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On the right: One of the storage facilities for thousands of Kassam rockets fired from Gaza into the city of Sderot since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in August of 2005.
Since Israel decided to put a stop to the terrorist rain of missiles on her towns in the south from the terrorism bad lands of Gaza, conflict has been rippling through the Body of Christ – not just between those in Israel and the Palestinian areas, but also in other parts of the world. We need to be cognizant of the spiritual warfare we all have entered into at the same time as the physical conflict is fiercely engaged in Israel and Gaza. This is not the time to hand the enemy of our souls the advantage.
As a Christian who has heavily invested in listening to the voices of the believing indigenous Body of the LORD in Israel, I can tell you that I am always challenged by people who don’t like how I stand on the issues of Israel. It comes with the territory. However in times of war, like in the past couple of weeks, there is such a rise in conflict between brothers over how different ones view the issues.
There are those with no compassion whatsoever for the plight of Palestinian people – a position that grieves the heart of God. There is also a position that is only superficially informed about the history, nature and dynamics that Israel faces day in and day out, year in and year out from Islamist terrorism avowed to eradicate Jews and Israel from the map.
Of the latter, portions of the Church somehow accept the premise that the humanistic secular media is reporting the truth when it casts Israel as a menacing Goliath against a helpless and cowering Palestinian people.
I realize this is because of spiritual deception, but if those in the Church who held this view would just do the due diligence on the facts you would see and know the truth. It is a truth summed up succinctly in a newspaper editorial today, "Hamas is not a mass national liberation movement of the Palestinian people: It is tiny Islamo-Fascist organization that forcibly took control of a disheartened strip of land and turned it into a nightmare of an Islamic state."
Yesterday, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzippe Livni said, "I can understand that sometimes the situation and the pictures that come from Gaza are difficult." But in fighting Hamas in Gaza, she continued, "Israel is doing what the entire free world is doing and needs to do, which is to fight terrorism."
When people magically separate Israel’s need and right to fight terrorism targeting Israeli citizens, from the rest of the world’s right and need to fight the Islamist terrorism targeting our citizens, I call that religious deception and hypocrisy.
I really would like to be more diplomatic about this, but I wonder how that is possible when I see huge demonstrations of anti-Semitism across American cities and the cities of the world churning hatred toward Israel.
Newspapers are not covering the fact that the core makeup of these international demonstrations are organized and fueled by pro-Hamas Arab supporters. Hamas is a terrorist organization for any of you who have been persuaded they are just “Palestinian soldiers” fighting with Israeli soldiers over disputed parcels of land. Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group that says the State of Israel has no right to exist at all.
The fact is that secular humanistic media are making an editorial choice to publish photos that downplay the pro-Hamas makeup of the demonstrators. It is part of the establishing facts on the ground to portray the demonstrations as a mostly non-Middle Eastern protest.
There is longstanding editorial choice behind the broadcast and print media favoring the pictures of Palestinian suffering, but rarely the scenes of Israelis in carnage and suffering.
These pictorial-editorials are not exactly a lie but close enough. If the media does not deliver all the facts then the whole, honest-to-God truth is not revealed. On the contrary, the media has long stacked the deck against public support of Israel. Remember, the press is mostly secular humanistic in its thought processes, ethics and morals. They believe their view is the high ground and the presentation of the conflict between Israel and terrorist groups is the media attempt to set its own agenda in public opinion toward the conflict.
It is not conspiratorial thinking about the evil media. It is simply understanding the power of the humanistic mindset that rules most of the media. Christians have all seen it in operation many times before so why should any Christian accept that the media are conveying the truth about Israel to us?
This is the same Israel that God has said many times over in the Scriptures that He would keep an eternal covenant with. Jeremiah 31:33-36 is not a matter of private interpretation: The promise of God is that the sun and the moon will cease before Israel will cease to be a nation before Him forever.
It is also not a matter of ignoring that the Lord loves the Palestinian people. It surely is the heart of God to bring many Palestinians to salvation, rescuing them from tyranny of abuse they have suffered because of the Islamist agenda of hatred. The opportunity is squelched by the rule of terror groups over the Palestinian people. Even before the war broke out we were getting urgent prayer requests for Christian Arabs threatened with murder in the West Bank and Gaza by terrorists. Thousands of Christian Arabs have fled the country for precisely this persecution by fellow Arabs who are Islamists.
As I pity children brought up in racist enclaves of America, like the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nations, so I deeply pity the Palestinian children. This is a people who have been kept living in squalor for decades by their own leaders because their continued suffering suited the cause of Islamist propaganda.
Millions have been given to benefit and raise the quality of life for the Palestinian people, but it was not just greed in the Palestinian Authority leadership that gobbled it up. It was also the propaganda value of Palestinian suffering in the refugee camps – those inside West Bank and Gaza, as well as those over the neighboring borders. No one allowed the Palestinian people to benefit and live any better because their lives are cheap, traded for the propaganda value of blaming their plight on Israel.
Palestinian lives are cheap – they are raised from the cradle to the grave with indoctrination to embrace suicide ‘martyrdom’ as their greatest value in this life. I saw it myself in the much evidence presented in two 12-week trials of a Hamas fund raising group recently convicted in Dallas for material aid to Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank.
Until the terrorist stranglehold is taken off the Palestinian people, they will never be given the opportunity to live a normal, peaceable life. Many people think the gospel only thrives in hardship and persecution, but it is a fact that the Palestinians will never be able to respond to the gospel until the power of Islamist terrorism control is broken off of them.
The desire among Israelis for peace is so strong, but the ability to give peace is impossible when terrorists control the Palestinian population. How can there be peace when Israeli cities around Gaza are being terrorized by thousands of Kassam rockets falling on their schools, their homes, their streets and their playgrounds? This is the cause of the current conflict.
I want to give you the tools to educate yourselves in what is really going on beyond the headlines of CNN or the New York Times, both notoriously unbalanced in presentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am asking you to trust that I am a seasoned veteran of the propaganda wars that go on surrounding the conflict and have learned to fact-check and know the reliable sources from the unreliable.
I am asking you to consider the resources that I put in front of you in this weekly Arrows from Zion prayer summary and the special focus issues I do on my IsraelPrayer.com and my blog IsraelWatcher.
I am not a propagandist for Israel but a Christian who knows that God has purpose for the indigenous Body in Israel – the Messianic Jewish and the Palestinian Christian.
This conflict is not about a perverted version of an Israeli Goliath against a little David Palestinian. It is about Islamist hatred of the purposes of God in Yeshua-Jesus in Israel and the whole Middle East. This is where I am putting my stake in the ground. As a person of God, I must rise and stand against that no matter what the eventual and ultimate cost.
