled communities locked at night, so that Jews could not freely interact with the Christian population around them.
3. Distinctive clothing - Jews were also required during the Middle Ages to wear distinctive clothing and badges to mark them out from the rest of the population, especially so that Jews and Christians couldn't intermarry or have sex together.
4. The Crusades - Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered and Jewish towns and villages were burned to the ground during the Crusades, as Christian armies crossed Europe and headed for the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims.
5. The “blood libel” - Persecution against Jews was always more intense every year around Easter, because of the so-called “blood libel.” The blood libel, if you're not familiar with that term, was the lie that Jews needed the blood of Christian babies in order to bake their matzah. And so every year around Easter, which is the same time as Passover, there would be pogroms, attacks on Jewish villages, based upon the belief that Jews had killed a Christian baby to bake their Passover matzah.
6. During the Black Plague, in the 14th century, when it's estimated that somewhere between 30 and 50% of all Europeans died in a period of 4 years, the slaughter of Jews throughout Europe became particularly intense, because it was alleged that the reason why so many Christians were dying was because Jews were poisoning their well water. Even the Pope couldn't stop the slaughter of the Jews, as he argued that Jews were dying in exactly the same numbers from the Black Plague as Christians were. But the slaughter continued.
When Napoleon marched through Europe, at the beginning of the 19th century, he tore down the ghetto walls and liberated Jews from the ghettos. Jews then, in the 19th century, began to assimilate with the larger Christianpopulation, and began to succeed in business and medicine and law and so on. But, anti-Jewish sentiment didn't die down during this period of time. If anything, anti-Jewish sentiment increased, partly out of resentment for newly achieved Jewish success, and partly because the attacks on Jews became infused with modern science and race theory.
7. “Scientific” antisemitism - Europeans claimed that the problem with the Jews was not with their religion. The problem was fundamentally their race. Even conversion to Christianity could not fix Jews. So in 1879, a German by the name of Wilhelm Marr rejected the notion that Jews could assimilate into general society. He coined a term for the modern incarnation of Jew-hatred which he called antisemitism. The problem with Jews wasn’t religious. Rather it was racial. Jews are an inferior race.
8. The Dreyfus affair (1894) - In France, there was a trial of a Jewish captain in the French army in 1894. This captain's name was Alfred Dreyfus, who, incidentally was the great-great uncle of the famous actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus from Seinfeld and VEEP. The claim was that Dreyfus was giving French military secrets to the Germans. This was all based upon some papers that were discovered by a cleaning woman in the German embassy. Handwriting experts said that these papers were written by Dreyfus. Below the surface in France was the ever-present antisemitism. French newspapers demanded that Dreyfus be punished. The Roman Catholic Church in France joined in the condemnation of Dreyfus. Despite overwhelming evidence exculpating Dreyfus, including many military officers in the French army who claimed that there was no way that Dreyfus gave military secrets to the Germans, the French government and higher-ups in the military refused to listen to this testimony. Dreyfus was publicly humiliated in a square in Paris. He was stripped of all of his medals and his sword was broken. Crowds surrounded the Parisian square, and screamed “Death to the Jews, death to all the Jews!”
9. I just want to parenthetically note, before we turn back to the impact of the Dreyfus affair on the birth of modern Zionism, that there has been an extraordinary rise of antisemitism globally and here in the United States in the past decade in general, an upsurge which has accelerated following the Gaza War. Just a few days ago, in July 2026, a Jewish man in New York City's Upper West Side was violently stabbed as he left a synagogue service on Tisha B’Av. (The Jewish holiday that commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem). The man who stabbed him was shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” (Allah is great), as he stabbed this Jewish man. Unfortunately, attacks on individuals who are wearing identifiably Jewish garb, like a yarmulke or a Star of David have become all too common. Parents are regularly calling Jewish camps, wondering about the security for their children. Jewish parents are choosing to not give their children stars of David or other ways to mark them out as Jewish because of concerns about their children’s safety.
Following the Second World War, Holocaust denial was driven out of the political right by Bill Buckley, who was able to marginalize antisemitism and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and '60s. Unfortunately, the unthinkable is now everywhere promoted, especially on social media. Hitler's speeches have all been translated from German into English, including all of Hitler’s inflections, and millions of young people have watched them on TikTok . Antisemites like Nick Fuentes, who has said such inflammatory things as “I love Hitler”, and “Organized Jewry is a transnational gang” have been on Tucker Carlson denying the Holocaust. Fuentes has dined at Mar-a-lago with President Trump and has millions of followers on his social media accounts.
Tucker Carlson regularly features Holocaust deniers on his extraordinarily popular podcast. He had a guest on his show last year named Darryl Cooper. Carlson said that Cooper is “the most popular historian in America.” Darryl Cooper is a man who has never written a book, but he engages in the worst kind of conspiracy theories regarding Jews and is also a Holocaust denier. Candace Owens, who is also very popular on social media and has a large following, claimed that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks. She regularly speaks about the Jewish mafia who controls America, and has repeatedly alleged that Israel or Mossad was behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
You might be familiar with the horseshoe theory of politics, which says that people on the extreme left and on the extreme right eventually come together. Nowhere is this truer than with Jew-hatred. We see radical antisemitic comments coming from Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayaupal, who are Democratic officeholders, and who constantly attack Jewish influence in government. Hassan Piker is a popular left-wing streamer, and also regularly engages in antisemitic rhetoric. This kind of rhetoric is magnified by bots, some of which come from Russia, to further divide the country and inflame antagonism towards Jews.
(B) Theodore Herzl and the birth of modern Zionism
Returning then, to the birth of Zionism, a Jewish journalist named Theodore Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial for an Austrian newspaper, and was shocked as he listened to this cry for death to the Jews that rang out in liberal Paris. Herzl had many experiences of antisemitism growing up in Austria. He thought that If even in the most liberal countries, Europeans are screaming for Jewish blood, there could never be a secure home for Jews in Europe. Herzl said that what Jews needed most of all was their own homeland where they got to determine their own destiny, and were able to protect themselves because Europeans would never protect Jews.
(C) The Balfour Declaration (1917)
In 1914, World War I broke out - the Allied powers of Britain, France, and Russia (joined later by the US) fought the Ottoman Turks, the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The British Foreign Secretary, named Arthur Balfour, along with the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, decided that when and if the Ottoman Empire broke up (because the Turks ruled the entire Middle East) that Jews were entitled to a homeland in the place that we now call Israel. Once the Ottoman Empire broke up, the French and English divided the Middle East. The French took Syria and Lebanon. The English took Iraq, the Trans-Jordan (now called Jordan) and Palestine. British foreign secretary Balfour wrote a letter to a wealthy Jewish banker named Lord Walter Rothschild on November 2, 1917. Here's what Balfour wrote:
”Dear Lord Rothschild. I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty's government, the following declaration of sympathy with the Jewish Zionist aspirations which have been submitted to and approved by the cabinet.
His Majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine, of a national home for the Jewish people and will use the best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Yours sincerely, Arthur James Balfour.”
So only twenty years after the Zionist Congress, the most powerful empire on the planet recognized the Zionist movement, sided with it, and promised that the British government would do everything it could to advance the Zionist cause. Few Jews could have imagined that when the modern Zionist movement was launched in 1897, it would be so quickly supported by a kingdom like Great Britain.
There continued to be more immigration into the land that we now call Israel. Arabs began to be concerned about the number of Jews that were flooding into Israel from Europe even before the Second World War. In the 1930s, Arabs began to attack their Jewish neighbors. In 1936, anti-Jewish riots broke out throughout the land.They destroyed Jewish stores, attacked Jewish homes, and then in 1937, large Jewish communities throughout Palestine were murdered. For example, terrible violence broke out in Hebron, where hundreds of Jews were killed.
(D) The Peel Commission (1937)
The British government decided that there was so much violence that the Balfour Declaration’s promise that the British made to the Jewish people to support a Jewish homeland in Israel needed to be revised. And so in 1937, in the hope of bringing peace between Arabs and Jews, the king sent a man named Peel to form a commission and to recommend a partition of the land between Jews and Arabs.
Now, remember that the original promise by the British to the Jewish people under the Balfour Declaration was that they would get the land of Palestine. But in 1920, the British reduced that promise, and gave 80% of the land to Arabs east of the Jordan River in an area that they call Trans-Jordan (the country of Jordan today). The remaining 20%, on the west side of the Jordan River, was to go to the Jews. But in 1937, having already split the land by giving 80% to the Arabs and 20% to the Jews, the Peel Commission declared, “We're going to further split the land west of the Jordan. We're going to give only 20% of the remaining land west of the Jordan to the Jews,” and the rest of it would go to the Arabs. So, of the original promise of all the land to the Jewish people under the Balfour Declaration, only 4.6% of the land was going to be given to Jews according to the Peel Commission.
David Ben-Gurion, who headed up the Zionist executive council which oversaw the Jewish people, accepted Peel's proposal. He said, “Okay, we'll accept just 4.6% of what was promised, and the Arabs can have the rest.” But, the Arabs who had already received the state of Jordan, and were going to get 80% of the remaining land west of the Jordan River, refused. The issue of Palestinian statehood could have been resolved in the 1930s, but it was not, because of Arab rejection.
IV. The third principle is this: Palestinians, like Jews, are entitled to their own homeland, but unlike many people today, I don't believe that Israel or the Jews have historically been the main impediments to a two-state solution. I believe the main impediment has been Arab intransigence in refusing to allow the Jewish people any portion of the land of what the Romans call Palestine and what we today call Israel. “From the river to the sea” has been the Arab demand for 90 years.
Indeed, there have been six offers made over the 90 years, for a Palestinian homeland, that Jews accepted, and Palestinians rejected.
(A) The Peel Commission - The first rejection was in 1937, the Peel Commission, as I mentioned. The Arabs flatly turned that down. The second Arab rejection came in 1948, after the Second World War. The British had turned their mandate over to the newly formed UN. They said, “We want no part of this land anymore that we've been ruling over.”
(B) The UN Partition and Israeli Independence (1948)
After taking Palestine from the Turks following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the Brits finally had enough. In essence they said “We are exhausted by all this fighting between the Jews and the Arabs.” England had been maintaining a huge military force in Palestine of 100,000 troops, trying to control it. Jewish and Arab terrorists were killing English soldiers, trying to push them out. So the Brits turned the whole mess over to the newly-formed UN. In 1947, the UN recognized Israel as the ancestral home of the Jewish people. But instead of the Peel Commission, the United Nations devised a different partition of the land west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. They gave 56% of that land to the Jews and 43% to the Arabs. Jerusalem was designated an international zone.
The British mandate expired on May 14th,1948. Israel accepted the partition of the land and declared its independence that same day. The Arabs, just like they did with the Peel Commission back in 1937, rejected this new partition. Neighboring Arab states invaded the land of Israel. The Iraqis, the Jordanians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, and Egypt, all assembled their armies and attacked the Jewish people in the land of Israel. Despite facing overwhelming odds, Israel won the War of Independence, and established what is now called the modern state of Israel in 1948.
(C )The Six Day War
In 1967, Israel fought another war with the Arabs, and after winning what is called the Six Day War, Israel tripled in its size from its 1948 borders.
Israel conquered Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and what is now called the West Bank of the Jordan River. Israel offered to give these lands back to the Egyptians and the Jordanians in exchange for peace. They said, “We'll give you back all of the land taken in the Six Days War.” In response to Israel's olive branch, twelve Arab states convened a summit, and said “no”. There were actually three “no's”. “No to peace with Israel. No to negotiations with Israel. And no to recognition of Israel's right to exist.”
(D) The Oslo Accords
The fourth rejection of a Palestinian state followed what was called the Oslo accords under Bill Clinton. Oslo mapped out a five-year process at the end of which the Palestinians would see the creation of a Palestinian state, but only if the Palestinian Authority abided by Oslo's basic terms, including, and especially, that it cease the endorsement of terrorism. Unfortunately, Oslo never got anywhere, because the moment that the terms of the Oslo agreement were revealed, Palestinian terrorists responded by launching a bloody wave of suicide bombings, targeting Israeli weddings, buses, pizza parlors, nightclubs and restaurants, When the smoke cleared, hundreds of Israeli civilians lay dead. And as a result of the terrorist attacks, many Israelis came to believe that Oslo was a mistake.
(E) Camp David - Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat (2000)
There was a fifth Arab rejection of a Palestinian state, following Camp David. Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with Yasser Arafat at Camp David, where the Israelis offered the Palestinians a state in all of Gaza, 97% of the entire West Bank. Arafat rejected it. Again, the Palestinian goal is and never has been a two-state solution. The Palestinian project is realizing the dream “from the river to the sea,” an Arab state on all the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
(F) Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas (2008)
And then in 2008, Ehud Olmert met in secret with Mahmoud Abbas, who became the head of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat's death. Olmert offered Abbas a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, and 93.7% of the West Bank, along with the implementation of a five-nation trusteeship, to maintain a ring around Jerusalem's old city. Abbas rejected the offer.
(G) The major sticking point: The right of return
A major sticking point for the Palestinians has been the so-called right of return. Palestinians have taught their children for generations that all Palestinians have a right to go back to the original property they held before the state of Israel was formed. During the war of Israeli independence, somewhere around three quarters of a million Palestinians fled their homes. Many left to go to Arab areas including Jordan, Gaza and what is now called the West Bank.
1) Palestinian and Jewish displacement
Some of these Palestinians were displaced by the fighting. Some were pushed out by Israeli soldiers. Some preferred to leave. The displacement brought terrible hardship to many Palestinians. What no one ever mentions is that nearly 1,000,000 Jews were also kicked out of Arab countries in the 20 years following Israeli independence. There were pogroms against Jews in Cairo, in Iraq, and in Libya. Jews had lived in some of these places for thousands of years going back to the time of the book of Esther in Persia. To give some sense of the extent of Jewish presence in Arab countries pre-Israeli independence, it is estimated that 40% of Baghdad was Jewish in 1930. Yet no one argues today that Jews have a right to return to the homes that they fled in order to escape Arab persecution.
2) Hindu and Muslim displacement after the partition of the Indian Subcontinent- A contemporary analogy:
Following wars of independence, there are often major displacements of indigenous populations. For example, at the same time that Palestine was partitioned by the UN, the Indian subcontinent that created Pakistan and India was also partitioned. The extent of population displacement was staggering. Between 7 and 8 million Muslims fled what became known as India and 7- 8,000,000 Hindus fled what became known as Pakistan. It is estimated that up to 1 million people died during the horrific wars that followed the partition. Yet no one claims a right of return to their former homes and there is no permanent UN refugee settlement agency overseeing the descendants of all of these people.
3) The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)
The only group of people in the world that have had a more than 75-year UN refugee re-settlement agency (UN Relief and Works Agency called UNRWA) is the Palestinians. This UN agency works with the descendants of Palestinians who left Israel and now live in Gaza, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank. They provide education, social services, and health clinics directly, not through host governments. Every other people group who were at some time refugees are encouraged to integrate into the country where they are, or resettle in another country.
Don’t imagine these Palestinian “refugees“ are living in tents or temporary shelters. They are living in apartments and houses. Many own businesses and farms and have done so for 3 to 4 generations. Yet only the Palestinians possess an internationally recognized permanent refugee status which has been continually renewed by the UN for nearly 80 years. This maintains the narrative that Palestinians have a right to go back to their ancestral homes and that Jewish control of major portions of the state of Israel is illegitimate. By the way, the UNRWA employed Hamas operatives in key UN positions in Gaza. It is not a neutral refugee relief agency. It is decidedly anti-Israel.
Palestinians have taught their children, their grandchildren, and now their great-grandchildren to wear the keys from their original homes and apartments (many of which no longer exist ) around their necks for the day that they will return to their ancestors' homes. Again, no one says to Indians who were kicked out of Pakistan or Pakistanis who were kicked out of India or Jews who were kicked out of places such as Cairo or Baghdad or Libya, “You may return to your ancestral homes despite the establishment of UN recognition of a new government in that place.” Only the Palestinians!
4) Closed doors to Palestinians by their Arab neighbors
Moreover, while any Jew in the world is welcomed into the state of Israel and can become a citizen there, 22 Arab countries have closed their doors to Palestinian resettlement. Jordan in particular, would have been a natural home for Palestinians since 40-50% of Jordan has Palestinian origins and Israel offered the West Bank back to Jordan who previously controlled it before the Six Day War. But Jordan has refused to accept more Palestinians in part because the Palestinians have proven to be a challenge for Jordan. Militant Palestinian groups tried to assassinate the Jordanian king back in 1970 and Jordan went to war against the PLO and killed as many as 10,000 Palestinians. Likewise, Egyptians have prevented Palestinians living in Gaza from settling in Egypt because of security concerns. So the southern border of Gaza (which leads to Egypt) is completely closed to Palestinians. Yet only the Israelis are criticized for their refusal to accept a massive influx of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.
5) Misunderstanding of Jews by their Arab Neighbors. Another possible reason for Palestinian intransigence may, according to some scholars, be due to the false belief that many Arabs have about Jews in Israel. The false belief can be simply stated like this: if enough pressure is applied, the Jews will leave Israel just like the French left Algeria after many years of warfare. All the Arabs need to do is to never give up, and eventually they will wear out the Jews, and the Jews will leave. But this is a false lesson learned from history because the French could pack up and go back to France. The Jews in Israel have nowhere else to go. So they are not leaving, no matter what.
So while I believe that the Palestinians, like the Jews, are entitled to their own homeland, I don't believe, and I don't think that history shows, that Israel has been the main impediment to a two-state solution. The main impediments have been Palestinian demands for the entire land "from the river to the sea,” and the Palestinian demand that the descendants of Palestinians displaced by the war of independence be given the right to return to the apartments they had in 1948.
VII. The Fourth Principle: I believe that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza was not worse than and is almost certainly better than American conduct of its wars in the Middle East. I need to say something at the front end of this fourth principle and that is that I don't have the time to speak about the conduct of modern warfare and how it ties in with Christian “just war” principles. That’s a whole other subject. I don’t think, however, that any Christian that has the heart of Jesus could feel anything but profound horror at the images coming out of Gaza of children being killed or parents weeping for the death of their child during the fighting in Gaza. Modern warfare is, by definition, horrible and, because of the nature of the weapons used in modern warfare, civilians almost always bear the brunt of any war. The issue that I want to talk about is whether Israel conducted this modern war, which by definition is brutal, in a way that constituted a war crime.
(A) The October 7th attack (2023)
We need to understand some things about The Gaza War. First of all, the Gaza War was a response by Israel to a horrific attack by the Palestinians from Gaza, in which over 1300 Israeli citizens were murdered, and where a multitude of Israeli women were filmed by Hamas soldiers being raped and murdered. Over 250 Israelis were taken hostage and placed in underground tunnels where they were tortured, beaten, raped, and starved - some for several years. The response by the Israelis and the war that then ensued, resulting in the death of so many civilians in Gaza can, in significant measure, be laid at the feet of Hamas.
(B) The Principle of Distinction
According to the law of armed conflict, also called the international humanitarian law under the Hague Resolution of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, armies have to take steps to distinguish between combatants and civilians. The way that this distinction is made is that combatants are required to wear uniforms or fixed distinctive emblems which distinguish soldiers from civilians. But Hamas does not wear uniforms except for publicly televised events. Hamas embeds its soldiers and its weapons beneath civilian homes, in mosques, in hospitals, in schools, in a cynical effort to prevent Israel from properly distinguishing between civilians and combatants. Hamas wants Palestinians to die because without international condemnation of Israel for mounting civilian casualties, Hamas cannot survive.
And this is not just speculation. Hamas's leader, Yahya Sinwar, in his own private correspondence which was analyzed and verified by the Wall Street Journal, made clear that increasing the number of civilian deaths was an essential strategy for Hamas finally being able to overthrow the Israeli government. Unlike Israel, whose soldiers go to war while Israeli civilians hide in bomb shelters, Hamas did not allow Palestinian civilians into the 500 kilometers of bomb shelters it built under Gaza. Hamas's spokesman said that Arab Palestinians are a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice our martyrs. So, Hamas sends its fighters into bomb shelters, but leaves its civilians on the front lines.
(C ) Israeli warnings to Gazans
In conducting the war, Israel sent out literally tens of millions of warnings to cell phones. and rained leaflets down on Palestinian cities often days and sometimes weeks ahead of a military strike in order to have civilians leave particular areas. Over two years of war, the IDF sent tens of millions of text messages, phone calls, emails, and social media posts, advising Palestinians of impending offensive operations near their homes, urging evacuations.
According to U.S. government officials and UK government officials, Israelis' conduct of the war in Gaza followed much higher standards than the U.S. and UK followed in Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, Major John Spencer, who is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and probably America's preeminent scholar on urban warfare, has written that Israel's commitment to saving innocent civilians in Gaza created a new standard for urban warfare. Here's what he wrote: “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history, above and beyond what international law requires, and more than the United States did in its war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Clearly, there have been allegations of war crimes by Israel that deserve to be investigated in the same way that America committed war crimes in every one of our wars. But that doesn't mean that Israel's conduct in Gaza as a whole was a war crime, or that Israel is somehow guilty of genocide. Israel has investigated unlawful conduct and needs to do more to punish perpetrators of individual criminal acts. Honest investigations and appropriate prosecution is unfortunately extremely unlikely under the present Netanyahu government.
VIII. The fifth principle: I believe that Christians, and indeed all people of goodwill, can legitimately disagree with the government of Israel. Israel unfortunately has individuals in their government, like Bezalel Smotrich the Finance Minister and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, who have made racist anti-Palestinian remarks. Those politicians have no business being in any Democratic government and ought to be removed. There have also been Israeli settler gang attacks on Palestinians on the West Bank. A different government from Netanyahu's government would have arrested the gangs - people perpetrating crimes against Palestinians on the West Bank, people responsible for destroying property and attacking Palestinians- and thrown the perpetrators into prison.
So what I am saying is that (A) I don't believe someone has to support every act of the Netanyahu government or be labeled antisemitic. Many Israelis themselves oppose Netanyahu. But every government on Earth is profoundly fallible. The distinction I would make is that (B) the world’s antisemitism and hatred of Jews in particular, is seen in the constant condemnation of Israeli actions compared to the rest of the world combined. Here's a shocking statistic: from 2015 to 2024, the UN passed 173 resolutions condemning Israel. During that same time, the UN passed 80 resolutions condemning the entire rest of the world. This means that 68% of all country-specific resolutions were passed against Israel. And yet, Israel has only 0.12% of the world's population. I don't think there is another way to explain the absurdly disproportionate condemnation of such a tiny nation, except radical antisemitism.
TIMELINE:
Date | Event
1446 BC | The Exodus from Egypt
1400/1200-1050 BC | Period of Judges
1050-586 BC | Period of the Kings
722 BC | Assyria conquers the Northern Kingdom
586 BC | Babylonian Exile begins
539 BC | Persia conquers Babylon
538 BC | Cyrus allows Jews to return to Jerusalem
516 BC | Second Temple completed
539-332 BC | Persian period
332 BC | Greek Period begins
167-160 BC | Maccabean Revolt
142-63 BC | Maccabean Jewish state
63 BC | Roman period begins
37-4BC | Herod the Great reigns
AD 66-73 | First Jewish revolt against Rome
AD 70 | Second Temple/Jerusalem destroyed
AD 73-74 | Fall of Massada
AD 132-135 | Second Jewish revolt
AD 135 | Hadrian expels many Jews from Jerusalem and renames Judea “Palestine”
AD 324-638 | Byzantine (Eastern Roman) period
AD 638 | Muslim Arab conquest of Jerusalem
AD 691 | The Dome of the Rock completed
AD 1099-1291 | European Crusaders set up Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, expelling Jews and Muslims
AD 1260-1516 | Crusaders pushed out, ruled by the Malmuk Sultanate from Egypt
AD 1517 | Ottoman Empire begins
AD 1917 | British forces, Balfour Declaration
AD 1947 | UN Partition plan
AD 1948 | Modern state of Israel established
AD 1948-49 | War of Independence - Israel gains territory
AD 1967 | 6-Day War, Israel captures the Gaza strip, West Bank, Sinai peninsula, and Golan Heights
AD 1973 | Yom Kippur War
AD 1979 | Camp David Accords
AD 1993 | The Oslo Accord
October 7, 2023 | Hamas attack