Backgrounds to the Current Israeli Conflict

So I’ve brought together three people with background and experience, not just in thinking about Israel and the Middle East, but also having spent time in Israel. Significant time in Israel. And so we just want to discuss kind of the background and situation with them. My guests are David Brickner, who is president of Jews for Jesus, who is with us by Skype and is on vacation in the San Francisco area. And Mitch Glazer, who is president and CEO of Chosen People Ministries. He’s the other Skype person that you see. I was going to describe them by their beards, but they both have beards, so if you want to distinguish them, what’s the best way to say this? Mitch is the more mature of the two that you’re looking at. And then

So we welcome you for being a part of the podcast today. Well gentlemen, as is often the case, the mid-east is boiling. And we’re going through a sequence in which we’ve had events that have triggered violence and conflict and rockets going back and forth. We’ve had cease-fires and violation of cease-fires. It’s a pretty chaotic situation that we see. Mitch, I’ll start with you. In your mind, how did we get to where we are?

And then Israel started settling that land, although there were plenty of Jewish people there beforehand. But this was a land now really settled by those who had survived who needed a country where they could be safe. And so there were some people there who were bedouins. And Arabs, it was all part of the Ottoman Empire. You know you had the Jewish people moving in. There was plenty of land for everybody. And instead of just going along with what the fledgling United Nations had really established, you basically had a fight over land.

And that fight over land has continued ever since. And I don’t think until everybody agrees to live with each other in peace. Until it’s recognized that historically and even legally that this is a Jewish country, but there’s room for everybody else, I think that there’s going to continue to be hostilities. And we’ve had three or four major wars, depending on how you count them. Maybe even five. And you continue to have internal strife. And I think that that’s how we got to where we are. Much more complicated, but basically it’s a dispute over land.

And Christians often have a depth of theological understanding regarding Israel and the past. Many are also very keenly interested in what the Bible has to say about Israel in the future. Unfortunately, it seems that when it comes to present day Israel, biblical thinking takes a backseat to political expedience. And so Christians who look at what’s going on in the Middle East today through a CNN worldview, are going to have a failed perspective. we need to understand that the Bible gives us a framework for understanding the conflict and as Mitch pointed out, God promised the land to Israel long ago.

And since then, as the scriptures say, the Jewish people, the nation of Israel has been at the nexus of the cosmic conflict between God and Satan. And God has made promises to the Jewish people. He intends to keep them. Satan wants to make God a liar. And his minions are trying to follow through on that. The church needs to stand with Israel right now and recognize that God is simply fulfilling the promises of his word. And we are alive to see it today.

The reason people deal with Israel in its current state is because of what I would say some people have an uncertainty about how to view the current state of Israel. So we’re going to come back to that question. It’s an important one that you’ve raised David. Jim, what’s your take on how we got to where we are?

There’s an uncertainty about how to talk about modern Israel. We know that the biblical Israel of the Old Testament is in the center of the biblical story. Many people believe that there is a future for a roll of Israel coming back into the program and promise of God because of texts like Romans 9-11, etc. So they talk about Israel having reconnected to the messiah and being in the middle of the program of what God is going to do. Those are categories that people are used to. But what we often get is discussion about how in the world should we think about modern Israel. She’s in unbelief. She doesn’t believe in the Messiah.

As things stand right now, there’s a remnant certainly of Messianics who do, but generally speaking the mass of Jewish people have not responded to Jesus. And so that leaves an ambivalence towards the modern state of Israel and to how to view Jewish people. So how do we walk into that scenario? And David, since you raised the questions initially, I’m going to let you take the first crack at it. But I’m going to come to all three of you on it.

And so because of their popularity, because that’s what people are reading, many people have started to waver on their understanding of what modern Israel has with regards to a claim to the land. I had a debate with John Piper about this where he said Israel has no divine right to the land. My counter was that Israel never had a divine right to the land. Israel always possessed the land by divine mercy.

And for much of the biblical record, Israel lived in the land while rebellious breaking the Mosaic Covenant. And yet God was merciful. He allowed Israel to remain in the land despite her unbelief. And he did this because of his gracious promise to Abraham and his descendants. Why could God not act in the same way today as he did back then?

And the Palestinian promotional agenda and narrative began making its way into the United States. And so we saw a reaction to probably you saw it most in reaction to the left behind series and to an emphasis to prophecy. But I think it goes much deeper than this sort of knee jerk reaction. I think that there’s been a growth as David mentioned to what I would call a Neo-Reformed revival in the United States where a lot of great theologians are from that background. And basically they’re either historic premillennialists to an extreme or they are supersessionists or traditional amillennialists.

And they would never take the Old Testament prophecies literally anyway. They would see the land promises fulfilled spiritually in the church. Therefore, there’s no theological future to Israel in the land whether it happened in 1948 or whether it happens when Jesus comes back or before Jesus comes back. And so I think that we have to understand that that is the climate.

Now you add to this the tremendous interest of our younger generation in social justice. And at one time, the Jewish people were weak and despondent and almost destroyed and so they were the objects of Christian sympathy, whereas today the Palestinian plight is much more dominant than the Jewish people who have a country and a military and everything else. And so the heart and the sympathies, the emotions as you mentioned Darrell, have been extended toward the Palestinian narrative. And so I think that just gives sort of a sociological setting to this. I also just want to affirm what David said.

And I’m asked all the time whether I believe modern Israel is a fulfillment of prophecy. And I would always say yes. And then people would say, “So you believe that the modern state of Israel is God’s established kingdom?” And I would say, “Well, hardly.” All you have to do is make one tour to Israel and you’ll know that’s not true. And so Israel is a very secular country. The reason I say this is that number one I do believe according to Ezekiel 36: 25 and following, that before the dry bones are made alive, they need to be resident in Israel; and it’s 37.

You do have Israel coming back into unbelief and so that would be the fulfillment of prophecy. Whether or not the Jewish people are moved out again, I once tried to figure out how many El Al planes it would take to move out six and a half to seven million people. It would be a major operation, needless to say. But let’s say that this is not the absolute final. It is one stage in the fulfillment of prophecy. But then again, if you’re dealing with people who are really not interested in prophecy, who are spiritualizing and allegorizing the scriptures and the land being the blessings enjoyed by the Church, then the truth is, Israel never gets back to the land.

And so prophecy in that sense is never fulfilled because it’s not literal. In fact it was a non-literal prophecy that’s been spiritually fulfilled in the Church, which is a position I just simply don’t accept.

One is the idea of yes Israel is going to be back in the land. She’s even going to be back in the land in unbelief. But the real trigger for the end time vents beyond that is associated with when Israel as a mass turns back to the Lord. And that’s when major triggers related to final events are going to take place. And I think keeping both of them in balance is an important part of this conversation. Jim, what’s your take on what we’re talking about?

I don’t see how you can escape the conclusion that those also have been spiritualized, that they are not to be taken literally. Under the Mosaic Covenant, enjoyment of the land was conditioned on obedience or whatever, but the promise of the land was still unconditional and irrevocable. Now under the New Covenant, we have the prophecy of Ezekiel 36 and 37 that the people will be brought back in unbelief. To hold them to the same standards as under the Mosaic Covenant, I think biblically doesn’t really work.

Although the modern state of Israel is committed to Western and Judeo-Christian values of property rights and the rights of individuals and all of these kinds of things, nevertheless those who want to try to hold Israel to the Mosaic standards may have difficulty with consistency.

Then for the U.S. or for western nations – the U.S. has been the best – but for western nations to then judge Israel in some type of moral equivalence debate that Israel is unfairly killing civilians. When the truth is what’s happening in Gaza with Hamas is the same as what’s happening with ISIS. They float in the same stream. And what you have is a real problem with a value that extreme Muslims seem to have.

And that is they do not regard human life at the same level that we do in the west. Particularly those of us who have been influenced by Judeo-Christian teaching. And until we recognize that, we’ll never be able to understand at the moral equivalence dilemma should not even in some ways, be discussed. Because if you had civilians killed, it’s not that these Israelis didn’t make a mistake here and there – in war there’s always civilian casualties, we know that.

But the reason why there might be quite a few of these, although not as many as claimed, is because of the actions of Hamas, not the actions of Israel. So I think we need to really rethink the moral equivalence debate.

And they’re actually trying to do two things at one time. Because often times they’ll march into a Christian home – a Palestinian Christian’s home and launch the rocket from that location in the hopes that the reprisal comes against that location. And that is a form of human shielding as well. And so to do this in the midst of families, in the midst of homes, et cetera and then to have the reprisal come and civilians and children die in the midst of it, they’re well aware of what it is that the strategy is reaping. And people who aren’t sensitive to that are missing part of what’s going on. David, your thoughts on this?

But those reports and those images are being broadcast by a very successful P.R. campaign that’s designed to allow these human casualties in order to whip up – not just anti-Israel sentiment around the world – but scratch that anti-Israel sentiment and very close to the surface, you’ll find the anti-Semitism that has been roiling throughout Europe. Jewish businesses being protested, boycotted, that maybe these owners have never even set foot in the land of Israel.

And yet, now it’s not just Israel in conflict with Gaza, it’s Jews around the world who are being blamed by these U.N. sponsored, media-centers like CNN or British press. Particularly in Europe, not so much in America, but it’s a tragedy that just going to the very heart of what this conflict is, which is not just a political conflict, it’s a spiritual conflict. And if we forget that as believers in Jesus, we’re not going to have the biblical world view and the framework to understand what’s happening today.

We now have a generation for whom it’s just about something they saw on film or something like that. And as a result we’re losing the memory and the impact of what got us there to begin with. And those who don’t remember history are prone to repeat it. And I think we’re seeing a little bit of that in what’s going on today.