The U.S. and Biblical Israel. By Barbara Lerner.

The U.S. and Biblical Israel. By Barbara Lerner. National Review Online, January 5, 2012.

Instead of the “two-state solution,” restore what God gave Abraham’s people.

Lerner:

WHY BIBLICAL ISRAEL IS THE ANSWER

 

The mystery is why so many Americans who recognize these obvious facts fail to reject the two-state “solution” altogether; why, instead of saying a clear, confident “No” to the two-state idea, they can only respond to the unending pressure from Muslim supremacists in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, their appeasers in the U.N. and the EU, and their allies on the Bill Ayers Left with a feeble, evasive “Not now.” Why don’t we stand up and say, “No. A Palestinian state is a Trojan horse of an idea; accepting it was a great mistake, and it is past time to firmly and finally reject it”? Some few won’t do that because they still cling to the blind faith that if we just push the Israelis to make more of the sorts of increasingly painful and enfeebling concessions they have been making to no avail since the Oslo accord two decades ago, Muslim supremacists will suddenly make a 180-degree turn and say, “Okay, that’s enough, we accept you as equals,” and peace and brotherhood with a small b — a brotherhood that embraces all people everywhere, not just Muslims — will prevail at last. Most Americans abandoned that illusion years ago, slowly and regretfully, but fully.

 

The problem for the great majority of Americans, I think, is that they have no new formulation with which to replace the two-state idea, no new policy idea they can openly embrace and work to implement in its stead. And when they look for one in the tangle of U.N. legalisms that greeted Israel’s rebirth, they get nowhere, because it is the wrong starting place. The shrunken and misshapen little piece of lowland the U.N. initially ceded to Israel was militarily indefensible — an open invitation to the attacks that followed. Looking for answers in the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl founded in Europe in the 19th century is no answer either. Herzl and his pioneering followers in Europe and America did yeoman’s work, culminating in modern Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, but it is shortsighted Western ethnocentrism to say that they created Israel.

 

A Jewish state in Biblical Israel could not be created by the U.N. or by the Jews of the West, only re-created. Ancient walls, scrolls, steles, and pottery, meticulously dated by modern science, bear irrefutable testimony to the existence of Biblical Israel. It was created nearly 4,000 years ago, and Jews have lived there, continuously, ever since.

 

It was only in the last 400 or so years that they migrated to the West in significant numbers, first to Europe and then to America. As late as the 19th century, a majority of all the world’s Jews still lived in the Middle East. Often, in their long, tortured past, they were reduced to a remnant in Israel itself, but they never disappeared entirely, and most did not go far; they remained in the Middle East. And from the rise of Islam in the seventh century on, they lived there as dhimmis, subservient, regarded as religious inferiors, impoverished, mostly, and with no rights that a Muslim was bound to respect. Today, these native Middle Eastern Jews — not Ashkenazi immigrants from the west — are a majority of all the Jews in Israel. They became the majority not long after Israel declared its independence in 1948, because Arabs in Middle Eastern countries where Jews had lived for centuries responded by stripping them of whatever possessions they had and driving them out, creating about a million refugees. Mass expulsions like this were not new to the Jewish people, east or west, but this time, all the Jews had a place to go. Nearly all of the eastern Jews, the Mizrahi, went home, to Israel.

 

But no matter where they were, religious Jews never forgot the dream of a return to Zion, greeting one another each year, on Rosh Hashanah, the penitential Jewish New Year, by saying, “Next year in Yerushalayim” (Jerusalem). And, until the 20th century, most Jews were religious. Like most Christians then, and a majority of American Christians now, they believed what the Old Testament teaches: that God gave Biblical Israel — the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Golan Heights to the Red Sea — to the Jews to be their homeland forever. They believe that God directed Abraham, the first Jew, to settle there, in Hebron, where he still lies, and his tomb still stands.

 

Abraham is the man who gave the world monotheism. Born into a primitive, polytheistic world where every tribe had its own jealous and exclusive god, often one that required human sacrifice, Abraham’s God taught him that there is only one God, a God who created the universe and all mankind, a God who rejects human sacrifice. And from that day to this, Jews at prayer repeat the same ancient affirmation of monotheism: “Shema Yisrael. Adonai Elohanu, Adonai Echad.” (Hear O Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is One.) This one God is a God of justice, the Old Testament tells us, the God who gave us the Ten Commandments, to make clear our duty to treat all men justly.

 

The Old Testament tells us that He did this on Mount Sinai, a ways south of the Bethlehem birthplace of the next world-changing Jew, Jesus Christ; or from his crucifixion site on Mount Calvary. Jesus came to us 2,000 years ago, the New Testament tells us, to teach the world love and forgiveness, and well over 2 billion people — about a third of the people on earth — believe that He is God’s own Son, sent here by a merciful Father Who took pity on us mortal sinners and offered redemption and the promise of paradise to all who embrace Him and show true repentance. All this and more happened in Israel, the unique state whose essential geographical boundaries, the Bible tells us, were drawn by God Himself. No wonder, then, that the whole of Biblical Israel is and always has been holy ground to Bible believers everywhere. It is also militarily defensible ground, because it includes both Judea and Samaria — the land Muslim supremacists taught us to call “the West Bank” — as well as the high ground to the north, the Golan Heights.

 

“So what?” I hear my secular friends saying. “What has all this ancient history got to do with us, here in America, in 2012? Why should we care?” The answer is that we should all care, whether we are Jews, Christians, or Americans of other faiths, or of none, because our civilization — the Judeo-Christian civilization, from which we have all benefited enormously, and of which we are all a part — is under fierce attack today by Muslim supremacists, determined to force us all to bow down before them, either by converting to Islam or by accepting the status of dhimmis. This war did not start with the emergence of modern Israel; it has nothing to do with Israel’s treatment of the million or so Arabs in its midst; and it will not end if we allow Israel to be destroyed.

 

This war began in the seventh century, when Muhammad, believing that God had ordered him to conquer and rule the whole world in the name of Islam, first used Taqqiya to trick and then slaughter Jews in Saudi Arabia who did not bow to his new religion, and then went on to conquer large parts of the Arab world. It began, and continues today, because too many Muslims still refuse to accept people of other faiths — Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian — as equals they can respect and live in peace with; because too many are still committed to using Taqqiya and violence to establish their supremacy and our subservience. The problem is not that we have mistreated Muslims or failed to show them the respect they are due as people with great civilizational achievements in their own pasts. The problem is that supremacist Muslims have no respect for us. Accepting the ersatz identity of the so-called Palestinian people and groveling before this and other supremacist Taqqiyas does not win us respect. It earns us contempt, and strengthens the conviction — growing by leaps and bounds all over the Muslim world today, even in once-friendly Muslim lands — that we are a weak, confused, and cowardly people, remnants of a dying civilization, ripe for toppling. To change their minds, and our future, we need to reject the Palestinian Taqqiya and embrace Biblical Israel.