“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

J. J. Kimche is a doctoral student in Jewish history at Harvard University and author of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal I hope you’ll read in its entirety. It begins: “Hamas’s attack on Israel was a small-scale Holocaust, a moment no Jew alive with the tiniest speck of communal feeling will ever forget. As a Jewish student, I was similarly chilled by the reactions at Harvard.”

He then describes the now-infamous response by more than thirty Harvard student groups to Hamas’s invasion of Israel, a statement that supported the terrorists while blaming their actions entirely on Israel. Kimche asks, “How can we share dormitories, classrooms, and ideas with students who would make excuses or even celebrate if we and our families were hacked to death by a Hamas terrorist tomorrow?”

He closes: “As a grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and a student of German-Jewish history, I was always incredulous that highly cultured Germans, the people of Goethe and Beethoven, could have displayed sympathy and even enthusiasm for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. Now I believe it. I have seen it happen here.”

“Using their civilians to protect their missiles”

I understand that Palestinians and Israelis have a fundamental conflict over who should own the same land. I believe strongly that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in peace and autonomy. I have dear and trusted friends of many years—both Jews and Arabs—who live in the Holy Land, some in Israel and others in Bethlehem and other areas of the West Bank. And I know beyond question that God loves Israelis and Palestinians equally (Galatians 3:28) and that he is grieving for the victims on both sides of this conflict.

However, I am writing today to voice my vehement opposition to a sentiment I am seeing after Hamas’s horrific invasion last Saturday: the claim that the two sides are morally equivalent to each other and that both commit similar atrocities against each other.

It is a tragic fact that some Israeli settlers have acted with indefensible violence against some Palestinians in the West Bank. And it is a fact that when Israel targets Hamas’s military installations in Gaza, since Hamas hides them behind human shields in schools, homes, and hospitals, Palestinian civilians are sometimes injured or killed.

But consider:

Hamas terrorists decapitated babies and slaughtered children when they raided Israel last Saturday morning. According to Israeli soldiers who discovered one massacre, “They have butchered women and children in worse ways than ISIS.” They kidnapped and killed elderly civilians as well, some of them Holocaust survivors, leaving what the New York Times calls a “trail of terror.”

By contrast, when Israel last had to go into Gaza to stop Hamas, it first warned residents by cellphone and leaflets. It also used small “warning rockets,” usually sent from drones, to identify buildings it was targeting so people had time to evacuate.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summarized the difference between the two this way: “We are using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

How Hamas dehumanizes the Jews

History records a long strategy of dehumanizing the Jews as the first step toward their genocidal eradication. The Egyptians of Moses’ day did this by enslaving them and treating them “ruthlessly” (Exodus 1:14). The Qur’an does this by describing them as “apes and swine” (5:60; 2:65; 7:166). Hitler did this by calling them a “race-tuberculosis of the peoples.”

Hamas does this when it claims that Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” They blame Jews for “the French Revolution, the Communist revolution, and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about.” And they claim that the Jews were behind World War I And World War II. In short, they state, “There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”

The plague of antisemitism has grown in the US and especially on college campuses in recent years. As I noted yesterday, many are deluded by Critical Theory that sees the state of Israel as the majority persecutor and Palestinians as its minority victims who must then oppress their oppressor. In so doing, these antisemites take a significant step toward dehumanizing the people of Israel as oppressors worthy of oppression.

Such defamation threatens Jews not just in Israel but around the world. Violent antisemitism surged in the US during the last Israel–Hamas war in 2014. Now we’re seeing:

• A local kosher restaurant in London was vandalized on Monday; graffiti that read “Free Palestine” appeared on a bridge.
• Antisemitic incidents tripled in Britain after the invasion.
• Police in France have opened forty-four investigations into antisemitic hate speech and glorification of terrorism.
• A synagogue in Spain was defaced with graffiti that read “Free Palestine.”
• Security for synagogues and other Jewish institutions has been heightened across Europe.
• Anti-Israel rallies have been held this week across the US, some displaying swastikas.

As Israel heightens its military response in Gaza, we should expect such antagonism against Jews to escalate.

“The foundation for the whole American political experiment”

Our nation was founded on the declaration that “all men are created equal.” Ronald Reagan was right: “Faith in the dignity of the individual under God is the foundation for the whole American political experiment.” Dehumanizing others threatens this foundation and our very future.

What is the solution? Mr. Reagan also warned: “When men try to live in a world without God, it’s only too easy for them to forget the rights that God bestows.”

Please join me in rejecting the rising antisemitism of our secularized culture. “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” with fervency (Psalm 122:6). Tell your Jewish friends and the leaders of your local synagogue that you are standing with and praying for them. Use your personal and social media influence to support the Jewish people in this hour of great crisis. Pray for God to redeem this tragedy in ways that bring peace to the Middle East and many to himself.

And pray for a moral and spiritual awakening in our land that restores the “foundation for the whole American political experiment” before it is too late.

Denison Forum