Why Stand With Israel?

In this essay Christine Darg outlines at least eight reasons

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Antisemitic history is repeating itself and shockingly, shamefully, this time on American soil.

Avi Lipkin, founder of the Bible Bloc party in Israel, a frequent speaker at our Passover conferences in Jerusalem, always predicted that eventually America would no longer be a safe haven for Jewish people.

A mass aliyah to Israel of American Jews will happen.

In Zechariah 12, Bible prophecy predicts all nations will come against Jerusalem prior to the Lord’s direct intervention. Events seem to be rapidly moving in that direction.

Calls for violence against Israel and Jews at New York's Columbia University and other universities are undisguised racist hatred.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed this tragic turn of events:

"What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. . . . they say not only, 'Death to Israel. Death to the Jews,' but 'death to America.' And this tells us that there is an antisemitic surge here that has terrible consequences.”

For thousands of years, the Jewish people have fought for their very existence.
This blog is being published during Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins with the ritual seder meal—an annual educational experience for Jewish families. At the Passover seder the liturgy is called the Haggadah. A line in the liturgy particularly rings true this year:

“In every generation they rise up to destroy us but the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hand.”

Even today, this spiritual warfare continues. On October 7, we witnessed the most barbaric massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The orgy of bloodlust unleashed by Hamas triggered waves of antisemitism unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. I cannot imagine anybody identifying with Hamas and marching in pro-Hamas protests, but depravity in human hearts is being exposed.

I want to share excerpts from an open letter written by my Facebook friend Hillel Fuld:
Dear European Jews in the 30s,
. . .So, my European ancestors, and I'm talking to you, Grandma, I'm sorry. You weren't weak and we aren't strong. We are letting them do it to us again and we are again not reading the writing on the wall. . . .
It's 2024 and we haven't learned the lesson that Germany was not our home.
Poland was not our home.
Austria was not our home.
Today, America is not our home.
South Africa is not our home.
The UK is not our home.
Australia is not our home.
We only have one home and that is Israel. . . .
Don't wait till it's too late.
Leave. Get out. Come home.
. . . . No one there has your back.
We have your back here.
So come home. . .
This is your home and we want you here with us.
We need you here with us.

I also want to share some thoughts from my soon-to-be published latest book, “Lord, Will You Restore the Kingdom to Israel?” In my Introduction, I wrote Eight Reasons to Support Israel. My reasons are not political argument. Praying for Israel is a commandment, not an option. I do not say that believers must support every action of the Israeli government. Nevertheless, we must stand in the gap on behalf of Israel’s right to exist.

Let’s start with reason number one. It is the right thing to do to support the Jewish nation and their right to exist. It is the ethical thing to honor one’s parents. The Jewish people are our elders, our parents in the faith. Israel is the root that supports every genuine Christian. In Romans 11, the New Testament teaches we are unnatural former Gentile branches in God’s olive tree. The Jewish patriarchs are our foundational root, the trunk in God’s family tree. It is the sensible thing to support the root that supports you!

One of the great scandals of our time is the boycotting of Israel by mainline churches. Throughout Church history clergy sought to divorce themselves from our Jewish patriarchs and to live in a separate stream. This error brought terrible consequences and prepared ground for the Holocaust. Because of Replacement Theology and unfaithful churchmen who despised the Jews, the celebration of the Lord’s resurrection became in many ways a pagan holiday called “Easter,” named after a fertility goddess. Remembering the death and resurrection of Jesus was not held in synch with the Jewish Passover, when Jesus died as the Lamb of God. The deliberate separation of the Lord’s Passion from Passover has brought distortion and great confusion to the churches and ultimately to the world.

Israel and the Jewish people gave us the Bible. We owe them a debt that we could never repay for being the nation that God entrusted as his guardians and scribes to record his immutable laws and then to bequeath the holy Scriptures to us. Without the Jewish people, there would be no church, no patriarchs, no prophets, no apostles, no Bible, no Saviour. We owe it all to God and to his chosen scribes, the Jewish people.

Reason number two for supporting Israel: In John 4: 22, Jesus said “salvation is of the Jews." Concerning the context of this verse, Jesus was talking theology remarkably with a woman at Jacob’s well. Why would Jesus complicate things by saying to the Samaritan woman that salvation is of the Jews? Do we have to convert to Judaism to be saved? No, that was not what Jesus was saying. He was explaining that salvation did not spring out of thin air but that it proceeded from the Jews, that God had laid all the groundwork for salvation through Jewish history. We owe the Jewish people a debt because they gave us the Saviour of the lineage of King David. Jesus gave us a charge that as we treat the least of his brethren the Jews we have done it unto him. Think about this: at the Cross Jesus entrusted his closest of kin, his mother, to his most trusted disciple, John. Today Jesus entrusts his family, the Jewish people, to the spiritual guardianship of believers because Jesus knows all too well that satanic forces aim to destroy them (but will never succeed).

Reason 3 to support Israel: Psalm 122 commands prayer for the peace of Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel. It is the capital of no other nation. Jesus prophesied in Luke 21: 24 that Jerusalem will be in Jewish hands in the End Times. In his Olivet Discourse His disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” Israel was under Roman occupation at that time. But Jesus answered that when the times of the Gentile nations are fulfilled, then Jerusalem will no longer be trodden down by the Gentiles. Every time we pray for the peace of Jerusalem as the Bible commands, we are praying for the return of Messiah, and we are praying for the shalom of Israel’s capital. Shalom means wholeness, complete, undivided. The nations want to divide Jerusalem, but God’s will is to keep Jerusalem whole and unfractured under Jewish sovereignty.

Reason 4 to support Israel and the Jews: the New Testament teaches in Romans 15: 27 that if we have received spiritual benefits from the Jewish people, we should also bless them with our material benefits. Moreover, it is not merely a debt of love that believing Gentiles owe, it is a debt of justice and equity. We received inestimable values by Jewish means: Messiah himself was Jewish. The oracles of the Hebrew Bible were committed to the Jewish people and were faithfully preserved by Jewish scribes. Jesus and the apostles were all Jews. The Gospel was first preached in Jerusalem and from Jerusalem the Good News was spread to the Gentile world and paid for by the treasury in Jerusalem. Because of the Romans 15:27 principle to return material blessings to the Jews, I have no problem giving offerings to messianics as well as non-Christian rabbis, helping with their food and clothing, whether or not they believe in Jesus, because we are debtors to the Jews in general.

According to the law of charity in Romans 13: 8, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.” And let us not forget the universal law of gratitude— if we have received spiritual riches from the Jewish people, we are surely obliged by some means to make returns to them. I hate ingratitude, don’t you? By acts of mercy and generosity we demonstrate gratitude. Otherwise we are mere ingrates. If you lived in somebody’s house, ate all their food, used their utilities and never repaid them for their hospitality, what kind of ingrate would you be? Yet all the covenants and promises that God made to the Jewish people have been shared with Christians when by faith we were grafted into the commonwealth of God’s Israel, as the Apostle Paul teaches in Ephesians 2: 12 and Romans 11.

Reason 5 for supporting Israel is very practical: It’s safe to be on the right side of history. Israel is scheduled on God’s timeline, and I hope sooner rather than later, to prove the identity of the real God. We are waiting for God to stand up again as in days of old. Satan, God’s enemy, has always wanted to destroy the Jewish people. But their existence proves there is a God and in the end, their presence in the Holy Land will prove that the God of Israel IS the true God. The inordinate amount of antisemitism throughout history is out of proportion compared to persecution of other people groups. Why have the Jewish people been so hated? The story is told that one day England’s Queen Victoria asked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli what evidence he could give for the existence of God. Disraeli thought for a moment and then replied succinctly, "The Jew.”
According to Ezekiel 38 and 39, a showdown between the God of Israel and the god of Islam will happen upon the mountains of Israel. The God of Israel WILL win this contest because God has determined that Israel will survive, not for their sake, but for the sake of his great name. So watch this space and do not be politically correct, be biblically correct. In the end, it will be safe to stand with Israel.

Reason 6 to stand with Israel is because Israel is on the front lines of freedom. Israel is an island of democracy and individual freedoms in the midst of a sea of dictators and repressive regimes, where fanatical religion would impose the sharia law of 8th Century Arabia. One of the great ironies of our day is that one of the smallest nations in the world, Israel, is guarding large nations like America and European countries. In Israel a T-shirt for sale features a picture of a fighter jet with the words, “America, don’t worry, Israel is behind you.” This is no longer a joke. It is reality!

Reason 7 Bible believers must support Israel is because, to use an expression, Israel is the apple of God’s eye. The prophet Zechariah said, “He who touches you touches the apple of His eye.” (Zechariah 2:8) Whoever touches Israel touches the most sensitive part of God. To hate Israel and to deny Israel her place in the sun is to hate Israel’s God and to poke him in the eye. You cannot despise God’s people and claim to worship God.

In one of our ministry’s many prayer convocations in Jerusalem, we repented for the countless times that the prophetic communities have sought knowledge about the End Times apart from caring about a relationship with the Jewish people, the apple of God’s eye. Our God has a permanent covenant relationship with Israel, so why shouldn’t we? Evangelicals have reduced Israel to a check-box on a prophetic scorecard. We tick the boxes of things that must happen before the Lord can return, starting with the super sign of the reconstitution of the nation of Israel. We asked God to forgive us for merely calling Israel “God’s timepiece.” Nevertheless, the Creator IS speaking to this world and especially to the Church, through the sign of the re-emergence of the nation of Israel. If we evangelicals have reduced Israel to a clock, we have done so to try to explain to others that it IS God’s TIME to favor Zion as Psalm 102: 13 declares: “You will arise and have compassion on Zion, for it is time to show favor to her; the appointed time has come.”

Reason 8: I stand with Israel because God personally commanded me to stand with Israel when all the nations of the world turn against Israel. I have always loved the Jewish people because of my upbringing and because of the spirit of revelation upon my life. When I was a young girl, I watched a movie about the life of Jesus and afterwards I was in tears. I was fearful for the Jews who were my Bible heroes. The people of the Bible were my family from my cradle. I first met Abraham through my ABC Bible picture book. King David was also my childhood hero for slaying the giant. I asked my father, of blessed memory, a minister and a moderator in his denomination, “Daddy, what will happen to the Jews for rejecting Jesus?” I’ll never forget my father’s wise answer to my question about the destiny of the Jews. “They are the Lord’s special people,” he said— and quoting Abraham, “Will not the Judge of the whole earth do right?”

Years later, during a period of fasting and prayer, I experienced an epic dream. I was standing on Mt. Zion, and I saw angry nations advancing because the Jews were again in possession of Jerusalem and the Promised Land. The nations were shaking their fists. In the dream suddenly from heaven I saw the Shekinah glory of God, and I heard the Lord say that I must stand with the persecuted people of God when all nations turn against Israel. In the dream I also saw a word —hegemony—sitting on top of a huge pillar. I did not know its meaning so I looked up hegemony in the dictionary. It means control, dominion, sovereignty, describing the territorial spirit that covets and usurps the Holy Land that was given specifically to Israel by God. Israel’s enemies are a hegemonic spirit. It claims all of the Promised Land for itself. Maps in Palestinian textbooks pretend that Israel does not exist. What God said to me he wants all Bible-believing Christians to do, and that is, to stand with Israel when all nations turn against Israel.

The Bible teaches that nations and individuals who have hated Israel will be cursed and separated by Messiah. When the Good Shepherd returns, he will separate sheep nations from goat nations. This is according to the rule of Genesis 12: 3, “I will bless those who bless the Jewish people and I will curse him down to the individual who curses Israel.”

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