Before I say what I am going to say about Israel and Hamas, let me start with a few preliminaries.
First, I am a Christian and this means that I believe that Jesus Christ is the only hope of every nation, and this includes Israel. This means that Muslims and Israelis both are summoned by the gospel to surrender to Jesus Christ, and until that happens, there will never be peace between them. How could there be?
Second, I acknowledge that this particular mess in the Middle East would not be occurring if not for the misbegotten policies of the Zionism of yesteryear. Israel had no peculiar divine right to that territory, but they went there anyway, and bad things started to happen because Zionism as a doctrine is false. But in just the same way, Manifest Destiny was a piece of impudence cooked up by Americans during our “look at us go” stage. I object to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, along with the assumptions that were underneath it. So I don’t hold to Manifest Destiny at all, and yet, there my house is, ensconced in Idaho. I own that house, have a legitimate right to it, and would object in quite forceful terms if Nez Perce Indians were shooting rockets at it.
No international policy that demands that every people group return to their original homeland of, say, three thousand years ago, can lay any claim to moral seriousness at all. And ironically, if we began making that kind of demand, the Israelis would suddenly have a much stronger claim on their land . . . until the Amalekites showed up anyway.
But with all that said, this is why Israel has every right to do what they are currently doing. In order to make this observation, it is not necessary to enter into the inner counsels of whichever conspirators you believe are actually running the world. All you have to do is look at what the two sides are publicly doing or saying, and think about it carefully for a minute. First, Hamas, hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, has nevertheless successfully provoked Israel into a military response. No response on the part of Israel would clearly be impossible, and yet a military response puts them into the role, on the international stage, of kicking puppies. This is because Hamas has positioned themselves in such a way as to make it impossible for a military response to not hit civilians, and a lot of them. In this case, military weakness is PR strength, just so long as you have sentimentalists there with cameras. So if you want to understand what is going on, you have to know how to look past the spin war. I can see on camera which side is shooting rockets, and which side is driving the tanks. But which side is pointing the cameras? Christians should be a little more suspicious of the direction the media is pushing them. Which leads to the second point.
Second, the true nature of this set-up should be clear at a glance. According to the new conventional wisdom, Israel has become tyrannical, forgetting their own experience with the Nazis, and they have become what they once fled from. In this new narrative, the Palestinian people have been provoked into choosing a leadership that is on the fighting, radical end of things, but this is understandable, root causes, so forth and etc. But just yesterday, I heard a spokesman for Hamas outlining their demands. What is one of the central things they want? They want the border crossings into Israel opened so that inhabitants of Gaza can get into Israel freely. Huh? How does that fit with the narrative? When Jews escaped from the Nazis, did they form enclaves outside the Nazi borders, demanding to be let back in? No, because the Nazis really were . . . Nazis. There was genuine tyranny there, not just agitprop tyranny projected for the cameras.