ISRAEL AT 60

• First some important historical background.  In 63 BC the Roman Empire annexed the land of Israel, making it a part of the Roman Empire.  The entire area remained a thorn in Rome’s flesh and, in response to a Jewish revolt, in AD 70 Rome destroyed Jerusalem, burned the Temple and dispersed Jews throughout the empire.  After crushing a second Jewish revolt in AD 135, no Jews were permitted to live in Jerusalem and Rome completed the dispersion.  In the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, Zionism was formed.  Primarily, Zionism sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.  In 1917, in an attempt to win Jewish support for World War I, England issued the famous Balfour Declaration, declaring England’s support “for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.”  After World War I, Palestine was placed under the British mandate.  As persecution grew in Europe under the Nazis, Jews fled to Palestine and in response Palestinian Arabs revolted against the British from 1936 to 1939.  Britain thereby restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, arousing militant Jewish resistance.  After World War II, large-scale Jewish resistance organizations began operating in Palestine and in the summer of 1946, England decided to turn the problem of Palestine over to the United Nations.  When the matter came to a vote in the UN on 29 November 1947, the General Assembly endorsed a plan to create separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem as an international zone.  President Harry Truman was instrumental in this decision and was the first to recognize the new state of Israel.  On 15 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion read in Hebrew Israel’s Declaration of Independence—“We . . . hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Israel.”  For the first time in nearly 2,000 years, there was an independent Jewish state of Israel.  This miracle led to the establishment of the first Jewish army since Roman times and the only recorded instance of the resurrection of a dead language—Hebrew, now the language of nearly 7 million people in the land.  The historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote:  “Israel is the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.”

• Second, how has the world responded to this historic event?  (1)  The theme of much of the Middle East today is Palestinian dispossession.  But the brutal facts are that the Jews accepted the compromise of 1947—to create a Jewish and a Palestine Arab homeland in the same territory—Palestine.  The Arabs did not!  Charles Krauthammer writes:  “Palestinian dispossession is a direct result of the Arab rejection, then and now, of a Jewish state of any size on any part of the vast lands the Arabs claim as their exclusive patrimony.  That was the cause of the war 60 years ago that, in turn, caused the refugee problem.  And it remains the cause of war today.”  Israel has fought three additional wars for its survival after the one in 1948—1956, 1967 and 1973.  It has also dealt with two major intifadas under Yasir Arafat’s direction and countless homicide bombings of its civilians.  The core issue for the Arab and Palestinian populations is the simple fact that they will not recognize Israel’s existence.  They will not compromise and they will not relent.  (2)  Throughout much of Europe, there is an unwillingness to accept Israel either.  It is not that Europe wants to destroy Israel, but in Europe Israel is consistently portrayed as a human-rights violator.  David Schwammenthal writes:  “In post-Christian Europe and Germany . . . Moses’ law, the foundation of Western legal codes and moral values, is hardly acknowledged on the Continent.  Jews are more often seen as having contributed to Western civilization, rather than being an integral part of it, thanks to the role they played as a nation.  Jews—often viewed as some kind of guest contributors—thus remain strangers in Europe, as does the Jewish state.  And one can be inclined to believe bad things about strangers.” 

• Finally, the existence of Israel is in more peril today than in recent memory.  With the fall of Saddam Hussein and the resurgence of Iran, Israel now faces an alliance of Iran, Syria and their lackeys, Hezbollah and Hamas.  Iran has built a web of influence around the Middle East that makes military action against Iran virtually unthinkable, because to do so would have major implications for the very existence of Israel itself.  Iran seeks to control Lebanon, through its minion Hezbollah, and threatens Israel from both the north and now the west with Hamas in Gaza.  Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has written:  “We stumbled for eight years under Bill Clinton over how to make peace in the Middle East, and then we stumbled for eight years under George Bush over how to make war there.  [The result is] an America that is trapped in a region which it cannot fix and it cannot abandon.”  The situation now is that the US cannot defeat, co-opt or contain Iran or any of the other key players of the Middle East.  The US is now in the center of the Middle East, finding it impossible to leave and unwilling to stay.  Iran’s power is greater than at any recent time in history.  And for that reason, Israel is more vulnerable than at any time since 1967.  But God’s promises of Ezekiel 36 and 37 are as true today as ever.  God is restoring the Jewish people to their homeland—and even the power of Iran will not stop that.

See Tom Freidman in the New York Times (14 May 2008); Daniel Schwammenthal in the Wall
Street Journal (14 May 2008); Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post (16 May 2008) and
The One-Year Book of Christian History, pp. 272-3.

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