One should only wade into the mine-infested waters of political Zionism with the greatest trepidation, for fear of being instantly tarred as ‘anti-semitic.’ Still, I feel compelled to take note of a savagely brutal war being waged by Israeli Semites on their fellow Semites whether of Christian or Muslim persuasion, namely the Palestinian people. The issue involves much more than a simplistic appraisal of whoever is claiming to be wearing white hats v. black hats if we are to arrive at even a modicum of actual truth.

In the first place a bit of context to a very complicated historical situation is needed. That involves drawing a distinction between the Jewish religion and the Nation of Israel. The confusion lies in the fact that in the Old Testament a theocratic state existed combining the two and which lasted shortly beyond the time of Christ. The Jewish religion was liturgical, revolving around the Aaronic priesthood and Temple sacrifice. But with Jesus, a new high priesthood in the person of Christ himself fulfilled the “promise” and the former rites of sacrifice were enfolded into the new rite which Christ instituted at the Last Supper and consummated on the cross. Thus the old religious liturgy was renewed and restored in the form of the Catholic Mass, Christ himself being the New Temple not made by human hands. He founded a new priesthood based not on a bloodline but on the twelve men chosen by Christ, as eternal high priest, to be his apostles and heirs, all of them Jewish.

But the leaders of the ‘Nation’ of Israel whose responsibility had been to welcome the Messiah when he arrived did the opposite. They rejected Christ because His stated messianic objective was not to elevate the nation to geopolitical supremacy as they had anticipated. They were more interested in being liberated from the Romans than being liberated from the ancient curse of sin. So the tree which should have had one strong trunk branched out into two competing trunks, both coming from the same shoot. But only one thrived even as the other withered. The Jewish ‘nation’ followed its own path, even persecuting Jewish followers of Christ, until the year 70 AD when, in a suicidal rebellion against Rome, it was utterly destroyed. The Temple was smashed and the survivors scattered to the winds. Even today one can read the Jewish historian Josephus’ tragic account of Jerusalem’s destruction in his History of the Jews, it is a truly heart rending account.

The Nation of Israel no longer existed but the Jewish will to survive continued in the dispersion or ‘diaspora’ as it became known. Absent a temple and priests to perform sacrifices the religion went dormant, but even dispersed around the world there was still something that Judaism clung to as its life force, the Torah, those first five books of the Bible encapsulating the Law given by God to Moses. Thus began the long era of Jewish scholarship which became known as Rabbinic or Talmudic Judaism. The Talmud began as an oral tradition of rules, interpretations, and commentaries on the Torah by esteemed rabbis which was eventually written down. For 18 centuries the law, both Mosaic and Talmudic, governed the lives of the Jewish people even to the most minute points of behavior. But as St. Paul so wisely pointed out the law can only condemn, it cannot save nor forgive sin.

It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the idea of Judaism, not merely as a unique people of the synagogue but as a reconstituted nation, began to reenter the Jewish mind. A new kind of political messianism was rekindled as a sort of means to force God’s hand into sending the long awaited Messiah. Ironically this was the same moment that an agnostic Enlightenment was busy corrupting the very idea of religious faith, both among Christians and Jews. Reformed Judaism as well as a considerable wave of atheistic Jews were by then abandoning the strict orthodox interpretations of the rabbis. So just as Judaism became more secular it also began to flirt with the Zionist ideal. Rebuild a new Nation of Israel on the very land that Jews had been driven out of by the Romans almost 2,000 years earlier. Was it to be a secular or a theocratic state? By now a consensus had become virtually impossible to form. Many orthodox rabbis doubted whether such a rash venture was even in the plan of God.

The bigger problem was that the ancient homeland of Palestine had been occupied for millennia by Palestinian people, many of them actual descendants of those Jews who had adopted Christianity in the first century AD. There were also Muslims of Semitic stock who had built the third holiest shrine in the Islamic world called the Dome of the Rock immediately on the site where the old Jewish Temple had once stood. Jerusalem was the holy city of the Christian world as well, where Christ had died and risen from the dead and the Church had its very beginnings. This was no longer the promised land of Moses but the home of nearly a million Muslims and Christians whose roots went at least as far back as any Jewish claimants. It was also part of a larger nation, the Ottoman Empire, and none of it was for sale.

Regardless, Zionists were determined to forge a new Jewish nation in Palestine. They got their opportunity during World War I when Great Britain seized Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. Under pressure from European Zionists the Brits issued the famous Balfour Declaration which proposed implementing a Jewish homeland in and among the Arab peoples of the Holy Land. “There is a British proverb about the camel and the tent,” said Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann shortly after the November, 1917 Declaration. “At first the camel sticks one leg in the tent, and eventually it slips into it. This must be our policy.” And so it was. Weizmann would later serve as first president of the new State of Israel. By this action Britain lit a long burning fuse to a veritable powder keg. Even many traditional Jews were horrified at the audacity of the Zionists, and not without good reason. For as the number of Jewish refugees and settlers grew in Palestine tensions with their Arab neighbors multiplied. The more the British tried to control the situation the harder it became to contain.

With the conclusion of World War II and compounded by Hitler’s monstrous ‘final solution’ which provided a moral pretext for increased Zionist demands, an exhausted Britain began to waver in its Palestinian policies. Deadly terror tactics by the infamous Stern Gang demoralized British resolve and helped open the floodgates of Jewish immigration into Palestine. The horrific bombing of the British administrative headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on 22 July 1946 by Jewish Irgun terrorists left 91 people dead. Long story short, in 1948 the Jewish state of Israel came into being with Great Britain’s withdrawal and Israel’s hasty recognition by President Harry Truman (33rd degree Freemason), absent any input from the U.S. Senate. It took little time for the new Israeli state to launch a war against the original Christian and Muslim residents and seize vast tracts of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements. The original hosts were effectively turned out of their own homes by the guests who had been forced on them during the British Mandate.

Nor was there any Divine mandate which could justify any such land grab, notwithstanding the usual Protestant literalist Biblical interpretations. “The idea that the Holy Land is somehow a Jewish birthright is an erroneous assumption. “With regards to the Zionist notion that Jews today are entitled to the land of Palestine, (Dr. Matthew) Tsakanikas explained this is not the case since the promises of the land have already been fulfilled (Josh 21:43-45, 1Kgs 8:56, Neh 9:7-8) as a means of bringing about the salvation of the world through the Messiah, Jesus Christ.” The Zionists claim is based on a literalist and materialistic interpretation of the Old Testament scriptures. “Tsakanikas explains how even the Jewish Talmud expected the Messiah to arrive “at the time of Jesus of Nazareth” and yet they misunderstood him, for his kingdom is spiritual and not of this world (John 18:36).”” (See Life Site News Sept. 12, 2024, Christendom College theology professor explains…)

Christians and Muslims had coexisted peacefully in the Holy Land for seven centuries before the new Israeli state fomented new tensions. The Six Day War of 1967 further expanded Israeli occupation into the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza, ostensibly to insure ‘security,’ but expansion was never far from the mind of the new Zionist state. Jewish settlers soon began infiltrating into the West Bank, displacing and subjugating resident Palestinians either by legal or illegal means. The original residents now discovered that they had become second class citizens in their own homeland. In fact the former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, candidly admitted as much in a recent interview, “There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is apartheid.” Even a former Israeli Prime Minister and mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, recently commented on the injustice of the situation. In a July 12, 2024 opinion piece he says, “Here crimes are committed on a daily basis, not by soldiers and not against soldiers, but by rioters who are Israeli citizens, Arab haters, with the clear intention of expelling them from their homes and the villages where they have lived all their lives.”

While never defending violent or illegal tactics by either side, it must be understood that organizations like the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah were formed reactively to counter decades of sustained Israeli aggression which, incidentally, is rarely reported in Western media outlets. Keeping that in mind, realize also that we must not equate the Jewish faith with a secular Zionist state which sees itself as a sort of political messiah. Many faithful and religious Jews actually deplore aggressive state tactics while others, under the spell of a false messianism, applaud it. Therefore Israeli society, much like our own, has become highly polarized over state policies. Unsurprisingly, considering their rejection of the kingship of Christ, the very thing that the Jewish (or Muslim) consciousness lacks is the Christian concept of forgiving one’s enemies. So one bad turn always justifies further reprisals, which brings us to the current war in Gaza which began last October 7.

The West, thanks in large part to a lopsided media culture, has very little idea of the scale or scope of atrocities currently being inflicted on Palestinians of every faith or creed. Worse, the perpetrator of these deadly attacks has been largely supplied and funded, alas, by the American taxpayer. Over the past year some 50,000 Palestinian residents of Gaza have been killed by Israeli Defense Forces (the IDF). Upwards of 60% of those casualties, over 30,000, have been children or women. Just this past week in Lebanon 700 died, mostly civilians, in the wake of IDF missile strikes launched to assassinate Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Whole apartment blocks were targeted in this ‘precision attack’ with little or no concern for the families living in them. As in Gaza, there seems to be no moral calculus of proportionality between achieving some military objective and the indiscriminate, lethal ‘collateral damage’ which such an action may inflict on hapless civilians and bystanders.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter, president of the World Surgical Foundation, is an eyewitness to the senseless attacks on hospitals and medical personnel in Gaza. In a July 21 CBS News interview Dr. Perlmutter revealed the routine execution of children and medical staff in Gaza by the IDF. A veteran medical volunteer during 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Haitian earthquake, Perlmutter reported, “all those (events) combined do not equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza. I have seen more incinerated children than I have ever seen in my life, combined… missing body parts, crushed by buildings or bomb explosions.” The doctor repeatedly stressed that children were routinely shot dead by IDF snipers. In March of 2024 when he arrived in Gaza he discovered “evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A 3 year old shot in the head, a 12 year old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen.” His fellow team surgeon, Feroze Sidwha, noted, “What we found in Gaza is a society that has been entirely destroyed. Everyone we encountered from newborns to the elderly is malnourished.”

Both doctors testified to attacks on healthcare infrastructure and healthcare workers… torture, abduction, and torment of doctors, nurses, and medical students. Working in the European Hospital ER in Gaza (which facility would be entirely shut down by July) Dr. Perlmutter said that “80% of those I took to the operating room were children, most of them toddlers… the remaining 20% of victims were healthcare workers, mothers, and the elderly. Not once did we see anyone who could be remotely described as a combatant. Instead we took bullets out of kids.” (Life Site News, Sept. 25, 2024, Volunteer Surgeons in Gaza…)

The World Health Organization reported that by April 5, 2024 over 450 attacks had occurred on healthcare facilities in Gaza. Despite heavily sanitized news reporting we learned just weeks ago about similar indiscriminate attacks in Lebanon, via tampered pagers and cell phones armed with plastic explosives. 39 people died and hundreds were injured in that vile operation, many of them children and innocent bystanders. This scatter-gun approach to carrying out assassinations is absolutely loathsome, yet few in the higher levels of government seem to be questioning the morality of such tactics which randomly kill, main, and terrorize civilian populations. When governments themselves implement such terror operations they are no better than the groups they condemn as terrorist organizations. Since 1948 tiny Israel has employed assassination as a standard policy tool, eliminating over 2,200 human targets, a number which considering Israel’s size completely dwarfs similar operations by Russia, MI6, or the CIA.

In principle every nation has a right to defend itself, but any response needs to be proportionate to the scale and level of the threat. Israel’s response to October 7 has been anything but proportionate. The brutal campaign in Gaza, as horrifying as the October 7 may have been, is both vengeful, vastly disproportionate, and seemingly directed against an entire population, both Christian and Muslim (there is not a single Christian facility thus far that has not been targeted by the IDF). The callous disregard for civilian lives and property by the Netanyahu government has now spread into Lebanon as well.

Just last Friday the Israeli Prime Minister stood before the UN General Assembly claiming that “Israel seeks peace; Israel yearns for peace.” Yet days before this Israel had assassinated the official Hezbollah peace negotiator. Such actions make one suspect that Mr. Netanyahu is not negotiating in good faith. Gaza this past year has not so much resembled a war zone as a slaughterhouse: the IDF shooting at gnats with oversize canons while deliberately destroying countless people’s lives in a genocidal frenzy. If he truly desired peace, Netanyahu would be at the negotiating table or preventing illegal Zionist settlers from stealing homes and property from West Bank Palestinians. Instead his government blocks humanitarian food and medical supplies from reaching the starving population in Gaza.

In a letter urging President Joe Biden to stop U.S. support for the war, Dr. Adam Hamawy, a former combat surgeon in Iraq wrote: “I have never in my career witnessed the level of atrocities and targeting of my medical colleagues as I have in Gaza… The children of Palestine are not safe. Civilians, population centers, are not safe. We, as humanitarian workers, are not safe. You have the power to end the invasion of Rafah and Gaza now.”

It is not just medical workers but journalists who are apparently being targeted as well. In July of 2024, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) reported that 116 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7 last year, making the 26 days following the outbreak of the war “the deadliest period for journalists” since its records began. What we are today witnessing (but seldom being told about) in Gaza is the tragic fruit of that “eye for an eye” mentality which prevails in the Middle East, yet whose bitter fruit will reverberate for generations (the current IDF calculus is more like 50 eyes for every Jewish eye). Vengeance rightfully belongs to God and not to men and so the cycle of endless retaliation and escalation will never bring about peace. The limited, proportional use of force is always legitimate in defending one’s nation and peoples. The unbridled use of force to punish or liquidate one’s enemies with total disregard for those who may be caught in the crossfire is a grave violation of justice.

At a deeper level what is happening in Israel today is not a security or political crisis but a spiritual deficiency stemming from the ongoing rejection of God’s New Covenant offered, through Israel in fulfillment of the Old Covenant, to all of mankind. Christ is the one mediator between God and men. He is the only way to lasting peace because He is the Prince of Peace. So long as the Jewish people (Muslims as well) refuse to recognize Him as both true Messiah and rightful King of all nations there can be no peace. The conversion of both Jews and Muslims to Christ should become a priority for every Christian. For saying as much I will doubtless be called anti-Semitic, the paradox being that all who harbor such a desire are profoundly pro-Semitic. Because to love one’s neighbor does not mean hiding the truth from them but to offer them the truth in love. The duty of every Christian therefore is to pray and fast for the conversion of all our non-Christian Semitic brothers and sisters. For in the end all the nations will belong to God.

O clap your hands, all ye nations, shout to God with joyful voices, For the Lord is Most High, a great king over all the earth… For God shall reign over the nations: God sits on his holy throne. The princes of the people are gathered together with the God of Abraham: for the rulers of the earth belong to God who is enthroned on high. (Ps. 47:1,2;9,10)

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.