Should Christians support Israel? Boy, there’s a can of worms.
Well, there’s a lot to it, but the short version is…generally yes. God gives both conditional (“if you do this, I will do that, but if you stop doing this, I will stop doing that”) and unconditional (“I’m doing this regardless of what you do”) promises. Genesis 12:1-3 contains an unconditional promise God gave to Abram when He told him what He was going to do through the man:
Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
I mean…there you go. The most neutral option you can take is to be indifferent about it, but if you go that route, you’re kind of avoiding behavior you know God wants to encourage (you just read it, taken right from scripture). So in this case, even neutrality is a form of disobedience.
Years later, Genesis 17:8 records God again talking to Abram (now Abraham): “Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” You could say the descendants of Abraham have an everlasting divine claim to the land.
So how does that square with all the heat Israel’s been taking over the past few years with its involvement in Gaza?
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s complicated, but I’d say we have to zoom way out to look at history and the prophesied future of Israel. In the Old Testament, the Israelites’ disobedience led to their being kicked out of the land and taken as captives to foreign nations. They were eventually allowed to return, and they reestablished the country, though the temple was a much reduced version of its former glory. Skip ahead to the New Testament and the Israelites still occupied the land. The Romans controlled it, and they even destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, after most of the New Testament was written.
But what about the events that have happened after Bible times? It’s been almost 2,000 years since the latest books of the Bible were written. There’s been plenty of time where God’s chosen people weren’t ruling, or even occupying, the land. More recently (say, around the year 1900) the land of Israel/Palestine was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim state, who was not fond of giving up territory for the sake of establishing a Jewish nation. Its alliance with Germany led to defeat and subsequent loss of support after World War I, and the British began forcibly making room in Palestine for the Jews, making lots of enemies in the process. Skipping ahead to 1948, Israel became a nation again and has remained so ever since. The nation is currently run by a secular government; while many devout Jews (and some Christians) live there now, the term “Jewish” in Israel generally refers more to an ethnic term than to religious beliefs.
Here’s the short version: the Jews are God’s chosen people, and will one day fulfill His original desire of having them be the ones to proclaim the Messiah. In Romans 11:25-26, Paul notes a future mass Jewish revival…all of Israel will be saved. So that means there will still be a sizable Jewish presence at that time, but we don’t know any details of what occurs to the physical land of Israel between now and then. Israelites have lost control of it in the past and could very well do so again between now and the mass revival, we just don’t know.
So we know the land of Israel will one day undergo mass revival, and we know that hasn’t occurred yet. In the meantime, the country, like any other country, is ruled by imperfect people. They’ll make bad choices sometimes. We don’t have to agree with everything they do, but they should generally enjoy the support of Christ-followers (barring decisions that go against what we know God’s will to be, as in things that run counter to scripture).