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The War in Israel

~ the following three sections are excerpts from a recently released book by Jim Denison.
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Why is there such animosity toward the nation of Israel?

One of the shocking consequences of Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel has been the rise of antisemitism in the weeks following. According to a recent report from the Anti-Defamation League, for example, antisemitic incidents in the United States rose about 400 percent in the two weeks after Hamas’s atrocities.

Antisemitism around the world has escalated to constitute an “existential threat” in the weeks since Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israeli civilians and wounded more than 3,300. Antisemitism in the US had already escalated last year to the highest recorded level. Now CNN reports that a “new wave of antisemitism threatens to rock an already unstable world.”

Nowhere has opposition to Israel been more evident than on America’s college campuses. Hundreds of protests against Israel’s response to the October 7 invasion have been staged by students across the country. As one example, Cornell University canceled classes after death threats were posted toward Jewish students.

• What is behind these campus movements and the larger rise of antisemitism in our day?
• How can we respond in ways that are both truthful and redemptive?
• Did the Jews steal the land from the Palestinians?

The first reason for opposition to Israel is the claim that the Jewish state is an “occupier” and “colonizer” of land it stole in 1948 from its rightful Palestinian owners.

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations claimed that Israel is an “occupying power” and thus does not have the right to self-defense. The International Court of Justice issued an opinion in 2004 that Israel is in fact an “occupier” of Palestinian lands in Gaza and the West Bank. We continue to hear this claim in the news and at pro-Palestinian rallies.

So, did Israel steal its land from its rightful Palestinian owners?

Based on the history of the land as described in Chapter 1, four facts are important:

• First, the original “owners” of the land were the Canaanites from whom the Jews conquered the land under Joshua. Their descendants now live in Lebanon and bear no genealogical relationship to the current-day Palestinians.

• Second, present-day Palestinians are descendants of the Arabs who first conquered the land in AD 640, not the Philistines for whom the region is named. They took the land from the Jews and Christians who lived there prior to their conquest.

• Third, the Jews never abandoned the land and repopulated it alongside Arab Palestinians across recent centuries.

• Fourth, an autonomous nation called Palestine would have been created by the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947, an arrangement Jewish leaders accepted, but Arab leaders rejected.

Thus, Israel did not steal the land from its rightful Palestinian owners. If anything, the Palestinians’ ancestors stole it from the Jews who were there prior to AD 640.

Israel maintains no presence in Gaza, so it cannot be “colonizing” the region. It granted the PA limited autonomy of the West Bank in 1993, though some Jewish settlements greatly complicate the Palestinian quest for ownership of this area.

In short, while Israel continues to be accused on college campuses and elsewhere of being an “occupying colonizer,” this is not true.
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Hamas and the Palestinians

We will discuss Hamas in greater detail in Chapter 5. For now, let’s note that this political party gained control of Gaza in 2007. It was founded in 1987 and published its official charter in 1988, calling for the destruction of Israel and raising “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” Its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, stated that “reconciliation with the Jews is a crime” and claimed that Israel “must disappear from the map.”

Hamas believes that the Qur’an requires Muslims to defend Islam by attacking Israel and anyone who supports the Jewish people (cf. Qur’an 2:190; 9:5). It views the Jewish people as “apes and swine” (Qur’an 5:60; see 2:65; 7:166). Since Israel is a democracy, Hamas considers its citizens to be complicit in an “attack” on Islam.

As a result, Hamas did not see the October 7 invasion as an assault on innocent civilians. It believes it is defending the Palestinian people and the Muslim world from their oppressors. Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters across US college campuses agree.

However, it is actually Hamas who is the enemy of the Palestinian people.

The terrorists hide their munitions and fighters in a vast network of tunnels beneath homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals used by Palestinian civilians. This way, for Israel to destroy these tunnels, it must destroy civilian structures under which they are located.

Hamas has turned hospitals into command-and-control centers for its militants and hides its soldiers among the civilian population.

In these and other ways, it continues to violate the rules of war as prescribed by the Geneva Convention and other humanitarian laws.

While more than half of the civilians in Gaza are impoverished, several of Hamas’s leaders live in Qatar, more than a thousand miles from Gaza; some are estimated to be billionaires. After their 2014 conflict with Hamas, Israeli officials estimated that the average tunnel built by Hamas required enough construction supplies to build eighty-six homes, seven mosques, six schools, or nineteen medical clinics. Hamas continues to steal fuel, medical supplies, and provisions intended for the civilian population.

As a result, the Wall Street Journal editorial board stated: “Palestinian lives matter, except to Hamas.” Referencing Israel’s challenge in destroying Hamas while protecting civilians in Gaza, the article notes:

"Blaming Israel for these civilian casualties amounts to denying the Jewish state its right to self-defense. It means that Hamas can launch attacks on Israel with the goal of slaughtering women and children, but Israel can’t attack Hamas in Gaza because civilians might be unintentional casualties. It means Hamas would retain a terrorist sanctuary from which it can attack Israel whenever it has the means and opportunity."

No other country on earth would agree to the terms of defensive engagement that much of the world wants to impose on Israel.

To summarize:

Israel’s incursion into Gaza is not an oppression of the Palestinian People — it is a military response to the atrocities of October 7 necessary to preserve the Jewish state and its future. When civilians are harmed as a result, this is the fault of Hamas. The terrorists started this conflict, and they are continuing it while hiding behind Palestinians and using them as human shields.
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By supporting Hamas – you are supportive of the following actions by Hamas on 10/7/2023:

“Babies, women, the elderly were dragged outside of their homes, were taken hostage. Civilians were shot and most were massacred in cold blood walking on the streets. This is something that, I mean, is truly unprecedented.”

This is how Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan described the surprise attack Hamas launched on Israel by air, land, and sea on October 7, 2023. “This is our 9/11,” he added.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said, “We have had the worst day in Israeli history when it comes to casualties. . . . In American terms, this is a Pearl Harbor and a 9/11 all together.”

After the invasion by Hamas’s terrorists, forensic teams were dispatched to document their atrocities. A reserve officer serving with these observers said, “We’ve seen dismembered bodies with their arms and feet chopped off, people that were beheaded, a child that was beheaded.” Multiple cases of rape were found by examination of the bodies.

A physician who is also an observant Muslim arrived on the scene on October 19 to spend ten days as a human rights observer. She reported: “One word continually came to mind: genocide. No matter how it emerges, the monster is easy to recognize. As a doctor, I had a rare and panoramic view of the aftermath: the targeted people’s long, agonizing journey to death.” She noted, “Hamas tortured and immolated its victims, including children, pregnant women, and the unborn.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken later described what authorities found in one home attacked by the terrorists: “A family of four. A young boy and girl, six and eight years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off — before they were executed. And then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with.”
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~ excerpts from: "The War in Israel", by Jim Denison, PHD

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