Faith is essential to victory

People who say that Israel’s only hope for peace lies in halting settlement expansion and agreeing to a two state “solution” are failing to comprehend the Islamist mindset. To Islamist groups like Hamas, Islam must ultimately rule the entire world, and all non-Muslims must be subservient to Muslims. No true Islamist will accept a sovereign Jewish state in the heart of the Holy Land, no matter how reduced its borders. Their mindset is that Israel must be destroyed, no matter how long it takes or how many lives are lost in the process.

In other words, Israel cannot achieve peace by trying to appease the Islamists. Concessions merely weaken the Jewish state while whetting the appetite of the enemy for more. The reality is that there is no diplomatic solution to this conflict. If Jews want to have a secure state in the Promised Land, they’ll have to fight their enemies and win.

The only reasonable “two state solution” is a single Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, with an Arab minority that can have full civil rights as long as they don’t try to undermine the state, and a Palestinian state located in Jordan. Since the Islamists will never agree to this, Israel will have no choice but to implement it unilaterally. But it will only be able to do so if it has absolute confidence in the justice of its cause, and it can only attain this confidence by returning to the foundational principles of Judaism itself.

Our 4,000 year old faith is based on the supremacy of God and the truth of His Covenant, which He declared to be binding on all generations of Jews. According to the Covenant, if we fulfill His commandments, He will provide us with many blessings. Among them, He will give us the entire Land of Israel as a possession, and protect us from all our enemies. He never predicts a time when we would have no enemies, He merely says that as long as we fulfill the commandments they’ll have no power to harm us.

Israel cannot prevail against its adversaries by denying God or rebelling against Him. Sadly, most of Israel’s political leaders have not internalized this message. What Israel needs today is new leaders who are not embarrassed to acknowledge the Almighty and who will dedicate themselves to doing that which is right in His sight, even when it’s unpopular among the nations. Israel as a nation must publicly declare that God promised us this land, and we will not voluntarily surrender any part of it, since doing so would be a betrayal of the Covenant upon which our entire national existence depends.

At the same time, we must honestly acknowledge our own shortcomings and failures in living up to what He requires of us in both our public and private lives, and resolve to repair our damaged relationship with Him so His spirit can once again dwell among us and bring us to victory.

When we go to war against our enemies, we must not trust solely in our own strength of arms, but must acknowledge that it is the Almighty alone who grants victory or withholds it, and our success or failure, regardless of our own military prowess, is ultimately in His hands.

Our past military victories in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, which some people have called “miraculous,” are a sign that He’s been helping us. I believe He would like to fulfill His entire promise to us and restore us to the land in peace and security with no one to make us afraid, but He can only do so when we fulfill our obligations to Him.