About ten years ago, I was one of the gentiles on a Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) tour of Israel, guests of the IDF. In the preceding decades, the FIDF had raised tens of millions of dollars for soldier welfare projects, e.g., recreation centers at posts in the Negev; hardship funds for the poor families of immigrant soldiers just getting a foothold in Israeli society; scholarships for study after tours of duty were complete. On this occasion, they brought non-Jewish friends to the Holy Land to get a week-long briefing on their philanthropic work in hopes that they, too, would pitch in to the cause. And, in this case, I was brought along by the Emmanuel Kampourises (publishers of Kairos Journal, of which I was the managing editor) to do some writing on what we found. 

It was a great experience, one involving face-to-face, on the scene, briefings from the Gaza Brigade, the Canine Corps, listening post techs atop Mount Hermon, the heads of the navy and intel in the Israeli “Pentagon” in Tel Aviv, personnel at the drone base on the southern coast, journalists from two major newspapers, veterans who took part in the Entebbe raid and the mission to take out Iraq’s Osirak reactor. We witnessed the nighttime commissioning of paratroopers at the “Wailing Wall” and met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in his conference room.

Of course, it was a public relations enterprise, but there is nothing wrong with that if the intended relationship with the public is based upon truth, sound in both context and particulars. And I’m persuaded that this was essentially the case, and also a critical project given the nasty treatment Israel receives perennially through the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement so popular on the left and the outrageous and tiresome condemnations that flow from the UN, a body whose Human Rights Council regularly includes such morally deficient members as Sudan, China, and Cuba. 

I don’t think I was a babe in the woods when it came to the real story of Israel, for I’d been studying it closely since my first visit in 1966 (the summer before the Six-Day War), when the Mount of Olives was still in Jordanian hands and Syrians controlled the Golan Heights, from which they could direct artillery onto the kibbutzim in the Jezreel Valley. Just out of high school, I was struck by the contrast between Jordan and Israel, a transition one took when passing through the Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem. Both districts had their charms, but Jordan seemed to be stuck technologically in Bible times, while Israel had more the feel of America.

To those who count me a willing victim of Israeli PR, to those who see moral equivalence if not Palestinian moral superiority in the recent exchange of fire, I would ask them to scrutinize the PR that generated and nurtured their perspective. For one thing, I think it’s useful to understand that the Palestinians are Arabs, whose forebears arrived not long after Mohammed launched a religion and military crusaders into the Holy Land. (BTW, they’ve chosen a name which was originally a term of slight toward the native Jews, used by ancient Greek and Romans to recognize Philistines who’d gotten a foothold in the land.) 

Fast forward to 2012: My impression of the divide had only deepened, especially in light of the Muslim warfare waged against Israel and the West, including the 1973 Yom Kippur incursion and the 9/11 attacks. And I’ve been glad to pitch in to a Kairos Journal publication on the divide: Israel and Legitimacy: Modern Achievement versus Islamic Prejudice, as well as to an article in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, “Stewardship of the Wetlands Below the Golan Heights: A Study in Judeo-Christian and Muslim Contrasts.”

One big difference is the Israeli military’s doctrine, “Purity of Arms,” whose creed is encapsulated in this statement:

The soldier shall make use of his weaponry and power only for the fulfillment of the mission and solely to the extent required; he will maintain his humanity even in combat. The soldier shall not employ his weaponry and power in order to harm non-combatants or prisoners of war, and shall do all he can to avoid harming their lives, bodies, honor and property. 

We read this in the orientation packet they gave us at the Machtzavim-IDF Educational Leadership School on Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, the site of a memorial to fierce fighting in June 1967. (The blue cap with white lettering came from there.) This message of restraint was illustrated by a drone video they showed us at the Palmachim Air Base, not far from the ancient, Philistine, coastal cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon. We watched the fuzzy black-and-white images of a terrorist launching a barrage of rockets from just beside a UN school, and then the long delay as the drone operator waited for him to distance himself from the school and then from people in two adjacent streets, with the take-out shot coming only after he separated himself from the people not known to be hostiles. It was the same sort of restraint Israel showed recently in taking out the Hamas-occupied high rise in Gaza, with a warning phone call to Associated Press reporters to vacate their offices in advance of the strike—restraint not shown by Hamas in raining rockets indiscriminately on population centers to the north and east. 

Fortunately, but not incidentally, Israel had a complex of defensive radars and rocket launchers, arrayed to intercept such terrorist attacks, as fine-tuned as to take out artillery shells as well as missiles. On our visit, we got an up-close-and-personal look at the system and the soldiers who manned them. The photo you see includes the cap they gave us and a photo of the crew standing beside one of the launchers. (I’m in back wearing a black “boonie” cap.) Note that these are “defensive” rockets, not designed to rain down fire on the innocent citizens of Gaza City. Note too that they are the product of Western technology, not the sort of thing you get out of a Muslim-majority society. Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah can blow up automobiles, but they can’t engineer them. Their religious base has shown itself unable initiate and sustain the sort of scientific research and development that produces such thing. (And in an article for Baptist Press, “An Animist Automobile?”, I extended this observation to other religious cultures outside the Judeo-Christian world.

No, Israel is not without guilt in matters of war. No nation is, including ours. But at least they aspire to moral combat, which is more than can be said for her mortal enemies who, astonishingly, enjoy a vast fan club, including members of the Congressional “Squad”—Illhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  

Having heard their PR, you might take a look at that Kairos Journal booklet I mentioned. I think it makes more sense than they do.