President Trump privately told senior aides late yesterday that he has approved attack plans against Iran but is holding off in the hope that threatening to join Israel’s strikes will lead Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. At issue is the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb (MOP) needed to blow up the Fordow nuclear facility, Iran’s fabled “nuclear mountain” buried half a mile deep. Fordow is believed to have some three thousand sophisticated centrifuges spinning constantly to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed to manufacture an atomic bomb. Israel does not possess weapons capable of penetrating the facility and destroying it.
But the US does.
Israel could disable Fordow by striking access points, ventilation shafts, and power supplies that would heavily impact the use of the facility. However, these could be repaired more quickly than direct damage to the facility. Israel could insert troops to invade Fordow and destroy it from within, but this would bring significant risks.
Or the US could join the conflict by using MOPs to destroy the facility. In response, however, Iran could attack our bases and Arab oil fields in the region, strangle oil shipping by closing the Strait of Hormuz, launch cyber attacks, and employ the Houthis to attack Red Sea shipping.
We are already sharing intelligence and helping intercept Iranian missiles and drones. However, there is something else we also need to share with Israel, a factor vital to our flourishing and future as a people.
They are the land, and the land is them
In his latest New York Times column, Thomas Friedman writes that Iran was delusional in thinking it could drive Israelis out of their biblical homeland. Deceived by the Marxist ideology that framed Israel as the “oppressors” and Iranians and Palestinians as the “oppressed,” they “kept referring to the Jewish state as a foreign colonial enterprise with no indigenous connection to the land.”
As a result, Iran’s leaders apparently believed the Jews would not risk war that could lead to significant loss of Israeli lives. If continually menaced by local proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, they could eventually be forced off the land, removing the chief obstacle to Iran’s dominance of the Middle East.
On one level, I understand this reasoning. Across my many trips to the Holy Land, every Israeli I met spoke English, and many spoke several other languages as well. All could easily thrive elsewhere. This was part of Hamas’s October 7 strategy: to make life so intolerable in Israel that the people would abandon the nation. The issue was less that Israel’s enemies could defeat them in battle than that they could cause millions of Israelis to move away for the sake of their families and their futures.
Such a “war of attrition” was the only way Iran and its proxies could defeat a nuclear power with the military might of the Jewish state. But, as Friedman notes, they completely misunderstood Israel’s commitment to its biblical land.
I can attest to the depth and passion of this commitment even among Israel’s secular Jewish citizens. They care for the land in ways that surprise many Americans upon arrival. I have never seen a piece of trash on the ground in a Jewish neighborhood there. Every parcel of land that can be cultivated is cultivated. There is a pride of place that goes to their missional identity.
In many ways, they are the land, and the land is them.
“The insoluble problem of our national makeup”
In his First Things article, “Is America a Creedal Nation?”, author and strategist David P. Goldman compares Israel’s self-identity with the “national spirit” that led to America’s founding: “The vision of a new City on a Hill and a new Mission in the Wilderness, a manifestation of religious faith, inspired the personal sacrifice of the Founders. No other group of property-owners, free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion, ever took up arms in this way.”
In so doing, the Pilgrims and pioneers who first came to our shores appropriated biblical Israel’s self-identity as God’s chosen people on pilgrimage to their Promised Land. Like the Jews who first settled the Holy Land and those who recreated the modern State of Israel, theirs was a spiritual mission to forge a nation in which they would be free to worship God as they wished.
The 1734 First Great Awakening was essential to that founding, forging a national identity that was united in God’s providential purpose for their lives and future. After America won her independence, the 1792 Second Great Awakening helped preserve and advance this ethos.
That was then, this is now.
By imbibing and embracing the secularism of our day, our culture has abandoned the biblical orientation that empowered and impassioned our nation at its founding. As a result, Goldman says of our national culture: “It is obsessed with the individual’s journey to redemption, but that is a journey that can never be completed.”
He explains why:
No path leads to the Heavenly City from our present circumstances, and in our impatience and petulance, we confuse the mechanics of civil society with the plan of the Heavenly City. That is our chronic weakness and susceptibility, the insoluble problem of our national makeup.
If a wheel loses its hub
Despite deep political and cultural divisions, Israelis are united in confronting Iran’s existential threat to their land and future. By contrast, because secular Americans have largely abandoned any unifying commitment to a providential purpose for our nation, we have no transcendent mission. We are therefore fragmenting on every level, from abortion and sexual morality to partisan politics to healthcare to immigration.
If a bicycle wheel loses its hub, the longer it spins, the more its spokes will fragment and disintegrate.
Here we find another reason the gospel is so vital to our society. Early Christians came from fifteen different cultural groups (Acts 2:9–11), but they soon discovered that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
Christianity was once the most unifying movement in human history. It can be again: the more we are “in Christ Jesus,” the more we are “one.”
If you put a chair in the center of a room, the closer everyone draws to the chair, the closer they draw to each other.
Now make that chair a throne. Who is on yours today?
Quote for the day:
“The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane.” —Dallas Willard
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