Shameful silence
Poisonous baton gets passed around in antisemitic relay.
Yeshua spoke much of deception in the last days. In fact, when his disciples asked him about the signs that would indicate his soon return, he began by saying:
“Watch out that no-one deceives you.” (Matthew 24:4)
Almost nowhere is deceit more prevalent than over the question of Israel, with the standard line of understanding – even in church circles – being that the country is engaged in genocide against the Palestinians.
I find it so frustrating that churches are disengaging from support for Israel because of the perception that they are the great pariah of the world. A colleague has rightly noted that today’s antisemitism has “chilling echoes of the 1930s” when the Nazis held up the Jews as the cause of all their troubles and the church (in Germany at least) was largely silent.
And I ask again for the umpteenth time, why are we silent? What is there not to learn from our rich Jewish heritage, on the one hand, and from our past mistakes when we walked by on the other side of the road as Jews were herded like cattle to the concentration camps?
After 1,200 Jews got butchered, raped, burnt alive and cut to pieces on October 7th, 2023, did the world respond with outrage? They hardly had time before Israel responded with understandably brute force in a determined effort to dismantle – once and for all – the Hamas terror infrastructure on their doorstep.
Cue antisemitic cries of woe sweeping the globe like poisonous gas. Speaking of poison, I mentioned of late how Hitler had passed on the poisonous baton of antisemitism to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and the same satanic spirit is at the heart of the anti-Jewish tirade around the world today.
It manifested itself horribly, not too many years after Hitler’s defeat, at the Munich massacre of 1972, when the Black September Palestinian group slaughtered eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. The baton had truly been passed to this athletic arena – and in former Nazi territory at that. Which begs the question as to why Germany had been allowed to host the Games so soon after the terrible destruction they caused in the war.
Black September, on the other hand, were not complete fools for having chosen a soft target, with no army to back up efforts to deal with the terrorists as Germany – already weakened by their crushing defeat at the hands of the Allies – were obviously denied their own military as part of the armistice agreement. A movie called September 5 tells the shocking story well.
Yet now Palestinians are regarded as the victims. What’s changed? Endless propaganda, that’s what, just as Joseph Goebbels had employed in the Nazi era, believing that if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.
Talking of athletics, I was horrified to learn there had been a pro-Palestinian protest against Israeli athletes competing in South Africa’s famous Comrades Marathon, a gruelling 54-mile race between Durban and Pietermaritzburg attracting thousands of runners each year for the past century.
As a three-times competitor in the race, I was sharing with fellow Christians in our weekly home group only last night about the camaraderie for which the race became known as runners would often – like the Good Samaritan – stop and help others they saw struggling at the side of the road.
Please don’t misunderstand me. There are lots of Arabs, including Palestinians, who are passionate believers in Yeshua, and the prayer of many is that more of them would come to know the one who breaks down the barrier of hostility through the blood he shed on the cross (Ephesians 2:14-16).
I also don’t wish to suggest that Israel can do no wrong. I concur with the thoughts of an Israeli journalist friend, who says: “While there was plenty of righteous outrage against Israel’s enemies in the wake of October 7, there was far too little soul searching. And of late Israelis are right back to their bickering, disputes, and even hatred for one another. To say nothing of the continued clinging to a profane secularism that most certainly is not pleasing to the Lord. As much as Israel needs prayer against her enemies, she needs even more prayer over the internal crises.”
Nevertheless, we need a clear perspective on the overall picture. As columnist Jake Wallis Simons expressed in the Daily Mail, the likes of climate activist Greta Thunberg are, by their anti-Israel actions, whether unwittingly or not, supporting Hamas.
As he writes, “The militant group seizes all aid, wherever possible. Its fighters commandeer the convoys and take food and medical supplies for their own terrorists, selling whatever is left over to civilians at hugely inflated prices.”
He too admits that the IDF has made some serious mistakes while trying to flush out Hamas from Gaza. But Israel had all along tried to avoid civilian casualties, made all the more difficult by the way women and children are used as human shields.
“Nevertheless, according to research by the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, the ratio of civilian deaths to military fatalities has been much lower than in any comparable conflict and half the fatalities had occurred during direct battle with Hamas fighters.”
Israel – and Jewish people everywhere – are the true victims of this war. And they need our loving support, not our shameful silence.
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