The unique nature of Jewish history cannot be understood without recognizing the hand of God directing it. Hatred of the Jews cannot be explained rationally, for any nation which tries to annihilate the Jewish people assumes the role of Amalek. The Word of God was given to Moses and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai and the Jewish nationhood was created along with the hatred against the eternal people. Sinai is derived from the word seen’ah (שינאה) meaning hatred, for the hatred of the world descended upon Israel for bringing God’s Word into the world.
Israel shall always survive the hand of Esau, for [i]f Esau comes to the one camp and strikes it down, then the remaining camp shall survive. Genesis 32:8. For I, your Lord, have not changed; and you, the sons of Jacob, you have not perished. Malachi 3:6. The Word of God given at Sinai, the Torah, is the portable homeland of the Jewish people and because of the eternal covenant between the people and the “homeland,” both shall survive exile and persecution.
Around 1895, Theodor Herzl expressed his belief in the Jews’ divine mission by writing “[f]or God would not have kept us alive so long if there were not left for us a role to play in this history of mankind.”1 Reverend William H. Hechler, chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, who had been a Protestant missionary in South Africa, wrote in 1883 The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine According to the Prophets.2 Upon reading Herzl’s The Jewish State, Hechler informed the British Ambassador that Biblical prophecy was about to be fulfilled and Palestine would be restored to the Jews.3
In 1902, Herzl published his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land) about a Utopian Jewish State in Palestine with the frontispiece having his famous motto “[i]f you will it, it is no dream.”4 The novel was published in Hebrew under the title Tel Aviv (Hill of Spring) and seven years later the town of Tel Aviv was laid out in the sands dunes north of Jaffa.5
When Dr. Chaim Weizmann heard in 1948 that the U.S. State Department was recommending the rejection of any partition of Palestine for a Jewish state and instead a UN trusteeship to President Truman, Weizmann wrote a private letter to the President saying:
The choice of our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination. Providence has placed this issue in your hands, and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of the moral law.6
The choice today is still the statehood of Israel or extermination. The mainline churches lead the fight to erase statehood for Israel by its anti-Israel divestment at their conventions, at their persistence to demonize Israel and to hype glowing praise on the myth of a pro-Palestinian Liberation Theology.
The mainline churches still preach a general replacement theology, superseding Israel and the Jewish people, and the Lord says to them:
Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? . . . the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete. Luke 6:46-49.
1 Robert St. John, They Came From Everywhere: Twelve who helped mold modern Israel, (1st ed. 1962), p. 26.
2 Ibid., p. 34.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 57.
5 Ibid., p. 59.
6 Ibid., p. 158.
Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman
Shavei Israel
Zion Oil and Gas