YOU SUPPORT JEWS? WHICH ONES?

YOU SUPPORT JEWS? WHICH ONES?

By Harmony Grant

Every wise and divinely inspired person in the Bible urges us to support righteous people and oppose those who do evil. �Love must be sincere,� writes Paul. �Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.� (Rom. 12:9)

Yet much of the evangelical church fails to apply this simple moral law to the state of Israel. Most evangelical Christians blindly insist we must �bless� Israel with unconditional support regardless of what she does. We are taught to ignore her injustice, her rejection and defamation of Christ, and her supremacist religious aims. Why is Israel an exception to the rule of approving those who do what is right? Evangelicals falsely believe God has an unconditional covenant of blessing upon Jews�a covenant that is unaffected by Jews� disobedience and rebellion.

But God�s promise of blessing to Jews�including the right to occupy Palestine�is conditioned on obedient faith, the kind given by Abraham, Moses and Joshua. Someday, out of respect for all the great Hebrew saints and prophets who labored for righteousness in Israel, Christ will redeem a remnant of repentant Jews at His second coming. They will satisfy God not because of their ancestral blood but because of the same obedient trust we all must give our holy Creator. Until then, God remains angry with unrepentive Jewry as they persevere in unbelief, their leaders persecuting Christianity in Israel and also in the West.

In addition to theological error, evangelicals are deceived by lying images and decades of propaganda. It is pleasant to believe that the Gush Katif settlers have made the desert blossom as a rose but horrible to believe that they have smashed children�s bones and stolen land God never wanted them to take. It is horrible to believe we share the guilt for what Israel has done, does, and will do�because we armed her, we supported her, and we are still fighting her wars. It is horrible to realize the truth of Gideon Levy�s recent words, �Israel does not want peace� The world has been turned upside down and it is Israel that stands at the forefront of refusal.� (Haaretz, April 2007)

If you want to support Jews, why not those with the moral discernment to see the truth of Levy�s words? Why not support those like Mordecai Vanunu who share your faith in Jesus and have suffered terribly at the hands of the Jewish state? Vanunu is a heroic Israeli Jew who converted to Christianity and spent 18 years in prison (11� and a half of them in solitary confinement) for exposing Israel�s nuclear weapons program in 1985. Vanunu told American Free Press he was tortured in prison; recent reports show that inhumane and humiliating torture of prisoners continues to be �routine� in Israel. Vanunu says he received worse treatment than Jewish prisoners because of his Christianity; he says his captors tried to �destroy� him. Vanunu wants to find freedom outside Israel; within her borders, he says, non-Jews are prisoners without freedom of movement or speech. His experience as a Christian at Israel�s hands speaks volumes about the real character of our great Mideast �democratic ally.�

Why not listen to Jews like Sara Roy, a religious Jew who mourns that her co-religionists now dwell in a �ghetto of our own making.� She writes, �Our pathology is this: it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no longer possess and in our need for persecution of a kind we can no longer claim but can only inflict.� With horror, Roy quotes the racist vengeance of Israel's largest selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth: "A village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire. This decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha. But better late than never." Roy also quotes this distressing ruling from the Yesha Rabbinical Council: "[A]ccording to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents of the enemy'." (�A Jewish Plea,� April 7, 2007)

Can you dismiss this easily? Roy writes that �the Jewish community demands unity and conformity�There is enormous pressure -- indeed coercion -- within organized American Jewry to present an image of "wall to wall unity" as a local Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion � mainstream Jewry does not speak for me or for many other Jews. And where such unity exists, it is hollow, built around fear, not humanity, on the need to understand reality as it has long been constructed for us --with the Jew as the righteous victim, the innocent incapable of harm.�

Why not listen to Jews like Norman Finkelstein, Israel Shamir, or the late Alfred Lilienthal, who all testify against the crushing injustice committed by Israel and blindly supported by the West? Why not listen to Neuterei Karta, who believe Zionism violates God�s law? If you think criticism of Israel or domestic Jewish activism is �anti-Semitic,� these are some reasons to change your mind. Listen to these voices. These are Jews. Their testimony offends the simplistic explanation that so appeals to evangelicals: �Support the state of Israel with money and moral justifications, and Jesus will come soon. Bless the state of Israel with support, and God will bless you.�

Today, most American Christians believe �blessing the Jews� means empowering Jewish leadership with financial, moral and political support. Who exactly are we empowering? The leadership in Israel is increasingly oppressive with its religious rulings; 12 of the 15 judges recently appointed to rabbinic courts were ultra-Orthodox, says Haaretz. God told the Hebrews, �You too must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. You must fear the Lord your God and worship Him and cling to Him.� (Deut. 10:19,20) But Israeli rabbinic regulations create a whole class of �unmarriageables� in Israel who are forbidden from enjoying family life because of their status under religious law.

Israeli Irit Rosenblum, writing for Ynet, said that in the �dark state ruled by Jewish religious laws�We are still slaves to the rabbinic institutions that clashes against us from the day we are born to the day we die. It is they who dictate who is eligible to have children and who is not, who is entitled to allowances and who is not, and who will be sentenced to be buried outside of the Jewish cemetery fence.�

Empowering evil actions is a curse upon a soul. To our shame, the evangelical church is now more a source of cursing than of loving truth to Jews. A recent BBC poll revealed that Israel is the most negatively seen nation on the planet. In an article for Ynet News, Martin Sherman addressed Israel�s plummeting reputation in the eyes of the world. We could still retrieve our honor, he said hopefully, especially considering the evangelicals. There as many as 100 million evangelicals in the United States alone, and they remain �staunchly pro-Israel,� Sherman said.

It is a crime in the face of God that when a Jewish person considers who might help recover Israel�s reputation in the midst of her crimes and sins, he thinks of the Christian church! Instead of being a source of light, the evangelical church has backslid into the darkness of an unholy alliance with Israel. As long as we continue to empower her defiant rejection of Christ and oppression of the stranger, we too face judgment from God.

Christ said, "Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. So watch yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.�

When we empower evil rabbis and religious Jews to enforce their false traditions while forbidding the gospel in Israel�when we assist American Zionists in their illegitimate reclaiming of God�s land while in disobedience�are we not guilty for the souls of innocent Israeli children raised in darkness, for Arab souls who reject Christ out of hatred for the West�s injustice? Do we not sin against Jewish leaders, further searing their consciences by acting as if God is pleased with their rabbinic traditions, their progressive activism, their supremacism and their false religious state? We sin also against our consciences and those of our children.

But most of all, we sin against Christ, whose words we disobey by not reproving our brother but being an accomplice to his sin. Think of Jesus� tortured body on the cross, His precious body on fire with pain as He hung from nails piercing His hands, as each breath grew more impossible to draw. He died for our spiritual salvation; He died rebuking the rabbinic state that crucified Him.

Today I write against the Judaic/Zionist agenda because my own people have become responsible for its crimes; we can�t be silent. What business is it of mine if Israel sins or the cultural and legislative attack on Christians is primarily spearheaded by Jews? What business is it of mine? It is mine because the church�s responsibility is to bear witness to truth, to bear witness against evil, and because the church in America has become the opposite. We now empower evil, as the primary enabler of Israel and the most silent receptacle of domestic Jewish activism against Christ.

I write with a broken heart because these things should not be true. We bear responsibility. We have to speak against what is happening. When our nation is strapped with ADL-inspired �anti-hate� laws that may soon make evangelism a crime�when we are pouring billions into a Mideast whose violence continues because of Israel�s injustice�when anti-Christ lies continue to saturate the Jewish-dominated media and academia like an arterial wound spreading blood through a t-shirt�the only question is: How could I sleep at night if I did not speak?

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Harmony Grant writes and edits for National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative watchdog group. Read more of her work at www.hisnamesake.blogspot.com. Contact her at harmony@truthtellers.org.

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