I’ve heard from a few Christians about this issue and I wanted to offer some historical and biblical context for the conflict that should help form our moral consciences. We need to begin by admitting that the Jews are history’s most unlikely survivors. Every empire that brushed against them tried to eradicate them. Egypt enslaved them, Assyria scattered them, Babylon deported them, Persia schemed against them, Greece desecrated their temple, Rome destroyed Jerusalem, and medieval Europe expelled them… repeatedly. Russia and Eastern Europe greeted them with pogroms. Then, in the twentieth century, came the Holocaust: six million exterminated with bureaucratic precision. Any other people would have vanished from the pages of history. Yet the Jews remain, reading the same Scriptures, praying in the same tongue, and living again in the land of their ancestors. Survival of this magnitude defies the statistical odds and mocks the ideologues who declared them finished.
Israel, reconstituted as a nation in 1948, was not an accident of colonial map-making but a convergence of ancient covenant and modern necessity. After Hitler’s ovens, the world belatedly recognized that the Jews required a homeland in which they could defend themselves. Almost immediately, every surrounding Arab nation attempted to strangle the newborn state in its crib. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon—all declared war. They failed. They tried again in 1967. They failed again. They tried in 1973. Once more, they failed. History’s longest-running obsession with exterminating the Jews continued, and the Jews continued to exist.
Palestine as a Placeholder
The fashionable narrative today is that Israel sits on stolen land once called “Palestine.” That narrative evaporates on contact with actual history. The term “Palestine” was coined by the Romans in the second century as an act of spite, renaming Judea “Syria Palaestina” after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt. The purpose was clear: erase Jewish identity from their own homeland. The British later resurrected the name as a bureaucratic placeholder for the territory under mandate. There was never a sovereign nation called Palestine, never a Palestinian currency, never a Palestinian king. The region consisted of recognized peoples and states: Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Iraqis.
When Jews began returning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they bought land legally. Often, they paid exorbitant prices to absentee Arab landlords in Beirut or Damascus for barren, undeveloped swaths of land. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described the region as “a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful expanse.” The land was not flowing with milk and honey until Jewish settlers drained the swamps, irrigated the fields, and built towns. There was no mass displacement. To the contrary, Arab immigration to the territory increased once Jewish development created jobs. The myth of a thriving pre-Israel Palestine being violently uprooted is an invention of later propaganda.
A Legal and Covenantal Claim
Israel’s right to exist is not merely sentimental. The United Nations recognized it in 1948. The Jewish people exercised their right to self-determination, as every other people have claimed. To dismiss this as “Zionism,” spat like an insult, is to play rhetorical games. Israel exists. It is sovereign. It holds elections. It has a functioning judiciary. It has free speech and free press. Arabs vote in its elections and sit in its parliament. In a region of dictatorships and monarchies, Israel is the only polity where dissent does not end with imprisonment or death. That fact alone should settle the question of legitimacy.
The Hamas Problem
Yet Israel’s legitimacy is precisely what Hamas denies. The Hamas charter is unambiguous:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (Hamas Charter, 1988, Article 28).
Later cosmetic revisions did not erase the fundamental point. The group exists to eradicate Jews. It is not interested in compromise, peace talks, or coexistence. If Israel were to lay down its arms tomorrow, Hamas and its allies would butcher them. If Hamas were to lay down arms tomorrow, peace would break out instantly. This is not a matter of perspective. It is a matter of asymmetry in goals.
Israel has shown up to peace negotiations countless times. It signed agreements with Egypt and Jordan that still hold. It offered the Palestinians a state on multiple occasions, including at Camp David in 2000, where Yasser Arafat rejected the deal and launched the Second Intifada instead. Time and again, Israel has said yes. Time and again, Hamas and its affiliates have said no.
The Genocide Accusation
Despite this, Israel is routinely accused of genocide. The charge collapses under the weight of definition. Genocide means the intent to destroy a people, in whole or in part. If Israel were intent on genocide, there would be no Arab citizens in its hospitals, schools, courts, and legislature. Instead, over two million Arab citizens live in Israel with full rights. The Israel Defense Forces warn civilians before strikes, drop leaflets, make phone calls, and urge evacuation. No genocidal regime in history has ever phoned its targets in advance.
By contrast, Hamas openly targets civilians. On October 7, 2023, it stormed into Israel, massacring families, burning children alive, raping women, and parading bodies through the streets. If we are applying the label “genocide,” intellectual honesty requires applying it first to Hamas. To demand that Israel cease defending itself under such conditions is to ask it to commit national suicide.
The Moral Calculus
The conflict is often portrayed as a tragic cycle of violence. That phrasing obscures the real dynamic. The Jews would live in peace if permitted. The Islamists will not permit it. The deeper issue is that Islam, as historically practiced in its political form, tolerates no difference of opinion. The dhimma system consigned Jews and Christians to second-class status. Apostasy and blasphemy are punishable by death in multiple Islamic jurisdictions. Reasoned dissent is not an option. The notion of pluralism, foundational to Western life, is alien to the Islamist imagination. To pretend otherwise is not peacemaking but self-delusion.
The West’s mistake has been to indulge in fantasies that all disputes can be solved by dialogue. Dialogue presupposes that both sides want to coexist. Hamas does not. Its declared purpose is annihilation. That cannot be negotiated away. It can only be defeated or contained.
Why Israel Matters
We are free to disagree with Israel’s politics, but we have to bear in mind that Israel is the freest nation in the Middle East. Women vote, serve in the military, and hold office. Christians worship openly. Even homosexuals march in parades. Compare this to Saudi Arabia, where women only recently received the right to drive and apostasy carries the death penalty. Or Iran, where dissenters hang from cranes. Or Gaza under Hamas, where dissidents vanish. The double standard applied to Israel is not born of concern for human rights but of a long, dark tradition of anti-Semitism dressed up as humanitarian critique.
What the Faith Tells Us
The biblical response to this conflict is not sentimental pacifism. Scripture values peace, but it also values justice. Ecclesiastes notes that there is a time for war and a time for peace. Paul, in Romans 13, affirms the sword of government to punish evildoers. The covenantal worldview insists that God has not abandoned Israel, even as the Church has been grafted into the promises. To demand that Israel surrender to its would-be butchers is neither just nor biblical.
The path forward requires clarity. Israel has a right to exist. It has a right to defend itself. It has a right to thrive in the land its people purchased, developed, and now govern under democratic rule. If the West loses sight of that, it will not be because the evidence is lacking, but because the will to face reality has collapsed. And that collapse will not only imperil Israel. It will imperil the moral clarity of the West itself.
The calculus is stark. As I mentioned, if Israel lays down arms, it dies. If Hamas lays down arms, there is peace in the entire region. Everything else is window dressing. History will not forgive those who confuse moral distinctions at such a moment. The survival of the Jews has always been improbable. That improbability continues today. It should not be made impossible by the West’s moral confusion.