December 2003 Personal Letter

Dear Friends:

As this is being written, I’m in Israel on our Fall Tour. Being here confirms my belief that the Lord has given Zola Levitt Ministries a unique calling as one of the few Christian organizations charged with helping the “lost sheep of Israel” (which, according to Mt. 10:6 and 15:24 was the primary ministry of our Lord as well). Our ministry has done this in a variety of ways, from showing the Jewish roots of Christianity to opposing those who would annul the Lord’s various covenants with His Chosen People.

All this has made our ministry unique in many ways as the Lord leads us to point out the theological errors of Replacement Theology, to support various groups here in Israel, and to reveal the many forms of anti-Semitism and hatred that have become so prevalent not only in the secular world, but also have seeped even into many American denominations.

With all this in mind, I recently came across a definitive article, “Graffiti on History’s Walls” by Mortimer B. Zuckerman in The US News and World Report, which addresses many of these issues as well as the recent history pertaining to Israel and its enemies. Because of the essential information this article imparts, we’ve reprinted most of it below. I encourage you to take a few minutes and thoughtfully read through it.

Graffiti on History’s Walls
by Mortimer B. Zuckerman

In the 20th century, fascism came and went. Communism came and went. Socialism came and waned. But among the most pernicious “isms” are an atavistic anti-Semitism and its 20th-century version, anti-Zionism. Recently, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said, “Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

This new strain of anti-Semitism is directed against the Jewish collective, the modern State of Israel.

Anti-Zionism would deny the State of Israel the right to live as an equal member of the family of nations. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism as Israel is today, there would be no question of its right to defend itself. A democracy must welcome critics, and Israel surely has its critics in spades — just look at the spirited Israeli press. But for many, recent criticism of Israel has become so perverse, so persistent, so divorced from reality that it can be seen only as emotional anti-Semitism hiding behind the insidious political mask of anti-Zionism.

Israel has become the object of envy and resentment in much the same way that the individual Jew was once the object of envy and resentment. Israel, in effect, is emerging as the collective Jew among nations. Traditional anti-Semitism has lately re-emerged as anti-Zionism, focused on the Jews of Israel, the role of Israel, and, for some, on Jews in the United States who support Israel.

A new Jew, cartooned as an aggressive, all-powerful collective called Israel, suddenly, has replaced Shylock. “Rambo Jew,” as the writer Daniel Goldhagen put it, “has largely supplanted Shylock in the anti-Semitic imagination.” With the territories seized at the end of the 1967 war, the “plucky little Jewish state” was no more. In the years since, as it responded again and again to Arab attacks, sympathy for Israel eroded further still as the world’s TVs broadcast images not of terrorists but of armed Israelis responding to terrorism. Only somehow the word “responding” too often got lost in the chaos. It is as if the world somehow believes Israel must win the “moral man of the year” award in defending itself. Is Israel’s approach, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, the same as that of the terrorists, who seek to maximize it?

Arab terrorists, incredibly, have managed to inspire more sympathy than their victims. The vocabulary of the accusations presents the Jews as Nazis and their Arab enemies as helpless Jews. Thus has Israeli self-defense been transmogrified as aggression. In much of the world’s news media and in its elite communities, as a result, there is a pattern of delegitimization of Israel.

In England, The Guardian wrote, “Israel has no right to exist.” The New Statesman ran a story titled “A Kosher Conspiracy,” illustrated by a cover showing the gold Star of David piercing the Union Jack. In France, the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur published an extraordinary libel alleging that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women so that their relatives would kill them to preserve family honor. In Italy, the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano spoke of Israel’s “aggression that’s turning into extermination,” while the daily La Stampa ran a Page 1 cartoon of a tank emblazoned with the Jewish star pointing its big gun at the infant Jesus, who cries out, “Surely they don’t want to kill me again.”

Across Europe, attackers, shouting racist slogans, throw stones at schoolchildren, at worshipers attending religious services, at rabbis. Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues are firebombed.

• France: synagogues and Jewish schools, students, and homes were attacked and firebombed. In Paris, Jews were attacked by groups of hooded men. Metropolitan Paris saw something like a dozen anti-Jewish incidents a day in the first several months after Easter.
• Ukraine: skinheads attacked Jewish workers and assaulted the director of a Jewish school.
• Holland [the nation of Anne Frank and Cory Ten Boom]: demonstrators carrying swastikas and photos of Israel chanted “Sieg heil!” and “Jews into the sea!”
• Salonika: the Holocaust Memorial was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti.
• Slovakia: Jewish cemeteries were firebombed.
• Berlin: Jews were assaulted, swastikas daubed on Jewish memorials, and a synagogue spray-painted with the words “six million is not enough.”

In the Muslim world, the intensity of the anti-Jewish invective equals or surpasses that of Nazi Germany in its heyday. Throughout the Islamic world, one finds slanderous quotations about Jews as the sons of apes and donkeys. A leading Saudi newspaper has Jews using the blood of Christian and Muslim children to make their hamantaschen pastry for Purim and their matzo, the unleavened bread of Passover. In this fundamentalist religious culture, America and Israel are seen as twin satanic forces, “The Great Satan” and “The Little Satan,” as Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to them.

Ever hear the story of the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center being told to not show up for work on the morning of September 11? Hezbollah planted the story on the Internet under the cover of a Lebanese TV station. This urban legend has now taken root among Muslims the world over. In Egypt, a 41-part TV series was broadcast across the Arab world during Ramadan entitled “Horseman Without a Horse.” The theme of the series was that the Zionists have controlled the world of politics since the dawn of history and seek to control the Middle East — a fantasy, as Prof. Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University pointed out, imported from the Germany of the 1930s.

Arab rhetoric that seeks to justify terrorism against innocent civilians by describing Israel’s existence as illegitimate is the product of a careful calculation by Arab political leaders who recognized the popular appeal of scapegoating Israel while legitimizing their regimes.

The UN has come a long way from the legitimization and legalization of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to have their own state on their own land through its 1947 resolution proposing and approving a two-state solution.

The UN today is a regular forum for vicious anti-Israel attacks, conferring on the spurious and the hateful the false cloak of reason and legitimacy, and thus has become an organization for the conservation, not the reduction, of the Middle East conflict.

Some UN actions simply defy belief. At the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East committed to civil rights, the rule of law, and Arab participation in democratic government — was attacked by Arab and Third World nations and accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Last year, UN conferees met and, for the first time in the 52 years since its adoption, excoriated one country — Israel — for alleged violations. Not Cambodia and Rwanda, with their well-documented records of genocide. Not Zimbabwe, with its racist economic policies. Not the Balkan states, with their ethnic cleansing. Not even China, with its dismal record on Tibet. Only Israel was singled out. Similarly, the UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired on occasions by such notably enlightened states as Libya, has followed this same pattern, devoting much of its time, energy, and efforts to attacking Israel. The commission went so far as to affirm, last April 15, the legitimacy of suicide bombing against Israelis, or in judgment-free UN-speak, “all available means, including armed struggle.”

In the Arab World, Zionism is portrayed not as the Jewish response to a history of anti-Semitism in a world that culminated in the Holocaust but as a hyper aggressive variant of colonialism. But since this new anti-Semitism manifests itself so clearly now as political rejection of the Jewish state, it is worth examining the historical record for a moment. Fact: the majority of Jews came to Israel in the late 19th century and early 20th century not as conquering Europeans, backed by a national army and treasury, but as the wretched of the earth in search of respite from ceaseless persecution.

They were not wealthy; they were young, poor, and desperate. The notion that the traditional position of the Arabs in Palestine was jeopardized by Jewish settlements is belied by another fact: that when the Jews arrived, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and wildly neglected land of sandy deserts and malarial marshes.

Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, described it as a “desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds — a silent, mournful expanse…. We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”

Even people unsympathetic to the Zionist cause believed that Jewish immigrants had improved the condition of Palestinian Arabs. Consider the words of Sharif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic holy places in Arabia, in 1918: “One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine…. They knew that the country was for its original sons. The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren.”

Hussein understood then, as so many refuse to see now, that the regeneration of Palestine and the growth of its population came only after the Jews returned in significant numbers. As Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary, pointed out: “The land was not being taken away from the Arabs. The Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so.”

The Arabs resisted from the outset a Jewish presence in the region. They expanded their war against Israel into an attack on the very idea of Israel. Zionism, the Jewish claim to a land of their own, was declared racist because the Arabs said it deprived them of their land. They substituted the homeless Palestinian for the homeless Jew. The Arabs, having rendered the Palestinians homeless by refusing to accept partition in 1948 and having kept many of the Palestinians who fled the battle homeless in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan by refusing to resettle them in their lands, now blame this homelessness on the Jews. They have consistently charged that it was the Jews who had driven the Arabs out of Palestine. But as the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis has written, “the great majority, like countless millions of refugees elsewhere, left their homes amid the confusion of and panic of invasion and war — one more unhappy part of the vast movement of population which occurred in the aftermath of World War II.”

Even the foreign press, in regular contact with all sides during the conflict of 1948, wrote nothing to suggest that the flight of the Palestinians was not voluntary. In fact, those who fled were urged to do so by other Arabs. Arabs and Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war were resettled in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Yet 55 years after they were first established, the Arab refugee camps still exist. With the exception of Jordan, the Arab governments that are home to these camps have refused to grant citizenship to the refugees and opposed their resettlement. Three generations later, they continue to serve as political pawns of the Arab states, still hopeful of reversing the events of 1948. “The return of the refugees,” as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt said years later, “will mean the end of Israel.”

UN officials define refugees in the Middle East to include the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. In other parts of the world, descendants of refugees are not defined as refugees. The result of this unique treatment has been to increase the numbers of Arab refugees from roughly 700,000 to over 4 million. TO SINGLE OUT ISRAEL as the only state that must restore a refugee population, is to hold the Jewish state to a different standard.

Last year’s “massacre” by Israeli forces at the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin is particularly illustrative. The Palestinians, with support from UN representatives, alleged that the Israelis had massacred hundreds of innocents. But subsequent news reports documented that there was no massacre and that the Israelis exercised great restraint during the battle to minimize civilian casualties while suffering an inordinately high number of their own as a result.

A critical moment in the relationship was the Oslo agreement of 1993. There, the negotiating principle was land for peace. What Israel received was no peace in return for its offer of land. The most generous Israeli offer of land for peace came at Camp David three years ago. Then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza.

The notion of land for peace bears exploring. The incurious may be left with the conclusion that the lack of peace must be the result of Israel’s failure to yield sufficient land. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only way Israel has been able to reduce the number of suicide bombers is eliminating their sanctuary by controlling the West Bank through occupation and sealing off Gaza.

The issue is Palestinian refusal to grant Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state. The spiraling Palestinian violence evidences a single-minded determination to continue the conflict. The insight of Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, “Jews to Palestine,” while today it has been changed, to “Jews out of Palestine.” The message to Jews, Oz says, is simple: “Don’t be here, and don’t be there. That is, don’t be.”

This ministry is in a unique position to combat this constant denigration of Israel, especially with our powerful new outreach on PAX. Many of the people we will now reach on this secular network may have been convinced by the anti-Israelism described above, but we can reach them with the truth. Please consider helping us at this time. I can truly say that is one of those times that we really covet your prayers and financial support. A gift right now will have twice the ministry affect of a gift a month ago. Thank you for praying about this.

And by way of supporting Israel against all this, we want to invite you to our upcoming tour of Israel in March. Now that tourism to Israel is increasing, we intend to return to our usual schedule of spring, summer, and fall tours. So keep this in mind and we’ll be bringing you more information.

We’re also hoping you’ll join us in Orlando, Florida, at The Holy Land Experience where we will tour on the weekend after Christmas (December 26th–28th). This excellent site gives a very realistic picture of first-century Jerusalem, with many Biblical attractions. Our people have loved it in the past, and our package cost makes it less expensive than doing the same trip on your own. Be sure to bring the kids — you’ll have a hotel suite! There will be plenty of time for questions and answers with me in this next-to-the-best Israel experience.

For more information or the confirmation of tour dates, check with Tony at (214) 696-9760 during business hours. You can also call 1-800-WONDERS (1-800-966-3377) anytime for a brochure about any of our tours.

Finally, with much of the world aligning itself against Israel and the Lord’s Chosen People, it is important now, more than ever, to remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Your Messenger,

P.S. Regarding PAX on Thursday mornings, cable viewers can tune Zola in at 9:30 am on both coasts and at 8:30 Central and Mountain Time. Both Dish’s Channel 181 and DirecTV’s Channel 255 will carry Zola at 9:30 ET, 8:30 CT, 7:30 MT and 6:30 PT. Local broadcast viewers should check these times with their local PAX affiliates. For our complete airing schedule, please refer to pages 18–23 of the December Levitt Letter.