In Defense of Defending Israel | Tom Pappert

The war between Israel and Hamas is revealing.

Many who were previously considered intellectual titans, or at least reliable sources, have been reduced to propaganda peddlers. Left wing intersectionality is on its last possible breath, if not already dead and splayed across the ground. And the familiar drums of war are beating, with Senate Republicans promising an alliance with Joe Biden if he will just invade Iran.

The price? More than 1,400 Israelis dead, dozens of women and children spirited away to Gaza, and reports of 3,000 civilians dead on the strip. Countless destroyed buildings, including a Orthodox Christian church, and tens of thousands of destroyed lives, are also among the carnage.

I am not here to kvetch about woke college students, nor am I here to tongue-lash The Squad. Instead, I will endeavor to explain why Israel should be supported on logical, geopolitical grounds.

I do realize many on the American Right reflexively support Israel, with a significant chunk asserting a theocratic component. Christian dispensationalism teaches God’s covenant with the Jewish people remains in place and must be protected. I am not a dispensationalist, and will not be reiterating those arguments.

For the record, my Christian theology insists anyone who accepts Christ becomes part of Israel. In the Bible, Israel is a name used for the people of God, not a geographic region, a flag, or lines drawn on a map. After Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again, our Lord revealed himself to all men – Hebrew and Gentile – on the day of Epiphany through the Holy Spirit. The moment proved God’s love extends to all who accept Him, making Jews no more, or less, special than anyone else.

While I do not view the current conflict through a theocratic lens, there certainly is one. In Judaism, their Messiah will not come until the Third Temple is complete. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans about 2,000 years ago, and when the Muslims later seized the Holy Land in Muhammad’s bloody revolution, they built the Al-Aqsa mosque near its original site. That mosque, we are repeatedly informed by the Muslim world, is the “third holiest site in Islam.”

As a result of some previous conflict, Israel agreed it would remain a Muslim holy site, and would be off limits to Jews. If either side accidentally lobs a missile at the mosque, and some lunatic then stacks two rocks and a stick together and calls it the foundation to the Third Temple, I believe the conflict could easily escalate to include the entire Muslim world.

I offer my analysis of the theocratic implications of the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish views on the conflict to stress that my own stance depends on none of them.

Israel is at war with a sectarian militant group that seized control of 141 square miles of land called Gaza. They were democratically elected in 2006, after Israel pulled out of Gaza in a U.S.-backed bid for Palestinians to experience Western values for the first time. After being democratically elected, Hamas ended all future elections, declared itself the only legitimate government of the Palestinian people, and began a conflict that would remain frozen for 17 years.

Some say Hamas does not represent the average Gazan, while others claim Hamas would be reelected in a landslide if they actually allowed another election. I don’t really think it matters.

Regardless of public support, Hamas is an openly hostile government that is willing to resort to mass murder, kidnapping, and rape to achieve their goals. To avoid punishment, they embed military assets in civilian locations. Most tragically, as I write this, Hamas is accused of housing its primary base of operations inside a hospital where women and children are receiving medical care.

They are not the first group of people to do this. For a recent example, Ukraine was accused of using hospitals, elementary schools, and daycare facilities to shield military targets from attack when Russia’s 2022 invasion began. As a more visceral example, I offer the fate of Dresden, Germany.

In World War II, more than 1,000 planes from the United States and United Kingdom dropped more than 3,900 tons of explosives on Dresden, a formerly beautiful city that the Germans irresponsibly used to support their military industrial complex without protecting it. The bombs killed 25,000 civilians, though less reliable estimates claim over 200,000 innocent people died in the bombings.

For each scenario, what is the correct course of action? The West often dismisses the Russian perspective and argues Vladimir Putin should end his war of aggression, but what about in World War II? Should the Allies have allowed Nazi Germany to feed, clothe, and equip its troops, merely because the innocent people of Dresden were used as human shields?

Should those human shields have been allowed to live, even if Dresden’s production abilities could have extended the war another several years, meaning even more soldiers would have died? More Romani, dissidents, homosexuals, and Jews systematically killed in camps?

How about the atomic bombs of World War II? Some say the Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and the United States committed a nuclear holocaust against two cities for no reason. Others, however, argue the Japanese were training women and children to fight, and insist that the Russians would soon have launched a ground invasion of Japan.

Would it have been better for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be spared, even it it meant the rape and murder of countless other Japanese? Even if it meant the people of Japan would suffer under generations of brutal, totalitarian communism?

I really hate to compare every conflict to the last World War, but it’s question that needs to be answered: What is the correct way to defeat a belligerent enemy that embeds itself behind civilian targets?

Historically, the only way is through the horrific practice of war. The more quickly a conflict can end, the less blood will be spilled.

I support Israel in its defensive war, and I will support Israel when it finally launches its ground invasion of Gaza. I see no way forward for Hamas to exist as a political structure within an enclave of Israel’s borders, nor do I see a way for the Israeli people to keep their national pride without dealing some critical blow to Hamas.

My heart breaks for the innocent people of Gaza, whether they are 40 percent of the population or 90 percent. Children are likely being born in Gaza as you read this. Even if their parents are Islamic radicals who preach death to America and Israel, the infant who was just born is loved by God and has committed no sin against us.

Likewise, my heart also breaks when I read the first-hand accounts of the Fall of Berlin. It breaks when I read about those souls trapped in Bakhmut as the Russians whittled away Ukraine’s defenses, and when I read about the stomach-churning suffering experienced by many who survived the initial nuclear blasts in Japan.

To be sure, Israel’s messaging is uniquely abysmal. Instead of promising to liberate the innocent Gazans who are held hostage by a rogue government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently referenced Amalek, which God ordered to be devastated beyond redemption for its transgressions against Israel.

Netanyahu declaring invasion: "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible"

1 Samuel 15:3

"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" pic.twitter.com/5QF9PkGhjJ

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 28, 2023

But who is really to blame for the current insanity in the Middle East? Is it the Israelis and their horrific propaganda, or Hamas and their theology of conquest? Perhaps instead, blame should lie with the architects of the Cold War who created Israel.

The modern nation of Israel was created in 1948. It was created from land that was most recently British, but previously Ottoman. Before the Ottomans, the geographic region now called Israel and Palestine was previously controlled by the Muslim Mamluks, before them the the Abbasids, and before them the Sassanids. This is, of course, a great oversimplification that ignores the brief Crusader period and exactly how many Muslim theocracies existed, but you get the point. 

Before the age of Muslim conquest, though, Syria Palaestina was part of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 500s, and the Roman Empire before that. In fact, the last time the region was governed by native peoples – the Cannanites, Philistines, and Israelites – was around 600 B.C.

As I understand it, the original Jewish Zionists wanted to buy land in the region. They believed that, should enough Zionists buy land, they could eventually gain enough power within government to form a Jewish state. If the Jewish state was slowly created over generations through hard work, grit, and determination, perhaps it would not be so controversial today.

But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where hostage-holding extremists are using their countrymen as human shields after seizing control and ending all redress of government 17 years ago. And in the United States, instead of a deal-making president who might be capable of defusing the situation, we have an Alzheimer’s president who governs by committee.

This is the world we live in, and the only logical stance is to support Israel’s right to self defense.

Before I leave, I will add a caveat: The United States is in no condition for war. I will never support direct U.S. military involvement in Israel’s war. In my view, Israel receives billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid to buy our military equipment specifically so we do not need to involve ourselves in their conflict.

And a second caveat: If the war does escalate, and come to include the United States, I believe it will result in China, Russia, and Iran becoming the preeminent poles of influence for the remainder of our century. If you are an American Nationalist, this must be avoided at all cost.