Israel and the future of the West

Survival of the West depends on it embracing its Christian foundations

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Have you noticed that the Israel seems to be at the heart of many of the divides in our society at the moment?

You can see it more and more, this last weekend providing another example. Over the last couple of days I’ve seen a lot of people on X talking about Bob Vylan chanting “death to the IDF” at Glastonbury. It’s fashionable these days amongst a certain class (the kind of middle-classes who usually attend Glastonbury) to be ‘pro-Palestine’. It seems that being ‘pro-Palestine’ goes along with the territory of ‘progressive’ political views.

At the same time, I see a lot of posts on X which are very much ‘pro-Israel’ — pointing out the horrors of Hamas and how Israel have to respond (“Israel has a right to defend itself”). Over this last weekend I saw a lot of people pointed out the irony of a UK music festival supporting Hamas when it was Hamas who brutally killed many at a music festival in Israel.

It’s clear that there is a big division now within society, and — while that division encompasses many different areas — the biggest and most fundamental one seems to be whether you support Israel or not:

• Those on the progressive left do not support Israel and continually speak about the horrors perpetrated by Israel / the IDF;

• Those on the conservative right support Israel and continually point out the horrors perpetrated by Hamas.

An example of right-wing opinions about Israel. I happened to see this on X while I was writing this article.

It’s all ludicrously tribal: those who are against Israel overlook all the evils done by Hamas and blame Israel for everything. Those who are for Israel overlook all the evils done by Israel and blame Hamas for everything. Things have only intensified post October 7th, even more so now with the attack on Iran (and, if you’d like more background on what’s going on with Iran, check out this Corbett Report podcast).

It strikes me that it is no accident that Israel is at the centre of our divides. I believe that Western support of Israel has been one of the gravest sins the West has committed over the last century, or at least, it epitomises the problems with the West today. I think we are due for a reckoning, which could end up with the end of the West as we know it. At the same time, there is even yet hope for the West, IF it returns to its Christian foundations and acts accordingly.

Let me explain what I mean.

Building Jerusalem

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

So concludes William Blake’s well-known poem and hymn. Jerusalem is seen here as a symbolic place rather than the literal Jerusalem: it is the place where righteousness dwells, the place of peace and harmony and everything we aspire to as a society.

Notice that this verse of the poem makes no mention of God at all. The effort is entirely centred on man — it mentions both “mental fight” and “sword”: that is, fighting the battle for the mind, as well as fighting physical battles. Overall, the message is that we need to work as hard as we can to defeat all our enemies so that we can conquer them and then build Jerusalem — that place where we can live in peace and prosperity.

Although I can’t speak to what William Blake originally intended with his poem (it turns out that Jerusalem is a whole book that he wrote!), if we take the words purely at face value I think they serve as a good description of what the West has been doing for the last century. It has been trying to build Jerusalem entirely without God. God has been gradually airbrushed out of the picture as secularism has come to dominate politics, the media and education. (Case in point: the EU Constitution makes no mention of Christianity, despite many European countries being built on undeniably Christian foundations).

The message of the West today is not, “God is not relevant to the discussion.” It’s more like, “God? What God?” God hasn’t simply been relegated to the private sphere, God has been intentionally eradicated. This is secularist rather than secular: secularist means the systematic eradication of anything ‘religious’ from public life (I wrote some years ago about the differences about different views of secularism). It seems to me that the secularist agenda has triumphed, and the majority of people in the country today — even Christians — live life with a secular mindset.

Note: Yes, I really do mean to include Christians. For more explanation on this please see Francis Schaeffer’s book True Spirituality, as well as Os Guinness’ book The Gravedigger Files which I did a series here about last year.

It’s important to understand that this doesn’t mean religion has been eliminated from the public square. The establishment tolerates, in fact even seems to like religion, to the extent that it serves their purposes. The Church of England is still permitted to have a voice, for example, largely because it has become a mouthpiece for government propaganda about climate change and the like. Islam is permitted because it is useful to divide people, as I wrote about before in my piece about being goaded into civil war:

We are being goaded into civil war

All of these things take on a whole new significance when it comes to the modern nation state of Israel. There, Jerusalem is an actual, physical, city — not simply a symbolic one. Secularists seem to think that Israel is strategically important for the battle with Islam in the Middle East. But even Christians seem to think, ‘Israel is mentioned in the Bible, it was created by God, therefore we must support it.’

Note: You can see an expose of the paper-thin theological reasoning used here in Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ted Cruz. Those who would like an in-depth analysis of whether Christians should support Israel can check out this piece of mine, which — over a year on — is still the #1 thing people read on my blog.

The problem with the West and its relationship with Israel helps crystallise exactly what is wrong with the West at the moment.

Israel shows up the Western problem

In the Old Testament, God promised to give Israel their own land. This promise goes all the way back to Genesis 12, when God said to Abraham: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). At every step of the way, it was God — and God alone — who guided the people to the promised land. The Bible is crystal clear that, although the people had to fight for the land, it was nothing less than a gift from God. Here’s one example — of hundreds you could choose — from the book of Joshua:

All these kings and their lands Joshua conquered in one campaign, because the Lord, the God of Israel, fought for Israel. Joshua 10:42

Israel didn’t conquer the land because they were stronger than their enemies — i.e. because of greater numbers or technological superiority. They were, in fact, a largely untrained and untested army who were technologically inferior to their enemies. They conquered because God was with them. This was demonstrated time and again, for example when the Lord saved them from the hand of the Egyptians when they crossed the Red Sea. As Moses said, “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” (Exodus 14:14).

The Lord continually blessed and protected his people in the land, while they were obedient to him. However, there were curses for disobedience. They were exiled by the Babylonians and the Assyrians because of their sin, especially the sin of turning away from God. The prophetic books are full of God’s displeasure at the Israelites because they turned away from him. To take another example out of many that could be chosen, this is from the prophet Jeremiah:

I will pronounce my judgments on my people
because of their wickedness in forsaking me,
in burning incense to other gods
and in worshiping what their hands have made.

Jeremiah 1:16

The first and foremost reason why the Israelites went into exile was their abandoning God and turning aside to other gods. The secondary reason is that this led to all sorts of wickedness — as Isaiah says, “your hands are full of blood!” (Isaiah 1:15).

In summary, God blessed Israel with their own land, he led them into it with no help from other nations. He kept them in peace there, although he judged them and sent them into exile when they turned aside from him.

Compare this to what’s going on today. Who created the modern nation state of Israel? It was largely a creation of Britain and America. (Victoria Clark’s book Allies for Armageddon is very good for the historical background. Britain was more involved pre-WWII with the Balfour Declaration; America was more involved post-WWII and since then Christian Zionism has been a much bigger thing in America than in Britain).

Western involvement didn’t end with the creation of Israel, however. Israel has been maintained largely through Western — chiefly American — involvement:

I suspect the reason why Israel needs constant reinforcement by America in order to ensure its own survival is because it is not a good and godly place. We could talk about, for example, how you can become an Israeli citizen if you are a Jewish atheist but not a Jew who has converted to another religion (e.g. Christianity). We could talk about how Israel seems to be leading the world in spying and technocracy. We could talk about Israel’s history of deception and false flags, such as their attack on USS Liberty or their involvement in 9-11.

Everything which is wrong in the Western world at the moment seems to be present in Israel — in fact, Israel seem to be leading the way. I don’t say this to absolve other nations of responsibility, or to lay the blame at Israel’s feet! But simply to say that, rather than being a beacon of light, Israel seem to be world-leaders in a particular Western kind of immorality.

One of the biggest problems at the moment is the way that Western nations use war and enemies.

Responding to enemies of the West

One of the things which I’ve found most disturbing over the last few years is the way that countries have justified war by saying they are responding to ‘terrorism’. This was most famous by America’s so-called “War on Terror,” although you can now see it all over the Western world. For example, I already mentioned October 7th, and how that has been used to justify the war in Gaza.

It seems to me that the new de facto way for the Right to respond to terrorism — let me say that again just to be clear, the Right, not the ‘warmongering progressives’ — is through war and violence. War no longer requires the high bar it used to have, e.g. one country invading another. War can be started for much more nebulous reasons, mainly to do with ‘wiping out all those bad guys who want to do bad things to us.’

Leaders in Western nations, especially Israel, have cunningly worked out that people will support them if their enemies are seen as sufficiently heinous. Hence why the Western world essentially created Al-Qaeda, leading to 9/11 and its role as the catalyst for the War on Terror, as well as many other events which have caused Western countries to send in their armies. (There are many questions about October 7th, for example, which suggest to me that it was a managed war trigger, if not a manufactured war trigger — to use the language of the Graeme MacQueen 9/11 documentary).

Note: the Left have a kind of mirror image of this view. The Left seem to see us as Western nations as being the ones in the wrong, and therefore counting any terrorist violence against Western nations as justified. Each side justifies violence because the other side ‘had it coming’.

The problem with this should be obvious, especially from a Christian perspective, but let me spell it out.

Firstly, Christians believe in the sanctity of life. Everyone is created in the image of God, and every human life is precious. This means that we must not take the life of another human being (i.e. murder). This is very far from the way that Western nations now see life. One of the things which strikes me about Western leaders at the moment is that they see war as a strategy, e.g. the war in Ukraine as a kind of strategic proxy war to weaken Russia. The human cost of war — which should be the number one priority — is no longer even on their radar.

Secondly, Christians are forbidden from taking revenge. When it comes to a fight in the playground, we don’t take “but he started it!!” as an excuse. This should be the same when it comes to countries: terrorism should never be a cause of war. However bad the atrocity, the right response is not to go to war! Not only is this wrong on a basic moral level, but it also incentives unscrupulous governments to manufacture the worst possible terrorist atrocity so they can justify responding with violence.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying there should be no response to terrorism. However, it is not a justification for invading another country and the ensuing death and destruction.

Thirdly, Christians should not seek to bring about change through violence. I fear that many Western countries want to bring about “regime change” through military might. For example, the Americans initiating colour revolutions to bring about “democracy” (the very idea makes my irony meter explode!). Jesus said God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45), and we should like him — loving even our enemies. That means we should act as God does: not destroying our enemies by blowing them to smithereens, but converting our enemies into friends by loving them and changing their hearts. That’s how God makes his enemies into his friends.

Once again, let me be clear that I am not advocating a kind of ‘pie in the sky’, naïve approach to foreign policy. In fact, quite the opposite — I think we should be wary of regimes like China who seem to be exerting quite the influence over us at the moment. But I am saying that going in to another country to effect change with violence is not the Christian way.

I am also not arguing for pacifism. Christians have for centuries argued in favour of ‘just war theory’ — i.e., we recognise that this is a sinful world and war is a reluctant necessity. At the same time, we recognise that there should be limitations upon war, and I believe these limitations have been transgressed time and again in recent decades. Lines have been crossed which should never have been crossed.

When it comes to Israel and the Middle East, the biggest battle which seems to be being fought at the moment is between the West and Islam. I’ve written before about how Christians should respond to Islam. Once again, the right way to engage with Islamic nations is not by blowing them up! There is a distinctly Christian way to engage with other religions such as Islam, and these have all been ditched in favour of the strategy of violence. See my previous article for more:

Responding to the promotion of Islam

Looking to the future

I believe that God is angry with the way things are in the West at the moment. As I have tried to explain, the reason why things seem to centre around Israel are because I believe this is where we see most clearly the sins of the West. The West has tried for too long to erase God from the picture and rely on its own strength. The West has tried to play God by creating and supporting Israel. The West also has blood on its hands in its continual thirst for more war, not to mention matters closer to home such as abortion and assisted dying.

At one point the West was Christendom — it was where Christ was honoured, at least in theory if not always in practice. But today, it has squandered its inheritance and become puffed up with vanity and pride. I believe that the axe is now laid to the root of the trees, and God is coming to humble the proud. Those who have conspired against him in their folly will be exposed, and will be brought low. There need to be changes.

In particular, I think something needs to change with the West’s relationship with Israel. I am not sure what the solution for the Middle East is — ultimately, I believe, it will only be solved through turning to Christ. But, in the short term, I believe that Western countries will need to rethink how they offer their support to Israel and what they are getting involved with.

I don’t think the destruction of the West is inevitable, I believe that there is still time to turn back to the Lord and repent. But, repentance means confronting things we would rather not confront, admitting things about ourselves we would rather not face. And, when it comes to the West, we need to repent of our whole approach towards war and terrorism and how we engage with our enemies, not to mention the relationship with Israel.

I’ve just been reading Churchill’s book “The Birth of Britain”, which includes the early days of being part of the Roman Empire. It must have seemed impossible in those early days that the mighty and powerful Roman Empire could fall — and yet, fall it did. It might seem similarly incredible to people living today that the Western world could fall, and yet it is happening as we watch.

Although — as I said earlier — it’s not too late for the West, I truly believe this is one of those ‘crossroads moments’: either we turn back to our Christian roots and survive, or keep going on our current path and are destroyed. I hope and pray that what is happening in the Middle East right now will lead to true repentance rather than destruction.

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