As the sun rises on the pastures of Israel, a missile disrupts the auburn sky. The Iron Dome activates, and sirens reverberate throughout Jerusalem. Jewish families take refuge inside their homes yet proceed with Shacharit, the morning prayer. Hamas militants activate charges set along the Israeli border wall and begin to rush through on motorcycles and pickup trucks. Terrorists move from house to house. Over 1,400 citizens are killed, and 245 are taken captive and carried back to Gaza. Israel is at war.
“Our fighters are ready to wipe out the bloodthirsty monsters who seek to annihilate us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a cabinet meeting on Oct. 15. “Hamas thought that we would come apart, but we will dismantle Hamas.” Hamas is a terrorist group whose charter calls for the complete and total destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Yet in 2006, they were democratically elected by the Palestinian people.
Arabs and Americans alike gather to protest the United States’ funding of Israel’s war against Hamas. Since World War II, the United States has given Israel more military assistance than any other nation, roughly $260 billion dollars. taken from flickr.com
“Hamas is trying to push for a state of Palestine,” history teacher Mrs. Anna Johnson said. “I don’t think that the Palestinian people support what they did in their latest attack against Israel, but they do support a nation of Palestine. They elected Hamas with statehood in mind but didn’t realize the means which they would use to achieve that goal.”
Since Hamas’s election in 2006, there has been no open election for any office in the Gaza Strip, and they continue to initiate conflicts with careless disregard for international law. While Israel builds bunkers for its civilians, Hamas’s leaders hide in the basements of overcrowded apartment buildings, using their citizens as human shields. The current cycle of violence in the middle east is perpetuated by a wave of international condemnation whenever Israel makes the moral determination to accept these inevitable casualties and strike back against Hamas.
“Hamas is hiding in hospitals and refugee camps,” history teacher Mr. Steve Fox said. “Israel recently bombed a refugee camp to take out the leader of Hamas. Yet I don’t think the Palestinian people blame Hamas for hiding there. I think they blame Israel for bombing there.”
This pattern of condemnation continues to fuel the fire of antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric. Hamas was elected because it was able to shift blame for the plight of the Palestinian people to Israel. The Palestinians’s lot in life, abject poverty and the promise of perpetual war, gets put upon Israel, rather than the government which has initiated the conflicts and sealed their fate in a missile that always has the homes of the innocent marked as its return address. Hatred of Israel does not end with Hamas. It is a cultural cancer, an ideology which the United States’s goverment has pledged to abolish.
“The Israelis are willing to live alongside the Palestinian people, yet this land was promised to them by God,” Mrs. Johnson said. “When you look at the Middle East, Israel is a sliver surrounded by a great sea of Arab nations. The current conflict has more to do with eradicating the Jews than anything else.”
The state of Israel was established in 1948 to give Jews a home after their lives were devastated by the Holocaust. History has continually demonstrated the necessity for a Jewish homeland and the subjugation that occurs whenever they are spread across other nations. In the past, when opportunities for a two-state solution have arisen, such as in 2000 with the Camp David Summit or 2001 with the Taba negotiations, Israel has demonstrated their willingness to achieve peace through negotiation. However, the Palestinian authority has been unwilling to compromise.
“If Hamas lays down their guns, there will be peace,” Mr. Fox said. “However, if Israel lays down their guns, there will be no more Israel.”
Though we have the Messiah, Israel remains God’s chosen people. He has promised to preserve this nation (Jeremiah 31:35-37) and not exchange His people for any other (Isaiah 43:4). He will keep His word, and this story, the history which God set into motion, will not end with the triumph of evil.
“I will show my greatness and my holiness, and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations. Then, they will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 28:13).