UNDERSTANDING EVIL: Why Demonizing Israel will Never Work

Accusing Israel of Genocide when she is a victim of Genocide is the definition of insanity

By David W. Virtue, DD

June 9, 2025

If there is one historical group that understands the ontological nature of evil; it is the Jews.

They have been bullied, persecuted, incarcerated, shot, murdered, and sent packing from country to country. Through it all they have survived.

In the Middle East they have built a democracy surrounded by nations run by oil rich oligarchs, so called Republics run by strong men, manipulators and murderers.

Today Israel sits isolated, a democracy that includes two million Arab Israelis who enjoy all the benefits of a free state.

What other nation on earth would take a jailed murderer in the person of Yahya Sinwar, give him free brain surgery, then release him, only to find that he and his brother are the brains behind the worst massacre since the Holocaust and then get world attention focused on a sliver of land that puts Israel at risk for international opprobrium.

It beggars belief. One can only marvel that countries like UK, France, Germany and the ICJ should beat up on Israel, even as Israel faces imminent threat from a nation enriching its nuclear capability with the single purpose of destroying it. 31 countries still don’t recognize Israel.

Liberals of all geopolitical stripes refuse to understand or believe in the nature and depth of evil. Jews will always have the Holocaust as a permanent reminder of what the face of evil looks like. The gas chambers, the gaunt faces of women and children, hands held high, surrendering to jack-booted men whose only will is their destruction. These images will never be erased from their minds. Not all the Holocaust museums in the world can capture the depth of evil visited upon a single people and nation.

Now Israel finds itself demonized by the world and its very existence threatened by a neighbor whose “death to Israel” mantra is the only reason for its existence.

Liberal minded Christians have succumbed to a weak doctrine of evil, casting it in terms of victimhood and psychology. But they are wrong. Evil lies at the core of every human heart, from the moment Cain killed Abel; Moses killing the Egyptian, King David and the apostle Paul were all murderers, either performing or giving consent to the death of others. We all stand condemned.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn rightly observed that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.

If and when I think of a person whose heart was pure it would be Queen Esther, who, when confronted with an evil about to be performed on her people, the Jews, and without an invitation from the king, boldly says, “if I die, I die”. That, is to confront evil with the heart of God.

Bibi Netanyahu is not perfect, but many believe that God is clearly using him to keep Israel intact. Many American evangelicals believe God chose Trump to confront the woke evils of America. And Trump is far from perfect. Right or wrong there is the overwhelming belief that God is somehow involved in the affairs of men that, on the surface, make no sense at all.

From the signing of the Balfour Declaration, to the Six-Day War, to the recent massacre of 1,200 Jews on Israeli soil, Israel has sighed, cried, lamented and gone on, undeterred. They have mourned and buried their dead; they have raised holy hands to heaven, and they have moved on.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) there have been a reported 9,000+ antisemitic incidents in 2024 as anti-Jewish attitudes surged to 'alarming' new heights, setting new records for the fourth straight year in 2024, including a major spike on college campuses.

What if there were 9,000 anti-Christian incidents in America…we would never hear the end of it! Yes, there have been a handful and they have been fully reported on.

For all his faults, Netanyahu understands his people, the land they dwell in, and most of all, how to keep it.

Hezbollah has been defeated in Lebanon; the Syrian regime has fallen in Damascus but the fighting continues in Gaza. Despite all the world’s press opposing the actions of the IDF, Netanyahu is determined to win. He has bluntly stated he wants the hostages returned (two were found dead recently) and Hamas destroyed as a military and political force. He will brook no opposition.

Yelling that Israel is a genocide state is to invert history. “Accusing Israel of ‘genocide,’ when it’s fighting a just war against genocidal attack, when it’s allowed into Gaza tens of thousands of tons of food and other aid, when it’s repeatedly moved Gaza’s civilians out of harm’s way and has killed a far lower proportion of civilians to combatants than any other military in war, denotes either illiteracy, imbecilism or malice,” writes British Jewish journalist Melanie Phillips.

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Israel has done none of these things. It has not slaughtered two million Palestinians; the IDF’s sole objective is the destruction of a terrorist organization called Hamas who have built underground fortresses; under hospitals and hidden behind ordinary Gazans. The war would end if Hamas surrendered their remaining forces and released the hostages. That, apparently is not going to happen.

In Lebanon, Israel demanded and got the government to search for Hezbollah’s weapons, and in Syria the transitional authority has made significant strides in the post-Bashar al-Assad phase, to live, at least for the moment, at peace with Israel. How long it will last is anyone’s guess. Iran poses an existential threat which we know Israel will have to deal with; with or without America’s support. Trump is ignorant of the geopolitics of the Middle East. Manhattan real estate deals are not Middle East real estate deals.

For Gaza, the price of peace is too great for Israel to accept. The price Gazans have paid for the last 18 months has been enormous, but they had the choice of Hamas or a Yemen styled future with Mediterranean waterfront hotels and prosperity. They chose billions of dollars being spent developing underground tunnels, including under hospitals, and starving their own people as food is syphoned off from ordinary Gazans for thugs in Keffiyeh head garb.

What Hamas continues to fight for is no longer worth the sacrifices Gazans are being forced to make. But stopping them is the choice of Hamas not Israel.

There will never be peace in the Middle East so long as hatred drives the players on one side. That is a problem of the human heart, not foreign policy. Israel will never capitulate to evil. It cannot. To do so would be to sign its own death warrant. And that would be an evil of relinquishment too hard to bear.

For Hamas to declare defeat means the end of its project in Gaza — and also the beginning of the end for the Muslim Brotherhood.

No one has an interest in victory or defeat — except the people of Gaza. They must want it enough to tell Hamas and what leadership is left, that they want them gone. They must admit that at the heart of Hamas darkness their lies evil – raw, naked unalloyed evil. But will they?

The prophet Isaiah stated it well when he wrote; “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

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