The world against Israel: Prophecies fulfilled

(JNS) — Last week, the Jewish people celebrated the holiday of Sukkot. Last year, the holiday ended with the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel. This year, we are celebrating our strength, resilience and success in fighting evil. Sukkot is the holiday when everything culminates: The annual holiday cycle that begins with Passover, the High Holidays that begins with Rosh Hashanah, and, in the mystical tradition, references the culmination of human history. That is why our Torah readings speak of the “end of days” and the final battles that will happen before peace reigns on Earth.

It is remarkable to consider how we are actually living through these prophecies. The prophet Zechariah (14:2) declared: “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle.” The prophet Ezekiel (38:14-16) also foretold a time when nations would converge against Israel: “You will come up against My people Israel like a cloud to cover the land.”

While we may have envisioned Zechariah and Ezekiel speaking of physical armies, perhaps today we see this prophecy take shape through diplomatic, economic and ideological forms. The nations may not all send soldiers, but they are united in their desire to undermine Israel.

Israel faces threats that go beyond the battlefield, extending across the global stage in both overt and insidious forms.

Some of Israel’s enemies, like Hamas and Hezbollah, openly call for its destruction and commit unspeakable atrocities in their pursuit of that goal. On Oct. 7, Hamas launched an assault on Israel that was one of the largest terror attacks in modern history, resulting in mass murder, rapes, kidnappings and thousands of casualties. It was the opening salvo of a genocidal campaign. Hezbollah and other groups have launched more than 23,000 missiles and rockets at Israeli towns in the last year.

Iran funnels millions into terror organizations with a clear goal: Israel’s elimination through proxy wars and direct confrontation.

However, it’s not just bullets and bombs that Israel is up against.

A different, more subtle war is being waged through the delegitimization of Israel on the global stage. International organizations, human-rights groups, media, college professors and administrators, and even state governments present themselves as morally upstanding defenders of justice, yet they consistently apply double standards to Israel. While the world condemns Israel for its attempts to defend itself, it fails to hold Hamas, Hezbollah and their backers accountable for mass murder, hostage-taking, the use of human shields, the indiscriminate firing of missiles at civilian populations and many other blatant violations of international law.

Israel is not just facing a physical war from multiple fronts—Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian terror groups in Judea and Samaria, the Houthis in Yemen, all funded by Iran—it faces a war that extends into the realms of international diplomacy, media and lawfare. While terrorists murder, kidnap and launch thousands of attack drones and rockets at Israeli civilians, much of the world issues condemnations not at the perpetrators, but at Israel itself for daring to defend its people.

Consider the hypocrisy. Amid wars in Ukraine and Syria, 40 nations welcomed 10 million refugees. Those same powers blocked evacuations of civilians from Gaza. Even as the Gazans were pleading to be let out and as Israel appealed for the same, the global community rose as one and declared a new moral principle that was apparently created for a conflict that involved Jews, exemplified by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s strange slogan, “No forcible displacement.”

This refusal reveals a double standard and violates international law. Under the Geneva Conventions, civilians in conflict zones have the right to seek safety. The international community’s selective enforcement of these principles when it comes to Israel exposes their hypocrisy. As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board observed, “Only when it can damage Israel does it become the liberal position to close the borders and keep refugees penned in a war zone.”

After abandoning the Palestinians to a war zone, these same global powers, media outlets and international bodies obsess over Palestinian casualties while ignoring conflicts elsewhere. This selective outrage shifts blame onto Israel, ignoring the role of terror groups like Hamas in engineering these tragedies. When Israel strikes back, it is condemned for harming civilians—even though those civilians are being used by Hamas (and the international community) as human shields. Indeed, Hamas’s Oct. 7 playbook took for granted that the world would react this way, which is the clearest revelation of the deep anti-Jewish bias at play and the ultimate indictment of West’s “moral standards.”

Instead of supporting Israel’s legitimate defense against the radical Islamists’ drive to annihilate it, global leaders pressure Israel to stop its military efforts prematurely, ensuring that Hamas and Hezbollah survive to attack again. The cycle repeats, all under the guise of “human rights” and “justice.” But the double standards are glaring.

The supposedly neutral United Nations has aided Hamas by allowing terrorists to use its facilities as launch sites and human shield zones. The U.N. Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees flawed refugee definition, which is applied only to Palestinians and passed down through generations, perpetuates ongoing misery and is used as a political bludgeon against Israel. UNRWA has also been implicated in the radicalization of young Palestinians and in allowing its schools to be used for storing weapons.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions and then to use that very failure against Israel. U.N. Resolution 1701, passed in 2006 to end the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, promised Israel the disarmament of Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the cessation of rocket attacks. Yet today, Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of more than 120,000 missiles and has fired some 10,000 of them in the past 12 months right under the noses of 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers from 50 nations.

Until Israel responded seriously, there was near global silence in the face of these war crimes. When Israel did act, the media circus began with an international outcry of calls for an immediate ceasefire. Just this week, when Israel asked the peacekeepers to leave to prevent collateral damage, 40 countries refused, turning these peacekeepers—once again with the global community’s consent—into a second, convenient batch of human shields in this war.

This global alignment of powers against Israel, dressed up in the language of human rights, is both cynical and immoral. They demand that Israel negotiate with groups that openly seek its annihilation. They want Israel to stop fighting so that Hamas, Hezbollah and other terror groups can survive and strike again.

This is an age-old story repeated throughout Jewish history. During World War II, the Nazis played the role of the murderers. The rest of the world either assisted them or turned a blind eye in silent acquiescence.

My birth country of Canada famously said “None is too many” when asked how many Jewish refugees they were willing to save from the Nazi Holocaust. As George Steiner wrote in his haunting 1981 novel, “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.,” which imagines Adolf Hitler as surviving the war and being captured in Argentina by the Israelis, Hitler’s defense during a makeshift post-war trial includes a chilling claim: “When I turned against the Jew, no one came to his rescue. No one. France, England, Russia, even America, despite its large Jewish population, did nothing. They were glad the exterminator had come. They did not admit it openly, I grant you that, but secretly, they rejoiced.”

Remarkably, what we are seeing today aligns with ancient prophecies found in the Torah. Zechariah (12:3) wrote, “And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will make Jerusalem a stone of burden for all the peoples … all the nations of the earth shall be gathered together against it.”

In today’s world, that battle is as much ideological and political as it is physical: It is not only for the land but for the legitimacy of Israel’s very existence. The international community’s attempts to pressure Israel into submission through both military and diplomatic means reflect this prophetic warning.

The global campaign against Israel, veiled in the language of justice and human rights, is nothing new. It is part of a deeper, more ancient struggle—an anti-Jewish struggle foretold in the Bible and played out across millennia. As King David wrote in Psalms (83:2-4), “See how your enemies make an uproar, and those who hate You have exalted themselves. They make shrewd plans against Your people. … They have said, ‘Come, and let us wipe them out as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more.’”

But just as Israel has survived every attempt to destroy it, so, too, will it withstand the current storm. The enduring strength of the Jewish people remains a testament not only to their resilience but to the fulfillment of ancient promises.