Israel Under Judgment, Not Erasure

In February 2026, Gallup reported that Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, 46 percent to 28 percent. Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League counted 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the most in 46 years. At the same time, Human Rights Watch concluded that Hamas-led groups committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity against civilians on October 7. None of these facts settles every dispute about Gaza, settlements, or Israeli strategy. Together, however, they describe a moral atmosphere: suspicion of Israel rising while anti-Jewish hostility rises with it, and while the barbarism of October 7 is increasingly treated as narratively inconvenient. That failure is not merely rhetorical. It reveals a deeper collapse in political judgment. Christian realism begins with an unfashionable truth: in politics, legitimacy and innocence are not the same thing. No nation is innocent. No state is pure. Every political community bears the marks of fear, ambition, coercion, and the tragic limitations of moral striving in a fallen world. Power is necessary because man is not innocent; power is dangerous because man is not innocent. That is true of every state, including Israel. This is where much contemporary discourse loses its footing. Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. States can act unjustly. Governments can become reckless, cruel, or strategically blind. Wars can be fought in ways that violate international law and conscience. Serious criticism of Israeli conduct is therefore not only permissible but, at times, morally necessary. But much of today’s moral passion no longer stops at condemning conduct. It wants something larger. Instead of wanting a reformed Israel, it wants no Israel at all. Plenty of nations have compromised origins, ugly wars, disputed borders, and stained histories. Very few are treated as metaphysical offenses. Israel is the exception. The Jewish state is not merely criticized; it is uniquely burdened with having to justify its continued being. The argument moves quickly from policy to ontology: Israel has no right to exist; Zionism is uniquely illegitimate among national claims to statehood; Jewish self-determination alone is inherently suspect. At that point, one is no longer engaged in ordinary geopolitical criticism but rather the hold habit of making Jews the exception. Christians should be especially wary here, because the biblical witness does not authorize Gentile contempt for Israel dressed up as moral seriousness. In Romans 11, Paul asks, “Has God rejected his people?” and answers, “By no means,” warning Gentile believers not to boast over the natural branches. In Jeremiah 31:35–37, Israel’s enduring nationhood is tied to the fixed order of creation. In Acts 17:26, God appoints the times and boundaries of nations; and in Revelation 21:24, the nations still walk by the light of the New Jerusalem. None of this means Christians must baptize every Israeli policy. It does mean the Church is not free to erase Jewish peoplehood from history and consider it a gesture of theological sophistication. Biblical Israel itself was often rebellious, unjust, and under judgment. Yet it remained Israel. The prophets condemned Israel precisely because it was real enough to judge. That is a better model for Christians now than either romanticism or erasure. Israel is not above judgment. But neither is it beyond legitimacy. That distinction matters all the more after October 7. Human Rights Watch’s findings matter because Hamas’s massacre, hostage-taking, and deliberate cruelty were evil, and any moral account that does not begin there is already disordered. Yet the existence of an evil enemy does not sanctify every response. Self-defense is real, but it is not limitless. Military necessity is real, but it is not self-justifying. Christian realism insists on discrimination, proportionality, prudence, and restraint precisely because war tempts states to confuse power with righteousness. That is why Gaza’s suffering must also be spoken of plainly. Civilian suffering there is real. So is the moral damage done when emergency measures harden into habits of rule. So is the corruption that follows when occupation ceases to look temporary and begins to look permanent. Christians are not asked to choose between Jewish fear and Palestinian grief. They are asked to tell the truth about both. And that truth cuts in both directions. Palestinian suffering does not nullify Jewish legitimacy. The Nakba was real; so too is Jewish nationhood. Palestinian claims to self-government are legitimate; so too is the Jewish claim to political existence. The conflict is tragic precisely because both peoples are real, both carry memory, and both lay claim to the same land. A serious Christian ethic must resist both sentimental denial and ideological erasure. The same seriousness should make Christians cautious about slogans that explain too much. “Settler colonialism,” used as a total account, obscures more than it reveals. The Jews were not simply an imperial population sent by a metropole to exploit an alien possession. They were and are a dispersed people with an ancient attachment to the land, a long memory of exile, and a real national continuity. None of that negates Arab attachment to the same land, which is also real and morally weighty. But it does mean the conflict cannot be honestly reduced to innocent natives on one side and wholly alien interlopers on the other. Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, January 2024. Photo by Chenspec via Wikimedia Commons The wider regional setting also matters. The Middle East is not morally simple, whatever Western commentary sometimes suggests. Public rhetoric and statecraft are often at odds. The Abraham Accords did not emerge because the Palestinian question had been resolved. They emerged because states still act on interests, balances of power, commerce, and common fears, especially fear of Iran. That does not make those governments noble. It does remind us that the region cannot be understood through moral theater alone. States still behave like states. The same sobriety is needed on Iran. The greatest danger of a nuclear-armed Iran is not necessarily an immediate apocalyptic strike. The more plausible danger is more disciplined and therefore more serious: nuclear-backed coercion. As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an acute threat to Israel and likely embolden a more aggressive regional posture. CSIS describes Iran’s present strategy as multidomain coercion across proxy, cyber, maritime, and energy theaters. Put those together and the likely first utility of an Iranian bomb becomes clearer: not cinematic annihilation, but a shield under which Tehran could intensify proxy warfare, missile pressure, maritime intimidation, and regional blackmail. That is exactly what makes the Iranian question so dangerous. So what should Christians say? They should say that Israel is a legitimate state because Jewish peoplehood is real, Jewish continuity is real, and self-determination is not a right from which the Jews alone are excluded. They should say that Palestinians are a real people with real rights and real grievances that cannot be denied without injustice. They should say that terrorism is evil and must be defeated. They should say that self-defense is real but not unbounded. They should say that occupation cannot become a permanent moral settlement. And they should say that anti-Jewish hatred remains real, including when it is laundered through the language of moral exceptionalism. That is not a soft conclusion. It is a Christian realist one. Israel should be judged as every state should be judged: soberly, proportionately, truthfully, and without the double standards that so often corrupt this subject. Not idolized. Not demonized. Not absolved. Not erased. In a fallen world, that is not moral compromise. It is moral clarity.