What Is Israel’s Sin?
Israel is guilty of war crimes, its critics say. It is deliberately starving innocent people. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is targeting civilians, destroying life-sustaining infrastructure like water and health-care systems, and causing mass casualties. Its war in Gaza is a genocide, say organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These claims are amplified by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.
Even supposed allies are openly criticizing Israel and threatening to retaliate by recognizing a Palestinian state. In July, France, the United Kingdom and Canada pledged to do this when the UN General Assembly meets in September. Even within Israel’s strongest ally, the United States, “conservative” voices are speaking out strongly against the Jews.
None of these critics seem interested in why Israel is fighting in Gaza. The truth is, this war would have ended long ago if Hamas had released Israel’s hostages. But Hamas has held them, in concentration camp-like captivity, for two years.
The world likes to see things in simple terms—heroes and villains. And in the Israel vs. Hamas conflict, it is casting the former as the bloodthirsty bully and the latter as the persecuted underdog.
It is truly difficult to understand. How did the nation that suffered the barbaric atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, end up being considered the villain—for defending itself, for trying to free its captives, for trying to prevent another such attack? How can Israel guarantee Gazan civilians receive aid when Hamas steals 85 percent of the aid for its own purposes? Why is Israel expected to prevent all civilian casualties when Hamas routinely and illegally hides behind its civilians?
So many of the accusations commonly leveled against Israel are demonstrably false. They are propped up by misleading media reports, fraudulent statistics and other instruments of propaganda. So many of the sins of which Israel is accused, it is simply innocent of. The nation has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect civilians and to safeguard food and medicine distribution.
Nevertheless, Israel is at war. It does face an enemy unwilling to coexist peacefully with a Jewish state and refusing to surrender. And Prime Minister Netanyahu seems more determined than ever to do what he must to protect his people rather than try to appease a world that hates him. For this, he should be applauded. As my father wrote last month, Netanyahu is “Israel’s rising lion” (theTrumpet.com/31628).
Does this mean, however, that Israel is without sin? The intense troubles the Jewish state is enduring right now—ongoing conflicts, international isolation, internal divisions—are terrible curses. And biblical prophecy shows that, sadly, they are going to grow worse in the time ahead.
What has Israel done to deserve all this? This is an important question on which we need God’s perspective. And we can have it, if we will just let Him show us!
Israel Strikes Iran
In July, I traveled to Israel soon after it had struck Iran’s nuclear program and America had followed with bunker-busting bombs. It was a bold, direct strike on Iran. I was stirred by Netanyahu’s action and his courageous, aggressive leadership. It is so unusual to see strength in the modern-day nations of Israel, of which the Jewish state, America and Britain are the most prominent (you can prove this with our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy).
What Israel did to strike Hamas, Hezbollah and even Iran itself teaches all mankind powerful lessons about what it takes to overcome evil. Spiritually, we all need the spirit of a “rising lion.”
God has given us some strong leaders to save our nations from the destruction other nations want to inflict. But He is only saving us temporarily—and only to give us a chance to repent!
Many people were enthusiastic that Israel and the U.S. had finally drawn some kind of line with a nuclear-ambitious regime of terrorists. We at the Trumpet, however, focused on Bible prophecy. And that cast the conflict in a different light. You can read our analysis in last month’s article “Is Iran’s Regime Finished?” Prophecy shows that Iran will emerge from these recent setbacks intact and as belligerent as ever.
With this in mind, it is easier to see how Israel’s and America’s strikes on Iran didn’t finish the job. Though the Israelis finally did deal their enemies a blow, their own nation has a deadly wound.
Hosea 5:13 describes Judah (which today is the Jewish nation of Israel) as having a “wound.” My father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, identified this wound decades ago as the Middle East peace process. Israel’s “cure” for its intractable problems is also its wound! It is trying to gain peace from the surrounding Gentile nations through negotiation, even to the point of surrendering territory it controls. Tiny Israel is facing enemies that want to destroy it and murder its people! Its very survival is on the line, yet it is trusting in negotiations, in limited strikes, in the fickle support of the United States.
Israel needs to trust in a power far stronger and more reliable! But this prophecy says it will trust not in God but rather in “King Jareb.” (Read “The Jewish State’s Deadly Wound.”) This is a terrible mistake.
What October 7 Revealed
We saw the terrible reality of just how fierce Israel’s enemies are on Oct. 7, 2023. Demonic terrorists stormed across the border, not to fight Israeli troops or police but to rape women, to torture families, to burn people alive, to murder children! Humanity is still stained by that horrific massacre. Hostages, dead and alive from that very day, are still in the hands of those psychotic Hamas butchers.
As journalist Douglas Murray writes in his book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, the horrors of October 7 revealed grave weaknesses in the nation of Israel. On that date, almost every part of the state failed catastrophically. The security barriers and cameras failed; the intelligence services failed; the military failed; the politicians failed. Israel’s divided and weak society failed horrifically.
How could this happen? While I was in Israel, I interviewed former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who said the reason Hamas could commit such a massacre for hours and hours was that Israel is so deeply divided. Israeli historian Gadi Taub alluded to this as well, telling me that the security failures were largely due to the politicization of the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet commands.
idf troops on the border warned on October 6 that something big was coming. And so it was: 3,000 terrorists and 3,000 looters were about to charge into sleeping Israeli towns! But this warning was ignored, and the nation was blindsided.
If it had been completely up to the top commanders, those helpless Israeli civilians would have lacked protection for nearly a full day! Many of the men who showed up to fight the terrorists were those who disobeyed orders. One soldier defied his orders to go to Jerusalem; instead he hurried south to where the murders had been happening for hours with just a pistol—and killed 30 terrorists.
The magnitude of the security failure is almost incomprehensible. It was caused by more than mere politicization and division. It was far more serious.
And it holds a lesson not just for Israelis but for the Americans and the British as well. We suffer the same vulnerability, and we too have enemies ready and waiting to destroy, terrorize and kill!
Hamas’s Goal
Israel has had to fight for its life since the day the nation was born. Less than 24 hours after its founding as a nation on May 14, 1948, more than half a dozen Arab nations attacked. Israel miraculously survived. The Jews again had to fight off attacks in 1956, in 1967, in 1973 and in 1982. They experienced many miraculous successes. But at some point, their lionlike courage began to fade.
They suffered the first intifada—terrorist attacks, car bombings, suicide bombings, kidnappings—from 1987 to 1993. And in 1993, they sat down with the men who were terrorizing and killing them to sign the Oslo Accords, marking the start of the infamous “peace process.”
In 1987, the same year the intifada began, Hamas (the “Islamic Resistance Movement”) was founded. The group published its charter a year later, and it literally states: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. … It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. … There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian cause is Islamic and is not a matter for negotiation or peaceful settlement.” That was how Hamas—an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, but more violent—defined itself.
Read that and think of the babies’ corpses in their rooms, lying in blood.
That “jihad”—using a terrorist army against civilians, murdering peaceful men, women, children and babies—was Hamas’s goal from the start. They did it in the 1980s, in the 1990s, whenever they have been able. They did it on October 7.
Remember how Hamas came to power. Back in 2005, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip completely. Tired of fighting, they simply gave the land to the Palestinians. idf troops had the terrible job of evacuating 10,000 Jewish settlers, some by force. The next year, the Palestinians in Gaza held their own elections. They voted in Hamas.
Hamas formed a government with Fatah that lasted a short while. Then in 2007, they threw Fatah leaders off of rooftops and took over all of Gaza at gunpoint. There has not been an election since. Hamas controls everything and everyone by force, taking money, supplies and resources for itself and running the territory as a police state.
What kinds of people are the Hamas leaders? Well, Yahya Sinwar was one. Early on, he was known as the Butcher of Khan Yunis. He hunted down Palestinians for cooperating with Israel. He killed four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers. Israel arrested him, and he was convicted and sentenced to four life sentences in 1989. In prison he educated himself, but he developed serious problems in his speech, memory and coordination. The Israelis diagnosed him with a brain tumor, rushed him to surgery, and saved his life—this murderer, who celebrated whenever Palestinian terrorists kidnapped or killed innocent Israeli civilians.
Meanwhile Israel’s “wound”—its belief that it can negotiate with terrorists and live side-by-side with them—was growing deadlier. One of the worst examples was the 2016 prisoner exchange of one kidnapped Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, criminals and terrorists.
Among the criminals Israel released was Sinwar the butcher. As soon as he was freed, this man, whose life the Israelis had saved, went straight back to work plotting more terrorist killings. He said in 2018 that Hamas would take down the border with Israel and “tear out their hearts.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, that is exactly what Hamas did. And that attack was masterminded by none other than Yahya Sinwar.
A Terrible Preview
That terrible day, thousands of psychotic terrorists poured across the border and massacred nearly 1,200 people from Israel and other nations, all of whom had been living peaceably across the border from them. It was the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust. They also—very shrewdly—took about 240 children, women, men and elderly people hostage.
The attack was a preview of a horrifying prophecy in Zechariah 14. Verse 2 describes what Palestinian terrorists will do in the near future: “For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.” My father writes in Jerusalem in Prophecy that there are three phases to the crisis this verse depicts, and it states them in reverse order. These events are leading to the return of Jesus Christ, described in verses 1, 3 and 4.
“The houses rifled, and the women ravished.” That happened on October 7. Thousands of men with automatic rifles, grenades, launchers, knives and gasoline entered sleepy towns and roadways and annihilated people who were groggy from being up all night, or still sleeping, or going about their weekend morning routine, or just driving down the road. They shot defenseless people. They tossed grenades into safe rooms. They burned people alive. They ravished women—multiple terrorists raping one victim. The New York Post reported one witness saying, “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, Stop it! I’m going to die anyway, just kill me!”
“The women ravished.”
Thousands of Palestinians cheered on the terrorists. Many followed them into the bloody homes of Jews to rifle through their possessions and steal whatever valuables they could carry. And when they found a Jew still alive, they ran to the monsters who were raping and torturing and killing and said, Come and kill him.
“The houses rifled.”
The world saw exactly what the enemies of Israel want to do in Jerusalem and across the nation—as well as in America and Britain! They want to take over Israel’s cities and towns through terrorizing force! They want to rifle the houses. They want to ravish the women.
Imagine what these monsters would do with even more powerful weapons. Imagine what a nation with a real military would do, given the same satanic hatred and a similar opportunity to act on it.
As difficult as it is to accept, we must understand this reality. We need God’s sober perspective on the horrors of October 7 and on what is about to happen all around the world!
Like the Jews on Oct. 6, 2023, we have a false sense of security. On a national scale we think, We have defenses. We have cameras and spies, guards and weapons. So we can ignore the enemy’s threats to “tear your hearts out.”
We have a wound, and it is deadly!
Confront Evil
God’s view on the suffering in the Middle East is that evil must be confronted head-on. Coexisting with evil—conversing with it, befriending it, moving next door to it—never works. It will destroy you.
One of Hamas’s first targets, right near Israel’s border, was the Nova music festival. In the early morning hours after a full night of partying, people started realizing that rockets were flying and terrorists were coming.
The Nova festival and many of the nearby communities were populated overwhelmingly with peaceniks. They befriended Palestinians, went into Gaza to work with their children, etc. Many of them didn’t even lock their doors. But as Prime Minister Netanyahu said, If your enemy vows to destroy you, believe them. He has acted on that with Iran—yet with Hamas, he himself has been guilty of acquiescing to prisoner exchanges (including the Sinwar deal) and of just “mowing the lawn” in Gaza: trimming back the power of Hamas every few years and then allowing it to regrow.
Israelis assumed Sinwar would return to a peaceful life in Gaza. The people living 3 miles from the border made the same mistake. Of their Palestinian neighbors—who were about to livestream their murders—they thought, If we’re nice to them, they’ll eventually love us. Many Americans have the same thinking. U.S. President Donald Trump is showing the same thinking through the work of his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. It is what I call “peace derangement syndrome.”
Evil must be confronted. Sin cannot be accommodated—it must be expunged.
Isaiah 59:2 says that when we harbor sin in our life, God hides Himself from us. He will not hear our prayers, and we lose His protection. That sin separates us from God and joins us together with the chief terrorist, our adversary, the devil.
That is why Satan’s primary objective is to get us to coexist with evil—even if just a little bit. Because he knows it will grow.
A great many Israelis have embraced a lifestyle that has separated them completely from God. The Nova festival was a blatant example. It was held on a Sabbath that was also an annual holy day, and 3,500 people came to dance and celebrate “friends, love and infinite freedom.” They danced and partied all night.
The devil loves framing sin as “infinite freedom.” This “music festival” was really a rave: a psychedelic trance electronic dance party with hypnotic beats, tribal melodies and transcendental synths. The partiers were drinking liquor and taking illegal drugs: lsd, mushrooms, cocaine and so on. And the police stationed to patrol the event just ignored it all.
The main musical attraction didn’t come on until 6 a.m.
The rockets started flying at 6:30.
Even after the attack began, people still partied. Drugged up and sleep deprived, they were oblivious to what was happening.
Then the music stopped. The murderous rampage had begun.
The Nova Victims
A mass-murder memorial now stands on the site of that party. It is sobering to walk around it today, thinking on those recent events. But it evokes other emotions as well. Because it has been turned into a shrine praising the murder victims.
We at the Trumpet are horrified by the October 7 massacre. We take no pleasure in criticizing people who died in terror. But we also need to face the truth and learn the lesson of Nova.
These people’s indulgence in “infinite freedom”—trance music, drugs, promiscuity—made them directly vulnerable to what was about to happen.
When the rockets soared overhead and machine-gun fire began ripping through the crowd, these young people stumbled and fled across an open field with no protection. They fled into a thin stand of trees here or behind a car there, or to a bus stop shelter that terrorists soon surrounded and threw grenades into. The result was the unimaginable slaughter of 364 people.
Today, instead of living, breathing people, there are hundreds of memorials. These little shrines, of course, focus on the positive parts of their lives, and the overall effect presents them as if they were saints. But there is no denying that these shrines are located where they are because the people they memorialize were reveling in sin.
In describing what these young people were doing before they were murdered, the memorials use euphemisms like “infinite freedom,” “partying” and “love.” Some openly proclaim that raves were a way of life for this or that victim. One describes a man who got married, had a son, quickly divorced, and grew enamored with the world of partying. Another describes someone who told his parents, “If I have to die, I hope it’s at a party.” He got his wish.
Everyone is silent about the fact that these people were not keeping the Sabbath or the holy day. One man who rushed in to fight the terrorists noticed as partiers fled past him that many were scandalously dressed. Even with the intensity and shock of everything going on, he briefly thought, Don’t they know it’s Shabbat?
Many of the terrorists and their leaders criticize the debauchery that many Israelis—and Americans and British—indulge in. That is one reason they think it right to gleefully terrorize, rape and murder them. Osama bin Laden once criticized our culture for our sins: drugs, pornography, immorality. And as my father said in a 2011 Key of David program, in that sense bin Laden was not wrong.
Israelis, Americans, the British: We are steeped in sin! The Nova music festival is but one example. Some people have defiantly celebrated Israel’s embrace of sin since October 7, a mark of distinction from the neighboring nations.
Just days before Israel attacked Iran, Jerusalem hosted a Pride and Tolerance March. With the slogan “Born to Be Free,” it combined lgbtq+ advocacy with a call for release of the hostages. About 10,000 people participated, including President Isaac Herzog and opposition leader Yair Lapid. It is because of events like this that in Revelation 11:8 God calls Jerusalem “the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt.” What an indictment!
This is God’s view. He wants to reach them and warn them and bring them to repentance!
Will We Learn the Lessons?
Our young people’s minds are being mowed down by sin. And some are being mowed down by people they don’t even realize are their enemies. Many more will be mowed down in the future by far more powerful enemies if we do not learn this lesson and if we do not repent toward God.
We say that we will never be defeated and that the terrorists will never win. What do we mean by that? We don’t mean that we will repent toward God, who would save us. No—we mean that we will never stop indulging, never stop partying, never stop sinning!
Most of us (not all, astoundingly) can recognize evil in others—Sinwar, bin Laden, October 7 murderers, etc. But we don’t recognize the evil within ourselves.
What happened to the Nova victims is tragic. But if we don’t learn why this happened and see it from God’s perspective, what a terrible waste! And far greater tragedy is coming! The lesson of October 7 is not being learned.
Israel, as well as America and Britain, needs a warning—a powerful warning! These nations must understand the real cause of the serious problems they are suffering from. That is their only hope of survival! That cause and that hope is explained only in Bible prophecy.
Some modern Israelites in Israel, Britain and America sense danger but are blind to just how serious it is. Even in wartime, many Israelis I have spoken to are optimistic; their daily lives are still largely safe and wealthy. The British and Americans enjoy even more security, abundance and relative peace. Some people turn on the news when they hear that Israel and America are bombing Iran, for example, but then quickly turn back to their sports and entertainment.
These three Israelite nations—who are overwhelmingly ignorant that they are Israelite—have a hard time facing reality. The reality is that the Gentile nations are the ascendant nations, and they are working to strip us of our wealth and safety. They have been planning our downfall for years, and when they have the opportunity, the outbreak of hatred, terror and violence will be shocking—just as it was on Oct. 7, 2023.
God cried out to our nations before October 7, and He continues to cry out today: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11).
Examine Yourself
When tragedy hits, we should ask, Why did God allow this? We should examine ourselves, turn to God in repentance, and become more spiritually urgent in these times we live in.
“Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am” (Psalm 39:4). Help me to understand this. Help me to see how my life could be snuffed out in two seconds.
This is God’s perspective: Whether you’re 18 or 80, if you have wasted away your life in sin, that is a tragedy. You have seen tragedies around you and have learned nothing.
Verse 5 says, “Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Selah.” Even at our best, we are vanity. It is important to go beyond simply seeing the evil in someone else—we must see it in ourselves and turn to God.
God is the only one to put your hope in. We are powerless without Him. Jesus Himself said that even He could do nothing without God (John 8:28). God is entirely trustworthy and faithful. There is a common saying, “Peace through strength.” They say it in Israel. President Trump says it all the time. It should be “peace through obedience.” We should be urgently seeking real repentance, really learning the lessons from the events swirling around us.
Apart from God, we are nothing. Disobeying God and indulging in sin makes us vulnerable.
But even when we are at our lowest and weakest, we can ask for God’s mercy and blessing and truly become strong. And our loving God, through His plan of resurrection, has hope even for those who have died.