Please allow me, as a - like you - professing Christian, as an American descendant, and as a distant relative (I believe we are cousins some eight times removed), to thank you for coming to congratulate the miraculous little land of Israel and its extra-ordinarily plucky people on the 60th anniversary of their national resurrection.
While other world leaders also visited last week, you - unlike them - did not come merely to attend a conference. With your lovely First Lady at your side you were here for nearly three days, sparing no expense and giving a great deal of your valuable time to assuring the Israelis that the special relationship between your country and theirs is as strong and as important as ever.
Although we are thankful to have our capital back after being flooded by your entourage and restricted by your need to move quickly and securely through Jerusalem, Israel will remember your visit, mostly with gratitude and appreciation.
For a nation almost globally bereft of friends, you and your United States are more important and special than you probably know.
Just hours after you left, we watched you embrace the Saudis, then walk hand-in-hand with PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas, and the feel-good atmosphere evaporated, replaced with that old “friend” - uncertainty and unease.
As I am sure you know, some of us - Jews and Christians - have our reservations. Trying to assess your stand vis-à-vis Israel as president and as ally is sometimes like reading two books. In the twilight of your eight-year reign as the world’s most powerful man, it is still hard to pin down exactly where you stand.
This ambivalence - between what you say and do on the one hand, and what you say and do on the other - came across especially clearly in your address to the Israeli Knesset last Thursday.
Your speech, in which you recognized Israel’s ancient origins and its modern achievements, and which included statements and promises of unequivocal US support for Israel, wowed most the Jewish members of parliament, triggering 12 rounds of applause including at least three standing ovations shared by the packed public gallery.
Much of what you said was good; some was less so; and some begs comments and questions. (For a complete parsing of that speech go to Parsing the President.)
I’d like to highlight some things.
You told Israel you saw the rebirth of their national homeland in 1948 as “more than the establishment of a new country. It was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David - a homeland for the chosen people - Eretz Yisrael.”
Your voice, as you outlined the painful history of the nation that had clung to that promise despite all the hatred and persecution they endured, sounded sincere.
“Centuries of suffering and sacrifice would pass before the dream was fulfilled,” you said. “The Jewish people endured the agony of the pogroms, the tragedy of the Great War, and the horror of the Holocaust…” But while “soulless men took away lives and broke apart families…they could not take away the spirit of the Jewish people, and they could not break the promise of God.”
You went on to link the political with the spiritual: The alliance that exists between your country and the nation of Israel, you said, “is grounded in the…bonds of the Book (the Bible).”
Continuing, you applauded Israel’s absorption of Jewish refugees, its forging of “a free and modern society based on the love of liberty, a passion for justice, and a respect for human dignity.”
Israel has “worked tirelessly for peace and fought bravely for freedom,” you said.
You commended Israel’s “pioneer spirit that worked an agricultural miracle and now leads a high-tech revolution”  and its “world-class universities and global leadership in business, innovation and the arts.”
Waxing almost poetic, you said that Israel has a resource “more valuable than oil or gold; the talent and determination of a free people who refuse to let any obstacle stand in the way of their destiny.”
Timbre entered your voice as you looked out from the podium at the upturned Jewish faces and emphatically declared to all the “citizens of Israel” that, as proclaimed in oath by graduating officers in the IDF, “Masada shall never fall again and America will be at your side.”
That bold annunciation of America’s determination to fight for Israel’s survival was followed with more bold words:
“As we go forward, our alliance will be guided by clear principles - shared convictions rooted in moral clarity and unswayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.”
Well, this all seems quite clear to me, Mr President. You say you believe the Jewish people are back in their own land in accordance with God’s promise to them, a promise to which they clung through ages of persecution, and which has finally been realized. And you say that that God’s Word, the Bible, is the rock upon which the alliance between Israel and the United States is grounded.
The heart of what you accurately called “Eretz Yisrael” (the Land of Israel) which according to your words you believe was promised to the descendants of Abraham, the Chosen People - i.e. the Jews - is, of course, Judea and Samaria. The Book you referred to tells us that God preordained the return of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael, and that He predestined the restoration of Eretz Yisrael to the Jews.
You acknowledge that Israel has fought bravely, not to take someone else’s land, not to expand its borders and oppress another people, but for freedom.
And you praise Israel for working tirelessly for peace - an assertion Israel’s leaders have repeatedly made, but which the rest of the world has disparaged.
Surely your credentials as a true friend and ardent admirer of Israel are impeccable. Surely those who have questioned your principles, your faith and your moral courage as a Christian have been dreadfully mistaken?
But how is it then, Mr President, that despite all that you say, all that you apparently believe, you still remain “personally committed” to prying this land away from its rightful owners, and giving it to those to whom my God and yours never promised possession of it?
In the case of your words in the Knesset and your deeds in the White House pertaining to Israel, one plus one simply does not equal two.
Do you see them as your fools - those Israelis who drank deeply of your words and applauded every time you made mention of their inheritance and their God?
Are you in fact, as some charge, an evil man bound to evil societies and organizations, working to dupe and falsely lull the Jews into a sense of security even as you help those who conspire to destroy them? Are you wooing with hope and flattery in order to seduce and take Israelis off their guard?
With all due respect, Mr President, are we not way past the time when you should have decided where you stand, and there taken your stand? For too long you have sought to position yourself as an “honest broker” between the Jews and the Arabs - between those who are for peace and those who are for destruction.
What is there to fairly broker between these two sides, and how does the United States help facilitate the wishes of the Arabs when those wishes are fulfilled only at the expense of the Jews?
With your visit last week you once again gave the Jewish people reason to hope.
Sadly, though, you have also given them reason to despair.
David, the great King of Israel and forebear of Jesus, refused to turn his hand against King Saul, even though he had been anointed as king in his place. For David, Saul was “the Lord’s anointed” until God removed him from the scene.
In my understanding you, sir, are God’s anointed to be President of the United States until you leave the White House. Although the hour is late, and your days in office are slipping away, my prayers continue to be joined with the prayers of untold numbers of concerned Christians in your country and around the world.
May your eyes yet be opened to the duplicitous nature of your dealings with Israel, and - while that God-given power is still concentrated in your hands, may you acknowledge the grievous error, the gross injustice, of your “two-state solution.”
May you, even at this late hour, wrench the wheel hard over and set the United States on a different course, one from which whoever succeeds you is unable to return.
Otherwise, I fear, the prayer “God bless America” will increasingly appear to go unheard.
Original Source