The pro-Israeli lobby is the most powerful and cashed up lobby in the US Congress. Supported by fundamentalist Protestants combined with wealthy Jewish citizens, every US administration has been forced into agreeing to support a militarily strong Israel. Under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. the USA funded Israel for billions of dollars flowing into Israel every year to support the Israeli armed forces. A Jewish population of six million citizens could not afford the largest, most powerful army in the Middle East without the billions of US dollars. In its turn the US has been happy to have another country keeping the Middle Eastern Arab countries in check without interfering with the Arab American oil trade.
Hence the attack on Gaza is a stern warning to Lebanon and the Hizballah and Iran, which funds both Hizballah and Hamas. That lesson to the other countries has cost Gaza at least 2,400 Palestinian dead and 4000 injured, the majority of both the dead and wounded being civilians and children.
Will Obama continue the US support of a militaristic Israel? While cognizant of the Jewish and fundamentalist Christian lobby, unlike the previous presidents he does not owe his election to this lobby. Obama has made a point of saying he wants to build better relations with the Arab nations and has pointedly refrained from excusing Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Israeli commanders and politicians are faced with a painful dilemma with the gains appearing to diminish compared to the spiralling costs â€" to Israel's moral stature, to the lives of Palestinian civilians and to the world's hopes that an ancient conflict can ever be resolved. Israeli politicians and generals know that the total elimination of Hamas' entrenched military command is not possible. The more realistic outcome is an unsatisfactory truce that leaves Hamas wounded but alive and able to regenerate â€" and Israel only temporarily safe from attack.
Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, promised a "war to the bitter end." But after 60 years of struggle to defend their existence against foreign threats and enemies within, many Israelis are wondering, "Where does that end lie?" During this recent aggressive attack on Gaza, a large protest force against their own armed aggression caused politicians to re-think their strategy of a cease-fire. The threat posed by Hamas is only the most immediate of the many interlocking challenges facing Israel, some of which cast dark shadows over the long-term viability of a democratic Jewish state.
Israel has grown into a strong, modern and democratic country and a dependable American ally. A strong, confident Israel is in America's interest, but so is one that can find peace with its neighbours, cooperate with the Arabs to contain common threats and, most important, reach a just and lasting solution with the Palestinians. That is what President Obama wants.
The offensive in Gaza may limit Hamas' ability to menace southern Israel with rocket fire but, as with Israel's 2006 war against Hizballah, the application of force won't extinguish the militants' ideological fervour. The anti-Israeli anger swelling in the region has made it more difficult for Arab governments to join Israel in its efforts to deal with Iran, the patron of both Hamas and Hizballah, and a state whose leaders have sworn to eliminate Israel and appear determined to acquire nuclear weapons.
Some critical correspondents called for the Palestinians to accept the democratically elected Israeli Government. But just as ominous for many Israelis is a ticking demographic time bomb: the likelihood that Arabs will vastly outnumber Jews within the next ten years (by 2020) in the land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. That is a catastrophic prospect for the Israelis.
At some point Israelis will have to choose between living with an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, or watching as Jews become a minority in their own land. Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, with those in Israel, may already outnumber Jews, and given their higher birth-rate, scare even hawkish Israelis like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who abandoned the biblical dreams of an Israel stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Many of my critics do not understand that this dream has already been abandoned by the Israelis.
As Prime Minister Olmert recently warned, "If we are determined to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, we must inevitably relinquish, with great pain, parts of our homeland." In other words, if Israelis cling to the West Bank and Gaza, as many religious Zionists insist, Jews will find themselves a shrinking minority in their own state.
Not only would Israel cease to be a Jewish state, it would no longer be a democratic one either, unless Arabs are given a fair share of power. A few bold Arab intellectuals are saying Palestinians should abandon the idea of a two-state solution and just wait until they outnumber the Jews. But the population shift underscores a plain fact: for Israel, the status quo won't be good enough for much longer.
A new exodus from the promised land? Many Israeli citizens have already given up on Zionism, the philosophy that underlies the existence of the Jewish state. It calls for the return home of the world's Jews, because of the continuing violence and for the sake of their children.
The fact of so many Israelis leaving the Jewish state to reside elsewhere clearly presents an ideological and demographic problem. In the past several decades, emigration has been growing. From 1990 to 2005, more than 230,000 Israelis left the country; a large proportion of these departures included people who initially immigrated to Israel and then reversed their course (60% of 2003 and 2004 departures were former immigrants to Israel). Eight percent of Jewish immigrants in the post-1990 period left Israel, while 15% of non-Jewish immigrants did. In 2005 alone, 21,500 Israelis left the country and have not yet returned.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 2005, an estimated 650,000 Israelis had left the country for over one year and not returned. Of them, 530,000 are still alive today. This number does not include the children born overseas.
The Ultra–Orthodox make a great deal of living in the Promised Land, including the settlements on the West bank. But most Jews are not Orthodox (believers in the Old Testament and Practitioners of the Jewish religion.) For the majority, the Promised Land is a political issue. Of all Israeli citizens, 25% are atheist, not believing in God at all, 43% are secular having no patterns of synagogue attendance or observance of regular worship. They are pagan non-believers. There are 12% who describe themselves are traditionalist or (non-practicing Jews) while 9% describe themselves as "religious" but not observing the Jewish religion. There is less than 1.8% who describe themselves as any kind of Christian, including an infinitesimal part of less than 1% who are Messianic Jews.
So here is a new part of the equation. As the numbers of Jews in Israel become a smaller part of the general population, a new Exodus is likely – this time from the Promised Land to the two continents where Jews from South Africa have moved in the last two decades – to North America and Australia.
Israel was established following a century of Zionist lobbying and to salve the Western nations' conscience over the Holocaust by giving the Jews the birthplace of their ancestors, in spite of the Palestinians who had lived there continuously for 1,300 years and considered it the homeland given to their Father Abraham. Israel is a latecomer to the land even though they share the same patriarch who was promised the land.
Many Christians remember the promise to Israel, but forget Ishmael's descendents were also there, and the Bible nowhere says the Promised Land will be for one tribe alone. Some CDP members who emailed me wrote that the fact that Israel suffered almost no casualties (four killed and 57 wounded since December 27th 2008) while the Gazans suffered 2,400 citizens killed and over 4000 injured is a sign that God was blessing Israeli soldiers.
I repudiate that suggestion. This is terrible theology, a sign of crooked thinking and absolutely untrue to every situation where the innocent suffer. It is simply a sign that one side had an army, navy and an air force, all armed with the latest weapons, and financed with billions of US dollars – while the other side did not. We do not believe the dictum that God is on the side of the strongest battalions. What a primitive view. In the early days of the church, this mentality was found in those in the stands of the Colosseum who were cheering on the lions!
The immediate challenge facing Israel is that posed by Hamas. Gaza's tragedy has for days been playing out on the world's TV sets. Israel's predicament is that in any confrontation with its enemies, it is damned if it does and doomed if it doesn't.
An Israel General election in a couple of weeks for a new Prime Minister to replace the corrupt Ehud Olmert, meant that all candidates for the position wanted their nation to see them tough on Hamas and keen on war.
Hamas' provocative rocket barrages could not go unanswered. So many people believe the propaganda that Israel had to go to war to protect itself from Hamas rockets. These people never acknowledge that for over two years Hamas has fired rockets because Israel had blocked all borders – not allowing in food, fuel, the commodities for normal living, nor allowing Palestinians to get out to go to work in factories or farms. Every farm, orchard and food factory surrounding Gaza was bulldozed by the Israelis. The tunnels into Egypt supplied the food required for one and a half million people but also allowed rockets to be smuggled.
Neither do people who promote Israel's Navy pounding the Gaza houses, Air Force directing bombs and rockets, and Army tanks shelling houses, schools, hospitals and refugee camps, ever consider whether Israel's response has been proportional to the threat.
Many who wrote to me stated that Israel had to respond because Hamas rockets were wiping out Israel's cities including Jerusalem and killing large numbers of Israel's citizens. That is rubbish. There has been no major damage to any city in Israel, including Jerusalem.
In fact Palestinian rocket attacks (which number 8,000 rockets over 8 years) which sounds like total warfare, have resulted in 20 Israeli deaths over those 8 years. That is half the number of deaths of people involved in traffic accidents on Israel's roads every month. Compare that with over two thousand deaths and four thousand injured in the past three weeks in Gaza. The Israeli aggression has been out of all proportion to their perceived threat.
Worse than Israel's loss of standing in the eyes of all other major countries of the world has been the loss of Israel's perceived power of deterrence, which is key to keeping its hostile neighbours at bay. Israel has failed in these past weeks, despite all the damage to Gaza their armed forces delivered to disarm Hamas. That power was badly eroded in 2006, when Hizballah was able to withstand the Israeli onslaught, force a cease-fire and claim victory in the process.
That surely emboldened Hamas, which intermittently sent rockets into southern Israel and finally prompted Israel to respond in force. As respected Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "A country that is afraid to deal with Hamas won't be able either to deter Iran or to safeguard its interests in dealing with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he didn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. If there was one loser in the Gaza conflict it was the leader of the Palestinians, Abbas, who has been propped up by Israel and USA. Even those Gazans who do not support Hamas know now that only Hamas can gain them freedom.
So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels.
Hamas says it will agree to a truce if Israel retreats from Gaza and loosens the economic chokehold that has strangled the 1.5 million Palestinians who live on the sliver of land along the Mediterranean. After weeks of global outrage over the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Gaza, any mediator â€" France, the European Union, Turkey or Egypt â€" will insist that Israel end its 18-month blockade on all food, medicines, supplies and movement for work.
What then? Like Hizballah, Hamas will declare itself victorious: not only will it have survived a direct assault by a far superior military force, but it will also have freed Gazans from Israeli tyranny. As an added bonus, any economic revival of Gaza would put money into Hamas' coffers. But Israel would gain some breathing space and force Hamas to prove it can actually govern and maintain stability in Gaza rather than heap blame entirely on Israel.
Some of my critics refuse to see any blame attached to Israel because they say, "the Bible can explain the mystery behind the supernatural hatred of the Jews. Bible prophecy predicted that Israel would be miraculously reborn in 'the last days'. This will be soon followed by Armageddon and the return of Y'shua the Messiah. All of this is being fulfilled to the letter before our eyes. So don't be surprised or afraid. Messiah Y'shua's return to deliver those who have believed in Him is coming very soon."
All of this is according to their theory of Biblical prophecy and their timeline. Most Christians in the world do not agree with them. Not one Christian reason was given to support Israeli aggression against Gaza.
Now that Western observers have been allowed into Gaza, they have discovered more than enough evidence that Israel committed war crimes in its three weeklong offensive. The UN investigator, Richard Falk, has called for an independent inquiry into Israel's violation of international humanitarian law. Falk said Israel's actions against the besieged Gazans are reminiscent of "the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto" which included the starvation and murder of Polish Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two.
"There could have been temporary provision, at least, made for children, disabled, sick civilians to leave, even if where they left to was southern Israel," said the Jewish American academic. Falk, who was denied entry to Israel in December, said Gazans may have been mentally scarred for life because Israel made no effort to allow civilians to escape.
Israeli officials moved closer to being prosecuted for war crimes after Norwegian medics in Gaza found traces of depleted uranium on Gaza victims, suggesting that Israel used the illegal weapons in its war on the impoverished territory, which houses some 1.5 million Palestinians.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), there is a "high risk of developing cancer from exposure to radiation emitted by depleted uranium weapons." The Geneva Convention has classified depleted uranium ammunitions as 'illegal weapons of mass destruction' due to their high radioactivity and toxicity.
Israel faces potential war crimes charges over its excessive use of other controversial weapons on the densely-populated coastal strip. Human rights group Amnesty International has also said that Israel "used white phosphorus munitions indiscriminately and illegally" in overcrowded areas of Gaza.
"The repeated use of white phosphorus in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," said Amnesty International. White phosphorus is a high-incendiary substance that bursts into all-consuming flames that cannot be extinguished with water, burning flesh to the bone and often leading to death.
My correspondents do not take these illegal activities by Israel into account. The argument that the assault was for self-defence is not acceptable, as the UN Charter and international law, do not give Israel the legal foundation for claiming self-defence.
But by killing thousands of Palestinians, Israel may have undermined its hopes of forming common cause with moderate Sunni Arab states against the nuclear ambitions of Shi'ite Iran. The Gaza offensive has greatly weakened Israel's few Arab allies. Moderate Arab countries that were edging closer to recognition of the Jewish state are now recoiling from what they see as the slaughter of fellow Arabs in Gaza.
Israel's leaders need to recognize that if Hamas cannot be beaten militarily, then it must be engaged politically. That means accepting the idea of dealing with some kind of Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, for the Islamic militants legitimately came to power in the January 2006 democratic elections.
The new administration in Washington has a chance to be both supportive of Israel and tough with it. Obama has the freedom to reduce America's financial support to Israel dramatically and, with the world's financial chaos, he has a good excuse to significantly cut back. Without those huge financial supplies, Israel's future is in doubt. Its survival depends upon Obama.
As Christian people of faith we seek nonviolent ways to confront the violence, terrorism and fear prevailing in many countries. We need believers from all Christian denominations, but also representatives of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, to join the efforts for peace. The most effective work for peace will ultimately require interfaith vision, effort and cooperation. No desire to make our own concept of Biblical prophecy come true should prevent us from working with people of good will from other faiths.
War is contrary to the will of God. It is true that many Christians still see war as a last resort. But there is now broad agreement that war is 'inherently evil'. Christians should never identify human violence with God's purposes. It is never redemptive. Instead, the Bible calls us to be "ambassadors of reconciliation."
On the Web:
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