“Israel, Israel, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” This haunting mantra, chanted by a large group of University of Pennsylvania students, is bewildering and heartbreaking. The students were holding a rally in support of the terrorist group Hamas after the inhumane attack on Israel October 7th. For me, and probably you too, it is difficult to comprehend how any American could cheer for and show support for a group of terrorists who broke into Israeli homes early that morning and slaughtered entire families. Some of the victims were still in bed. Many lost their lives as they simply started their daily routine of life. Those Hamas criminals decapitated sleeping babies and bound scores of toddlers together before burning them alive. Hamas terrorists committed horrendous, unimaginable, and evil deeds against people whose only crime was being Jewish.
So, what drives Hamas members to harbor such extreme levels of hatred for the Israeli people that incites them to commit unspeakable acts of barbarism and brutality? If we read the story of Abraham in Genesis chapters 14 through 21, we quickly conclude that part of the contention between the Jews and the Arabs goes back to God’s choice of Isaac over Ishmael. Isaac was the son born within God’s covenant with Abraham and Ishmael was born outside of that covenant. That was not Ishmael’s fault and God remembered Ishmael. God promised both Isaac and Ishmael they would produce a great nation of Jews and Arabs respectively, but Isaac’s lineage resulted in the birth of the Savior. Undoubtedly, Ishmael’s decedents feel rejection rather than blessing. This is very tragic because Ishmael’s descendants are choosing to live with hate in their hearts for the Jews and suffering for it. However, there is another major factor playing a significant role in the Middle East conflict. It is a factor orchestrated well by Satan. We call it deception and it is one of Satan’s most effective spiritual warfare weapons thrust upon on God’s creation since the Garden of Eden.
Step back with me a few years and consider what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Lies abounded, and deception clouded the ability for citizens to understand the truth about the Jewish population in Europe. The Jews received blame for every problem plaguing society. German leadership told lies often enough that people began to believe them resulting in the German church ignoring the suffering Jews in their own country. The Holocaust became a macabre reality and over six million Jews of all ages and societal strata experienced torture and death at the hands of German people who, normal in many ways, bought into the deception without thinking for themselves. Their real-life horror stories became possible because “good” people explained it away and hid their heads in the sand. In 1867, John Stuart Mill said it best,
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Mill went on to say,
“Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”1
We must understand that truth is under attack, just like Israel, to shift public opinion away from support for Israel to support for Hamas and the “Palestinian” issue. As I demonstrated in the first sentence of this article, even the campuses of higher education in America are foaming with anti-Israeli rhetoric by students who have no knowledge of the true history. They are merely reacting to lies rather than seeking truth. Here are several examples of current lies spread across the globe about Israel (I say current, but they have been around for hundreds of years without any basis of truth.)
Lie #1: Israel pursues genocide of the Arab people.
The Truth: Hamas, and the Palestinians who support them, want every Jew and the nation of Israel eradicated from the face of the earth while facts confirm that the Jews continually send humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. Israel has never initiated a confrontation with the Palestinians or any Arab nation. Every conflict ever fought in the Middle East began with Arab and Palestinian provocation. If the Israelis laid down their arms and pledged not to fight, they would face immediate annihilation. If the Palestinians and the Arab nations would lay down their arms and pledge not to fight, there would be immediate peace.
Lie #2: The Jews occupy Palestinian lands.
The Truth: God gave Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey, to the Jewish people more than three thousand years ago. The people groups living in Canaan prior to the Jews conquering them were not ancestors to the Palestinians. In fact, some people living there were descendants of Esau, Jacob’s twin brother. The Jews are the rightful owners of every inch of land given to them by God. The only sovereign state that ever existed within those borders is the Jewish sovereign state. Jewish artifacts found in Israeli land date back as far as the 6th century BC. The House of King David ruled the Jewish Commonwealth for more than four hundred years. The Jews established their second Commonwealth on their land after returning from Babylonian captivity through King Cyrus’ decree in 539 BC. It was not until 70 AD, when the Romans overran and destroyed Israel, that the Jews lost control of their land until 1948. To sever ties between the land and the Jews as a particular type of punishment, the Romans renamed the Jewish country Palestina, which incited today’s misconceptions of the terms Palestine and Palestinians.
Lie #3: Israel will not allow the Palestinians to have a homeland.
The Truth: The Israelis offered the Palestinians a two-state solution giving the Palestinians a homeland within the boundaries of Israel’s land five times and the Palestinians replied “No” to all five of those offers.
Offer One. After World War 1 Britain incorporated the Middle East territories into the British Empire. In 1936, after an Arab uprising, the British offered a compromise to the Arabs giving them 80% of the land in question and giving the Jews the remaining 20%. The Arabs said no.
Offer Two. In 1947, the British asked the U.N. to create a two-state solution and the Arabs flatly turned down the proposal. On May 15, 1948, the U.N. ceded the land to the Jews and the Nation of Israel was born. On May 16, 1948, all the surrounding Arab nations banded together and attacked Israel. By the grace of God, the 1-day old nation survived. In the process, Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however, we must note that Israel did not push back on those two acts of occupation.
Offer Three. In 1967, the Arab nations attended a summit in Khartoum, Sudan and created a document called the “Three No’s”. These “no’s” included:
- No Recognition
- No Peace
- No Negotiations
After that agreement, the Arab nations once again attacked Israel. This time, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pulverized them. Israel retook the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza strip as buffer zones for defensive purposes. Later, Israel offered these areas to the Arabs if they would recognize Israel’s right to exist and agree to peace. Adhering to their Khartoum agreement, the Arabs said no. In 1978, Israel unilaterally offered the Sinai Peninsula (including all the Sinai oil reserves) back to Egypt for the promise of peace. Egypt agreed to peace so Israel turnaround and offered the other occupied areas to the Palestinians if they also recognized Israel’s right to exist. Not only did they say no, but the Palestinians sent suicide bombers into highly populated areas of Israel and killed as many people as they could.
Offer Four. In 2000, Israel once more offered a two-state solution to the Palestinian leadership and again the response was no.
Offer Five. In 2008, Israel sweetened the year 2000 offer with additional land and for the fifth time the Palestinians said no.
Lie #4: The Israeli military has no regard for life and kills innocent Palestinian people including women and children at will.
The Truth: First, recognize that Israel has never started a war. They finished several wars and fervently protected themselves, but they are not bloodthirsty people. The IDF typically takes actions that exemplify a people who value and safeguard life. For example:
- As a warning, the IDF typically sends text messages to the phones of civilians who may be within or near areas, such as the Gaza strip, they plan to attack or bomb.
- The IDF drops warning leaflets and allows civilians to leave an area before a military ground invention starts.
- The Israeli military even communicates via cell phone calls to people who may be injured or killed advising them to leave the area before any IDF actions commence.
- In past military confrontations with the Palestinians, the IDF actually aborted actions that would benefit Israel strategically because the threat of civilian injury or death was too high.
I wonder how many Israeli citizens received a warning phone call from Hamas on the morning of October 7.
Middle East topography contains 22 Arab nations and 1 Jewish nation. The Jewish nation is about the size of New Jersey and is smaller than El Salvador. In all of history, Israel’s small piece of real estate has never been an Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian state. I doubt very much if the protesters on the University of Pennsylvania campus or any other place in the world where pro-Hamas/ Palestinian protesters chant words like “Gas the Jews” (Sidney, Australia) know any of this history or even care to know the truth. They bought the lies, and they support a people group whose motto reads, “We love death as much as the Jews love life.”
Truth is a victim along with the innocent Israeli and Palestinian men, women, and children who only want to live in peace. Pray for exposure of the lies and for truth to prevail. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6). Pray for the Jewish families who are suffering. Pray for the Palestinian families who are also suffering. God loves them all and His heart breaks over the loss of any life and over the rejection of His Son who is Truth and can bring peace. Be a bold truth communicator. The world around you every day needs to hear the truth. Do not let evil triumph.
1 https://www.openculture.com/2016/03/edmund-burkeon-in-action.html
We need to continue to pray for Israel, our nation, and especially our youth.
Britain, the UN, and the Two-State Failure
The Ottoman Empire – whose official religion was Islam – ruled the region from the 1500s up until World War I. The League of Nations placed the region of Palestine and several other Ottoman territories under British control in 1922. All but Palestine became fully independent states.
The British Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people inside Palestine. From 1922 to 1947, Jews from around the world – though mostly from Eastern Europe – migrated to the region, many of whom were fleeing Nazi persecution.
In 1948, an attempt at partitioning the land into two independent states failed, resulting in the establishment of Israel as a nation the West Bank and Gaza falling under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, respectively. The UN’s partition plan, called US Resolution 181, came as the UK prepared to withdraw from the region. It would have divided Palestine into an Arab nation and a Jewish nation, with the Palestinians gaining more land than the Israelis. It would have made Jerusalem a special international city, open to both peoples.
Israel agreed to the plan, but Palestinian leadership rejected it, launching a war against Israel instead. At By the end of the Arab-Israeli War, Israel had occupied more land than originally granted by the plan. This cycle of Israel agreeing to a plan that favors Palestine, only for Palestinian leaders to reject it, launch a war, and end up losing more land in the process continued through multiple more attempts, all the way through the failed two-state solution President Bill Clinton hoped to achieve in 1993.
The war with Hamas today – sparked by the October 7 terror attack in Israel – is little different. The Jews and Muslims of Palestine and Israel are unable to live in peace, largely because the Palestinian authority seeks not peaceful coexistence, but the utter destruction of Israel. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free – but if a Muslim Palestine ruled by a terrorist group like Hamas extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, where does that leave the Jewish people?
Great article Mr Wills.