How Should Christians Think About the Modern State of Israel? By Rich Nathan (After Church Discussion)

I want to attempt today to briefly discuss the modern state of Israel and hopefully apply uh Christian principles to our understanding of the state of Israel.

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, so I'm going to make my remarks as brief as possible while trying to cover the uh salient points.

Uh each of the points that follow are worthy of book-length treatments.

Uh 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 the subject.

First of all, if you're looking for a history of Israel, uh not going back to ancient times, but a history of modern Israel and Zionism from a pro-Israel Israeli perspective, and you want to read just one book, I would recommend Israel a concise history of a nation reborn by Daniel Gordas.

And Daniel Gordas, by the way, is the grandson of my rabbi growing up uh in New York.

And uh so he's a great scholar, and this is a great book.

Second, if you're considering issues raised by contemporary critics of Israel, for example, that Jewish people have no historic claim on the strip of land that's now called Israel, that Palestinians ought to control the land, as the chance 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, that Israel controlled Gaza like an open-air prison.

If you're interested in the merits of those arguments, I would recommend the book Israel on Trial, Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law by a United States district court judge named Roy Altman.

And third, if you're 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.

So those are some book-length treatments.

Let me share with you a brief summary of where I'm going in this talk so you'll be able to follow my uh arguments.

First of all, I don't believe that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Second, I do believe, however, that the modern state of Israel is the in the geographic location of the current state ruled by the Jews is a fulfillment of biblical justice.

So I would distinguish between Israel being a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and Israel being a fulfillment of biblical justice.

Third, I believe that the Palestinians, like the Jews, are entitled to their own homeland.

But unlike many proponents of a Palestinian homeland, I don't believe that Israel has been the main impediment to a so-called two-state solution.

Fourth, I believe that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza has not been any worse than America's conduct in its recent engagements in the Middle East, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan or now in Iran.

Indeed, I believe that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza was in most respects morally superior to America's conduct of these Middle Eastern wars.

And fifth and finally, I believe that Christians, and indeed all people of goodwill, can legitimately disagree with the government of Israel regarding a huge range of issues without being considered anti-Semitic.

But the disproportionate criticism of Israel by the global community does reasonably raise a suspicion of anti-Jewish bias.

So let me go through each of these principles.

And beginning 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 and 19 these words On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said to your descendants, I give you this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, Canaanites, Cadmonites.

That's Genesis 15, 18 and 19.

So we see there's a promise of a land that stretches from the Nile River in Egypt to include all the Sinai Peninsula and parts of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria all the way to the Euphrates River in modern day Iraq.

And this promise is repeated a number of times throughout the New Testament.

You'll could, for example, read it in Exodus 23, verse 31.

Exodus 23:31

And I would just say that 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 4,000 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 to you that Israel or the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a legitimate question to ask back would be, okay, what do you think the boundaries should be of this promised land?

Should the Jewish people control all of Jordan and Syria and parts of Iraq?

What are the boundaries?

Second, it appears, according to Old Testament writers, that the promise to Abraham has been fulfilled.

And that the prophecy of this land was fulfilled 2900 years ago, during the reign of the third Israelite king named King Solomon.

Here's what we read, for example, in 2 Chronicles 9, verse 26.

2 Chronicles 9:26

He that is Solomon ruled over all the kings from the Euphrates River to the land of the Philistines as far as the border of Egypt.

Now, for New Testament believers, it's 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 to the Jewish people.

The Old Testament promise of a piece of land in this world and an earthly temple in Jerusalem just doesn't seem to be a concern for the New Testament writers, whatever.

The Old Testament promise of a restored temple, other than Jesus' restored body, is also not repeated in the New Testament.

What is mentioned by the Apostle Paul is a reworking, a reconfiguring of the promise to Abraham, not by way of a particular piece of ground in the Middle East.

Rather, here's what we read in Romans 4, verse 13.

Romans 4:13

It was not through the law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world.

I want to underline that, heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.

And notice that Romans 4, verse 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.

Romans 4:13

Rather, Abraham's descendants were to be heirs of the world.

So the promise of a particular plot plot of land is extended out to the whole world, and these divine promises find their fulfillment in the heirs of Abraham, which, according to the book of Romans, includes both Jews and Gentiles who trust in Jesus as Messiah.

So unlike a group of people who are 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, I believe there are strong arguments to the contrary from the Bible itself.

And moreover, it's clear that the promise of a return to the land was conditioned upon Israel repenting and turning back to the Lord.

And certainly for those of us, both Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus, we do not believe that the majority of non-Messianic Jews in the current state of Israel have, in fact, 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 a significant percentage of Jews in Israel are not Torah observants.

So in some, I don't think the conditions for any restoration on Hebrew Bible grounds, much less on New Testament grounds, are fulfilled.

So my first principle in considering the question of the modern state of Israel is this I don't believe that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

My second principle is a little different.

I do believe that the modern state of Israel, governed by the Jewish people, is a fulfillment of biblical justice.

And why do I say that?

I say that because, first of all, the Jewish people have been in control of the geographic location of the modern state of Israel, going back, according to archaeologists, somewhere, if you accept the traditional dating back to uh 1446 BC.

If you accept a more uh contemporary uh dating from uh many archaeologists, it would be in the 1200s B.C.

But there is tremendous archaeological evidence of the presence of Jewish people in the place we now call Israel, going back 3,200 years at least.

And this is not just a modern Israeli claim.

The claim can be found in archaeological artifacts that are in museums in Cairo, in the Louvre in France, in the British Museum.

In fact, uh Marlene and I were just in the British Museum.

I used AI to find every biblic every uh artifact that references a biblical event, and we ran through the British Museum and found all these different artifacts uh that were drawn from the ancient Near East.

The Jewish people, here's the bottom line, the Jewish people are indigenous to the land that we currently call Israel.

And 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 A.D.

after what is called the Second Jewish Revolt.

It was this Roman Emperor Hadrian who renamed Judea Palestina after the Philistines, who were 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.

And it was Hadrian who tried to get the world to forget the Jews' ancient connection to this piece of ground in the Middle East.

So, first of all, Jews have a historic connection that is absolutely undeniable to this piece of land in the Middle East.

Second, there was a Jewish presence even after Hadrian massacred tens of thousands of Jews in Judea and Samaria.

For 1800 years, there was a Jewish presence in Jerusalem as well as many other cities in the current state of Israel before the establishment of the modern state.

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.

Under contemporary international law, four questions are asked in assessing the legitimacy of a people's claim to statehood.

First, does the state have a permanent population?

Second, does it have a defined territory?

Third, is it governed by a single effective government?

And finally, 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 in the UN.

At the time of Israel's founding in 1948, Israel had a permanent population, so it meets criterio number one.

Second, it had a defined territory.

In fact, the territory was supported by a vote of the United Nations.

And I just might add that this was one of the rare times that Russia and the United States agreed during the post-World War II Cold War.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union voted to recognize Israel's foundation and the borders of the State of Israel.

The United Nations voted 37 to 12 to accept Israel as its 59th member state in 1949.

So criteria number two.

Criteria number two is met.

Third, is the nation governed by a single effective government?

The answer is yes.

In 1948, at the time of Israel's declaration of independence, Israel had an effective central government headed by an executive committee led by David Ben Gurion, who became the country's first prime minister.

The new country had an independent court system, it had a legislative body, and so on.

And finally, in 1948, Israel had an entire infrastructure dedicated to the conduct of foreign relations.

And so Israel satisfies the four elements of modern international law that governs the creation of nation states.

It's really important, and I just want to underline this for you, that 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 both the United States and the Soviet Union, along with the General Assembly being in agreement, supported the creation of the State of Israel.

Israel, governed by the Jewish people, meets every criteria for nationhood more thoroughly than many nations whose legitimacy is uncontested.

Also, uh, the Jewish people constitute, they uh embody in every way the very definition of peoplehood.

The Jewish people in Israel 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 have had a physical presence in the land under the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Ottomans.

They have a common self-identification.

They even share common DNA, no matter where Jews have come from, anywhere in the world.

We can trace back our DNA to this particular area going back thousands of years.

Now understand that the Arabs didn't arrive from the Arabian Peninsula into the place we now call Israel, as best as we can determine, until 636 A.D., a minimum of 1800 years after the Jews settled there.

In other words, Israel was a kingdom in the geographic 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 and that the Arabs are the indigenous people 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'd be like here in America if Cherokee tribes who were displaced by European colonists in what's now called the state of Georgia, returned to Georgia, and the Europeans said to the Cherokees, listen, you're settler colonialists.

We're the indigenous people.

But that's the claim made against the Jews.

Well, how did modern Zionism arrive, arise?

How did so many Jews end up in the State of Israel from around the world?

And let me give you a very quick overview of what is modern Zionism, what is modern Zionism, the push by Jewish people, primarily in Europe, to have a re-established homeland where Jews would be able to protect themselves and determine their own destiny.

In the place that the majority of Jews were exiled following the Roman Emperor Hadrian, you may know that Jews have experienced a history of antisemitism going back almost 2,000 years.

And for those of you not super familiar with European anti-Semitism, let me just touch some points.

First of all, you may not know that Jews were expelled from virtually every European country at one time or another.

Jews were kicked out of England for 400 years from the 1200s to the 1600s.

Spain kicked the Jews out in 1492.

The same year that Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus on his journey to explore what became the New World.

Spain kicked its Jews out.

France expelled the Jewish population of over 100,000 years and took all Jewish property away for several hundred years.

So there's been these expulsions.

Third, Jews were required during the Middle Ages to wear distinctive clothing and badges to mark them out from the rest of the population so that they would not have close interaction with Christians, and especially that Jews would not have sex with Christians.

And these badges became the Historic precedent for the yellow badges that the Nazis required Jews to wear during the Nazi period.

Fourth, in talking about anti-Semitism, we always need to remember 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.

Fifth, in terms of anti-Semitism, you may or may not be familiar with the term blood libel.

But persecution against Jews was always more intense around Easter because of the so-called blood libel.

Blood libel was the lie that Jews needed the blood of Christian babies in order to bake their matzas.

So every year around Easter, which basically overlaps the same time as Passover, there would be these pogroms, these attacks on Jewish villages, based upon the false belief that Jews had killed a Christian baby to bake their Passover matzas.

And sixth, during the Black Plague in the 14th century, it's estimated that somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of Europeans died in a period of four years of the plague.

But uh the slaughter of Jews by Christians became particularly intense during that four-year period because it was alleged that Jews were uh poisoning the wells of Christians, and uh that's the reason why so many um Christians were dying.

The Pope came out against this and said, Listen, uh Jews are dying in the same numbers as Christians, uh, but uh the slaughter continued.

Now in the 19th century, when Napoleon marched across Europe, he tore down the ghetto walls and liberated Jews from the ghettos.

Uh and Jews began to assimilate with a larger Christian population throughout the 19th century.

They began to succeed in business and medicine and law and so on.

But anti-Jewish sentiment uh didn't die down.

And uh, you know, one would have thought that with the modern world and the enlightenment and that people would get past their anti-Jewish uh uh sentiment, but it actually increased, partly out of resentment for the newly achieved success of Jews, but partly because the attacks on Jews became infused with modern science and race theory.

And so uh there grew the notion in uh Europe that the problem with Jews wasn't their religion.

It wasn't that Jews were Christ killers, as was historically uh believed.

Rather, the problem was with the Jews was their race.

And even conversion to Christianity couldn't fix that about Jews.

So in 1879, a German by the name of Wilhelm Maher rejected the notion that Jews could ever uh assimilate into the general society.

He coined a term for the modern incarnation of Jew hatred, he called it anti-Semitism.

Problem with the Jews is not their religion, problem is racial.

Jews are an inferior race.

And finally, when we speak about anti-Semitism, I mean there's so much that could be said, but uh there's something called the Dreyfus Affair.

In France uh the there was the trial of a Jewish captain in the French army in 1894.

The captain's name was Alfred Dreyfus, and just as a little sidebar, Alfred Dreyfus was the great-great uncle of the famous actress uh Julia Louise Dreyfus from Seinfeld and from Viepe.

Anyway, the claim was that this Jewish cat French captain uh gave French military secrets to the Germans, and this was all based upon some papers that were discovered by a cleaning woman in the German embassy.

Handwriting experts said uh Dreyfus was uh behind these papers uh that were handed over that were military secrets.

Uh French newspapers demanded that Dreyfus be punished, and despite overwhelming evidence of Dreyfus's innocence, including many uh military officers who testified to his innocence and said there's no way that Dreyfus was behind the disclosure of these military secrets, and all the evidence pointed to another Gentile military officer.

The French government and higher-ups in the military, as well as the Roman Catholic Church in France, demanded that Dreyfus be punished as a traitor.

And so he was publicly humiliated, stripped of his medals, his sword was broken, and this was all in a very public uh ceremony done in a square in Paris.

Crowds surrounding the Parisian square scream death to the Jews.

And I just want to parenthetically note one thing before we turn back to the uh impact of the Dreyfus affair and the birth of modern Zionism, and that is that there's been an extraordinary rise of anti-Semitism globally in the last few years, and here in the United States in the last decade.

Just a few days ago, July 2026, a Jewish man in New York City's Upper West Side was violently stabbed as he left a synagogue service on Tishe Baav.

And Tishe Ba'av is the ninth of day of the month, the Hebrew month of Av, and it commemorates the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

The man who stabbed him just a few days ago was shouting, Alua Akbar, Allah is great.

And unfortunately, attacks on individuals who are wearing identifiably Jewish garb.

You know, a yarmulke, you know, uh the skull cap that Jewish religious Jewish men wear, or a Star of David.

These attacks have become common everywhere in the world.

Parents are regularly calling uh Jewish camps, uh, wondering about the security for their children.

Jewish parents are choosing not to give their children Jewish stars to wear, the Star of David, uh, or other ways to mark them out as Jewish, because they are concerned about their Jewish safety everywhere in America and across the world.

You know, Holocaust denial was driven out of the political right by a man named Bill Buckley, conservative, but he was able to marginalize anti-Semitism in the John Burt Society in the 1950s and 60s.

But today there's been a revival of historic Holocaust denial and uh Nazi propaganda.

Hitler's speeches have been translated from German into English, including all of Hitler's voice inflections, and they're all on TikTok now.

So you can watch Hitler screaming only in English on TikTok, and millions of young people are viewing these things.

Anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes has said inflammatory things like, I love Hitler, and organized Jewry as a transnational gang, and they've been on Tucker Carlson denying the Holocaust.

Nick Fuentes dined at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump.

He has millions of followers on social media.

Tucker Carlson regularly features Holocaust deniers on his popular podcast.

Candace Owens is very popular on social media.

She claimed that Israel's behind the 9-11 attacks and that Mossad uh actually was the ones that killed uh 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.

On the extreme left and on the extreme right, there's one thing that people agree about.

We hate the Jews.

There's you know growing uh sentiment on the uh democratic left.

Uh we see you know anti-Semitic comments from uh Democratic office holders like Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapoul.

Um Hassan Piker is a popular left-wing um streamer.

He engages in anti-Semitic rhetoric, and all of this stuff is magnified by Russian bots, and it's just everywhere.

Okay.

Getting back then to the birth of modern Zionism, there was a Jewish journalist named um Theodore Herzl, uh, who covered the Dreyfus trial for an Austrian newspaper, and he was shocked as he listened to this cry for the death of Jews in liberal Paris.

Herzl himself had had many experiences of anti-Semitism growing up in Austria.

And he thought, you know, if even in the most liberal countries in Europe, France, people are screaming death to the Jews, there really is no future for Jewish people in Europe.

Jews simply will never be able to determine their own destiny or protect themselves from anti-Semitic attacks.

So Herzl brought Jews together from around the world and hosted what was called the first Zionist Conference in 1897.

And the goal of Zionism was to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secure homeland in Palestine.

And to foster that, they encouraged Jews to return to Palestine with farmers and laborers and artisans, and to take steps to eventually have a Jewish government in that part of the world.

And so tens of thousands of Jews joined their Jewish brethren who were already present in the land of Israel.

Remember that there were already, there was already a Jewish presence in Israel.

These folks from Europe joined them over the next 30 years.

And Jewish scholars began to also work on recovering the ancient language of Hebrew for modern-day use.

You know, uh that became a spoken language.

Uh if you don't know this, Hebrew, like Latin, Hebrew, the language of uh that the Old Testament was written in, like Latin or ancient Greek, was a dead language.

No one in the modern world spoke Hebrew as their everyday language.

Jews in Central Europe spoke Yiddish, which is a mix of German with some Hebrew and Aramaic words added.

It's written in a Hebrew script.

It's got the little garnish of Russian and Polish.

But Hebrew spoken in everyday life was revived in the early 20th century after more than 2,000 years of disuse.

And Jews coming from Europe also established what were known as kibbutzim, that's the plural of kibbutz, which is a collective farm where Jews of a more socialist bent gather together and uh engage in collective farming and collective living.

And even though these kibbutzim never uh really uh involved more than a small minority of Jews in Israel, they had outsized influence, a significant percentage of future uh prime ministers and uh government leaders in uh Israel as well as uh military leaders uh grew up on a kibbutz.

In terms of the growth of Zionism, I need to mention the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

In 1914, you know, the World War I broke out between the Allied powers of Britain, France, Russia, it was later joined by the U.S., and they fought the Ottoman Turks, the Germans, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

There was in 1917 a British Foreign Secretary named Arthur Balfour.

He was a believer.

And he, along with the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, decided that when and if the Ottoman Turks lost the war and the Ottoman Empire broke up because the Turks ruled the entire Middle East, uh, Arthur Balfour and Lloyd George decided that Jews were entitled to a homeland in the place that we now call Israel.

And so once the Ottoman Empire broke up, the Middle East was divided between France, which took Syria and Lebanon, and the English, which took Iraq, the Transjordan, which we now call simply Jordan, and Palestine.

And uh Arthur Balfour wrote a famous letter in which he promised uh this area called Palestine.

He promised it and uh the Transjordan to uh the Jews.

And so only twenty years after the Zionist Conference uh Congress, uh the most powerful empire on the planet, the British Empire, recognized the Zionist movement, they sided with it, and they promised that the British government would do everything it could to advance the Zionist cause.

And so it was really miraculous.

In twenty years, Jews are getting a promise that they can have their own homeland in the place that we now call Israel.

More Jews emigrated to Israel, and uh Arabs began to be really concerned about this flood of Jews into Israel before the Second World War.

In the 1930s, Arabs began to attack their Jewish neighbors, there were anti-Jewish riots in 1936, and there was a huge pogrom in um 1937 that broke out in the uh historic city of Hebron, um Caleb's city, if you're interested in the Old Testament, and where David was first anointed king.

Uh this pogrom destroyed Jewish uh stores, attacked Jewish homes, hundreds of Jews were killed.

The English uh sent a a uh man by the name of Peel to form a commission to sort out the Jewish and Arab uh uh dispute, and the uh Peel Commission uh suggested or recommended a partition of the land between Jews and Arabs.

Now remember that the original promise under the Balfour Declaration was that uh the Jews would get the land of Palestine, but in 1920, the British reduced that promise.

And they gave 80 percent of the land uh to the Arabs east of the gave all of the land east of the Jordan River in an area that they called the Transjordan or the country of Jordan today, the remaining 20% was to go to the Jews.

But in 1937, having already split the land, giving 80% to the Arabs and 20% to the Jews, the Appeal Commission said we're gonna further split the land west of the Jordan, or we're gonna give only 20% of the remaining land to the Jews.

So uh even with this reduced amount of less than 5% of the original uh promise, the Jewish people, led by David Ben Gurion, said, okay, we accept the partition of the land.

The Arabs can have the rest.

But the Arabs, having already gained Jordan, and 80% of the land west of the Jordan River, rejected it.

So the issue of Palestinian statehood could have been resolved in the 1930s, but it was the Palestinians who rejected it.

Which leads to the third principle, and that is that Palestinians like Jews are entitled to their own homeland.

But unlike many people today, I don't think that Israel or the Jews have historically been the main impediment to a two-state solution.

I believe the main impediment has been Arab intransigence and refusing to allow the Jewish people any part of the land that the Romans call Palestina and that we today call Israel.

From the river to the sea has been the Arab demand for 90 years.

From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, we want it all.

Indeed, there have been six offers made over the past 90 years for a Palestinian homeland that the Jews accepted and the Palestinians rejected.

The first, as I mentioned, was the Peel Commission.

The Arabs turned that down.

The second Arab rejection came in 1948 after the Second World War.

After the collapse, just to get a little background here, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, uh the Brits came in, they oversaw what they called Palestine, and uh this was a really violent place, constant fighting between Arabs and Jews, and also there were Jewish terrorists and Arab terrorists that were trying to push the English out.

Uh eventually, England sent over 100,000 troops to try to maintain peace in Palestine.

There was one British soldier for every 19 people living in the area.

They still couldn't keep it calm.

So the Brits got exhausted, and in 1947, they turned the whole mess over to the newly formed United Nations.

In 1947, uh the UN recognized Israel as the ancestral home of the Jewish people, and they came up with a new partition, different than the Appeal Commission.

The U.N.

gave 56% of the land west of the Jordan River to the Jews and 43% to the Arabs.

Jerusalem was designated as an international zone.

And on the day that the British mandate expired, May 14, 1948, Israel accepted the partition of the land and declared its independence.

The Arabs, just like they did with the Peel Commission back in 1937, the Arabs rejected this new partition.

They could have had a Palestinian state in 1948, but they rejected it.

And neighboring Arab states invaded the land of Israel, the Iraqis, the Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egypt, they assembled their armies, and despite these overwhelming odds, uh the Israelis defeated this five-state coalition and established what's called the modern state of Israel.

Then in 1967, they fought another war with the Arabs.

It was called the Six-Day War, and following that war, Israel tripled in size from its 1948 border.

It conquered Gaza, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula and what's called the West Bank of the Jordan River.

Israel offered to give those lands back to the Egyptians and the Jordanians in exchange for peace.

They said, We'll give you back everything that we want in the Six Day War if you will simply recognize Israel's right to exist.

And in response to this Olive Branch, twelve Arab states convened to summit and they said no.

There are actually three no's.

Peace with Israel, no to negotiations with Israel, and no to the recognition of Israel's right to exist.

Fourth attempt at creating a Palestinian state were what was called the so-called Oslo Accords under Bill Clinton.

And Oslo had 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 and ceased the endorsement of terrorism.

Unfortunately, Oslo never got anywhere.

And the moment the terms of Oslo were revealed, Palestinian terrorists responded by launching a wave of suicide bombings.

They targeted Israeli weddings and buses and pizza parlors and nightclubs and restaurants.

And when the smoke cleared, hundreds of Israelis were killed, and that proved the death knell of the Oslo Accords.

At the end of Bill Clinton's administration in the year 2000, Clinton and then uh Prime Minister Ayud Barak, as well as Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO, met, and uh it was proposed and accepted by the Israeli Prime Minister Ayud Barak that the Palestinians should have their own state in all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, and there would be a two-state solution in exchange for peace with Israel.

Arafat walked away from the table.

Fifth rejection of a Palestinian state.

And finally, in 2008, Ehud Barak met with the new um head of the Palestinian Authorities, and that is uh Mahmud Abbas.

He again offered um a Palestinian state on the West Bank, and Abbas walked away.

We you need to understand that the Palestinian goal has never been and is not today a two-state solution.

The Palestinian project is realizing the dream from the river to the sea.

Okay?

So uh this idea that um you know Israel is the problem is simply not justified by uh history.

Well, here then um is let me just continue uh in my notes.

Um sorry.

Just got ahead of myself.

The major sticking point, you say, well, why has there been so much intransigence on the part of the Palestinians?

The major sticking point 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 that they held before the State of Israel was formed.

During the War of Israeli independence, somewhere be somewhere around three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled their homes in the land of Palestine.

Many left to go to Arab areas, including the West Bank, um Jordan, Gaza, what's uh and uh some of these Palestinians were displaced by the fighting, some were pushed out by Israeli soldiers, some preferred to leave.

The displacement of Palestinians, three-quarters of a million Palestinians, worked a tremendous hardship on these Palestinians.

But what no one ever mentions is that nearly a million Jews were also kicked out of Arab countries in the 20 years following Israeli independence.

There were pogroms against Jews in Cairo, in Iraq, in Libya, and many other Arab countries.

And Jews had lived in some of these places going back thousands of years, back to the time of the Book of Esther in Persia.

But to give some sense of the extent of Jewish presence in Arab countries, uh before Israel declared its independence, it's estimated that 40% of Baghdad was Jewish in 1930.

But no one ever argues that Jews have a right to return to the homes that they fled to escape Arab persecution, only that Arabs have a right to return to their homes in the land of Israel.

And uh just by way of a historic analogy, at the time that Israel and uh the UN proposed the partition of Palestine into one area for Jews and another for uh Arabs, there was another partition going on in the Indian subcontinent.

And that was between the uh Muslims and the Hindus.

And what happened was that you know, following wars of independence, there's often major displacement.

So when the Indian subcontinent was divided between a Muslim country that became known as Pakistan and a Hindu country known as India, seven to eight million Muslims fled India and moved to Pakistan.

Eight million Hindus fled Pakistan and ended up in India.

And uh this was a terribly violent and horrible time for many people, and it's estimated that uh upwards of a million people lost their lives in the war following independence.

But there's no there was no uh refugee, permanent refugee agency set up to deal with the literally uh uh multiple millions of people who were displaced.

The only group of people that's had more than a 75-year UN refugee resettlement agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency called UNRWA, is the Palestinians.

And this UN agency has worked for nearly 80 years with the descendants of Palestinians who left Israel and now live in Gaza and Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan.

This UN agency provides education, social services, health clinics, uh, through not through host governments, but uh provides it directly.

And only the Palestinians possess an internationally recognized permanent refugee status, which has been continually renewed by the UN for 80 years.

And this maintains the narrative that Palestinians have a right to go back to their histor ancestral homes and that Jewish control of major portions of the state of Israel is illegitimate.

UNRWA is decidedly anti-Israel.

And in fact, during the war with Hamas, many of the folks employed by UNRWA were in fact Hamas operatives.

But um uh this right of return has been taught uh by uh uh Muslim um Palestinians to their children and their grandchildren and now their great grandchildren.

One other thing, while any Jew is welcome in the state of Israel and can become a citizen, twenty-two Arab countries closed their door doors to Palestinian resettlement.

Jordan in particular would have been a natural home for many of the Palestinians who left their original homes.

Forty to fifty percent of Jordan is indigenously uh Palestinian, but unfortunately, Palestinian terrorists attempted to assassinate the King of Jordan back in 1970, a civil war broke out, uh, more than 10,000 people were killed.

The doors to Jordan are shut to additional Palestinians.

The doors to Egypt are shut on the southern border of Gaza.

People always argue why is Israel not permitting Palestinians to freely move into Israel?

But the 22 other Arab states also do not open their door to Palestinians, but only Israel is criticized.

I think finally, there's a misunderstanding of Jews living in Israel by their Arab neighbors.

And one reason for possible intransigence by the Palestinians may be due to the false belief that Arabs have about Jews.

The false belief can simply be stated like this: if we simply apply enough pressure to the Jews that eventually they'll wear out and they will leave Israel.

And uh this false belief might be generated by the experience of the Algerians with the French during the 1950s.

There was a terrible war that broke out.

Over a million Algerians were killed by the French, but eventually the French wore out and they went back to France.

But I think that Arabs are learning a false lesson from history, because the French could pack up and go back to France.

The Jews in Israel have nowhere else to go.

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 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, Palestinian demand that the descendants of Palestinians displaced by the war have a right of return, and possibly a false belief that if we just keep attacking Israel, the Jews will be exhausted.

Here's the fourth principle.

I believe that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza was not worse than and is almost certainly better than America's conduct of its wars in the Middle East.

And I need to say something at the front end of this fourth principle, and that is 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 nother subject.

But I don't think that any Christian that has the heart of Jesus could feel anything other than profound horror at images coming out of Gaza of children being killed or parents weeping for the death of their children during the fighting in Gaza.

Modern warfare is by definition horrible, and because of the nations used in modern war, 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 now is whether Israel conducted a modern war, which by definition is brutal in a way that constituted a war crime, because that's been the charge that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza was itself a war crime.

And we have to begin with the October 7th attack.

The Gaza War was a response by Israel to a horrific attack by Palestinians from Gaza, in which over 1,300 Israeli citizens were murdered.

A multitude of Israeli women were filmed by Hamas soldiers being gang raped and murdered.

And the uh I mean the horror of this is that some Hamas soldiers were using GoPro uh cameras filming uh the gang rape of women, including one Israeli grandmother who was herself left-wing peacenick, uh pro-Palestinian.

She was gang raped, uh murdered.

All of this was filmed, and then Hamas put the video of that on this grandmother's Facebook page in order to horrify her family.

Over 250 Israelis were taken hostage.

They were placed in underground tunnels where they were tortured, beaten, raped, starved, some for years, and then the response of the Israelis was to uh attack Gaza and to free their hostages and to make uh Hamas pay a price to defeat Hamas so that this could never happen again.

Um of the war crimes that was committed that's uh rarely spoken about in the press is the requirement of distinction between civilians and soldiers.

Under international humanitarian law, uh from the Hague Resolution in 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, armies have to take steps to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

And one of the ways that they make this distinction, armies have to wear distinctive uniforms and have badges that are clearly identifiable, but Hamas refuse to wear uniforms except for publicly televised events.

They embed their soldiers and their weapons beneath civilian homes and in mosques and in hospitals and in schools in a cynical effort to prevent Israel from properly distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Hamas wanted Palestinian civilians to die because this increased international condemnation of Israel for mounting civilian casualties.

And this is not just speculation or some pro-Israeli propaganda.

Hamas's leader, Yahya Sinwar, before his death, we have his correspondence, and in his own private correspondence, which was analyzed and verified by the Wall Street Journal.

It was clear that increasing civilian deaths was an essential strategy for Hamas being able to finally overthrow the Israeli government.

Unlike Israel, which hides its civilians in bomb shelters and soldiers or above ground doing the fighting, Hamas turned that on its head.

Hamas' soldiers hid in the tunnels, and they left their civilian population on the front lines.

Israel sent millions and millions and millions of advance warnings before their attacks via text and uh dropping leaflets on populations in Gaza and um Facebook posts and so on.

Uh I think that uh well let me just uh uh say that uh according to U.S.

government officials and UK government officials, Israeli's con Israeli conduct of the war in Gaza followed much higher standards than the U.S.

and the UK did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And that is not just my opinion.

Major John Spencer, who is the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, probably America's preeminent scholar on urban warfare.

He's written extensively about Israel's commitment to saving innocent lives in Gaza.

He said it created a new standard for urban warfare.

Let me just quote him directly.

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 wars in Afghanistan and Afghanistan.

Now clearly there were individual acts that might be considered war crimes, and these deserve to be investigated.

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.

Israel needs to do more to punish perpetrators of individual criminal acts.

And unfortunately, under the Netanyahu government, it's unlikely that honest investigations and appropriate prosecution is going to happen, much like our own government has covered up American war crimes in the Middle East.

Here's the fifth and final 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 Bazalel Smoltrich, who's the finance minister, or Itamar Ben Kavir, the Minister of National Security, who have made racist anti-Palestinian remarks.

These politicians have no business being in any democratic government, and they ought to be removed.

There's also been Israeli settler gang attacks on Palestinians, and these are well documented.

Israeli settler gang attacks on Palestinians in the West Banks.

A different government, other than Netanyahu, would have arrested these gangs.

They would have taken the people and the gangs and thrown them in jail for destroying property and attacking Palestinians, but this government's not willing to do that.

What I'm saying is I don't think that a person has to support every act of the Netanyahu government or be labeled anti-Semitic.

There are many, many Israelis who oppose Netanyahu.

But every government on earth is profoundly fallible, and the distinction I would make is that the world's anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews in particular is seen in the constant, disproportionate condemnation of Israeli actions compared to the rest of the world combined.

And here's a shocking stat that I'll close with.

From 2015 to 2024, the U.N.

passed 173 resolutions condemning Israel.

During that same time, the U.N.

passed 80 resolutions condemning the entire rest of the world.

Think about this with me.

68 percent of all country-specific resolutions in the UN over a 10-year period were passed against Israel.

68%.

And yet Israel has only 0.12 percent of the world's populations.

I don't think there's another way to explain the absurdly disproportionate condemnation of such a tiny nation, except radical anti-Semitism.

When you consider what's you know, what happened in that ten-year slice of time, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, uh a horrific slaughter of people in Sudan, uh the um thousands and thousands of uh of Iranian soldiers uh Iranian civilians, civilians that were killed by the Revolutionary Guard, and on and on of injustices around the world, the oppression of the Uyghurs by the Chinese, and yet two-thirds of the world's condemnation comes against this tiny nation.

How can that be explained other than anti-Jewish sentiment?

So that's it.

I just wanted to give you a brief and I hope uh helpful overview of modern Israeli history, how Zionism came to be, what Jews around the world are contending with in terms of global anti-Semitism, and I hope to give you a deeper appreciation and uh not only of the modern state of Israel, but a deeper appreciation of what Jewish people uh have historically dealt with and are currently dealing with today.

Thanks so much.