This War Has a Price

And we know it will be paid

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Psalms 2:2-3)

Over the weekend during the holiest day of the year, Hamas struck deep into Israel from the Gaza Strip. From Reuters, we read these reports of the map of the conflict:

“A careful campaign of deception ensured Israel was caught off guard as the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched a devastating attack at dawn on Saturday during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.”

“The assault—the worst breach in Israel’s defenses since Arab armies waged war in 1973—saw Hamas gunmen kill hundreds of Israelis after breaching security barriers under the cover of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza.”

To understand the Gaza Strip and it’s troubled history, The Washington Post has provided some important historical and geographical understanding of the Gaza Strip that not all Americans really know and understand:

The American people have been lied to by the press, the politicians, and even well-intentioned people who simply don’t know history. The truth is that Hamas is funded by Islamic regimes, including the Islamic Brotherhood and Iran, and with the political encouragement of marxists everywhere. The Gaza Strip was a concession by Israel from years of coercion by neighboring states and the world’s super-powers. The Israelis are now paying a hideous price. The barbarians are not at the gate, they have been inside it all along. Their atrocities should make us sick.

“The Gaza Strip is a small area bordering Israel and Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of two Palestinian territories. The other is the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem and borders Jordan and the Dead Sea.”

“Gaza was part of the Ottoman Empire before being occupied by the United Kingdom from 1918 to 1948 and Egypt from 1948 to 1967. Nearly 20 years after Israel declared its statehood in 1948, the country captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war. Palestinians claim these territories and see them as part of a future state.”

To put things perspective the Gaza Strip is approximately the size pf Washington DC with a population of about two million people, making it one of the most densely populated regions on earth. Interestingly, the age of the people there is comparatively young. The Washington Post reports, “The population in Gaza is extraordinarily young. UNICEF has estimated that there are roughly 1 million children living in the Gaza Strip, meaning almost half of the people in Gaza are children. Almost 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15, according to the CIA.”

What happened over the weekend during most important Jewish holiday, is hugely significant for a number of reasons. Among them it might be argued—given the history of the region—that it was all but inevitable.

The Palestinians and the Jews have not just endured centuries of enmity, but Millenia.

The attack was horrific, but it could have actually been even worse. To understand why requires a look at the geography itself. Israel is not much larger than the state of New Jersey. So imagine if you will, Long Island, without warning, deciding to attack New Jersey using powerful rockets and swarms of heavily armed fanatics. New Jersey would have every right and reason to retaliate with force.

Finally, the price of the attack was inarguably paid for by Iran, suddenly flush with $6 billion in fungible assets; a gift, if you will, by the timing of the stunningly appalling idea by the Biden regime to release the money—frozen by the prior administration to deprive Iran of building up nuclear capability—in exchange for the release of just five American hostages. It’s in this last part that we should be asking why. Why now?

Americans were persuaded to place their trust and dependency in a woefully unqualified, incompetent, and politically corrupt government. Three years of open borders, breathtakingly profligate spending, weakening military, and feckless foreign policy. The short story is this: America is simply not equipped to provide any support to Israel in this new war. A war, we must remember, that’s not the only war still in full spate: Ukraine. We squandered too much in Afghanistan and in Ukraine. The US is not at all prepared to offer much to Israel insofar as assistance, and history will show this regime did not provide meaningful alliance with Israel, or tough diplomacy in the Middle East at large.

Once before, I recall having discussed the type of government that would have brought America to this juncture: a kakistocracy. Its etymology is from the Greek: “The word is derived from two Greek words, kakistos (κάκιστος; worst) and kratos (κράτος; rule), with a literal meaning of government by the worst people. U.S. Senator William Harper compared kakistocracy to anarchy, who said, “Anarchy is not so much the absence of government as the government of the worst—not aristocracy but kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honor of our nature, has seldom obtained amongst men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most horrid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, are goaded by terror to be forward and emulous in deeds of guilt and violence.”

American poet James Russell Lowell (pictured) used the term in 1876, in a letter to Joel Benton, writing, “Is ours a ‘government of the people by the people for the people,’ or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”

Does this sound familiar anyone?

So, who are the Palestinians? The National Library of Medicine reports that, “Palestinians are genetically very close to Jews and other Middle East populations, including Turks (Anatolians), Lebanese, Egyptians, Armenians, and Iranians. Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences.” Any Bible scholar or student would know that already.

In Deuteronomy 20:16–17, God commanded the Israelites, “In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.

“The Canaanites were a brutal and wicked culture that frequently engaged in incredibly decadent behavior. Leviticus 18 provides a list of sins that Israel was to avoid at all costs: incest, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality.” (From gotquestions.org)

It’s debatable the world will end with people battling it out against the ideology of transgendered men and women, or aborted babies, or climate change, or even racism. No, the world will end when God has had enough. This new atrocity is a sobering reminder that the time we spend lecturing against the sexually debased and the politically corrupt is set on the stage in a world made by the same God who gives life and who can take it away. He has always provided a way, not to simply understand the world, but to embrace the truth in painful, but grateful understanding and willing obedience; something maybe we wish Joshua could have succeeded in doing when commanded by God.

We should pray, we should weep, but most of all, we should confront such evil by standing firm in what we believe by collaborating in resistance.