Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

What we must know about Israel and the Middle East Crisis.

January 27 marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Germany’s largest extermination camp in Poland. The Holocaust was supposed to be a ‘never again’ situation. But sadly, that has not been the case. We must keep speaking out for the beleaguered Jewish people. In a previous piece, I shared quotes from eight books about Israel, terrorism, and the Middle East conflicts.

Here, I add ten more recent volumes. They all argue that modern Israel has a right to exist, it has a right to defend itself, and it is the only real democracy in the entire Middle East. Given the global hatred and hostility to Israel, we need to be aware of books like these.

First, my full list of these 18 important volumes:

• Chafets, Ze’ev, Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America’s View of the Middle East. William Morrow, 1985.
• Dershowitz, Alan, The Case for Israel. John Wiley, 2003.
• Dershowitz, Alan, Defending Israel. Hot Books, 2019, 2023.
• Dershowitz, Alan, The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them with Truth. Skyhorse, 2024.
• Frantzman, Seth, The October 7 War. Wicked Son, 2024.
• Friedman, David, One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Humanix Books, 2024.
• Gilder, George, The Israel Test. RVB, 2009.
• Journo, Elan, What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Post Hill Press, 2018, 2023.
• Levy, Bernard-Henri, Israel Alone. Wicked Son, 2024.
• O’Neill, Brendan, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. Spiked, 2024.
• Pipes, Daniel, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated. Wicked Son, 2024.
• Prager, Dennis and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. Touchstone, 1983, 2016.
• Ryvchin, Alex, The 7 Deadly Myths: Antisemitism from the time of Christ to Kanye West. Academic Studies Press, 2023.
• Senor, Dan and Saul Singer, The Genius of Israel. Constable, 2023.
• Simons, Jake Wallis, Israelophobia. Constable, 2023.
• Smith, Mark, Israel Disarmed. Bombardier Books, 2024.
• Spencer, Robert, The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace. Bombardier Books, 2023.
• Tishby, Noa, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth. Free Press, 2021.

Chafets, Ze’ev, Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America’s View of the Middle East.

Most of the countries in the Middle East are closed societies that admit journalists on a selective basis and allow them only brief and carefully supervised visits. Reporters are made to understand that their future access to the country may well depend on the acceptability of their work. Even correspondents who are undeterred by this condition are usually hard-pressed to find any real news in places that have no free press, no political debate, and few citizens who are prepared to speak candidly about public affairs.

When American journalists were banned from Grenada during the first few days of the American operation there, the press was quick to point out the patent impossibility of gaining independent, reliable news from an area to which there is no access. Yet most of the Arab world (with the partial exceptions of Egypt and Lebanon) has denied any real access to the American press for years. Their results have been predictable. (pp. 18-19)

Dershowitz, Alan, The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them with Truth.

Unlike all other refugees worldwide, Palestinian refugees are treated to a separate UN agency, with a separate definition of refugee and a separate mission. If the standard definition of refugee (which applies to all other refugee groups) were to apply to the Palestinians, the number of Palestinian refugees would fall precipitously.

This approach to the refugee issue was calculated to keep it from being resolved and to allow it to fester and even be exacerbated. The Arab refugee problem could easily have been solved between 1948 and 1967 when Jordan controlled and annexed the West Bank, which was an underpopulated and under-cultivated area.

ut instead of integrating the refugees into a religiously, linguistically, and culturally identical society, they were segregated into ghettos called refugee camps and made to live on the UN dole, while being fed propaganda about their glorious return to the village down the road that had been their home for as little as two years. (p. 22)

Frantzman, Seth, The October 7 War.

The Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath has revealed the toxic entanglement that many international organizations have with terrorists in Gaza. For instance, during the war, the presence of hundreds of terrorists at hospitals in Gaza was not reported by NGOs and international organisations that are present at the hospitals. This appears to point to an undisclosed code of silence, or non-disclosure agreement, that exists between many organisations and the terrorists they cohabitate or collaborate with. Throughout the war, armed gunmen waylaid aid trucks that entered Gaza, endangering the humanitarian aid workers and also appearing to hijack the trucks.

Given this entanglement, the work of many NGOs and international organizations should be reviewed. The fact that Hamas exploited UNRWA and hospitals to operate, store weapons, and also build tunnels beneath civilian facilities shows that much better oversight is needed in Gaza.

Hamas was able to get international organizations to ignore its presence for a decade and a half as many of these groups profited from the suffering in Gaza. In essence, this created a symbiotic relationship where the NGOs and Hamas both needed each other. Hamas needed them to provide cover for its terrorist activities, and they needed Hamas authoritarianism to guarantee them mafia-like “protection” and create the suffering they would benefit from. (p. 251)

Friedman, David, One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Palestine was never a country and never governed itself. Israel is very different. As a state, it has both the responsibility and the opportunity to lead its residents to a better place: a place of peace, dignity, and prosperity; a place where God’s covenants to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob can finally be actualized.

The State of Israel is a sovereign nation. But Israel’s sovereignty over portions of its biblical homeland is challenged by many around the world and even some within Israel itself. Israel, however, can never fully be a Jewish state without sovereignty over the territory that makes it Jewish.

As a sovereign state, Israel, and only Israel, can bring closure to this critical issue. I believe it should do so in the manner discussed within this book — a manner that incorporates God’s will as expressed within the Bible. And at this special time in history, God’s instructions and commandments also clearly present the best outcome for all of Israel’s inhabitants.

If we all just took a step back and did an overlay of biblical wisdom on geopolitical realities, the convergence that we would perceive would be striking. It would lead many around the world to support Israel in this effort. (pp. 8-9)

Journo, Elan, What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

The actual injustice is that America has sold out the region’s only free society, Israel — along with freedom-seeking people across the Middle East and among the Palestinian community — while empowering jihadist forces. And it is this injustice that hurts us. The book’s theme is that America should be strongly supportive of freedom and freedom-seekers — but hasn’t been, much to our detriment. (xvi)

Levy, Bernard-Henri, Israel Alone.

This war is a horrific war that the Israelis did not want. Their enemy is a terrible adversary whose declared aim is to post not only the greatest possible number of Jewish deaths but also the greatest possible number of martyrs on its own side. These hybrid combatants who hide in tunnels that they do not use to provide shelter to their own people, and who resurface outside buildings full of civilian men, women, and children, expose themselves to IDF soldiers as if to say, “Kill me if you can, but kill them with me, because in so doing you’ll be killing children, and by killing children you’ll return to being the outrage of the world.” (pp. 130-131)

O’Neill, Brendan, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.

So, we live in an era when you can be banished from a university for saying women don’t have penises, but you’ll be fine if you say ‘kill all Jews’. We live in a time when asking someone where they’re from is considered a ‘racial microaggression’, but hollering ‘Globalise the intifada’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ in which a thousand Jews were slaughtered is apparently okay.

We live in a culture in which students will demand access to ‘safe spaces’, complete with colouring books and bean bags, if a speaker they hate turns up on campus. And yet these same students who fear words like the rest of us fear death, will happily cheer the invasion of Israel and the murder of hundreds of its citizens. No safe space for Jews, it seems. (p. 114)

A fightback is needed against the indifference of our elites to the difficulties facing Jewish people, and against their excuse-making for pogroms, and against their infliction on our societies of a politics of jealousy and division that they falsely call ‘progressive’. And, most importantly, against the people on our streets agitating against ‘Zionists’, which means Jews. If you see them, tell them: You shall not pass. (p. 171)

Pipes, Daniel, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.

The hostility to Israel extends to democratic governments. … Anti-Zionism has become so central for the left that support for Israel now tarnishes one’s progressive credentials, as the experience of American liberals is illustrated by feminist Phyllis Chesler, jurist Alan Dershowitz, historian Richard Landes, television commentator Bill Maher, and politicians Ritchie Torres and John Fetterman. “Woke” corporations have joined the battle. … Leftist anti-Zionists include educators, students, journalists, artists, and bureaucrats. Leftwing priests, pastors, and rabbis spew vitriol. …

A tectonic shift in attitudes toward Israel has taken place. Since the creation of Israel, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims provided the mainstay of anti-Zionism, with non-Muslims merely their auxiliary. But then, as Arab states quietly reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence, the global Left noisily took up their slack. By now, the global Left often acts more stridently anti-Zionist than the Arabs. Arab leaders, for example, show near-indifference to the absence of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, while leftists express anger over it. (pp. 37-39)

Ryvchin, Alex, The 7 Deadly Myths: Antisemitism from the Time of Christ to Kanye West.

What is remarkable is that the ancient Jews survived as a distinct people, even became fortified in their sense of self, when others were simply washed away, absorbed into other nations and quickly disappeared. They emerged from slavery, they returned from Babylonian exile, they established their own little civilization with its distinct languages, cultural practices, connection to land and religious convictions.

When the great empires of the Greeks and Romans came upon the Jewish commonwealth, they sought to assimilate the Jews to spread their influence and suppress the independent thinking that is dangerous in a colonized people. The fact that the Jews refused to pray to foreign gods and waged heroic, often hopeless revolts, fearing not for any mortal rulers or generals, but their god alone, drove their conquerors to frenzy. Few are hated more than those who forget their lowly place. (p. 15)

Smith, Mark, Israel Disarmed. Bombardier Books, 2024.

Countless historians have noted the astonishing perseverance of a cohesive people and culture known as “the Jews.” As the eminent historian Paul Johnson observed, “From the time of Abraham up to the present covers the best part of four millennia. That is more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilized humanity…. The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives.” They have had their own religious language (Hebrew); their own religious beliefs; their own oral traditions and sacred literature; their own customs, traditions, and observances; and a common culture that has, at least up until very recent times, generally resisted assimilation or dilution.

The Jews have maintained this identity “amid appalling adversities”, in Johnson’s words. The fact that they have largely lived apart under hostile conditions within host countries has reinforced their durability as a people and culture for the past two millennia. And they lived in these conditions because they lost their traditional homeland. (p. 25)

___

Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Adobe.