Abandoning Israel

On May 14, 1948, more than 2,500 years after its kingdom fell and its people were exiled from their Holy Land, Israel was reborn. Preceded by a continual, unbroken presence of Jewish people in the land, a wave of Zionism initiated by Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl at the turn of the 20th century breathed new life into the nation God set apart for His purposes.

Only 11 minutes after Israel declared independence, U.S. President Harry Truman officially recognized the newborn Jewish state. Twenty more countries followed suit by the end of 1948, and the number steadily increased thereafter. Today, 167 of the United Nations’ 193 members officially recognize Israel.¹

American Opinions Shifted
Before the Jewish state existed, Americans championed its creation. Weeks before the UN’s 1947 Partition of Palestine, 65% of Americans favored dividing the land into separate states, “one for the Arabs and one for the Jews.”² When Israel fought for survival immediately after declaring independence, the American public largely upheld the tiny nation’s right to defend its people against Arab attacks.

While most nations today consider Israel a legitimate state, a decades-long cultural shift has weakened America’s endorsement. In March 1948, two months before the State of Israel’s formation, a Gallup poll asked Americans if their sympathies lay more with the Jewish people or with the Arabs. The poll determined that 28% of Americans sympathized with the Jewish people, while 11% sided with the Arabs.³

Gallup has posed the same question annually since 1967. While more respondents have always sided with Israel and the Jewish people, support for the Arabs (who now call themselves Palestinians) has gradually trended upward over the years. While only 7% supported the Palestinians in September 2001 (coinciding with the Islamic terrorist attacks in New York City), a record 31% backed them in February 2023, only months before Hamas’s massacre in Israel on October 7.⁴

Israel Vilified
In recent years, Palestinians have benefited from a public-relations movement that paints them as victims of so-called Israeli oppression. Accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing swirl around Israel in discussions concerning Palestinians.

North American universities and colleges drive this smear campaign. Campuses have undergone a gradual yet profound transformation from bastions of higher education into hotbeds of incitement against Israel. This makeover owes its success in part to a plan by the Muslim Brotherhood to “institute the Islamic Revolution in the United States,” as revealed by an FBI source inside the Brotherhood in 1988. The Brotherhood is committed to applying Islamic law to all aspects of society. Central to its plan is the work of its American proxy group The International Institute of Islamic Thought, which strives to implement the “Islamization of knowledge.”⁵

In February 2024, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, detailed the results of this plan’s execution. AICE reported that, since 1981, Arab individuals, institutions, and governments accounted for nearly one-fourth—$13.1 billion—of foreign donations to American colleges and universities. Meanwhile, 76% of these contributions have no listed purpose.⁶

While such unspecified donations are not entirely uncommon, the resulting quid pro quo that developed between these Arab sources and American universities can be linked easily to the growth of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters on these college campuses. Since the group’s origin on the University of California, Berkeley campus in 2001, SJP agitators have preyed on emotionally charged listeners and fomented hatred of Israel, driving them to chant for its destruction.

Israel Exonerated
But anti-Israel demonstrations ignore the Jewish nation’s commitment to the very democratic values and freedoms that secure the right to protest. Israel’s Declaration of Independence states the nation’s aim to serve as a Jewish homeland, while guaranteeing equal rights for all groups:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Israeli Arabs, who make up more than one-fifth of the nation’s population, enjoy the same rights and opportunities as their Jewish countrymen. But antisemites desperately seek to blame the world’s ills on Israel, slandering it with lies of inequality. While Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorists hide behind human shields in war and kill civilians senselessly, Israel goes to great lengths to preserve lives as it defends its people from these enemies.

Opposition to the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish nation and to its attempts to protect itself stems from opposition to God’s will. By rejecting Jewish sovereignty and seeking Israel’s destruction, sinful humanity enacts Satan’s plan to war against God’s Chosen People and destroy the conduit through which He offers redemption to the world.

God will always love His nation and His Chosen People “with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3). And as more and more Christians learn the truth about Israel, He will continue to raise up Zionists who love and support it too.

ENDNOTES

1. 1. 1. 1. “Israel International Relations: International Recognition of Israel,” Jewish Virtual Library (jewishvirtuallibrary.org/international-recognition-of-israel).
         2. Lydia Saad, “Gallup Vault: Americans Backed 1947 Palestine Partition Plan,” Gallup, November 29, 2017 (tinyurl.com/GallupPartition).
         3. “The American Public and Israel,” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, March 16, 2015 (tinyurl.com/USSympathy).
         4. “Gallup Polls on American Sympathy Toward Israel and the Arabs/Palestinians,” Jewish Virtual Library (tinyurl.com/GallupSympathy).
         5. Ryan Mauro, “Islamist Infiltration of American Universities,” Middle East Forum, March 19, 2018 (tinyurl.com/UniversityInfiltration).
         6. Mitchell G. Bard, “Arab Funding of American Universities: Donors, Recipients, and Impact,” Jewish Virtual Library, May 2024 (tinyurl.com/ArabFunding).

      Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

      

      Jesse King is the managing editor of Israel My Glory magazine and a staff writer for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.