Proclaiming Justice to The Nations, an international Judeo-Christian foundation, has recently completed a documentary entitled “Israel Indivisible,” making an excellent historical, Biblical, and legal case for the presence of a Jewish state. I was privileged to be one of the few to watch it last weekend in preparation for the NRB’s International Christian Media Convention coming up at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, TN on February 24th, 2014.
If we’re going to be honest about it, there is no such thing as Palestinians. The land belonging to the current state of Israel has been conquered and re-conquered many times – wash, rinse, repeat. But the only sovereign nation to ever sit on that piece of land is a Jewish state named Israel. After fifteen hundred years of solid presence in the land, the Bar-Kochba revolt provoked the Roman Empire into slaughtering most of the Jewish people, and enslaving and driving the rest from their homes.
As part of their giant plan to obliterate Jews from the face of the earth, they renamed their country “Philistia,” or “Palestine,” after the Greek-Canaanite people who had wandered over the land with their sheep a millennium before.
During the eighteen hundred years that followed, anti-Semitism followed the Jewish people into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. But unlike every other people group that has been forcibly assimilated, they didn’t just disappear into those other cultures. In an absolutely miraculous fashion, they retained their bloodlines, their names, and their connection with a land they weren’t even supposed to belong to.
The land itself seemed to be lost without them. Farmers and itinerant herdsmen moved in, but in very small numbers. There was very little vegetation, and no real economy. The Jews who had survived the holocaust of the Romans lingered on as well. According to “Israel Indivisible,” when the Jewish people began returning to their homeland as persecution in Germany increased in the last century, about 300,000 people occupied the entire country. 10,000 or so were Jews.
Even the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land got a much better deal after Israel became a sovereign nation once again. Real estate values certainly went up. And let us compare living in a country with a king (think Jordan and Syria) versus a constitutional republic. I don’t mean to say democracy is perfect, not by a long shot, but you try living under a genocidal monarchy for a few years and let me know how it compares. I’ll be here, utilizing that whole freedom of the press thing.
When the nation of Israel was formed, a good half of the land mass was broken off for the “Palestinian” people. Modern Jordan was originally part of the country of Israel. But the Arab nations wanted more. They wanted all of it; to the point that they’ll relentlessly lob rockets with the outspoken intention of driving every Jew into the sea.
If we, as a nation, as Christians, do not stand behind Israel – if we don’t stop the rockets being fired out of Gaza – if we don’t bless them, God has stated quite clearly that he will not bless us.
“First the Saturday people,” an old Islamic taunt puts it, “then the Sunday people.”
It’s not about the freedom to speak up anymore. It’s about the freedom to live, and the freedom to stop, God forbid, yet another Holocaust on a nation that has endured far more than its share.
I encourage you to make the trip to Nashville to see this documentary. It will be shown at 7pm in the Governor’s Ballroom at Opryland.
By: Melissa Kirby
