Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a twenty-three-year-old American-Israeli born in Berkeley, California, was at the Nova music festival last weekend when more than 260 attendees were massacred by Hamas terrorists. Hersh took cover in a bomb shelter, but a grenade blew off his arm from the elbow down. Since he could still walk, he was ordered by Hamas to leave the shelter. His phone soon pinged across the border in Gaza, where authorities say he is being held hostage.

His parents, who were born and raised in Chicago and moved to Israel fifteen years ago, have not heard from him since. His mother, Rachel Goldberg, said of him, “Hersh is my only son and he’s my first child. He’s what made me a mother. I feel like God could have given him to anyone and he gave me the perfect son for me.”

Now she is spending her days praying for his return, telling his story to media outlets, and appealing to US senators and Israeli politicians. “We need to know that we are doing every single thing that we can do,” she said.

She added: “I think when you’re in hell, if you stop, then you’re really stuck. So when you’re going through hell, keep walking—and that’s what I’m doing.”

“Not knowing where he was going”

From the beginning of their story, the Jews have needed such courage simply to exist as a people.

In Genesis 12, God called Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (v. 1). Hebrews 11 tells us that he then “went out, not knowing where he was going” (v. 8).

This is the epitome of courageous faith.

Moses did the same when he faced down Pharaoh, the most powerful man on earth, and led his people through the Red Sea and the desert wilderness. So did Joshua when he led them across the flooded Jordan River. So did the judges when they led their people into battle time and time again against their enemies. So did David against Goliath and the Philistines. So did Daniel when he trusted his God in the lions’ den. So did Jesus’ apostles when they left their homes and vocations to become his disciples, then preached the gospel in defiance of the religious authorities who arranged his murder (Acts 5:27–32).

In a brilliant 1973 article for Foreign Affairs, then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir wrote that her people “brought to fruition the labor of Jewish pioneers who, since the turn of the century, gave their lives to transform a barren and denuded land into fertile fields, flourishing settlements, and new patterns of society.” The land they rebuilt “had neither oil nor abundant natural resources. Its wastes offered no temptation except to Zionist pioneers animated by the twin ideals of a new Jewish society and a reconstructed land.”

Now that land is home to one of the most advanced economies and militaries in history. Their courageous faith is an invitation and example our nation urgently needs today.

“The most dangerous time the world has seen in decades”

Jamie Dimon is the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; the New York Times calls him “as close as Wall Street has to a statesman.” He is in the news because of a statement he made accompanying his bank’s quarterly earnings last Friday: “This may be the most dangerous time the world has seen in decades.”

High inflation and rising interest rates are risks, to be sure. But Dimon told reporters that the conflict in Israel and Gaza is “the highest and most important thing for the Western world.” In his view, it could have “far-reaching impacts on energy and food markets, global trade, and geopolitical relationships.”

The Wall Street Journal offers evidence, reporting that the war is “affecting the global balance of power, stretching American and European resources while relieving pressure on Russia and providing new opportunities to China.” The article notes that both are positioning themselves to lead the global movement against the West’s “neocolonialism.” An escalation of the war could force many European nations into greater dependence on Russian oil and gas and carries the risk of renewed violence by Islamist militant groups across the Continent.

Walter Russell Mead is one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of our day. His Wall Street Journal response to Hamas’s atrocities, titled “A Middle East Wake-Up Call,” concludes with this paragraph:

Finally, there is the question of whether American and Western opinion will awaken to the new state of the world. In a horrible way, the descent of death-dealing paragliders into a peaceful music festival in Israel is an apt symbol of our times. The post-Cold War trance of the West, reaping peace dividends, celebrating flower power, and generally living as if utopia had already arrived, has left us mentally and morally disarmed. The revisionist powers that recognize no moral limits on their power as they seek to overturn the existing world system in an ocean of blood are descending onto our festival of folly like the hell-bound paragliders of Hamas. We cannot and should not respond with irrational panic and random outbursts of violence. We must soberly and deliberately address a mortal danger to everything we hold dear—and we must at long last wake up (my emphasis).

Forging a new future

If Dimon and Mead are right—and I believe they are—we are witnessing a hinge point in history. Our secularist path has indeed “left us mentally and morally disarmed” as the moral therapeutic deism that dominates our culture separates God from life, rejects moral absolutes, and celebrates self-centric self-reliance.

As a result, America can forge a new future only by turning to the source of Israel’s courage in the past.

Abraham and his heirs who built the biblical nation of Israel risked everything to follow God’s call. Now Jesus is calling you and me to do the same for the sake of our nation and her future.

Will we?

Denison Forum

Israel Ziv is a sixty-six-year-old decorated former paratrooper. On the morning of October 7, the retired Army general was taking a bike ride when news broke that a rocket barrage had been fired from Gaza and gunmen were pouring across the border. He raced to his home overlooking olive groves near Tel Aviv, put on his uniform, and grabbed his weapon, a nine-millimeter pistol.

He then drove to the battle zone around 10 a.m. with his close friend, Noam Tibon, a retired general whose son was trapped in the Nahal Oz kibbutz. He found disorganized groups of young Israeli soldiers, piled several of them into his Audi, and began attacking Hamas gunmen on the road. After a soldier in his car was wounded, he snatched his M16 and started firing out the window.

Gen. Tibon was eventually able to rescue his son while Gen. Israel Ziv raced to other hot spots. He spent nearly twenty-four hours around the kibbutzim and villages under attack, firing his own weapon, organizing evacuations of civilians, and coordinating with the military to dispatch backup units.

Why is Israel important to America?

At this juncture in the war, it’s worth asking why Israel is so important to America.

As Israel prepares for the next stage in this conflict, Americans remain solidly supportive of the Jewish state: 49 percent say the US is doing “about the right amount” to support Israel in the war, while 29 percent say the US is actually doing too little. Only 18 percent say the US is doing “too much” in the aftermath of the attacks.

However, the nation is tiny, ranking 149^th in the world in land size at approximately the size of New Jersey. It is not unusually significant to us economically, ranking only twenty-fifth among US trading partners. Of the sixteen million Jews in the world, less than half live in Israel.

But Israel Ziv, with his sacrificial and unselfish bravery on behalf of his people, answers our question in a way that is far more significant than it might first appear.

“Butchering people was the aim”

After a week, let’s ask ourselves what we have learned about Hamas and Israel in the context of their worldviews.

Regarding civilians:

• Hamas attacks noncombatants, intentionally targeting young children, elementary schools, and a youth center. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote: “Butchering people was the aim. It was what they set out to do.” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Hamas “vividly reminds me of ISIS: bloodthirsty, fanatical, and hateful.”
• Israel has sought to protect civilians in past conflicts with Hamas and is doing the same now, warning Palestinians in Gaza ahead of military advances there. Israel Defense Forces seek to follow the law of armed conflict against targeting noncombatants, while Hamas uses civilians (and often disguises its soldiers like them) to shield its forces and weapons.

Regarding the future of the other state:

• Hamas is pledged to the annihilation of the Jewish people, which is why they staged the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Andrew Sullivan compared them to the Nazis’ quest to exterminate the Jewish race: “The same ethno-fascism; the same blood-and-soil ideology . . . the same internalization of an entire group of humans as subhuman, to be treated like dangerous vermin; the same hideous sadism; the same eliminationist ideology; the same glee.”
• Jewish leaders accepted the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan that would have created an independent state of Palestine (with more land than the West Bank and Gaza Strip today), but the Arab nations rejected it. Every Jew I know in Israel (I have been traveling there for nearly thirty years) believes the Palestinians deserve to have their own homeland.

Regarding their leaders:

• After Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007, there have been no more elections. More than 65 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, but the party’s leaders are wealthy, some estimated to be billionaires. They are currently living in Qatar in what the Telegraph calls “five-star luxury.”
• Israel’s democracy is often divisive and chaotic, as recent months have shown, but its leaders are ultimately responsible to those who elect them.

“The rock-solid foundation of Western culture”

Two caveats: Hamas is not the Palestinian people (a subject I intend to address later this week), and Israelis are fallen like the rest of us (also a subject I intend to address soon).

But the way Israel lives out its worldview raises a crucial question for us in our secularized culture: Is it a coincidence that the only true democracy in the Middle East, the nation in this conflict most committed to just war and to the law of armed conflict, was birthed from a biblical worldview that values all humans as made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27)?

In “The Nihilism of Antisemitism,” Thomas Balazs and Yonatan Hambourger write: “It is precisely because the Jews advanced a moral system that doesn’t tolerate murder, theft, rape, or mistreatment of the weak, and demands we care for other human beings, that other peoples have tried to wipe them out. The spree of killing and rape committed by Hamas is, among other things, a cry for freedom from a Jewish moral system that forbids such things.” They call Judaism “the rock-solid moral foundation of Western culture” and note that Hitler was reported to have said, “Conscience is a Jewish invention.”

As post-Christian America continues its unconscionable march away from biblical truth and morality into self-centric immoral relativism, what is our future?

Shakespeare’s observation comes to mind: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

Denison Forum

“Mom and Dad, they sacrificed their lives to save me,” sixteen-year-old Rotem Matias told CNN yesterday. When the Israeli-American teenager and his parents were attacked by Hamas terrorists last Saturday, his mother died trying to shield him. He was shot but survived and will keep the bullet removed surgically from his stomach “as a memory to never forget” his parents and the other victims.

Every Jew in Israel and around the world old enough to remember Hamas’s invasion will never forget it. After more than thirty trips to the Holy Land, I can tell you that this tiny country is interconnected in ways Americans cannot understand. Nearly everyone knows someone who was directly affected by the atrocities of October 7.

Now we are learning that Jews around the world could be victims of Hamas. The terror organization’s head is calling for a Global Day of Rage today in which Muslims across the globe would “fight against the Jews.” The former leader of Hamas is similarly urging Muslims around the world to protest today and is calling on Muslim nations in the Middle East to join the battle against Israel.

Hamas is also vowing to broadcast executions of its hostages on the internet if Israel strikes Gaza. The terrorists have already flooded social media with violent videos and graphic images of the kidnappings and murders it staged last weekend. We are now learning that a nine-month-old baby is among the hostages taken by Hamas.

What should Israel do next?

How should Israel respond to such horrific terrorism? Broadly speaking, they have four basic options.

One is to effect a prisoner swap, exchanging Palestinian prisoners for hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. This was done in 2011, when Israel exchanged a thousand such prisoners for a soldier named Gilad Shalit who had been held in Gaza for five years.

A second is to continue the aerial bombing campaign they began earlier this week, seeking to kill Hamas’s leaders and degrade the group’s ability to launch weapons against Israel. This has been Israel’s response numerous times in the past.

A third is to tighten the blockade that already exists around Gaza. For example, Israel’s energy minister announced earlier this week that no electricity or water would be supplied to the area until those abducted are returned home.

A fourth is to stage a ground offensive in which Israeli troops enter Gaza to find and destroy Hamas’s leaders, fighters, and weapons.

Is a ground offensive coming?

The first three approaches have not deterred Hamas in the past from the continued aggression against Israel to which its charter pledges the terrorist organization. Any or all of them would be perceived as a major victory for Hamas and could be used to help the group gain power in the West Bank. If this occurred, the threat posed to Israel from Gaza (some forty miles from Jerusalem) would be magnified exponentially from the West Bank (which includes East Jerusalem).

Israeli military leaders have not announced their decision at this writing, but this morning they directed the evacuation of northern Gaza within twenty-four hours, which could signal an impending ground offensive. They have also amassed more than three hundred thousand reservists close to Gaza. A military spokesman said, “There’s not a family that does not have somebody that’s been called up.”

If Israel chooses this fourth option, its soldiers will face “brutal urban warfare” in the coming days. We should also note that Hamas is in the West Bank and Lebanon, as well as in Gaza. As a Gaza-based political analyst noted, it would be difficult for Israel to truly uproot Hamas. “The US stayed in Afghanistan for twenty years, did it end the Taliban?” he asked.

And urban warfare in an area as densely populated as the Gaza Strip would undoubtedly lead to many civilian casualties among the Palestinian population. Would this damage the prospects for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors? Would it kindle a wider war, sparking uprisings in the West Bank and bringing Hezbollah into the conflict? Is this Iran’s larger strategy?

At the same time, how can Israel allow Hamas to continue to exist in anything like its present state and capacity? If they do, will the October 7 atrocities only continue? Can there ever be peace with a terrorist group pledged to their destruction? Does Israel have an obligation to its people to destroy this enemy that threatens its very future?

“The line separating good and evil”

My purpose today is twofold.

First, to help us understand the truly difficult choices Israel is being forced to face and thus to encourage us to pray fervently for her leaders and people in this unprecedented time in their nation’s history.

Second, to illustrate the biblical fact that “sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15). Death to the sinner and, all too often, to their innocent victims as well.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed in The Gulag Archipelago, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

This is why the gospel is so urgently needed. Only Jesus can change terrorists like Saul of Tarsus into missionaries like Paul the Apostle. Only he can forgive the deepest depravities of the human heart. Only he can bring lasting peace to the human condition.

We are told to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6). However, true peace is a “fruit” of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) and thus can come only from the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:7; cf. John 14:27; 16:33).

The old aphorism is still true: “Know God, know peace. No God, no peace.”

Will you join me in praying for the truest and deepest “peace of Jerusalem” today?

Denison Forum