It’s Thursday, February 10th, 2022.
I’m Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
Part I
Amnesty International Declares Israel an Apartheid State — But What is Apartheid and the Historical Context Behind This Charge?
We’re back to the international scene today, but the issue is Israel. And the headline is that the group known as Amnesty International has produced a near 300-page report accusing Israel of being at its essence an apartheid state. And thus, they mean a criminal state. Now, as you look at this, you recognize that this is an extremely serious charge, but also realize that there would be many people, especially younger listeners, who might not know the term apartheid. Apartheid is a term that goes back to Dutch influence, but it goes back in particular to South Africa and to the years of official apartheid. That means race separation by law with coercion and imprisonment for breaking the laws.
But it also means the historic context of the dominance of the majority African population by White settlers coming most importantly from the Netherlands. And that means the Bor people in particular and also from the British. And so what you had was a British colonial elite and a Dutch farming colonial elite that had control over the entire society of South Africa and passed a set of laws intended to keep the races absolutely separate to such an extent that there were areas designated for the African population and then for the Dutch, or for the so-called White population. It was a criminal act for any Black person to buy property in a White designated area. It was a criminal act for any White Person to sell property to a Black person in a White designated area. It was also illegal for White people to buy property in the Black designated areas.
It was evil in the 20th century beyond the imagination of most people alive at the time. It seemed to be the reappearance of a form of institutionalized racism that was virtually unthinkable. But then again, let’s be honest, in the United States throughout much of the same time you had legalized segregation in the form of so-called Jim Crow laws. But those laws began to disappear particularly in the 1960s with massive court decisions and also national legislation going through Congress. But the apartheid regime just hardened itself against all resistance and it continued its repressive laws and its crackdown on all breaking of those laws in such a way that South Africa basically became an outlaw state. It became an outlaw state in which you had most nations passing laws that prevented investment in South Africa, that prevented all kinds of business connections in South Africa.
It was an intentional effort undertaken by most Western nations to isolate South Africa and to starve its business community until it would politically do whatever was necessary to abandon apartheid and to repudiate it. That international pressure was actually in the end quite effective. Of course, there was internal pressure too. Liberation movements and African nationalist movements, there were all kinds of forces that were allied against the apartheid regime by a White minority government in South Africa and there was the effort that turned out to be successful internally and externally to basically force an end. And by the time of the early 1990s, it was clear that apartheid was coming to an end, that it was impossible for South Africa to continue as a criminal nation, an outlaw nation with a minority government that was clearly, undeniably, for that matter, unapologetically repressive of the majority of its own citizens.
So understand right now, you say, “Well, we’re not talking about South Africa. We’re talking about Israel.” Yes, but the word is really crucial to understanding the historical context and thus to understanding that what Amnesty International is trying to do is to label the state of Israel as a criminal state, as an outlaw state, that is also to be brought to an end, at least in terms of its current composition, its current constitution, its current national identity just as was brought about in South Africa. This is a concerted, very intentional political agenda, and yet I think the vast majority of Americans simply don’t understand what Israel is facing in the onslaught of this report and the likely effect that this report is going to bring in influence in capitals around the world, particularly in Europe. As I said, Amnesty International’s report is nearly 300-pages long and is filled with all kinds of accusations against Israel.
And by the way, some of them are true, as even Israeli politicians and the Israeli government have conceded. Israel is a representative constitutional democracy. It has a very lively political culture and when charges like this are made about human rights abuses or about some kind of violation of law, either Israeli law or international law, you can count on the fact that there will be a vigorous discussion in the democratic society of Israel, inside Israel’s legislature, The Knesset, and certainly in the Israeli press.
So just to be clear, there isn’t a nation on earth that does not make mistakes, that does not violate international principles at some point, and doesn’t do moral wrong. In a fallen world, Every nation is going to be involved in some kind of moral wrong. The question is, how is that an identified? How was it corrected? But as we’re looking at Israel, we need to understand that something far more basic is going on here. This is not an accusation against Israel that Israel can fix. This is an accusation against the state of Israel as the state of Israel.
We’re going to have to look at some history here. We’re going to have to look at the geopolitics. We’re going to have to understand what is going on. But if you look at that 280-plus page report by Amnesty International, it is clear that they say that Israel didn’t become an apartheid state by some declared human rights abuses over the course of the last several decades. No, they date the time when Israel became an apartheid state to 1948. And just remind yourselves, that is when the modern state of Israel came into existence. In other words, Amnesty International is saying that the nation of Israel as the state of Israel is not a legitimate state and never has been. Now, Amnesty International as an organization is what’s called an NGO. That is a non-government organization, an organization at least officially unconnected to the agenda of any state or of any government.
Amnesty International has trended left throughout most of its existence. Now, it has been right at times. In other words, when it has looked at human rights abuses across the world, it has often brought documentation. It has shed light. But there is no doubt that it comes to the very question with the assumption that becomes explicit in its report that Israel just shouldn’t exist, not just as a state, but explicitly as a Jewish state.
Part II
It All Started in 1948? Amnesty International’s Ideological Agenda to Delegitimize the State of Israel
Now, that requires us to remind ourselves of how Israel came into existence. Not, of course, as a people. That’s rooted in God’s covenant election of Israel as recorded in Scripture. But we are talking about how the modern state of Israel became a state. And in order to understand that, we have to go back to the late 19th century and the early 20th century. We need to look at the fact that in the English-speaking world there developed a very important movement that was first identified as Philo-Semitism. This is really, really important.
Philo-Semitism means love of the Jewish people and it is very important that emerged primarily in the English speaking lands, particularly in the United States and in Great Britain. So as you’re thinking about the term Philo-Semitism, understand that it is the contradiction to anti-Semitism. And that meant that the British, who had, after all, an enormous amount of colonial, imperial, and political influence in the Middle East, had eventually come to the conclusion that the Jewish people should have a state, a state that would be known as Israel. It would be defined as a Jewish state. But that was basically an abeyance. The second movement was Zionism, and Zionism emerged with impetus from the Jewish people in Europe and in North America as an effort to reclaim the Jewish homeland in order for there to be a return to Israel, in order for the Jewish people, once again, to have a land of their own.
And this came after centuries of European anti-Semitism, just think about how the Jewish people had suffered pogroms and massacres and genocide long before the scale of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in the 20th century. I want to return to underline the fact that this tradition of Philo-Semitism as it was known and is known now emerged in the English speaking world. It included as advocates a good many in the aristocratic class of England. And one of the most important to those was Winston Churchill, the central character in English history of the 20th century. Indeed, I think you could say safely of Western civilization in the 20th century. Winston Churchill is in so many ways the central character in England, certainly in the middle of the 20th century. Just to set in contrast, Winston Churchill had very close Jewish friends as personal friends, something to say the very least that would not have been the case in most other European capitals.
But the movement of Zionism began to gain steam and then, just a fast forward history, came the horrors of World War II, the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi attempt eventually to exterminate the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Now, over that has to be laid the breakup of the empires and even the breakup of the British Colonial Empire, and eventually the Jewish struggle even against the British mandate, as it turned out, for independence as a nation, for statehood for Israel, and for the right of return of the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland.
Tragically, that meant for a time that the main dynamic was between the Zionists who were trying to establish the Jewish Homeland as a state and the British who were trying to fulfill what was declared to be an international mandate. But, eventually, it was clear that the Zionists would win. Meanwhile, Zionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic were seeking to build both political and economic support for the establishment of the state of Israel. There was a great deal of support, especially from Christians on both sides of the Atlantic, for the Jewish people in this aim.
And by the way, there’s a lot of American history that is involved in this. I was sitting in a restaurant years ago in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I looked up and saw very large portrait of Golda Meir, who became one of the most famous Prime Ministers of Israel. And as I thought about it, I all of a sudden realized, Golda Meir had grown up in Milwaukee as a young girl. And when I asked about the portrait, I was told that she had grown up right across the street. Sometimes history is a lot closer to you than you expect, even at dinner. But there’s another sense in which the dynamic towards the establishment of the state of Israel was driven by moral concern after the Holocaust that the Jewish people, were they to survive, would have to have a homeland and a Jewish state.
The eventual establishment of the state of Israel, even by the mandate of the United Nations in the 1940s, is one of the great miracles of the 20th century and there has been a sense in which Israel has understood itself to be something of a miracle nation from the very beginning. It managed to bring crops out of the desert. It managed to bring a booming economy out of virtually nothing at the time. It became a very young nation and it was surrounded by enemy nations that tried to bring it to extinguishment over and over again in wars that involved particularly the Arab states around it that sought to kill the state of Israel.
But before that, we have to recognize how of the state of Israel actually came into existence. It was by the mandate of the United Nations. And here’s something really important for us to understand, the United Nations, in its mandate, authorizing the establishment of the state of Israel by concerted international action defined the state of Israel as a Jewish state.
That is say, Israel didn’t later develop that identity. It didn’t later decide that it was a Jewish state. From 1948 onward, it was declared to be, even by the mandate of the United Nations, a Jewish state. By the way, it should be a matter of pride for Americans that the very first country to offer diplomatic recognition to the establishment of the state of Israel was the United States of America and it was because of the action of then President Harry Truman. And you can also track the fact that he was a supporter of the state of Israel at least in part because he also had a very close Jewish friend with whom he had been in business. And the plight to the Jewish people was made very clear to him by the events of World War II, by his own involvement in the aftermath of the new world order that came out of World War Two and by his knowledge of what had happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Now, Israel has been a controversial state from the very beginning, because as you look at the globe, if you just consider a map of the area in the year 1948, it’s not uninhabited. There were people who were there, most particularly the people who are now known by the designation “Palestinians.” And even as we should take time in a future edition of The Briefing to think about the meaning of the Palestinian people and how they came to be at this point, particularly in the 20th century, we need to recognize that the Arab world was not yet fully a national world during the time of the early half of the 20th century. And even as there were nations, the more important reality is that you had colonial empires that were largely in control. You also had the Ottoman Empire that had claimed so much of the Muslim world, and that included so much of the Arab world, until its eventual decline and then its disappearance early in the 20th century.
The reality is that most of these states as states were relatively young. It’s also true that as you look at what is now the state of Israel, it really wasn’t a previous state. It was instead a mandated territory. Christians looking at the situation even going back to 1948 need to ask some serious moral questions we can’t avoid. Were there people who owned property who lost that property, lost their family place of residents, lost their farms, lost their home in the midst of the Jewish state being established? The answer was yes, undoubtedly, it did happen. There were many Palestinians who were disadvantaged by the creation of the state of Israel. But, at the very time, Israel had to fight for its existence as a state, even within much smaller borders than Israel has now because the Arab states around it declared it to be illegitimate from the very beginning.
But the other thing we have to think about here is simple math. Israel is surrounded by historically hostile nation, many of whom were and some of which are now committed to the annihilation of Israel as a state and to the eradication of the Jewish people as residents of what is now the state of Israel, or the entire region for that matter. But the math comes down to the fact that there are many millions more Arab people than there are Jewish people and thus the Jewish people are a minority in that part of the world, a very contested part of the world. They know they are in a situation and the United Nations understood in 1948 that they were in a situation that could only be survivable by the definition of the state as a Jewish state. And that does not mean that there are not Arabs and Palestinians for who are citizens of Israel. It does mean that Israel is defined as a Jewish state.
And it also means that if Israel simply had something like open borders, it would immediately become an Arab state, no longer a Jewish state, and the Arab nations surrounding Israel have understood that for a very long time. When you look at this report from Amnesty International, it clearly comes with an ideological agenda and that agenda is at the very least anti-Israel. In a very clear way. And the fact that it goes back to 1948, betrays the real agenda here. They’re not saying that Israel has done things that were wrong, that should be defined as human rights abuses, that should be fixed. They are so saying that the very idea of a Jewish state is illegitimate. There’s a sense in which it is in a way helpful that they would come out and use 1948 as the origin of what they see as the emergence of the apartheid state by their description, because that tells us this is a rejection not just of Israeli actions. This is a rejection of Israel.
Now, as we think about this report, it clearly comes with an agenda that we can now understand. There are a couple of interesting issues that we can now see. One is the fact that, in the United States, this report has not received a great deal of attention yet. The report is probably more aimed at European nations and European capitals. First of all, as a way of continuing the assault on Israel, the effort to subvert Israel that has been frankly incredibly effective throughout much of Europe. And that includes Western Europe over the course of the last several years. The support for Israel that was very, very clear, even in, or you might say even especially in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, it has largely if not entirely disappeared. Israel is now on the defense when it comes to the foreign policy of so many major European nations and there has also been the effort undertaken by so many, even at the United Nations. Remember, the United Nations created Israel as a state by UN mandate.
Now, the Jewish people would say they created the state by their own heroic effort. But, nonetheless, we understand that the United Nations mandated the creation of Israel as a Jewish state and there has been an effort to subvert it ever since.
Now, that requires us to remind ourselves of how Israel came into existence. Not, of course, as a people. That’s rooted in God’s covenant election of Israel as recorded in Scripture. But we are talking about how the modern state of Israel became a state. And in order to understand that, we have to go back to the late 19th century and the early 20th century. We need to look at the fact that in the English-speaking world there developed a very important movement that was first identified as Philo-Semitism. This is really, really important.
Philo-Semitism means love of the Jewish people and it is very important that emerged primarily in the English speaking lands, particularly in the United States and in Great Britain. So as you’re thinking about the term Philo-Semitism, understand that it is the contradiction to anti-Semitism. And that meant that the British, who had, after all, an enormous amount of colonial, imperial, and political influence in the Middle East, had eventually come to the conclusion that the Jewish people should have a state, a state that would be known as Israel. It would be defined as a Jewish state. But that was basically an abeyance. The second movement was Zionism, and Zionism emerged with impetus from the Jewish people in Europe and in North America as an effort to reclaim the Jewish homeland in order for there to be a return to Israel, in order for the Jewish people, once again, to have a land of their own.
And this came after centuries of European anti-Semitism, just think about how the Jewish people had suffered pogroms and massacres and genocide long before the scale of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in the 20th century. I want to return to underline the fact that this tradition of Philo-Semitism as it was known and is known now emerged in the English speaking world. It included as advocates a good many in the aristocratic class of England. And one of the most important to those was Winston Churchill, the central character in English history of the 20th century. Indeed, I think you could say safely of Western civilization in the 20th century. Winston Churchill is in so many ways the central character in England, certainly in the middle of the 20th century. Just to set in contrast, Winston Churchill had very close Jewish friends as personal friends, something to say the very least that would not have been the case in most other European capitals.
But the movement of Zionism began to gain steam and then, just a fast forward history, came the horrors of World War II, the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi attempt eventually to exterminate the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Now, over that has to be laid the breakup of the empires and even the breakup of the British Colonial Empire, and eventually the Jewish struggle even against the British mandate, as it turned out, for independence as a nation, for statehood for Israel, and for the right of return of the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland.
Tragically, that meant for a time that the main dynamic was between the Zionists who were trying to establish the Jewish Homeland as a state and the British who were trying to fulfill what was declared to be an international mandate. But, eventually, it was clear that the Zionists would win. Meanwhile, Zionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic were seeking to build both political and economic support for the establishment of the state of Israel. There was a great deal of support, especially from Christians on both sides of the Atlantic, for the Jewish people in this aim.
And by the way, there’s a lot of American history that is involved in this. I was sitting in a restaurant years ago in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I looked up and saw very large portrait of Golda Meir, who became one of the most famous Prime Ministers of Israel. And as I thought about it, I all of a sudden realized, Golda Meir had grown up in Milwaukee as a young girl. And when I asked about the portrait, I was told that she had grown up right across the street. Sometimes history is a lot closer to you than you expect, even at dinner. But there’s another sense in which the dynamic towards the establishment of the state of Israel was driven by moral concern after the Holocaust that the Jewish people, were they to survive, would have to have a homeland and a Jewish state.
The eventual establishment of the state of Israel, even by the mandate of the United Nations in the 1940s, is one of the great miracles of the 20th century and there has been a sense in which Israel has understood itself to be something of a miracle nation from the very beginning. It managed to bring crops out of the desert. It managed to bring a booming economy out of virtually nothing at the time. It became a very young nation and it was surrounded by enemy nations that tried to bring it to extinguishment over and over again in wars that involved particularly the Arab states around it that sought to kill the state of Israel.
But before that, we have to recognize how of the state of Israel actually came into existence. It was by the mandate of the United Nations. And here’s something really important for us to understand, the United Nations, in its mandate, authorizing the establishment of the state of Israel by concerted international action defined the state of Israel as a Jewish state.
That is say, Israel didn’t later develop that identity. It didn’t later decide that it was a Jewish state. From 1948 onward, it was declared to be, even by the mandate of the United Nations, a Jewish state. By the way, it should be a matter of pride for Americans that the very first country to offer diplomatic recognition to the establishment of the state of Israel was the United States of America and it was because of the action of then President Harry Truman. And you can also track the fact that he was a supporter of the state of Israel at least in part because he also had a very close Jewish friend with whom he had been in business. And the plight to the Jewish people was made very clear to him by the events of World War II, by his own involvement in the aftermath of the new world order that came out of World War Two and by his knowledge of what had happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Now, Israel has been a controversial state from the very beginning, because as you look at the globe, if you just consider a map of the area in the year 1948, it’s not uninhabited. There were people who were there, most particularly the people who are now known by the designation “Palestinians.” And even as we should take time in a future edition of The Briefing to think about the meaning of the Palestinian people and how they came to be at this point, particularly in the 20th century, we need to recognize that the Arab world was not yet fully a national world during the time of the early half of the 20th century. And even as there were nations, the more important reality is that you had colonial empires that were largely in control. You also had the Ottoman Empire that had claimed so much of the Muslim world, and that included so much of the Arab world, until its eventual decline and then its disappearance early in the 20th century.
The reality is that most of these states as states were relatively young. It’s also true that as you look at what is now the state of Israel, it really wasn’t a previous state. It was instead a mandated territory. Christians looking at the situation even going back to 1948 need to ask some serious moral questions we can’t avoid. Were there people who owned property who lost that property, lost their family place of residents, lost their farms, lost their home in the midst of the Jewish state being established? The answer was yes, undoubtedly, it did happen. There were many Palestinians who were disadvantaged by the creation of the state of Israel. But, at the very time, Israel had to fight for its existence as a state, even within much smaller borders than Israel has now because the Arab states around it declared it to be illegitimate from the very beginning.
But the other thing we have to think about here is simple math. Israel is surrounded by historically hostile nation, many of whom were and some of which are now committed to the annihilation of Israel as a state and to the eradication of the Jewish people as residents of what is now the state of Israel, or the entire region for that matter. But the math comes down to the fact that there are many millions more Arab people than there are Jewish people and thus the Jewish people are a minority in that part of the world, a very contested part of the world. They know they are in a situation and the United Nations understood in 1948 that they were in a situation that could only be survivable by the definition of the state as a Jewish state. And that does not mean that there are not Arabs and Palestinians for who are citizens of Israel. It does mean that Israel is defined as a Jewish state.
And it also means that if Israel simply had something like open borders, it would immediately become an Arab state, no longer a Jewish state, and the Arab nations surrounding Israel have understood that for a very long time. When you look at this report from Amnesty International, it clearly comes with an ideological agenda and that agenda is at the very least anti-Israel. In a very clear way. And the fact that it goes back to 1948, betrays the real agenda here. They’re not saying that Israel has done things that were wrong, that should be defined as human rights abuses, that should be fixed. They are so saying that the very idea of a Jewish state is illegitimate. There’s a sense in which it is in a way helpful that they would come out and use 1948 as the origin of what they see as the emergence of the apartheid state by their description, because that tells us this is a rejection not just of Israeli actions. This is a rejection of Israel.
Now, as we think about this report, it clearly comes with an agenda that we can now understand. There are a couple of interesting issues that we can now see. One is the fact that, in the United States, this report has not received a great deal of attention yet. The report is probably more aimed at European nations and European capitals. First of all, as a way of continuing the assault on Israel, the effort to subvert Israel that has been frankly incredibly effective throughout much of Europe. And that includes Western Europe over the course of the last several years. The support for Israel that was very, very clear, even in, or you might say even especially in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, it has largely if not entirely disappeared. Israel is now on the defense when it comes to the foreign policy of so many major European nations and there has also been the effort undertaken by so many, even at the United Nations. Remember, the United Nations created Israel as a state by UN mandate.
Now, the Jewish people would say they created the state by their own heroic effort. But, nonetheless, we understand that the United Nations mandated the creation of Israel as a Jewish state and there has been an effort to subvert it ever since.
Part III
‘There’s Apartheid in the Holy Land, but Not in Israel’: The Moral Importance of Israel’s Existence and the Christian Responsibility to the Jewish People
To its credit, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal pressed back on the Amnesty International report. They pressed back hard. Also, yesterday’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal included an article by Eugene Kontorovich in which the headline simply states this, “There’s Apartheid In The Holy Land, But Not In Israel.” Kontorovich writes, “Palestinian law makes selling land to Jews a crime punishable by death, often without trial. Nor does the Authority recognize any Jewish titles to private property. Last year, a Palestinian religious official said on Palestinian TV that this land is a pure right of its Muslim owners, the people of Palestine.”
Kontorovich points out that if there is an apartheid regime in the region, it’s not Israel. Israel includes non-Jewish and Arab citizens. And as he writes, “In all arenas controlled by Israel, Jews and Arabs mix openly yet the Palestinian Authority has for decades ruled over Gaza and about half the West Bank and all the areas under its jurisdiction are Jew free.” Kontorovich goes on to say this too, and I quote, “There isn’t a single Jewish community living anywhere under Palestinian control.” The Palestinian people have undoubtedly suffered. I think history will record they have suffered far more from the treatment of Arab states than from Israel. But there is no question, and let’s just face this, sometimes Christians understand we are looking at intractable problems of history that as a result of human sinfulness simply can’t be unwound in a way that all parties would consider to be absolutely fair.
Who owns property in Israel? Who has the right to live there? Does the state of Israel have a right to exist? Those are questions that the United Nations settled in that mandate known as UN Resolution 181 going back to 1947 with Israel declared to be a nation in 1948. It is actually morally consistent to say that Israel has a right to exist and the Palestinian people have rightful claims as they think of their own human dignity and as the nations of the world recognize that. But there is no way, and this is one of the heartbreaking issues of the Christian worldview, as you look at many historical problems throughout time, there is no way to go back and unwind history. We can rewind it a bit in order to understand it but he can’t unwind it. Christians also understand the state of Israel in the context of a responsibility to love, to honor, and to protect the Jewish people and that comes with deep covenantal responsibility.
Some Christians would point to 1948 as the literal fulfillment of biblical prophecy, but Christians, regardless of their eschatological views, should understand our biblical responsibility. As those who’ve been grafted onto the vine of Israel and thus God’s covenant promises, we need to understand our responsibility to contend for the safety and the security of the people of Israel, of the Jewish people. We need to be advocates for Israel.
And that raises a problem we also see right now, and that is the fact that by many measures, younger evangelicals in the United States have a far weaker commitment to Israel than their parents and grandparents. And one of the things we can point to is the fact that there has been very little, there has been inadequate Christian preaching on the Christian responsibility to the Jewish people. There has been inadequate preaching from the Old Testament looking to the Jewish roots of Christianity. There’s been inadequate theological attention to the Christian stewardship of our own covenant responsibility and there has been an inadequate Christian response to the sustained, unceasing effort to oppose Israel, to remove legitimacy from Israel, to isolate the political and economic support of Israel, and to lead Israel into a position of non-existence, to basically cancel Israel as a Jewish state.
Back to the report from Amnesty International. Understand that at a point, it became in moral terms, but also just in public relations terms, it became impossible for many major American institutions and American corporations to continue doing business with South Africa, having any official ties to South Africa. The agenda of Amnesty International here, and they’re basically joining a movement that was already under way, is to try to do to Israel what had been done to South Africa by accusing Israel of the same criminal activity and the same immoral sinful activity of apartheid.
But there’s a difference between apartheid in all of its horror and the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Let’s be clear, the United Nations understood that. Perhaps, in a way, the United Nations would not understand that now in 1947 and 1948 and we understand in that historical context why that understanding was present. There was clear support in the United States. You have to wonder, will that support continue? This kind of report from Amnesty International is intended to subvert and to undermine support of Israel and by extension of the Jewish people and the right of a homeland in the United States.
Finally on this issue, it’s going to be very interesting to see where this conversation goes, particularly after the Abraham Accords now brings a new chapter in the relationship between Israel and many of its Arab and predominantly Muslim neighbors.
The visit of the Israeli Prime Minister, an official state visit, to one of those Arab states just in recent days is something that would have been unthinkable just a matter of a few months ago. But a good deal of that progress took place under the previous administration of President Donald Trump. The Biden administration is now going to be very much on the line and Amnesty International intends to put it on the line in terms of the current American support for the state of Israel.
But as we close, the state of Israel is an indispensable nation in the near east to the United States and our allies, and the United States knows it. The same thing is now true of at least some of Israel’s Arab neighbors who understand that the great threat to the Arabs is not Israel, but Iran and the nations allied behind it.
I spent some so much time today on this issue because of its urgency and timelines. I didn’t want to defer it until next week. Tomorrow, we’ll turn to some other issues and we’ll also be turning to the Mailbox and I’ll look forward to taking on many more issues in the days ahead.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing.
For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can find me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/AlbertMohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
