Any which way but God’s

He is a lucid thinker and a comprehensible communicator. His columns frequently inform me. Sometimes they move me, sometimes they encourage me and now and then they have the potential to topple me into a depression.

One of the latter is his latest, which you can read at the source.

As you’ll see if you do, Times of Israel founding editor David Horovitz stopped alongside the graves of two Jewish women stabbed to death by Arabs in the second half of January – mother-of-six Dafna Meir on the 17th and Shlomit Krigman on the 25th – and pondered on how Jews in Israel (Jews everywhere I suppose) should respond positively to realities like these “rather than despair at the awfulness of it all.”

What we must insist on doing, he writes, to his Israeli readers, is seeking “the most effective means to prevent the unconscionable loss of more wonderful people.”

The prospectively disheartening thing is that, while he seems to clearly see and correctly identify the actual problems, and at least partially recognise their nature and their cause – thereby proposing concrete and realistic sounding answers and solutions, he constructs his argument on sandy soil.

Horovitz’s solutions hang on an imperative “to reduce the incitement among Palestinians – the lying and the brainwashing, the abuse of religion, the distortion of history that has produced yet another Palestinian generation deaf to the notion of Jewish legitimacy in the Holy Land.”

“We’re talking here,” he maintains, “about the need for wholesale re-education, for revealing to a people cynically blinkered by its political and religious leadership that actually there are nuanced, conflicting narratives at play between Israelis and Palestinians; that both peoples have rights; that neither is going anywhere; that we are fated to live in much the same place.”

(It certainly sounds plausible.)

And the Arabs need to be shown that “this Third Intifada stab-fest will change nothing…except to gradually persuade an increasing number of Israelis that the Palestinians cannot be trusted with independent statehood.”

“But the Zionist challenge was never easy, and neither was it about fatalist defeatism. If it is perpetually life-threatening for us to take our place among the nations, what are we doing to at least try to change that?” (Emphases throughout added)

What Horovitz cannot see – or perhaps, as a man with an evidently humanistic rather than religious outlook, what he will not see – is that the fountain of hatred that sends Arabs to murder Jews emits not from their leaders (though they definitely encourage it) but from the very pages of their religion. Muslim murder of opponents was established by example by the man who founded Islam and declared the Arabian Moon god Allah to be God. Mohammed lied to his enemies and made telling lies to one’s enemies a strategic and laudable tenet of Islam.

All Muslims, if they want to be good and faithful Muslims, must seek to follow their leader.

Stabbing Jewish women and children and men (the victims’ ages matter not in Islam as they are all ‘sons of pigs and monkeys’) is not the abuse of Islam – it is an adherence to the spirit and letter of the religion (or more accurately, the ideology).

As for distorting the past – Jews learn one version of history and Muslims learn another.

Islam holds that it is the Jews and the Christians who perverted the ‘heavenly revelation’ they received, so that Allah entrusted the final version to his ‘prophet’ who preserved its unadulterated form – as his faithful followers still do.

Just how Horovitz thinks the world’s two billion Muslims will accept that it is his – Jewish – version that is right and their Islamic version that is wrong escapes me.

For its part, Israel’s inability to effectively withstand and stanch this violence lies at the door of its leadership’s insistence on not subscribing to the beliefs as recorded in the pages of the religion of the Jews – and on not following their Leader.

For the Bible is anything but politically correct or politically practical.

But if they only would stand on the Word of God they would see that He has a plan, a wonderful, cast iron solution for the survival and flourishing of the Jewish people – a plan that not only can, but promises that it will, bring peace to all the peoples of the Middle East.

According to the Tanach (Bible) Israel’s destiny (Horovitz’s ‘fate’) is not to seek to find its place among the nations of the world but specifically not to “reckon itself among” them (Numbers 23:9).

It is this very being set apart that Israel bucks against.

Israel is a Chosen People. Its founder, Abraham, was ‘called out’ and his seed was consecrated by the King of the Universe, who established this nation to be a light to the Gentiles – meant to lead by example, not pander to the leadership of other nations, no matter how big or powerful or developed or advanced.

Yet this is precisely the opposite of how Israel behaves much of the time, especially with regard to the US, as if Israel’s saviour is the man in the White House and not the LORD God of hosts.

Israel’s God-guaranteed destiny is to be the head or chief of the nations – the world’s ultimate number one superpower. And all nations seeking the blessing of heaven will have to serve this one.

This is God’s idea. It is His plan – His glorious and certain solution.

Israel could stem the internal violence very effectively if it stopped ignoring historical and religious truths, if it stopped trying to find an answer that is any which way but God’s, and if its leadership was emboldened by a bedrock of support to choose to follow the spirit and letter of the Jews’ biblical mandate to settle and claim the land Divinely set apart for them.

It is time for Israel to extend sovereignty over the territory miraculously restored to Jewish control in 1967. Let all men and women of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel encourage the government of Israel to claim its land.

For it was God Who told the Israelites in the beginning that they were to “occupy” the land in order that they might take possession of it.

The Lord said to me, ‘See, I have begun to deliver Sihon and his land over to you. Begin to occupy, that you may possess his land.’ (Deuteronomy 2:31)

In 1948 God ‘began to deliver’ the land of Israel back to the Jews, and in the Six Day War He delivered the cradle of Israel’s nationhood over to them. And they began to occupy and continue to occupy in order that they may possess the land.

Yes, it is God Who has once again made the Jews ‘settlers’ in Judea and Samaria, in the Galilee and the lowlands, in the Negev and the Arava.

And it is God Who stipulates that all of this land is the Jews “own.” Hear Him:

For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, and will still choose Israel, and settle them in their own land. (Isaiah 14:1 – my emphasis)

Hear Him.