In a too-infrequent moment of moral clarity, the United States has vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Israel to accept a comprehensive ceasefire arrangement regarding the Gaza Strip.
Instead, the United States is calling for “a temporary ceasefire in Gaza as soon as practicable, based on the formula of all hostages being released, and calls for lifting all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale.”
Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, was both more direct and more accurate: “A ceasefire achieves one thing and one thing only — the survival of Hamas. A ceasefire is a death sentence for many more Israelis and Gazans.”
Hamas must be ended as any kind of viable military or political organization — without qualification. Israel is not trying to kill the families of Gaza. For a time, at least, the Israel Defense Force posted warnings on the internet, dropped leaflets, and even made phone calls into Gaza urging everyone not involved with Hamas to leave for the Strip’s southern region to avoid bombings and ground attacks.
No one can question that the needs of the people in Gaza are profound, and Christians need to be deeply concerned for them. As relief ministries seek to provide essential medical and food aid to the Palestinian Arabs, followers of Jesus should support them.
Yet with all this said, the single greatest irony of the conflict to date is the charge that Israel has a “genocidal” policy toward Gaza’s Arab population while genocide is exactly what radical Islamists have in mind for Israel.
Consider Iran, the greater Middle East’s leader in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. As reported by scholar Kian Tajbakhsh in The Atlantic, “Hours after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, all of Iran’s parliamentarians rose from their seats to chant ‘Death to Israel!’” Tajbakhsh notes, “Iran’s fingerprints were all over the October 7 operation. Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are only the biggest in a network of 19 armed groups that Iran has established along Israel’s borders.” These and other groups receive financial support nearing $1 billion annually from Iran, whose military provides them with weapons and training.
Hamas is unapologetic in its desire to slaughter Jews and destroy the Jewish state. In April of last year, a Hamas leader named Hamad Al-Regeb preached a sermon in which “he prayed for ‘annihilation’ and ‘paralysis’ of the Jews whom he described as filthy animals: ‘[Allah] transformed them into filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs because of the injustice and evil they had brought about’.”
Why such hatred? Clearly, Satan is its ultimate inspiration. The irrational hatred of a people who compose one-fifth of one percent of the world’s total population cannot but have a spiritual basis. The story of the Bible is, in part, the story of the adversary’s attempts to destroy the Jewish people spiritually, morally, and physically. The Jewish people are the channels of God’s self-revelation in His written Word and in the person of the world’s Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. Of course the Hateful One wants them dead.
On a political level, many Arab leaders see Israel’s representative democracy as a threat to their power. Newsweek columnist Lee Habib, himself Lebanese, writes that “Israel, like America itself, is a threat to dictators, kings, mullahs, and clerics who despise freedom of conscience and the sanctity of the individual.” This has led Arab nations to rally against “a manufactured common enemy” — Israel.
Again, consider the disturbing but undeniable paradox: Those who try to deny that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis and their abettors are the same people who want to fulfill Hitler’s demonic scheme all while claiming that the Jews themselves want to commit genocide against Gazan Arabs. “There can hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the allegation against Israel of genocide,” said Israeli attorney Tal Becker in his opening defense of his country at the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands. “Israel is in a war of defense against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people,” he added.
Israel is in crisis, at home and abroad. America has a moral duty and political obligation to safeguard her security. And, at a time when America’s college campuses contain cesspools of anti-Semitism, that safety must be ensured on our own shores. In a 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington wrote to Jews anxious about how they would fare in the then-new republic, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Amen, Mr. President. Amen.
Rob Schwarzwalder, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Regent University's Honors College.
