Standing with Israel
Blessed be those who bless you, and accursed be those who curse you!
Jerusalem Bible, Numbers 24:9
Imagine that the cartels took control of Mexico and every year for the last twenty years fired at least a thousand rockets into the United States raining fear and death down on San Diego, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, and other cities. Then the Mexican cartels conducted a barrage of over 3,000 rockets on American targets. They followed this with an armed invasion. Before the U.S. military could push them out, the cartels killed a total of 1,139 Americans including more than 695 civilians, including thirty-six children, and kidnapped more than 240 hostages. All of that is hypothetical but I ask the reader, what would the United States do if it suffered such an attack across its southern border?
Kyle Pratt with his Israeli flag
That has been life for Israeli citizens since January 2006 when the terrorist group Hamas won control in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the Organization of American States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and others. Between 2006 and 2023 Hamas fired about 20,000 rockets into Israel. These were not precision weapons, they were primitive point-and-shoot rockets that Hamas fired and hoped they hit something important or killed many people.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest terror assault since the founding of Israel. This attack began with the launch of nearly 3,000 rockets into Israel and on that first day killed a total of 1,139 Israelis including more than 695 civilians, of which thirty-six are children. The number of deaths has only grown since that day. Hamas has also kidnapped more than 240 people most of whom they still hold captive.
Map showing the United Nations partition of the British Mandate.
As I write, there are numerous protests on college campuses in support of Hamas. Steven Stallinsky writing in The Wall Street Journal said, “Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive action which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the west.” Stallinsky went on to say, “Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel.” When this is coupled with a recent Fox News report that many protesters don’t know why they are protesting, it is easy to see that America is blindly walking into a propaganda trap of Middle Eastern terror groups.
There has never been a nation of Palestine. In 135AD, after crushing the Bar Kokhba, or second, Jewish revolt, Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the Kingdom of Judea “Syria Palaestina” as punishment. Many of the Jewish residents were enslaved, deported, or died in the war. After the Romans, the Byzantines, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluk, and the Ottoman Empire, and even the British ruled the area.
Anti-Hamas protest in Israel
The British gained control of the region at the end of World War I and held it through World War II. After the war Jews fleeing the Holocaust sought refuge in what had long ago been their homeland. Already, the Jews and Arabs were fighting and the British were seeking a way out of the region they called the British Mandate. In 1947, the United Nations resolved to partition the territory into Arab and Jewish states. The resolution became effective on May 14, 1948. The Jews declared they were a nation reborn and in their portion of the land discarded the Roman name of Palestine and called their homeland Israel. That same day the Arab League, including the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan invaded the new Jewish state hoping to destroy it.
That war and at least six others over the last seventy years have not pushed Israelis from their homeland and into the sea. Israel is now a prosperous democratic state, the only one in the region. By kidnapping civilians, raping women, and killing children Hamas has shown that it is more interested in terror than living in peace with its Jewish neighbors. America should stand with Israel. I know that I will.
