Thursday, August 22, 2024

Part I

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President Biden Continues Pushing for Ceasefire in Israel — But Neither Israel Nor the Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution

Over the next few days, we will be taking a look at what, in retrospect, was most important at the Democratic National Convention, but we also understand there are other issues pressing upon the Christian mind and the Christian conscience. So, we want to take a look at some of those issues, and then we’ll get back to issues with the Democrats and the 2024 presidential race. In particular, I want us to look at some international issues right now, because these are looming large, and there’s a sense in which it’s hard to keep our perspective, especially during a presidential campaign season, where the headlines, the front pages in the newspapers, the dominating media conversation, and beyond that, even the dominating cultural conversation, it’s overwhelmingly domestic.

But we just need to keep in mind that the international scene is not waiting for the American presidential election before you’re going to have more headlines, including more very demanding and troubling headlines. And thus, there are some big issues, so let’s just state up front. We need to look at some of these big issues. We need to update our thinking, because we are looking at a very dangerous world situation. As a matter of fact, a part of what I want to convey today is that even the Biden administration is recognizing, in a way we will discuss in just a few minutes, we are in an increasingly dangerous world. This is something we need to seek to understand.

First of all, let’s go to the very troubled situation in Gaza, and let’s just remind ourselves of the landscape there. The big headline news right now is the fact that the American administration, that means President Joe Biden, he is trying, during the remaining time on his term, and remember that’s now expiring pretty quickly, in presidential terms, really quickly. He is seeking to win some kind of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Now, that’s in the aftermath of the October 7th, 2023 attack upon Israel by Hamas, a terrorist organization that indeed inflicted terror upon Israel, murderousness, and then taking hostages in the most serious attack upon Israel in a matter of decades.

And if you look at the big news stories, you’re going to see that the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, was in the area meeting with the principals, putting pressure from the United States and allies for an immediate ceasefire, a negotiated ceasefire. And of course, there is just story after story about the devastation being experienced there in Gaza, as the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, are persecuting, necessarily so, their effort to end the threat of Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization, but Hamas is also a terrorist organization with the base there in Gaza from which they attacked Israel. Hamas is also, at least it would claim, the elected governmental authority there. So, we really are looking at a huge problem.

But we’re also looking at a shift in history, and I want to talk about this and put it into a Christian perspective, seek to understand this. What you have, for example just in recent days, take teh front page of the Wall Street Journal, “Two State hopes for Israel Look Dimmer Than Ever. Now, just understand, that the official policy of the United States of America, going back as far as 1948, the year of the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, you had an American argument that there should be two states there in that deeply-troubled region. There should be a Jewish state and there should be a Palestinian state. In one form or another, whether it was called the two-state solution or the two-state settlement, that was basically where you had the United States and European allies when it came to Israel.

And you’ll also recall that when Israel was declared to be a nation, it inhabited much less space. Now, we’re not talking about much space at all in that region of the Middle East, but it inhabited much less space by means of declarations of groups such as the United Nations. But then you recall that in a short amount of time, Israel ended up with more space. And the answer to the reason why is this, the Arab states around Israel savagely attacked it. They sought to extinguish Israel there in the very beginning of the nation’s story. And not only did they fail to extinguish Israel, but Israel fought back in such a way that it ended up with slightly more territory after that battle or series of battles than before. But then you have other wars, including wars in the 1960s, wars in the 1970s, and then you have an increased understanding on the part of Israelis, and this means also eventually governments in Israel, that a two-state solution was really not going to work.

Here’s the problem for Israel. Israel is facing the fact that it cannot exist without allies in this global picture, and the United States is at the very top of the list of those necessary allies. The United States, President Harry Truman, in office at the time, was the very first nation to recognize Israel as a nation. And even as the United States and Israel have sometimes had a troubled relationship, over time, the United States has been the most important, the most crucial ally of Israel in terms of its national history. But it’s also true that even as Israel needs the United States, the United States needs Israel, because one of the hard lessons of the second half of the 20th century for the United States is that disruption, mayhem, anarchy, and worse, there in the Middle East, is actually a part of America’s daily political equation, which is to say the United States cannot extricate the United States and our national interests from the Middle East, but it’s also simultaneously true that the national interests of Israel and the national interests of the United States of America have a natural congruence.

Also, remember the fact that it’s a worldview congruence. As much as the United States and Israel are different in forms of constitutional government, et cetera, it is also true that Israel is the only constitutional democracy there in the entire Middle East. It’s the only nation that shares the kind of democratic heritage that we have here in the United States of America. It’s not exactly the same, but it is in the family, and that sets Israel apart in the entire region. But even as President Biden is trying to reach a sort of presidential achievement by reaching a ceasefire before he leaves office, and even as Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is assigned to take the lead in helping to bring that about, even trying to force it into coming into existence, the reality is that on the ground, Israel and Hamas, well, they’re not the same thing. This is what’s so very important.

You have the front page of major newspapers, “Two State Hopes.” Well, what would the two states be? And when you talk about Israel and Hamas, Israel is a nation, a legitimate recognized nation. Hamas is a terrorist organization. We’re not talking about a parallel moral equation here. There’s a sense in which anyone looking at the situation, well, might be tempted to say a two-state solution is exactly what looks most fair. You could have a Palestinian state and you could have a Jewish state. Okay. Here’s the problem. It is very limited territory, and at least many among the Palestinians claim all of it. They claim that Israel is an absolutely illegitimate state. When they talk about from the river to the sea, they’re not just talking about Palestinian sovereignty, they’re talking about the erasure of Israel.

Now, the United States does not want to see that happen. And if anything, that’s an understatement. Israel’s determined that that not happen, and I guarantee you, if anything, that’s an understatement. But it’s also important for us to realize the fact that even as the Wall Street Journal put this on the front page in this week’s story, the reality is the government in Israel, and increasingly the Israeli public, has come to the conclusion that it is illusory to believe there can be a two-state solution. And that is because when you have at least a sizable number of Palestinians who believe that their purpose should be to bring about the non-existence of Israel, it is very hard to imagine how these two nations can live in peace. But even as we will look more closely at that in just a moment, I think this is a good time for us to go back a bit, because even as we talk about Russia and Ukraine in just a moment, this is going to apply also.

It raises the question, what is a nation? And we talk about nations as if we just commonly share the notion of a nation, and we know exactly what a nation is. But the very fact that you would divide the world into nations, you’d be able to put together a globe with different colored nations just showing all their national boundaries, locations, and all the rest. The fact that the nation is the best way of describing people groups around the world, and government systems around the world, and armies and all the rest around the world, the fact that the nation is the most basic and fundamental unit, that’s more recent as an assumption than you might think. Now, the word nation, of course, is very old. It appears in the scriptures and, for example, the Greek word is ἐθνη or peoples, it’s often defined as nations.

But as you go back then, you really are talking more about language groups, and there might be a polity to it, but there’s not necessarily something that you would call a nation to it. One of the ways to think about that is to go back, say, to the early 19th century, and say that you’re going to plot on a map the areas dominated by various Native American groups in what has become the United States of America. The fact is that you wouldn’t really talk about boundaries. You would talk about areas of concentration, maybe areas that are held by different Native American groups, but you would not separate them into nations as if you could cleanly do it on a map. Now, we use the word nations, but it really is more like that ancient Greek word ἐθνη, meaning people, than it is defined territory or the modern nation state.

When did all that change? It really changed in a big way at the end of the 19th century, and yet, it changed more fully in the 20th century. Now, in the 19th century, what happened was basically war in Europe in which the map kept being redefined. For example, you would have war between major European nations. You’d have the Franco-Prussian war, you’d have the Crimean War, and you would have different peace treaties, in particular, meetings such as the Congress of Europe that would try to come up with, okay, how are we going to define this? And out of that really became something like the modern nation state. But even as we think about World War I in the early 20th century, 1914 to 1918, it was most often described as a war between empires more than a war between nations.

You had the German Empire allied with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that meant you had the Hohenzollern throne that was unified with the Habsburg throne, and they saw themselves as waging war upon the British Empire with what became known as the House of Windsor. It wasn’t known as the House of Windsor long before that. The house had a German name, but that was quite inconvenient when they were waging war with Germany, so it was changed to the House of Windsor. And also allied with France, which also had an empire. And Britain was the United States of America, and at least for some time, Imperial Russia.

But the Russian Empire fell apart. And of course, the catalyst for that was the Bolshevik Revolution, the toppling of the czar, eventually the assassination of the czar. But World War I also brought about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, what had been a vast empire, powerful empire, claimed to be a permanent empire headquartered there in Vienna, it actually became a coalition of different nation states. Now, the very fact that that’s unsettled takes us to history and wars all the way to the end of the 20th century. But the point is it was the breakup of empires, and the new world system was largely based upon nation states. So, as you had the League of Nations attempted after World War I, it was with the assumption that the nation is the unit of the future.

You go to World War II, and then you look at the emergence after that horrifying war of the United Nations, think of the organization. What is it? It’s not the united empires, it’s not the united communities, it’s not the united tribes, it’s the United Nations. Okay, as we come back to Israel, the problem is Israel actually functions as a nation. It is not particularly honest, I’ll say, to argue that there’s anything like a Palestinian nation, and that’s for a number of reasons. The first reason is there is no natural way to define an area there as a Palestinian area. A lot of the Palestinian population, or what would be called the Palestinian population, is located now in Jordan, or for that matter, even in Egypt. So, as you look at the area, you think, well, the grouping then has to be larger than that in terms of, say, Arab peoples or Arabic-speaking peoples. But this gets really complicated.

The other problem that Israel sees in this, of course, and I think it’s quite a legitimate concern to say the least, is that if there were such a nation, why would they welcome having a functioning nation, even a functioning nation alongside Israel if that nation was determined to bring Israel into non-existence? That would mean that Israel’s basically signing a death warrant. And I can assure you, Israel does not intend to sign any such warrant, nor would the United States of America, to state the obvious. The more recent conversation, including this front page article in the Wall Street Journal that’s just kind of a signal of all this, is that increasingly, Palestinians say they don’t believe in a two-state solution either.

Now, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, we read this, “Most of the world has long agreed on what it would take to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has now brought the Middle East to the brink of a regional war that would almost certainly draw in the United States. The US, Europe, and many Arab governments insist the overdue answer is the two-state solution under which Israel and a Palestinian state would exist side by side.” The next sentence, “The snag is that Israelis and Palestinians no longer believe in it.” Okay. So, this gets really interesting. Now, you have a paper with the international credibility of the Wall Street Journal telling us that even as the American government clearly says that it believes in a two-state solution, you have Israelis and Palestinians who basically increasingly agree that there’s not going to be a two-state solution. Neither side actually any longer believes in it, fundamentally.

And then, you have to ask the question, well, does the United States administration, does the Biden administration really believe in a two-state solution, or is this the line they feel they have to continue to push? Because that’s what’s required by many fellow allies around the world, in particular, allies of the United States in Europe. The answer is we really don’t know, but it is looking increasingly foolish to have the American administration, and for that matter, add the United States and European nations, insisting on a two-state solution, which a decreasing minority of persons in the area actually believe in it all. But before we leave the issue with Israel and Hamas, we need to remind ourselves of recent development such as the fact that Israel was able to take out two major Hamas leaders and one major leader of Hezbollah, which is the Shiite terrorist group that threatens Israel from the north.

Both of them increasingly backed, by the way, by Iran. And the United States is also now having to ramp up military forces there in the Middle East because of the threat of a wider regional war. People might ask, Americans might ask, well, why would the risk of a wider war there in the Middle East require that the United States all of a sudden pretty urgently beef up Naval and other military forces in the area? It is because, like it or not, in the current world, the United States is a part of this equation, and it cannot extricate itself either politically, or militarily, or morally from this equation.

One final thought on Israel and Hamas. Let’s just remind ourselves again, Israel is a nation, Hamas is a terrorist group, and the recent headlines coming out of the push by the Biden administration and Secretary of State Blinken to force an immediate ceasefire, it has come down to the fact that Hamas has turned it down. So, there’s no equivalence in the first place. But even as Israel has been making additional demands for a ceasefire, Israel, I think, has the right to do that. It should do it honestly, but Israel has the right to do that. When it comes to Hamas, let’s just remind ourselves we’re not talking, when we say Israel and Hamas, of two nations and legitimate governments. We’re talking about a nation and a terrorist organization. We lose sight of that. We lose sight of reality.

Part II

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Ukraine is Being Redefined Right Before Our Eyes: Big Questions Loom About Russia as Ukraine Retaliates in Kursk

Next, as we turn to the other hottest of hot spots, in terms of the world trouble list, we have to go to the war inflicted upon Ukraine by Russia. This has been going on longer than the war between Israel and Hamas there in Gaza, but it has taken an interesting turn and it continues some of the very big worldview issues we’ve been considering. So, the question is, are we talking here about two nations? Yes, we are. We are talking about Ukraine, which is a defined nation with borders, and we’re talking about Russia, a defined nation with borders. But let’s be honest, the border between Ukraine and Russia has never been particularly settled.

During most of the 20th century, Ukraine was actually, by force and sometimes by absolute terror, even to the point of a horrifying famine that killed multiple millions of people, Ukraine was forced into becoming a part of the Empire of the Soviet Union. Eventually, it became a part of the Soviet Union. But even going back to the age of the ancient czars, the centuries of czarist influenced during the old Russian Empire, and then you also note that at times the issue of a border between Ukraine and Russia and where Ukraine fits has never been particularly clear. And the greatest evidence for that is that the region now occupied by force, by theft, you might say, by military aggression by Russia in Ukraine, the overwhelming part of that region is Russian speaking, not Ukrainian speaking. It’s most importantly in the Donbas region, as it is known, and that’s a region in which many of the people think of themselves as Russian rather than Ukrainian, or at least they did before Putin exercised his aggression upon Ukraine.

Just to remind ourselves, Russia invaded Ukraine. It did so invading a sovereign nation. It did so, after several years earlier, invading Ukraine and seizing the Crimean Peninsula, and it has done so under the leadership of Vladimir Putin in such a way that Putin basically has not said what his ultimate aim is, although we now know that when he launched this, he intended to destroy Ukraine as a nation and absorb the entirety of Ukraine into Russia. It does not look right now like that is going to happen, and that’s just another testament to the fact the nations actually are important fundamental units. It turns out that Ukraine is a nation.

That doesn’t mean that the national borders and all the territory before the Russian invasion were equally a nation in the sense that we speak of Ukraine emerging as a nation here. It is to say that clearly there is a nation that we call Ukraine, and Ukrainians have discovered their national identity, and they’ve been fighting back very courageously. So much so that the big game changer in recent days is that Ukrainian forces have invaded Russia. They seem to have discovered, they discerned, and now they have exploited a defensive weakness in Russia’s system, and they have gone as far as conquering territory, seizing villages, doing a lot of damage, and the region is most famously referred to as the region around Kursk. And the historians among us will remember that Kursk was the location of one of the most violent historic battles of World War II. Even today, it will still go down as the largest tank battle in human history.

Well, this is all right now to the embarrassment of Vladimir Putin, and one of the more embarrassing aspects after this is that Russia hasn’t really responded in the way you would think Russia would respond to this. They’re calling up reservists. Interesting headlines, by the way, also telling us, in various ways that Russia is having a hard time coming up with enough personnel in terms of its armed forces. And many of the personnel who are now involved are people, for example, who’ve been released from prison in order to fight. That doesn’t necessarily make them great soldiers, and others are having to go in without very much training. So, it’s also going back to the fact that Russia has traditionally treated its army as expendable. I think to most people, the honest assessment is that there’s going to be some kind of eventual negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.

And at the end of the day, just given Russia’s strength, and it’s about, just to summarize, something like 10 times the size of Ukraine by some estimations when you think about military power, not to mention geographic region. But the reality is that Ukraine has very unique strengths. It clearly has some political strengths. It also has some cultural issues. I mean, when you’re talking about Ukraine, you’re talking about what before the Russian invasion was clearly understood by many Americans to be a nation that was headed in some very troubling liberal and morally-progressivist directions. But Ukraine is being redefined right before our eyes. That’s not to say all these questions are being answered, but the big question is, is Ukraine a functioning nation? The answer increasingly is yes. Many of the big questions about what’s really going on are now directed at the far larger nation, Russia.

Well, we’re going to continue to track all of this, and we understand that Christians have a great stake in understanding how this turns out. We also have a theological understanding of what it means to, for example, point to the nation as a basic unit, and the nation state, as it has emerged in the modern age, turns out to be one of the great strengths of the ability of human beings to create and honor and sustain a civilization. But in a fallen world, nothing is a permanent solution, certainly to trouble in mayhem and revolt.

Part III

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San Francisco Attempt to Walk Back Certain Forms of Pornography — But a Society That Accepts Any Pornography Has Already Lost

All right. At the very end today, I want to mention something, and this is something I can discuss just very quickly. Headline coming out of San Francisco. It’s a California headline, and it’s telling us that authorities in San Francisco are going after websites, “that make AI, artificial intelligence, deep fake nudes of women and girls.” Now, we know what pornography is. It is an effort to try to distort human sexuality to illegitimate immoral ends. So, the evil of pornography is not that it relates to sexuality or to the human body. The problem with pornography is that it is an explicit effort to corrupt the goodness of God’s creation and creation order, which includes, for example, the integrity of marriage and the sanctity of marriage and the restriction of sex to marriage. It is a deliberate effort to try to entice persons by salaciousness and by pornography, porneia, to confuse these things and to corrupt sexuality.

But now, you have the addition of the issue of AI or artificial intelligence, and then you have the secular world, and here’s what I want to focus on, that is now seeking to crack down on AI made deep fake forms of pornography. I’m just going to put it that way. Okay. Here’s the problem. It’s an evil before you get to the artificial intelligence. In other words, here, you have a secular government trying to say “this is an illegitimate demonstration of pornography. This is an illegitimate use of photographic images. This is a form of assault upon those whose images are misused and turned into pornographic images without their complicity and even without them taking off their clothes. It is the complete stealing of a person’s identity in order to corrupt that with an evil purpose of pornography.”

Now, this is where you have to come back and say, well, here again, this is the problem, that it’s the pornography itself that is evil and a society that tries to say, look, this is legitimate pornography and this is illegitimate pornography. I’m not saying, for instance, when it comes to children, there’s not a distinction. I’m just saying that if you’re a government that says any form of pornography is okay, well guess what? You’re going to end up with an awful lot of pornography. And eventually, it is going to be an issue that will overwhelm and define your civilization, artificial intelligence or not.

So, when Christians look at this, we have to understand that the problem is the desire for the corruption, the porneia itself, for the corruption of the eyes that reflects the corruption of the heart. And of course, we have clear commandments in Scripture against this, against every part of it. Making it, looking at it, selling it, cooperating with it, authorizing it. Period. But here’s where we also have to understand. If a society gives itself to pornography, and even tries to benefit by it and claim it’s an evidence of free speech and its moral openness, it is making persons very vulnerable, and that includes children, and it includes every single human being on the planet by the eventual extension of the logic of pornography. It is an evil that has different gradations all the way down to the unspeakably evil. But I just want to point out that a society that says, “We’re going to accept this pornography, but not that pornography,” pretty soon, it’s unable to draw any meaningful distinction, and the makers and purveyors of pornography know it.