Op-Ed: Isaac Woodward: Why Christians stand with Israel two years after October 7th
Isaac Woodward lays out the Christian case for Israel, two years removed from the horrors of October 7th.
Exactly two years ago, the United States was invaded by tens of thousands of members of a Mexican drug cartel who murdered over 44,000 Americans and kidnapped over ten thousand more. They used GoPro cameras to livestream their rape, murder, torture, and dismemberment of men, women and children. Notably, they largely avoided Border Patrol stations, military bases, and law enforcement installations. Their stated aim and tactics were simple: to inflict the maximum amount of terrorism against civilian targets and brag about their terror to the world.
After being beaten back, these cartels fired hundreds of thousands of rockets from Mexico into the southwestern United States for over 700 days. To date, thousands of Americans still languish in cartel captivity, hoping and praying that their country rescues them.
Of course, the event described above never occurred — but the numbers are adjusted by population to put the scale of the atrocity of October 7th in perspective. With this perspective in mind, I ask you to evaluate the commentary and criticism you’ve heard about the War in Gaza, and see if any single line of attack would persuade Americans like yourself, your family, or your neighbors to abandon a military operation set to neutralize the terrorists who attacked us and to give up on rescuing thousands of Americans still in captivity. Keep this comparison in mind as we evaluate where we are two years after October 7th and its earth-shattering inhumanity.
In particular, I ask my fellow American Christians to consider how they’d respond to a similar scale attack and where their values should point them in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Where were you when __ happened?” is a common question that arises when the scale and significance of an event is taken into the collective consciousness of a society. “Where were you on 9/11?” “Where were you when JFK got shot? Or more recently, “where were you when Charlie Kirk got shot?” All of these events have a lasting significance in one way or another beyond the lives taken or the emotional trauma inflicted.
They signal something deeply wrong about a culture or society that we all seek to understand. But when it comes to the sheer scale of the attack, the proximity to the perpetrator, and the ongoing threat faced, October 7th, 2023, surpasses even events like 9/11 by comparison.
The deeply personal and barbaric methods of murder used by Palestinians on October 7th leave a deep scar on the Israeli psyche. However, there is a difference between a scar and a fatal wound. And in this, Hamas failed to achieve their objective. They failed to kill the Israeli desire to live, love, and protect their nation. I’m reminded of an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine who was stabbed in the back in New York City by an anti-Semitic man. This vile person did leave a scar on my friend, but he failed to kill him or his courage to walk, visibly Jewish on the streets of New York. Instead, he hardened the resolve of my friend to fight anti-Semitic terrorists wherever they arose. He went on to fight bravely as a member of the IDF’s elite Golani Brigade.
To Jews and Israelis, the sheer scale of the attack perpetrated by Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians on October 7th, 2023 represents thousands of stab wounds to their society. Even still, they refused to surrender in the face of terror or let the nightmarish images, phone calls, videos, and other reminders of Hamas’ genocidal depravity paralyze them with fear. There is much more that can be said about the courageous example of Israelis since October 7th, but I’ll leave their stories to those closer to the events and their victims and turn to address my own people: American Christians.
I was born and raised in a Bible-believing evangelical Christian household in the American South. Growing up, I heard theological and political arguments about the shared values and goals of Israel and the United States. I was taught that the two largest threats to the survival of the Judeo-Christian civilization I held dear were Islamists (using terrorism and statecraft) and atheistic ideologues that sought to create technocratic “utopias” which dethroned God and put themselves in charge. While these factions often fought each other, they all agreed that the Judeo-Christian West was the primary obstacle to achieving their ideal societies. For, each of these factions were totalitarian in Mussolini’s classic definition: “everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
For Islamists, that means Sharia Law governing every aspect of society. For Nazis, it meant ridding the world of the Christian notion that all men are created equal in the eyes of God and establishing a racial hierarchy. For Communists, it was dethroning God and crowning a technocratic elite that would control all economic activity.
All three of these totalitarian regimes cannot tolerate the idea of a sovereign creator deity that endows all humanity with rights entirely independent of the dictates of their regime. The purpose here is not to make an exhaustive argument for this paradigm, but to explain a worldview which characterized a large majority of Evangelicals for several decades. And in this worldview, we saw how the two most hated nations on earth by these totalitarian idealogues and Islamist zealots were always The United States and Israel. While the Shia Muslims of Iran formally call these two countries the “Big” and “Little” Satans, the atheistic totalitarians completely agree with the sentiment even if they would not use religious language to describe it. Christians in America used to largely agree on this paradigm where our enemies sought to eradicate the foundations of the West through delegitimizing, attacking, and isolating the United States and Israel in the eyes of the “global community.” One need only search “Israel” as a keyword on any social media website to see that this consensus among broad swathes of American Christianity is fraying.
Let us return to the hypothetical attack on the U.S. from Mexico with the numbers made proportional to the October 7th attack on Israel. Imagine that before we even knew the numbers of fatalities, casualties, and hostages, spontaneous demonstrations of support for the Cartel’s terrorism erupted across the globe.
Recall that in the real world, one of the first major demonstrations after October 7th happened in New York City, but it was composed of hundreds of people celebrating the attack. So, in our alternative timeline, the last 730 days, we’ve seen millions of people across the world rally in support of the cartels or in opposition to American military efforts to bring justice and return our hostages. We’ve been called “colonizers” and accused of genocide as our forces push into cartel territory. Even in these politically fractious times, it’s hard to imagine any American political party not joining ranks with American citizens to prosecute the campaign until every hostage was rescued. That is how Americans would likely respond to a similar style attack on our homeland, but what accounts for various political responses to the October 7th attack on Israel?
As the political scholar Walter Russell Meade has written, there are four main schools of foreign policy thought that animate the American populace, consciously or not. One of the most enigmatic of these schools is the “Jacksonian” camp. This spirit was largely shaped by the Protestant Scots Irish immigrants who came from the fringes of northern England, Southern Scotland, and Northern Ireland. These immigrants brought with them a deep skepticism towards centralized power, a deeply ingrained honor culture making them willing to avenge injuries and insults with sustained ferocity, and a willingness to defend family, country, and faith from any attacks. However, this willingness to fight when wronged does not make this part of the American population to look abroad for foreign interventions or battles to join. But when attacked like at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11, this part of the population is consistently overrepresented in the ranks of the military. This overrepresentation also means that a higher proportion of deaths and injuries are born by these men and women compared to other segments of the population. This awareness of the horror of war also leads many from the Jacksonian camp to lead the opposition to foreign involvements like we have seen with Pat Buchanna, Ron and Rand Paul, and Thomas Massie, among others.
So where does Christianity come into play? The answer is partially demographic and partially ideological. The Scots Irish immigration which was the seedbed for the Jacksonian spirit are geographically rooted in the American South and the Appalachian region. These regions were also a large part of the First and Second “Great Awakenings” which helped make America far more tied to its Christian roots then was the case of European Christianity following World War I. The modern Evangelical movement was disproportionately influenced by the American South and Appalachia. This means that Evangelicals in America share two, seemingly contradictory impulses in their ideological heritage. On the one hand, Evangelicals know their Bibles (especially the Old Testament) and have long studied the role of the Jews as God’s chosen people. They see the affinity for Jews, especially in their shared hatred by Islamists, as a unifying force. However, post 1948 when the Jews went from a diasporic, oppressed remnant of Biblical times to a sovereign nation state, the paradigm had to be revaluated. Now, the Jacksonian impulse towards isolationism, skepticism for government, and aversion to foreign conflicts collided with the desire to learn from and protect the Jewish people.
Historically, America started off vaguely sympathetic to Israel and only grew in large scale support after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where Israel was no longer seen as merely a weak victim; a hangover example of a struggling stateless people in the post-colonial era. Prior to 1973, the ratio of left-wing versus right-wing support for Israel was far different than today. Israel went from being perceived as an underdog and began to face more left-wing attacks as the “Oppressor/Oppressed” Marxist narrative gained purchase in American society.
However, while left-wing support waned, Evangelical support increased. Israel began to transition from a small seemingly secular (in the eyes of many) socialist state into a robust regional player. We saw our battles reflected in Israel’s daily struggle for survival. The 1970s and 1980s saw Muslim terror, hijackings, and murder hitting Americans and Israelis at home and abroad.
The Muslim revolution in Iran saw kidnappings of Americans while Israel faced murders at the Munich Olympics and kidnappings and daring rescues at Entebbe. It became increasingly clear that whether we desired the affinity or not, our enemies saw Americans and Israelis as their primary targets. However, whenever American involvement became protracted, as in Lebanon, the Jacksonian Spirit along with other forces put pressure to return to fortress America and leave the world be. To our shame, President Ronald Reagan responded to the murder of over 240 Marines and others in Beirut by abandoning the campaign.
So we see this paradox of Evangelical support for Israel and the Jewish people in principle sometimes colliding with the realities of a military alliance that occasionally resulted in foreign conflicts. However, not until the aftermath of October 7th did we see such a precipitous decline in young evangelical support for America as to cause alarm.
In the intervening decades, many Evangelicals became disillusioned by Bush era wars and their disastrous withdrawals executed by Presidents Barack Obama (Iraq 2011) and Joe Biden (Afghanistan 2021). In the minds of many, the idealistic hope that we could liberate people from oppression and thereby neutralize their countries as bases of support for terrorism were dashed. There is no space here to relitigate the policy choices of these wars, but the popular perception of many was that they were doomed to fail from the start and all we had left to show for it were military casualties and inflated national debt. Enter the “New Right.”
Up to this point, we’ve focused on one strain of American Christianity: Evangelicals. However, over the last two decades, a growing ecumenism has led to cross pollination of American Christianity. Specifically, certain strains with a greater emphasis on sacrifice and suffering, social justice, and elements of favoring the “oppressed” (real or perceived) creeped in. This led to revaluations of issues like race relations, climate policy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some evangelical leaders bought in the notion of Jews as white and Palestinians as people of color and used this notion to determine which party they supported in the conflict. This notion is fundamentally anti-Christian for many reasons including the fact that applying a racial lens to a person or people group rather than using ethics and logic to evaluate a dispute dehumanizes people on both sides. Additionally, the Howard Zinn reading of American history which has colonized the minds of many on the Right like Tucker Carlson and Candance Owens led some Evangelicals to see alliance with the United States and support by white Christians as fundamentally suspect. If America was an evil racist colonizing state and some white Christians were complicit in slavery in the past, then the mere fact that these parties support Israel makes them guilty by association. For Owens and Carlson, they reject the racist narrative but fixate on CIA conspiracy theories and relitigating World War Two to paint America as morally suspect. This logic paired with the incessant lies about Israel coming from the mainstream media and globalist institutions gave plenty of fodder for some Christians to oppose Israel.
This dynamic explains a left-wing assault on Evangelical support for Israel, but the right-wing was not to be outdone. The aforementioned isolationism of Jacksonian Americans meant that anytime that support for Israel left the ideological realm and became practical in military terms, this population began to fear foreign entanglements that would threaten the blood and treasure of Americans. There is nothing wrong with prioritizing our own nations. In fact, we ought to, but at some point, many Jacksonian Evangelicals bought the lie that support for Israel came at the cost of allegiance to, or support for American policy objectives. This was a failure of many of us to explain that any valuable alliance must be evaluated on the basis of if it is overall in the best interests of America First.
But America First, as President Trump has reminded us, does not mean “America alone.” However, advocates for a close alliance between Israel and the U.S. must always make clear that we hold this position because of our love for America, its values, and its future, not in spite of it. One of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in the book is to imply Jews, or their allies, support Israel even though it’s bad for their nation of residence. Instead, we must demonstrate that the very freedoms, values, traditions, and heritage that we in the West hold dear are the wellspring of our support for Israel.
Our deepest values came from the revelations given to Abraham as he trusted God and left modern day Iraq to settle in the Holy Land. Our most profound inspirations to create charitable institutions, defend the weak, and care for the orphan came from the lips of a First Century Rabbi named Yeshua Ben Yosef of Nazareth. These ideas were debated, refined, and rationalized in the Hellenistic stew of First Century Rome.
This heritage gave rise to Christendom and blossomed into the Anglo-American system of common law. This law was codified over centuries through the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628) and other documents. A love for this tradition and a recognition that rights come from “nature and Nature’s God” led the Founding Fathers to break from the British Empire and create our nation.
You do not get America with its protection of rights, values, prosperity, and power without Abraham and his obedience to God. Similarly, you do not get modern day Israel without Abraham. You don’t have the miraculous preservation of language, tradition, and values of the Jewish people which prevail in Israel without God and his special revelation. To paraphrase the New Testament, “the root cannot reject the branch from whence it came.”
Where does this leave us on this second anniversary of October 7th? Let me first address my Jewish brothers and sisters. Alas, the choices for you are narrower than for Christians as we saw on October 7th. The forces of radical Islam see the only good Jew as a dead Jew. So long as you choose to maintain your Jewish identity and not undergo the Submission to Islam (the literal meaning of the word) your right to independent life and liberty is forfeit. The butchers from Gaza did not ask about your political party. They did not look for a Kippah. They did not even ask if their victims were Jewish as we saw from horrific videos of Asian migrant workers tortured and killed on October 7th. They were presumed “Zionist” by the mere act of setting foot in Israel. No, the choice for Jews is to abandon your faith or cultural identity and submit, or to fight. Rejecting Israel or Zionism is not even a protection as we saw from the numerous assaults and murders of Jews for the crime of being visibly Jewish.
Now to my Christian brethren. With whom will you side on this anniversary? For any of us who are politically aware, we can see the allied forces of atheistic totalitarianism and Islamism unite in a war against the fundamental values and freedoms of the Judeo-Christian West. Is it a mere coincidence that the same Islamist forces trying to bring Sharia to Dearborn Michigan or London also hate Israel and the Jewish people? Is it a coincidence that the U.N. the Davos Euro technocrats that seek to undermine the vestiges of Christendom in Europe also hate Israel and fail to protect Jews in their country? Is this just the one issue where they happened to be justified? Maybe you didn’t want Greta to turn us all into vegans freezing by the electric heater set to 50 degrees in the Winter, but she is right when she condemns Israel from her flotilla in the Mediterranean? I would submit that it is no accident that these enemies of the Christian West also dedicate so much of their vitriol to the one Jewish state on the planet.
In addition to committing a moral failure by siding with Islamists and secular totalitarians, any Christian who discards Israel as an ally of the West commits a strategic error. In a multi-front battle for the shared values of religious freedom, freedom of speech, rights to conscience, and other values, we must not abandon any flank to our enemies. Israel is the only example in a sea of Muslim nations where Jews, Christians, and Muslims live at peace with their rights protected. If we abandon them to be devoured by the forces is Islam which exploded from Arabia to conquer the Christian Byzantine Empire, we risk not only the loss of allies, but access to holy sites and the deep connections to the fountain of our faith.
I’m often asked why I care about Israel so much. As if there is an implicit contradiction between me being a patriotic American and also valuing the relationships, culture, civilization, and alliance with another nation like Israel. The same thing that leads me to passionately defend the Judeo-Christian roots of America. Our cultural legacy, our religious heritage, and our moral leadership. These same things are what lead me to champion Israel as a beacon of truth and justice in the region. They are still a flawed country, as is our own, and every other nation in human history. However, lack of perfection does not mean there is moral equivalence between Israel and its Islamist enemies or the secular European technocrats that enable them.
We can make distinctions between a country that supports the human rights of all of its citizens and has a demonstrated record of seeking peace even at its own expense or land and loss of security. It is not a simple topic, but the basic moral rectitude between Israel and its enemies is one of the most basic tests on earth. If American Christians, on this second Anniversary of October 7th, fail to see where our common values and sympathies should lie, then we will continue to lose our way not just on this issue, but at our moral core.
Isaac Woodward is the Director of the Philos Leadership Institute.