October 7 is nothing new for the Chosen ones

One nation is chosen, for what? Greater things.

See this in your mind. Up to five thousand civilians, some with military or weapons training, cross a weakly defended border. They fly drones, use motor-powered hang gliders, ride in trucks and stolen vehicles, sweeping in during the early morning hours. They proceed to murder in cold blood: women, children in front of their parents, men protecting their families who are hiding from the horror. They rape, burn, execute, and then take some hostage to return to their own land.

Except see this in your mind that the invaders are Israeli settlers, and the victims are Palestinians living in West Bank communities. See how the international community, the Arab world, and American college students would react. Israel would immediately become an international pariah—even more so than Russia after its February, 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the world would unite against Israel, perhaps to topple its government, certainly to avenge those who were killed and violated, and to rescue or secure the release of those stolen from their homes.

Protesters marched on Storrow Drive as a coalition of pro-Palestinian organizations gathered in Boston on October 7, 2024. JESSICA RINALDI/ BOSTON GLOBE

What you would not see happen is practically anyone outside of Israel and the settler community itself defending the actions of the rapists and murderers as just vengeance for years of being attacked, marginalized, having their homes continually bulldozed, with little support from their own government or the Palestinians they work with and live among.

For the 300,000-odd Israelis who live in what’s supposed to be a temporary arrangement that is now nearly 30 years old—Area C in the West Bank—this is their situation. They live among 400,000 Palestinians, in a constant state of potential conflict, even when there isn’t a shooting or stabbing. And though the Oslo Agreement that was supposed to be concluded by a permanent two-state solution was never really intended to be forever, it seems like these settlers are stuck, with Israel’s government building its own housing for an increasing number of immigrants.

Since 1948, when the British struck their colors over Jerusalem, and the blue and white Israeli flag was raised over Tel Aviv, over 800,000 Jews were forced out of their homes, or fled violence in eleven Arab or Muslim-governed nations. There were 265,000 Jews living in Morocco in 1948, and in 2017 there were only 2,000 remaining. Libya had no Jews living in it in 2019, where 38,000 resided before. I could go on but the map tells its tale.

There has been almost continual violence in Israel since 1948, from the first bloody war Palestinians call the “nakba” or “catastrophe,” to outright wars of elimination in 1967 and 1972, to Intifada in 1986 and 2000, to the Lebanon wars, to Gaza and now Hezbollah again in Lebanon. Over 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 soldiers were injured in the six years beginning in 1987, while hundreds of American soldiers were killed and wounded beginning in 1983 in the Beirut Marine barracks and Khobar Towers bombings conducted by Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah.

The second intifada was far more deadly for Israelis: 1053 dead, about 70 percent of them civilians. The continual violence and hatred thrown at Israel, combined with the outright lies spun to whip its enemies into a killing rage, would be plenty of reason for any nation on earth to be given justification—by someone, anyone—for their people to fly into a vengeful rage.

But this is unthinkable for Israel. We cannot even conceive of Israelis raping innocent women, butchering them, along with men and children, in view of their families. Not even Israel’s biggest enemies charge them with that kind of unfettered barbarism.

Instead, on October 7, 2023, the opposite happened. The terror really occurred, but it was Hamas who inspired, planned, and carried it out. It was Israeli women who were raped. It was Israeli men and boys—and babies—who were carried away to become hostages. Some have never been seen since. Some had been recovered as corpses. Some have been negotiated back in return for killers who are being held in Israeli prisons—prisoners given meals, showers, and living spaces as prisoners in advanced nations do. The hostages endured terrible conditions in tunnels, along with threats to their lives.

And Israel, after suffering 695 civilian deaths, including 36 children, along with 373 army and other security forces, and 71 foreigners, on October 7th, has responded by crushing the heads and infrastructure of its primary enemies. These enemies had embedded themselves over decades within civilian neighborhoods, mosques, hospitals, schools, media outlets, and the United Nations itself. That means for every hostile fighter Israel killed, the terrorists did their best to ensure that at least three civilians died with them at the hands of the Israelis. They generally succeeded at this gory math.

This makes the lopsided battles and counts of the dead of the Israel-Hamas war, by any reasonable standard, atrocious. But by the legal rules of war, it is not an atrocity by Israel. It’s an atrocity against war itself perpetrated by Israel’s enemies, who want not just the territory “from the river to the sea,” but the complete elimination of the world’s Jews from every land, everywhere. (Read the Hamas charter.)

When the war is not against an army, or a territory, or a fiefdom, or a kingdom, or a government, but against a people group who have from antiquity been expelled from practically every major western and Eastern European nation on earth (save the United States!), then things like the rules of war or international law cease to apply.

Many pundits would say that the Jews bring this kind of genocidal hatred upon themselves. That Jews, who make up less than 0.01 percent of the world’s population, do not deserve to win over 25 percent of Nobel Prizes, especially in the areas of physics, medicine, literature, and economics, except they did win. What have the Jews contributed to the world (besides the polio vaccine, penicillin, and other medical breakthroughs)? Why do Jewish-run businesses do well; why do Jews excel in certain fields?

While it’s amusing to hear such brainless invective like Jew-powered space lasers or weather control devices (from brainless people like MTG), it’s not amusing that people who otherwise know better than to believe the conspiracies, give it some serious thought when it comes to trusting Jews, or treating them with equal dignity and presumptions of loyalty to the nation they live in (I mean American Jews). It should not be surprising that American Jews, and Jews around the world support the existence of Israel, being that it is the one and only Jewish state, the one and only place where Jews have a historical, religious, and physical connection with the land on which Israel exists.

While Jews differ in opinions on the government of Israel, and its leaders, and their actions, just about all Jews agree that Israel should not be wiped from the map. Yet thousands of college students in America side with those in the Middle East who want exactly that. These students blame individual Jews peacefully going to classes, or teaching, among them for nothing more than being Jewish and holding to the beliefs of Jews around the world—that “never again” is not just a slogan for a museum in Washington, D.C., or a shrine in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem).

Anything short of Jews abandoning their Jewishness and favoring the expulsion of their own people from their own land—likely by massacre, by the way—is seen to be some kind of “dual loyalty” that no other people group in the world is saddled with, at least not with the same universal ferocity with which is it hurled at Jews.

It would seem as if Jews are indeed chosen. Being chosen, goes the dark humor, is not the joy you might think it is. Chosen to be hated, to be singled out. Chosen to be killed en masse. Chosen to be expelled, to be accused. But also, chosen to shine. Chosen to excel, to build what was said cannot be built. Chosen to invent, to create. Chosen to succeed, in spite of all opposition. Chosen to keep existing despite all evidence they should simply fade away.

For those who are not religious, who don’t hold to a belief in a supreme being, the creator known as Adonai in the Torah and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and the New Testament, it can be quite a puzzle and a mystery as to why the Jews hold a unique place in history and current events. Statistically, it should be impossible for such a small population to have such a giant impact on world events. Explanations evade logic and do not survive critical inspection without huge logical leaps and not a few “magic” steps of accepting what should not be explainable except that they have occurred.

Being a person who believes in the living God of the Bible, the explanation, to me, is not only Biblical, but also personal. The goal of the enemy of human souls is to “kill, steal and destroy.” It is to oppose the plans and creation by God—those whom God loves, meaning all of us. My pastor offered a Biblical take I had not heard in this way before: Genesis 3:15 says “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

The definition of “enmity” is open violence. God was speaking to the serpent, the deceiver, known as satan, who deceived Eve, and caused Adam to sin in the Garden of Eden. Whether you hold this to be poetic theology or actual events, it is telling that the enemy of our souls is also the enemy of women, and the seed of women.

Though critics of the Old Testament and New Testament being anti-woman have some points about the roles of modern couples, the enemies of Israel have abysmal records in their treatment of women. The seed of woman, in most interpretations, includes and directly references Jesus Christ, the son of a woman and a man who had no earthly father. He is to crush the head of the serpent at the times in the Book of Revelation, when Jesus arrives to the Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem. It can also refer to the seed of all women: babies in the womb, but I won’t get into that here (that was the more interesting way it was referenced).

What I do see, however, is that hatred of Jews is not simply demonic and supernatural, it is satanic, and a particular obsession of satan, at that. It is possibly the major deception of the deceiver himself. Jesus said in John 14:12, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” Jesus was merely (merely!) resurrected from the dead, after performing miracles of healing and other signs and wonders. What is greater than that?

The Apostle Paul, in Romans 11:11-12, speaks of it. “So I ask, did they [the Jews] stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather, through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean!”

Now if you know Biblical history, Paul was born Saul, in Tarsus, modern Turkey. He was educated by the famous Rabbi Gamaliel, a member of the Sanhedrin. Saul was a brilliant rabbi and quickly advanced as a man of law and action to become the “fixer” for the Jews in Jerusalem. Saul was on his way to Damascus with letters of authorization to arrest and punish followers of Jesus there when he was met on the road by the voice of the Lord himself, temporarily struck blind, and given a new identity in Christ as Paul. Paul was a learned Jew, who spent more than a decade in prayer and study to become the man who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament canon, held as core doctrine of the faith.

Paul wrote that the greater thing than Jesus’ own resurrection is that the Jews, who had been cut off from the new covenant, still operated and were bound to God’s original covenant as the chosen people. Anyone who preaches “replacement theology” must ignore this scripture or invent ways to skip around it, because that theology, that the Church replaced Israel, is heresy. It means there is no greater thing to which Jesus referred.

The greater thing is that the Jews, who still light the world like no other people in history, are chosen, and their return to the savior they are waiting for will mean more, and accomplish more, than Jesus himself did in his own return from the dead. It will be a return of an entire people from the dead.

Though the Jewish state occupies the Holy Land, it is not fully alive yet. The enemy, satan, knows this, and wishes to do away with the old covenant, and the chosen people of that covenant, so that the greater thing cannot be accomplished, and that God’s plan will fail. Of course, we all know that isn’t what the Bible says, and satan knows it too. But he will not stop trying until it all comes to pass. He will continue to deceive, to kill, steal and destroy the things of God.

You don’t have to believe that, but it, to me, is the only logical piece that fits an otherwise illogical, irrational, and completely psychotic hatred of Jews, all over the world. If not mass deception, then what is it?

Planned for years, the events of October 7th are no different than any other burst of antisemitism, Jew hatred, in the world at various times and in various places, by various people. This one will not be the last, nor will it be the most wicked. The enemy, satan himself, has reserved that for when he supplants God on the throne in the rededicated temple’s holy of holies. That’s what the Bible says, and it’s been pretty accurate regarding hatred of the Jews thus far, so I tend to trust it above pundits with their own ideas.

There is a reason that if Israel had done what was done to them a year ago, the world would hate the Jews for it. And because Israel’s enemies did what they did to Israelis a year ago, the world hates the Jews for it. That’s what being chosen is. Chosen for greater things.

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