They couldn’t keep quiet

Dear coworkers,

In an evil and adulterous generation, the place of a righteous man is in prison.

Think Joseph, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, Paul, John the Apostle, James (Yakov) the brother of Jesus. They couldn’t keep quiet about what they knew.

And even now in the turmoil of war in modern Israel there are still voices willing to pay the price for speaking up.

Houses under siege. Water and electricity cut. Families with children afraid to leave their homes because they fear that if they step outside, they could be beaten, attacked, or worse.

Cars are torched. Homes are hit with Molotov cocktails. Farmers picking olives or grazing sheep are assaulted. Innocent people driving along roads have stones hurled at their vehicles.

And the forces responsible for enforcing the law? Too often, the military and police arrive, look around, try to separate the sides if a confrontation has already begun, and then leave…

This should not be complicated. Imagine for a moment that the story was reversed. Imagine Palestinians surrounding an Israeli community in Judea and Samaria and preventing families from leaving their homes. Imagine them cutting the electricity and water, throwing stones at Israeli cars, attacking farmers in their fields or hurling Molotov cocktails at Jewish homes.

Would anyone in Israel hesitate for a second before calling them terrorists? Of course not.

There would be breaking news on television screens. The incident itself would be over in minutes since the whole place would be swarming with special forces. Arrests would follow. We would be told, correctly, that terrorism cannot be tolerated, and that those responsible must be hunted down and brought to justice.

So why, when Jews do the same thing to Palestinians, do we suddenly struggle with the vocabulary?…

Israel is already fighting an increasingly difficult battle over its legitimacy and standing in the world. Israelis encounter growing hostility and protests overseas, and European governments are again considering imposing sanctions on the state. Friends of Israel are finding it harder to defend the country.

It is tempting, as many people do, to dismiss all of this as antisemitism, anti-Zionism, or the latest manifestation of the world’s double standard toward Israel. And sometimes that is what it is. But that argument can only carry weight when Israel can look its friends in the eye and say that it is doing everything possible to uphold its own laws and values.

Right now, when it comes to Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, it cannot say that. If Israel wants the world to believe that this violence is not state-sanctioned, there is a very simple way to prove it.

Stop it.

And yes, thank God, Christian friends of Israel are also waking up and speaking up. The report of the death of our board member Jim’s son David, not long after a violent attack from extremist Jews, has now been seen by millions worldwide, and prompted this from a staunch Christian Zionist commentator:

I believe David’s story needed to be told too. It was not only because he was a delight and a blessing to his parents through his life, but also for the testimony he speaks now to me of being raised in Israel and in a Christian Zionist environment. I believe that influence is the basis for David’s integrity. It sprung from his faith to not be willing in his generation to turn a blind eye to violent actions of extremist religious settlers against Palestinians.

I don’t know all that God is up to in David’s story, but maybe it is to call us all to handling the issue of extremist settler violence with more honesty and transparency. 

Those Jews who attack their Arab neighbors believe they are simply being faithful to God’s covenant, which promised this land to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Non-Jews, in their view, have no right to be here, and indeed, as shared in this letter two weeks ago, they see the very lives of non-Jews as of less value than the lives of Jews.

This view of course is not a fair reading of the Torah, which also records God’s covenant with Ishmael, and repeatedly emphasizes loving the stranger. In fact this anti-Gentile sentiment only came to fruition in the century after the Jewish religious establishment rejected Jesus, and eventually led their people to disaster by following the false messiah Bar Kochba.

A Jewish scholar, Amy-Jill Levine, was in the news this week after her election as president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America (!),  and in an interview with the Jerusalem Post helpfully highlighted the ongoing significance of this first-century split:

“My scholarship focuses primarily on how first-century Jews would have assessed Messianic claims, why some Jews would have followed Jesus, and others did not, how Jews would have understood Jesus’s parables, etc. This type of work can serve to enhance Christian belief rather than challenge it. It also can introduce Jews to part of our history that the synagogue has not preserved.”

She said that when she first started studying the New Testament, she also received pushback from her own family members who asked, “Why are you studying that hateful, antisemitic book?”

“I asked them if they had ever read it, to which they responded, ‘No, why would I read that hateful antisemitic book?’”

“Ignorance helps no one,” she added.

Indeed, the message of that book is that Messiah came to put an end to the enmity between Jews and non-Jews, thus fulfilling the covenant to make Abraham’s seed a blessing to all the families of the earth.

The hope of our Shevet Achim community is to share this truth with both Jews and Arabs here in the land, as I tried to do in an interview published last week.

“Chosenness is not a privilege. It’s a call to service. Like following Jesus, whoever would be a leader in his kingdom will be the servant of all,” he said.

He said that war in Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has made that calling increasingly difficult. Access to Israeli hospitals for Gazan children has largely been cut off, while restrictions and the crisis in Judea and Samaria have dramatically reduced the number of children the ministry is able to help.

Miles said the conflict has also brought a painful hardening of attitudes, including toward children who have no say in the circumstances surrounding them.

However, he believes personal encounters can break through those barriers. Families who see their children welcomed and treated in Israel can experience something that transcends politics. As Miles puts it, “Politics isn’t going to save us, but changed hearts can.”

The ministry itself operates with limited resources and depends heavily on prayer and faith. Hospital costs can still leave thousands of dollars to be raised for a single child, while volunteers sacrifice time and comfort to serve families in crisis. Miles sees that dependence not as a weakness, but as central to the ministry’s identity: “We’re poor people. We have no money, no connections, no recognition in the world. So it’s just faith in God that I think has carried us through these years of never really having to turn away a dying child and always trusting God that he’ll make a way.”

Friends, this is a way that we can join those righteous who will not be quiet about what is happening in the land. Not just as hands pounding on a keyboard, but hands of healing, reaching out in partnership with Jewish doctors to give life to Arab children.

On Tuesday precious, shy, mischievous, blue, frail Montaser from Bethlehem is finally coming back to Israel for heart surgery, two years after his last one.

We put our trust in the covenant of Abraham, who believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.

Jonathan for Shevet Achim

“Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity…for there the LORD commands the blessing, even life forevermore.”