peace on earth -- a judaic perspective

By Vince Dhimos

Paradoxically, when Netanyahu went to the US in an attempt to ignite a war with Iran back in 2014, thousands of Orthodox Jews protested. Christians stayed home.
 
"Netanyahu and his state don't represent Jews or Judaism,” said Rabbi Shaye Weiss. "This draft issue once again proves that their intention is to uproot religious Judaism."

"Only the Israeli government breaks into people's homes in the middle of the night, drags them out and throws them in jail for a year and a half, just because they don't want to be influenced by the irreligious and immoral environment of the Israeli army.”

Traditional Jews and Christians alike would agree that the Israeli army, which allows LGBT people to join and even provides free hormone treatment for transgender conscripts, is not moral by biblical standards. Yet ironically, US Christian Zionists, most of whom reject this libertinism on religious grounds, are more than willing to support the Israeli government simply because it is located in the “Holy Land.”

Despite the devoutness proudly displayed by many American, and some European, Christians, many Orthodox Jews have a clearer, more scriptural view of God’s will for the Hebrews than do Christian Zionists (as I will show further on). In fact, many Orthodox Jews reject Zionism completely and denounce the notion of a Jewish state as contrary to God’s wishes. One Jewish site even calls for a boycott of Israel, based on Biblical precepts.

Another site, True Torah Jews, posts a passionate plea by a non-Zionist Jew to Christians begging them not to encourage Jews to immigrate to Israel because they are much safer in America. He reminds us that every time the Israeli government issues a warlike or hateful statement about Palestinians or others, there is a deadly or potentially deadly attack on Israel.
He points out that it is more anti-Semitic to support Israel in this way than not to.

But this message seems to be falling on deaf Christian ears, with US fundamentalists blindly supporting the warlike Likud government without any awareness of the danger of war into which they are plunging the world.

By contrast, Evangelicals are bending over backwards to Israel, even twisting the scriptures completely out of shape just to be counted among the defenders of Israel, perhaps in a vain bid to get a shoe into the pearly gates despite their sins.

Almost every evangelical site I visited (for example, here, here and here – the first ones to come up in a search) said exactly the same thing about the so-called Palestinian Covenant supposedly contained in Deuteronomy 29 (though it is in fact in Deuteronomy 28), namely, that unlike the older Mosaic Covenant, of roughly the same content, this covenant is “unconditional,” ie, no matter whether the Israelites obey God or not, According to these "Bible scholars," God makes this promise to Israel forever.  But that’s just the opposite of what Chapter 28 says, which presents the actual content of the covenant. No wonder they pass over that inconvenient chapter, which says:

1 And it shall come to pass, if [oops. If introduces a condition] thou [Israel] shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

2 And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.

This is followed by a lengthy series of blessings.

But later in this same uncomfortable chapter, God says through Moses:

15 But it shall come to pass, if [here comes] thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

This is followed by a lengthy series of divine curses, including this: 36 The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your ancestors.

And that's exactly what happened. When the Israelites disobeyed, God did indeed allow them to be scattered, once in the Assyrian exile of 722 BC and again in the Babylonian captivity starting in 597 BC. Other diasporas followed, and the Jews were told they were scattered due to disobedience to God. A return to their traditional beliefs is not recorded. After 73 AD, Israel ceased to exist as a place, only as a diaspora.

Chapter 29, which Evangelicals inexplicably insist is the covenant itself, then opens:
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29 1 These are the words of the covenant, which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which he made with them in Horeb.
This first verse of Chapter 29 is clearly referring back to Chapter 28, the actual covenant we are not supposed to notice, because the next passage in chapter 29 (the supposed covenant) moves on to another subject, ie, a brief recap of the history of the Israelites during their 40 years in the wilderness following their liberation from Egyptian bondage, and then segues into a warning as to how God would punish certain individuals – not the Israelites at large – who disobey Him. Note that, as we have seen, chapter 28 discusses what would happen to all of Israel should it disobey, not just to individuals, so chapter 28 is indeed the content of this covenant made with God and the Hebrews, not chapter 29 as almost all Evangelical Bible “scholars” would have us believe, yet without providing any explanation for such a mangled interpretation.

So why would almost all Protestant (Evangelical) commentaries ignore the content of chapter 28 and insist that chapter 29 is the covenant when it is so obvious to any unbiased reader of the scripture that it is the other way around?

It’s because this chapter 29 does not apply to the Hebrew people as a whole and therefore fits in with a centuries-old cultish set of beliefs, notably that the covenant to grant land to Israel is irrevocable, ie, unconditional. Since the 17th Century, prominent Protestants in both England and the US (including President John Adams) have raved about the restoration of Israel, originally because they thought that if the Jews came together in their old homeland, they would somehow be led to accept the Messiah, and Jew and Gentile would join hands and live in harmony forevermore. Wikipedia provides a very comprehensive article on Christian Zionism that is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic.

Beyond this, there are 2 major reasons for the Christian zeal to extend “Christian” doctrines well beyond the Bible and into a fantasy world in which Christ takes a back seat to an Israel that has never repented of the sins for which it was banished.

Firstly, American fundamentalists frequently indicate that the restoration of Israel is a prerequisite to the Second Coming of Christ. Many naively believe that they can actually lend God a hand in making this happen.  As if He really needed their bungling assisance, including a blatant misinterpretation of the scriptures.

Secondly, there is a palpable fearamong many believers that anyone who does not bow to the wishes of the secular Israeli government is inviting God’s curse mentioned in Genesis, namely, that those who curse Israel will be cursed and those who bless her will be blessed. And since they accept the notion that today’s Israel is the embodiment of the re-assembled dry bones prophesied in Ezekiel 37, then they believe it behoves them to lend God a hand in making this prophesy come true – as if God really needs the efforts of foolish men to do his work. Thus, according to this reasoning, if they fail to fully support this nation that calls itself Israel, they will bring down God’s wrath upon their heads – something that, in their minds, could quite likely put them on the path to hell. They ignore that Ezekiel foretold that this resurrected Israel would be obedient to God, in stark contrast to the Israel of today with 50% irreligious among its populace.

The Jewish scriptures tell a different story, and the Orthodox know that God had first blessed them but then cursed them, leaving them without a homeland. These Jews, whose beliefs are, ironically, much closer to those of Christians in areas outside the topic of modern Israel, do not entertain any illusions that God has forgiven them for disobedience – because their fellow Jews by and large reject the scriptures. You’d think Christians could understand this just as easily as they, and in fact they could were it not for the blatant Christian Zionist propaganda that has permeated the Anglo-Saxon world for centuries.Support for Israel today is like the Medieval purchase of indulgences from the Church to keep oneself out of hellfire.

The following anecdote should serve to show how much Christian leaders fear any departure from their Zionist cult.

To illustrate how desperately these cultists cling to their beloved Tel Aviv, consider the following.

Recently a friend sent me a link to an article by Joseph Farah posted at WND, titled “Palestinian people do not exist.” It’s like saying the Sherpas of Nepal do not exist because they are not a nation, so it is ok to just mow them down with machine guns.                                                                                                                                                     
I was compelled to respond in the WND forum, and wrote:

http://www.wnd.com/2002/07/14501/#ixzz1N2CNzRCw
There you go again Joe. Look, Friend, there may or may not have been a Palestinian people at one time. But when a powerful country bares its fangs and comes after any group, that group solidifies. Trump and the country that arrogates the name Israel to itself are the enemies of a small group of people who once lived, worked and farmed in a place from which Britain and the world's Zionists banished them, without a cause. That violent act called into existence a nation that had not existed until then. They were harming no one. Now they are angry, and that anger will not go away. And besides, they have most of world opinion on their side. Hitler gave the world a lesson that it never assimilated. Instead of saying "never again" to the rude and inhuman tactics of Adolf, the Western world decided to pass Hitler's torch on to his victims, tacitly giving them the green light to torture, kill and disenfranchise others. A Christian nation would not do this, but the West has never received Christ's message. Instead we turned to the law and pushed aside Christ's core teaching of love. All human conflicts and wars are caused by dehumanization. Dehumanizing them makes it so easy to harm or kill them. We have constructed a whole culture of narratives to give ourselves the "right" to hate and push aside an entire group of people. We have said Jerusalem is not really important to the Muslims because it is not mentioned in the Koran [Zionist Daniel Pipes wrote this in a commentary]. Nice play. Except that the Koran does mention Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque as the holiest of places. We have said Israelis are geniuses who have made our lives better. Hitler said this too about the Germans. Yet nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus say that talented people have more rights than others. We have said their children throw stones at the police. Yet these police are usurpers and occupiers. They occupy land that was the home of these children's grandparents who were dispossessed. The Zionists cry "never again" as they beat, jail, kill and disenfranchise these people. Yet it was not these people who threw them in the gas chambers. We say the Palestinians are subhuman. That is what Hitler said about the Jews. Joe, it is time you accepted Christ. You've been rejecting Him for a long time.

When I returned to the site, I saw the comment was missing, so I tried to insert it again. I received the message:

 We are unable to post your comment because you have been banned by WND. 

Censorship is a  typical Zionist response to criticism. And in this case, Joe surely was shocked that I told him he should turn to Jesus, because he enjoys the label of Christian conservative.
Now normal people know that if you aren’t cursing or insulting anyone, then the best approach is to respond and rebut the criticism. But poor Joe just couldn’t find the words. Perhaps he thought that what I said was blasphemy. Indeed, if the current twisted interpretation of Ezekiel 37 were accurate, then I suppose it would have been blasphemy. But for whatever reason, Joe was not ready for a head to head confrontation with me. I welcome him to come to this forum. I still harbour warm feelings toward the man (and he has a nicely groomed moustache), but felt I had to set him straight. After all, nowadays, considering the strange tolerance of the Israeli military for ISIS (as reported here), blind support for Israel is blind support for war.

Any time, Joe. I am not afraid of words. Are you?

I would encourage readers to post at the forum from which I was banned.
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Here is the link: http://www.wnd.com/2002/07/14501/#ixzz1N2CNzRCw