‘Secular’ Grounds for Supporting Israel
July 7, 2012 15 Comments
From John Hagee to John Piper, Christians are weighing in on whether the promises of God in Genesis warrant special support for the state of Israel. While this is a fascinating discussion with powerful implications, one need not settle this issue before deciding to stand with Israel against its foes. For there is a “secular” argument for supporting this nation, a case grounded in Western Civilization and the broad biblical notions upon which it rests.
Israel’s safety is not a narrowly Christian or Jewish concern, any more than Western support of Japan over China in the Cold War was a narrowly Buddhist or Shinto concern. The overriding issue is preservation of democratic ideals, including religious liberty and the right to free expression, in an ideologically hostile region.
Space here permits only the leanest outline of this argument, which appears in the Kairos Journal booklet, Israel and Legitimacy: Modern Achievement vs Islamic Prejudice:
1. Islam predominates overwhelmingly in the region (including the West Bank). Her scripture denigrates Jews racially1 and prescribes their subjugation. This attitude is reflected, for example, in the constitutive documents of Hezbollah and Hamas2 and would seem to make conflict intractable.
2. Israel is the only genuine “parliamentary democracy” in the region,3 with its leaders accountable to the people through the many parties that represent them, and the military strictly accountable to these elected leaders.
3. As Franklin Roosevelt observed a century and a half after America’s founding, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy is education.”4 Because Israel is the educational leader in the region, she offers the best promise for enduring fraternity with the democratic nations of the earth.5
4. The Israeli populace, outnumbered 14 to 1 by its immediate neighbors, sustains the region’s only journalistic powerhouse. Here alone does the expression “free press” ring true. There are more than 40 print newspapers in Israel, with more than 20 of them appearing daily—and contentiously so.6
5. Israelis have distinguished themselves as stewards of the land. As John Kennedy put it, “I first saw Palestine in 1939. There the neglect and ruin left by centuries of Ottoman misrule were slowly being transformed by miracles of labor and sacrifice. But Palestine was still a land of promise in 1939, rather than a land of fulfillment. I returned in 1951 to see the grandeur of Israel.”7
6. Israel “has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other country,” and the fruit of their research and technology is a blessing to nations of every ethnicity and conviction.8
7. Israel relies upon the knowledge, resourcefulness, and initiative of its women to keep it strong and fruitful—in the marketplace, journalism, the military, the corporate boardroom, the university, and the halls of government—and educates them equally and fully to that end. This is unique in the region.9
8. Though its record is not spotless, the Israeli Defense Forces train their soldiers in the “Purity of Arms,” characteristic of the Western just war tradition: “The soldier shall not employ his weaponry and power in order to harm non-combatants or prisoners of war, and shall do all he can to avoid harming their lives, bodies, honor and property.”10 Terrorism is condemned and not condoned, celebrated, or even rewarded, as it is in the neighborhood.11
9. As England’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has put it, “Today there are 82 Christian nations and 56 Muslim ones, but only one Jewish one: in a country . . . one quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Arab world.”12 With the annihilation of one-third the Jews on earth in WWII, it is important that the Diaspora Jewish people have a place to stand, and a place to flee from persecution around the world. In this connection, over 200,000 Russians13 and around 100,000 Ethiopians14 have emigrated to Israel in recent decades, the latter through special operations named Moses, Sheba, Joseph, and Solomon.
10. Declarations of the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” to Israel mask deeper realities — that, before the 1948 conflict, many “West Bank” Arabs (Muslim and Christian alike) opposed Jewish settlement on duly-purchased land (almost 800 square miles);15 that many of those who left did so voluntarily, trusting they could return once Israel was destroyed by the Muslim nations which invaded the day after her founding;16 that of the surrounding Arab nations, only Jordan has granted their brother Arabs a path to citizenship;17 that Jewish refugees from Arab lands have forfeited tens of billions of dollars worth of property, without receiving apologies or compensation;18 that repatriation of the Palestinians and their families would mean demographic suicide for Israel,19 whose Jews would then face the same difficulties they do in other Muslim-majority nations where they might abide.
From the beginning, Israel has lived under dire circumstances, and today is no different. So it is vital to recognize that there is a cultural and political kinship with the Israelis that calls us to stand against those who would cripple or destroy her. This does not mean endorsing all she does; it does mean rejecting the specious claims of moral equivalency employed to compromise or neutralize her sovereignty.
Footnotes:
1 For example, Qur’an 5:60. 2 For instance, the Hamas Covenant blames WWI and WWII on the Jews, and credits them with founding such nefarious “secret societies” as Rotary and Lions (Article 22); it also rejects all “peaceful initiatives and conferences” concerning the status of the Palestinians, who have unquestioned right to all the land in question (Articles 11 and 13). 3 For instance, the CIA World Factbook designates Jordan, to the east, a “constitutional monarchy” and Syria, to the northeast, a “republic under an authoritarian regime.” Though Egypt is designated a “republic,” it seems, in the wake of the “Arab Spring,” that the army has the upper hand when it pleases. 4 Franklin Roosevelt, “Message for American Education Week,” The American Presidency Project Website, September 27, 1938, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15545#axzz1yvUvQJvd (accessed June 26, 2012). 5 In unfortunate contrast, as a writer for the Economist has observed, “The Middle East has a bad reputation when it comes to books; nowhere else do so few people read them.” See “Revolution between Hard Covers,” The Economist Website, January 28, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21543588 (accessed May 16, 2012). 6 Half again as many as one finds in metropolitan Chicago, whose population is roughly the same as Israel’s. 7 “Speech by Senator John F. Kennedy, Zionists of America Convention, Statler Hilton Hotel, New York, NY,” August 26, 1960, The American Presidency Project Website,http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=74217#axzz1jLMDZqNh (accessed May 4, 2012). 8 For instance, the Weizmann Institute of Science conducts cutting-edge medical research on the causes of Batten disease, “a rare but fatal neurodegenerative disorder that begins in childhood.” 9 Muslim women, whose literacy rate is well below that of their husbands (e.g., in Egypt, 59% versus 83%), are better known in literature for their writings of protest and lament (e.g., Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Cruel and Usual Punishment by Nonie Darwish; A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan; The Trouble with Islam Today by Irshad Manji). And these Muslim women have been joined in their cause by such European writers as Italy’s Oriana Fallaci (The Rage and the Pride) and Norway’s Asne Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul). 10 From orientation packet for the Machtzavim-IDF Educational Leadership School in Jerusalem. See also “The Spirit of the IDF: The Ethical Code of the Israel Defense Forces,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/IDF_ethics.html (accessed May 4, 2012). 11 Christopher Schult, Britta Sandberg, and Ansgar Mertin, “Life Insurance for Palestinian Suicide Bombers: Arab Bank Pays Out Blood Money,” Spiegel Website, February 9, 2007, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,465438,00.html (accessed May 4, 2012). 12 Jonathan Sacks, “Israel Rightfully Belongs to the Jews,” in Israel: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Myra Immell (Detroit: Greenhaven, 2011) 53-54. 13 Ofira Seliktar, “The Changing Political Economy of Israel: From Agricultural Pioneers to the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the Middle East,” in Israel’s First Fifty Years, ed. Robert O Freedman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 211. 14 Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami, The Palestine-Israeli Conflict, rev. ed. (Oxford: One World, 2003), 73. 15 [A]fter 1908 . . . a consistent activity against Jewish settlement started . . . which was undertaken mainly by two Arab newspapers: al-Filastin and al-Karmil. They were both owned by Palestinian Christians . See Anthony O’Mahony, “Palestinian Christians: Religion, Politics and Society, c. 1800-1948,” in Palestinian Christians: Religion, Politics and Society in the Holy Land, ed. Anthony O’Mahony (London: Melisende, 1999), 46. 16 Syria’s prime minister Khaled al-Azm, reflected on the situation: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.” See James Ciment, Palestine/Israel: The Long Conflict (New York: Facts on File, 1997), 35. 17 Ciment, 38-39. 18 Richard L. Cravatts, “There Is No Right of Return,” in Israel: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Myra Immell (Detroit: Greenhaven, 2011), 83. 19 Rashid Khalidi, “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation: Elements of a Solution to the Palestinian Refugee Issue,” in The Palestinian Exodus: 1948-1998 (Reading: Ithaca, 1999), 229.
About Fr Stephen Smuts
Indeed Christianity simply must support Modern Israel, if only for the fact that Jesus was historically a Jew! (Rom. 9: 4-5 ; 11: 28-29 ; 15:8, etc.) But of course biblically there is also the Salvation History of God, and the Covenant/covenants of God. I am myself not ashamed to admit, I am a “Biblical” Zionist! (And btw, this position includes both the Historic Pre-Mill, and the older Post-Mill).
Why is it that hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews abominate the modern Zionist state? Whilst I firmly belive that there should be a Jewish homeland in the middle east, protected from anti-semites like the iranians..it can’t be a fulfillment of prophecy as it is a secular Republic aproving ungodly actions like homosexuality, contraception and abortion.
If the Palestinians were black, there would have been a settlement 20 years ago.
Historically one should know that Modern Israel was moved and founded by the well-known somewhat liberal Zionist Theodore Herzl. Indeed most Orthodox Jews don’t like the govermental Israeli establishment, but I am sure that they like the freedom and democracy it gives to the Israeli Jewish people, themselves.
And btw, even the Queen voted for contraception and abortion!
Modern Israel is indeed a “prophetic” mystery, in their land in unbelief, noting Rom. 11: 28-29! But the great rise of interest in and around modern Israel, and certainly with the hatred of the Jews there by Muslims and Islam, will indeed play a major role in the Gentile Nations, and the Eschatological End! (Lk. 21: 24-27, with Zech. 14: 4, etc.)
*And we must note the great movement of the Messianic Jews in Israel today!
the Messianic Jews are treated as the lowest of the low in modern Israel,and are even the subject of physical abuse.Plus some of teh Messianicsare reviving old heresies about the Mosaic Law.
Yes, I lived and taught in Israel in the late 90′s, so I know something about Israels great religious nature, which actually has some diversity. Funny, just like the early Christians, the Messianic Jews are growing in Israel, even with being the lowly “scum”! Humm, what a place for the Jewish Christian again, in the land of Israel!
Heresy and the Law of God? WE Gentiles still stumble here…the proper Law & Gospel (Grace), is always a fine line! Btw, Roman Catholicism has often been Judaistic here, itself!
Wrong, sir. We do not require circumcision or abstention from pork. Your accusation of Judaizing is libelous Protestant drivel. And hilariously ironic, considering how obsessed Evangelical Protestants in America are obsessed with Judaism to compensate their bastardized, non-historic, non-apostolic version of Christianity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVkoQHCXSK8
Protestantism should be destroyed and their books burned.
Protestantism necessarily leads to atheism. At its core, Protestantism is the exaltation of the individual, that a common individual is the ultimate decider of truth. The movement of Protestantism to atheism is a historical trajectory that moves through a number of stages. Look at mainline Protestant denominations- practically every major denomination REVELS in a plethora of evil and sin within 80 years. Contraception, in particular. It was only a matter of time before some issue came along and separated Catholicism and Protestantism that wasn’t strictly theological but drifted into the realm of morality as well.
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, Protestantism is a system of belief based on nothing more than just personal opinion, with no real, final authority to turn to. Despite claims by various Protestant ministers, in fact all of them, that the Bible is the final authority, that argument falls flat and fails totally because Scripture still needs interpreting. And this is where Protestantism simply devolves into internal conflict. When there is no final authority, and Protestantism does not have one, then each man becomes his own final authority. In an effort to get away from the Successor of Peter, Martin Luther set in motion events that would result in millions of popes. Not to mention thousands of varieties of Christianity.
What happens when a man becomes his own moral determining agent is that he eventually starts to do what he WANTS to do, not what he is REQUIRED to do, blinded by the effects of Original Sin, called concupiscence, he starts to thrash about with no real guide in a sea of self-desire. And all that sin looks appealing as the fruit did to Eve. And then comes the distortion of the intellect: Rationalization.
Rationalization can be understood in a certain sense as the effort to legitimize sin through a distortion of the intellect. And this is exactly why an outside objective voice of authority is needed to say “This is Good’ or “This is Bad”- without such a voice of authority, human beings get derailed. In morality which is called is sin. If it is mortal sin, without repentance, people who commit sin become damned. Sin darkens the intellect, it crowds out the light of God, who is Truth, and in absence of Truth, man becomes like a beast, seeking nothing but what he desires, that is, his self-interest.
Such is atheism, there is no moral compunction at all. it doesn’t mean an atheist can’t perform an act of human kindness, it’s just that he has no reason other than his own feelings and thoughts to perform such an act. He sets the moral agenda of what is right and wrong for him, just like how Protestantism does with regards to Christianity. Atheism is the natural conclusion of Protestantism, because having surrendered theological truth to the caprice of individual persons, moral truth will be surrendered as well. This is why Protestant Christians are able to support evils such as homosexual marriage, abortion, contraception, etc. because their their thinking has become that of the atheist’s.
@Ioannes: Only one word or statement can be said to you mate, get in the ball game, i.e. on the real subject!
PS…And you might want to consider going with the SSPX!
(You had said how close you were to them!)
Btw, just a historical and theological note, but Roman Catholicism basically teaches a form of Neo-evolution, with their now Theistic-evolution. Now there is a theological debate! And I tend toward an Old Earth Creation myself, but I keep an open mind with the Young Earth ideas.
Loannes; I do believe that your preconceived notions of atheism (and probably protestantism as well) are a bit wrong. Xenophobic. Self-righteous. And wrong. I am an atheist and my beliefs, that are a result of my own humanity and my place in it, is that we are bound to each other to make as many of our lives as best as we possibly can. Someone doesn’t have to agree with your particular religious views or doctrines to be a moral person. I am moral because I believe that you must live to make yourself and others happier, and better off, than yesterday.
Wrong? According what or whom, other than your own arbitrary feelings on the matter? Your feelings are just that- subjective and not independent truth, and that makes you abnormal, like homosexuals and other mentally ill individuals. Without God, there is no objective basis for any moral outrage any more than you can have for beasts that consume each other. Wolves eat rabbits, people, and whatever it wants because of its nature. Your beliefs, if they are indeed derived from evolutionary progress (Or social construct) do not at all find a solid basis for the moral obligations the rest of us hold sacred. Rape and mass murder, are NATURAL, and if human history is reliable, people have been practicing it regardless of what religion they practice. And guess what? People of no religion have caused more deaths during the last 100 years than all the ignorant human actions have caused during the few 4,000 years of written human history before anyone can be openly called “Atheist.” and before it has become a fashionable mode of thought.
Mao-Tse-Tung, Atheist: 40 million plus dead
Joseph Stalin, Atheist: 20 million plus dead
Kim-Il-Sung, Atheist: 5 million dead
Pol Pot, Atheist: 2 million dead
Fidel Castro, Atheist: 1 million dead
You may of course, respond that all these people killed for the sake of Communist ideology, as though Communism’s status as an atheistic philosophy had nothing to do with persecuting theists.
Atheism is a parasitic ideology that is devoid of its own morals and standards and so they adopt Christian morality and standards while proclaiming to have no belief in God. According to Nietzsche, such people are “Englishmen” which exposes more of their cowardice for the sake of not being offensive. Well, I tell you, Christianity is not the Church of Nice or the Religion of Peace, or the Inoffensive Fellowship; all the benefits that you enjoy are brought about by Christian men and women who have shed blood, both theirs and their enemies so that you can talk about how much you don’t need God without the fear of being hunted down and hung from cranes as what they would do in Islamic countries.
Were it up to me, I would like to hunt down all these “brave and courageous” atheists and observe how they hide like cockroaches and all other sort of vermin and suddenly be “converted” to the One True Faith- because truly, no greater victory can be had on Earth than when your enemy lives a lie and follows a faith that is not his, and either die off or see his children believe in the things he does not.
As we see, you atheists have the highest suicide rates and the lowest birth rates in Europe. So if you godless will die off? Islam will take over, and that is a thousand times more honest of an enemy who can, theoretically be dialogued with due to the common ground of belief in God. If not, then I fight them as much as I would fight the atheist.
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Without God, you reduce morality to “happiness” but then even that is subjective. Who says what makes you happy makes others happy uniformly? What is the fixed standard that makes something “Better” than another? Not even individuals, but entire societies and civilizations have different ideas of “better” and “happiness” and yet you vaguely talk about them as if there is no such thing as an absolute; (this is, of course, logically false.)
And then, happiness is reduced to being what is “Pleasurable”, which is basically hedonism. Here are the problems with morality being reduced to hedonistic terms:
(1) It rests on a false psychological analysis; tendency, appetite, end, and good are fixed in nature prior to a pleasurable feeling. Pleasure depends on the obtaining of some good which is prior to, and causative of, the pleasure resulting from getting it. The happiness or pleasure attending good conduct is a consequence, not a constituent, of the moral quality of the action.
(2) It falsely supposes that pleasure is the only motive of action. This view it supports by the fallacy that the pleasurable and the desirable are interchangeable terms, which goes back to the vagueness of your usage of the word “better”.
(3) Even if it were granted that pleasure and pain constitute the standard of right and wrong, this standard would be utterly impracticable. Pleasures are not commensurable with one another, nor with pains; besides no human mind can calculate the quantity of pleasure and pain that will result from a given action. This task is impossible even when only the pleasure of the agent is to be taken into account. When the pleasure and pain of “all concerned” are to be measured the proposal becomes nothing short of an absurdity.
(4) Egoistic Hedonism reduces all benevolence, self-sacrifice, and love of the right to mere selfishness. It is impossible for altruistic Hedonism to evade the same consummation except at the cost of consistency.
(5) No general code of morality could be established on the basis of pleasure. Pleasure is essentially subjective feeling, and only the individual is the competent judge of how much pleasure or pain a course of action affords him. What is more pleasurable for one may be less so for another. Hence, on hedonistic grounds, it is evident that there could be no permanently and universally valid dividing line between right and wrong.
(6) Hedonism has no ground for moral obligation, no sanction for duty. If I must pursue my own happiness, and if conduct which leads to happiness is good, the worst reproach that can be addressed to me, however base my conduct may be, is that I have made an imprudent choice.
And you said that through atheism, man becomes like a beast. As opposed to what? Constantly condemning one another and advocating one another’s destruction through and because of their self-aggrandized view of their own religion?? Please….