I'm a life-long friend of Israel.
Even as a kid, when I was more enarmored with end-times prophecy than with Christianity, I was
firmly impressed that the creation of the modern state of Israel was one of God's signal works in
our times. And I was pleased to reflect that Israel's birth and mine were within a few days of each
other.
By the time I was old enough for the draft, Vietnam was much on my mind, and I didn't want to end
up there if I could avoid it. Not that war was then a great evil to me: just that, even in its early stages,
the Vietnam war seemed the kind of ill-conceived muddle nobody should risk their life in.
But I remember staying up all night excitedly listening to the news of the outbreak of war between
Israel and its Arab neighbors. It was the kind of war I could genuinely consider a "cause:" Israel's
rightful fight for national survival.
I wrote to the Israeli Embassy the next morning, asking how and where I could volunteer for the
Israeli Army. I was no doubt thinking, as most people probably did, that the war would continue
for some time. The fact that hostilities ended after six days, with the Israelis sweeping the board
(including most significantly, the formerly Arab-held parts of Jerusalem), was marvelous, and made
me jubilant: and even more certain that God (as little as I knew of Him at the time) had re-asserted
that Israel
would exist.
It was also a bit disappointing. A letter from some junior military aide at the Israeli Embassy only
arrived weeks after the war was over, thanking me for my wishes of support for Israel. I think I still
have it somewhere in my papers.
When I became a Christian, I had even more admiring interest in Israel. I'd gone back to school,
and the university I was lucky enough to attend had a program in Judaic Studies, which became
my minor. I wanted to learn Hebrew anyway, for studying the Bible; and also picked up some hours
on Biblical archaeology and history.
Interestingly, one course under the Judaic Studies program was on Middle Eastern society, taught by
an authority on Islamic civilization (herself Jewish). One of the most informative courses I took, it
really didn't deal much with politics: but treated Israel as one of the nations whose society was, and
is, shaped by Arab people, and by Islam.
(My Hebrew teacher Tzivia Gaba, the
sweetest lady, was by contrast not an academic at all, but a
local housewife. I think she got the gig because of her fluency in the language. I learned later that
her husband Joe "had friends" who'd illegally shipped guns to Israel in 1948.)
But the greatest influence on my love for Israel was the man under whose ministry I was baptized in
the Holy Spirit, and whose teaching I've followed ever since, Derek Prince. A teaching Fellow in philos-
phy at Cambridge before the war, he'd taken a Bible with him to critique when he was drafted in 1940:
and felt that he personally encountered Christ, reading one night in an Army training barracks. ("From
that day to this, I never doubted that Jesus is Alive.")
He served as a medical non-combatant in North Africa and the Sudan during World War II. When the
war ended, he moved to Ramallah in the British Palestine Protectorate to marry a Danish woman he'd
met on leave, Lydia, who had started a small Christian orphanage there. He became the father of her
adopted Jewish and Arab orphans, and began to preach Christ. The family remained there until 1948,
and had what he called "the very dangerous privilege" of being in Isreal as it became a nation, and
fought for its survival. (When his ministry became international, he maintained a home in Jerusalem,
where he lived 6 months of each year, and where he died in 2003.)
A lot of my understanding of
rightful Christian love for Israel traces back to Derek Prince' teaching.
Too much to summarize it all; but only to say that my conviction of Israel's centrality in God's plans
is firmly rooted in scripture.
From that viewpoint, I have to regard the current "Christian" political adulation of Israel as completely
unscriptural. It has made love of Israel a political "issue;" and fostered the inevitable
unGodly mindset
of angry partisanship. Its teaching is that love for Israel must entail contempt for Palestinians; if not
hatred of them.
This fits nicely into the mindset of many American "conservative Christians," with whom contempt for
Arabs is an article of faith "sanctified" by the fact that they are Muslims, followers of a violently anti-
Christian religion. It's a false belief, which overlooks the fact that the minority Christian community in
both Israel and Palestine is Arab, and the oldest continuing Christian community in the world. It's also
an unChristian belief that any race or nationality are inherent enemies of Christ.
But it has served the purposes of "conservative" Israeli politicians (Bibi Netanyahu, for example) that
America's "Christian conservatives" support, as "love of Israel," whatever violence and hatred Israel's
government visits on Palestinians. (There's a close parallel in "Christian conservatives" willingness to
support the violence and hatred their faction inflicts on Americans, as "making America great again.")
The best counter to what today's "Christians" teach as "love for Israel" is scripture. Simply this: that
America's "Christian conservatives" show they "love Israel" by approving Israel's unrighteousness and
violence towards its neighbors. In
His love for Israel, God continually excoriated and chastised the Jews
for their unrighteousness and violence toward their neighbors.
I do not for an instant believe that "Christian conservatives"are better "friends of Israel" than God. And
fiercely believe that their politically-motivated "love for Israel" is spiritually destructive to Israel.
