No, Evangelicals Are Not Selling Their Souls for Israel

A Reflection Occasioned by Jim Fitzgerald’s Recent Article

The Aquila Report has released its most read articles of 2023. Number 19 on the list is “Are Evangelicals Selling Their Souls for Israel?” by Jim Fitzgerald, a missionary and Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) minister who believes that evangelical support for Israel is mistaken. Fitzgerald is rightly aghast at the killing of civilians that has attended the war, and denounces the October 7th massacres. But these virtues are outweighed by some glaring faults in his article.

He uncritically accepts Hamas’ figures about the number of civilian deaths. Scripture is clear that murder and lying often accompany each other (Ps. 52:2; Prov. 6:16-19; Matt. 26:59; Jn. 8:44), so that people who do the former are suspectable of the latter. It is easy to lie and hard to kill, and if someone has a sufficiently seared conscience to do the latter, he is apt to have no qualms about the former. Scripture is clear as well that we are to have nothing to do with the wicked – and Hamas is in the foremost ranks of that category – and that listening to or associating with them has a corrosive effect and leads to righteousness and truth being overthrown (Prov. 1:10-16; 4:14-17; Prov. 29:12; 1 Cor. 15:33; comp. Ps. 1:1; Prov. 25:5). We should close our ears to all Hamas’ claims, therefore, for their wickedness has forfeited their right to be heard.

But Fitzgerald thinks Hamas’ claims verified by the statements of a single named person, a cardiologist named Dr. Sabra:

How can anyone be so heartless as to say the number dead is not accurate? I think the number is understated.

The attentive reader will note that is opinion, not testimony, and consists only of emotional rhetoric without any evidence in support; further, that it involves an ad hominem attack against anyone who dares think that murderous terrorists might exaggerate civilian casualties for propaganda purposes. Fitzgerald believes the point is buttressed by a nameless “many humanitarian workers” “making the same claim,” and by Israel’s own testimony of the amount of ordnance it has dropped on Gaza, some 30,000 tons as of his article in late November.

That last argument from sheer volume is weak: no amount of ordnance will kill anyone if they leave the target area. Israel issued a blanket warning to evacuate North Gaza before opening its main campaign, and it warns civilians near targets to evacuate before a strike by call, text message, or “roof knocking.” Actually, on technical grounds this arguably proves the opposite of what Fitzgerald thinks. Rather than demonstrating Israel’s “wholesale slaughter of civilians,” as he asserts, it demonstrates its firepower is being used in a way that has resulted in vastly fewer casualties than would be expected given the amount of ordnance dropped.

Without getting too much into the minutiae of what munitions Israel has used or the finer points of the many factors that affect the extent of damage done by explosive blasts and fragmentation, we can nonetheless get a rough idea of how much devastation can be wrought by that amount of bombing. To use the example of a single common munition, the pressures from a Mk. 82 500 pound bomb are enough to collapse reinforced concrete structures about 52 feet from the point of impact, and to collapse other buildings at twice that distance.[1] Those represent blast areas of about a fifth of an acre and three fourths of an acre, respectively, and the area within which fragments may kill or wound is far larger: there is an estimated 10% risk of incapacitating wounding as far as 820 feet from the point of impact, an area of some 48.5 acres.[2] Israel had dropped the equivalent of 120,000 such bombs as of Fitzgerald’s writing, enough to ravage pretty much the entirety of Gaza’s approximately 90,240 acres of territory, which has a density of about 25 people per acre.

When Fitzgerald then says that “a genocide is taking place right before our evangelical eyes,” we might reply that the claim is incredible. If that is what they are attempting, the Israelis are the most inept murderers in the history of the world. Israel has the most advanced weapons, planes, targeting and surveillance systems, munitions, etc., and has dropped about enough ordnance to flatten Gaza and kill its entire populace – and yet she has not done that. There is no way of knowing how many people Israel has killed, exactly, since nigh well everyone insists on taking Hamas’ figures at face value, and since most reporting makes no effort to distinguish civilians and Hamas fighters. But the large point remains that Israel has used enough firepower to actually kill much of the entire Gazan populace, had she desired to do so in a fit of genocidal rage. Instead she has focused those efforts on Hamas positions and accompanied them with repeated efforts to warn noncombatants to avoid being caught in them.

The point is not to argue that this Israeli effort is the best approach to fighting Hamas or responding to the larger political situation. The point is that it is false to say that Israel is engaged in genocide when it is deliberately acting to not kill civilians by general and particular warnings, and when it is trying to limit its attacks to its armed opponents. There is a moral difference between intentionally murdering civilians and accidentally killing civilians while fighting an honorless enemy that does not wear uniforms and readily hides among them. And that difference is the difference between a crime and a tragedy, between an inexcusable and intentional act on the one hand and an unintended consequence of a morally-permissible action on the other.

If it be rejoined that nonetheless the scope of human suffering is larger under Israel’s bombing than under Hamas’ intentional murders, we rejoin that one may freely criticize her tactics on that point, but that it has nothing to do with the accusation of genocide. Genocide – like all murder – has its moral and criminal character determined by its intention, not the amount of killing it entails. The Allied forces killed millions of Axis personnel during World War 2, but were not guilty of genocide, for those nations endured and are amongst the most prosperous in the world today. By contrast, one could murder a tribe with only a few members in a fit of wicked rapine and be guilty of genocide.

And we might rejoin yet further that the only reason there is a difference in the amount of killing between Hamas’ warning-less and intentionally-murderous efforts and Israel’s counter-response is because Hamas does not have the military capabilities of Israel. If Hamas had Israel’s arms, the state of Israel would no longer exist, more Jews would have died in the last three months than during the entire Holocaust, and there would be multitudes cheering over their corpses.

There is indeed an ongoing attempted genocide, and it is not that of Israel defending itself against Hamas, but of Hamas against Israel. Just because Israel has state of the art means of defense (missile defense systems, armored vehicles, aerial surveillance, etc.) and fights back much more effectively doesn’t change the fact that Hamas is trying to kill every Jew it can, civilian or military, young or old, man or woman. The mercy of the moment is that the genocidal murderers are much less competent and have far inferior numbers and arms than the civilized nation they are trying to destroy, whereas the people who have the best and most plentiful arms are the ones who are fighting with a sense of moral responsibility and restraint. The tragedy of the moment is that there is no way to fight an enemy that hides among civilians without many of those civilians being caught in the crossfire; further, that not fighting back is not an option, since Hamas will never stop trying to destroy Israel and its citizens until it is either destroyed or achieves its aims: every ceasefire simply gives Hamas time to recoup its strength, perfect its tactics, and plot further murder.[3]

Nations can accept defeat and move on, because they have a purpose for existing other than conquering other nations. But an ideological group like Hamas cannot do so, so long as its raison d'être of destroying Israel is unrealized.[4] It must either succeed or be destroyed, or else beaten so utterly that it sees the futility of its aims and changes its goals.

However that may be, the precise term for what Fitzgerald has done here is slander, for he has falsely accused Israel of committing genocide when that is not what it is doing. Worse, he has brought this accusation against the victims of attempted genocide, thus inverting the truth of the situation. To be clear, Fitzgerald has a right to criticize Israel, either in general or regarding its present war or tactics in particular, as well as to generally promote a pacifist or non-interventionist perspective. Support of Israel is not required by our faith, but is a political question about which believers may differ; and there is plenty of ground to criticize that nation for past and present faults.

But no one has a right to make false accusations, least of all in articles bylined with his official position as a PCA minister. Regrettably, Fitzgerald’s slander is not limited to his claims about Israel’s bombing constituting genocide. They extend, by implication, to all evangelicals who support Israel. No one who reads his article or compares it to his other statements can doubt that Fitzgerald’s answer to his own question is an unequivocal yes. An implicit slander by way of a rhetorical question is still a slander: the legal concept is sometimes called defamation by implication,¹ in which one constructs claims in such a way that a reader is led to the desired conclusion about the slandered victim without the slanderer explicitly saying it.

The false accusation here is that evangelicals who support Israel are “selling their souls,” i.e., being hypocrites who have compromised their principles in the worst possible way by giving support to crimes against humanity (genocide). One, since Israel is not committing genocide, the suggestion is false. Two, the idiom is a poor one, since selling one’s soul typically means doing so for some personal advantage. What does one gain for supporting the most hated nation in the world? Nothing except a share in that hatred.

Last, scriptural testimony leads us to regard the support of Israel as no great evil in itself, for both Peter and Paul commanded loyalty to the Roman Empire (Rom. 13:1-7; Tit. 3:1; 1 Pet. 2:13-17). If first century believers were required to be allegiant to an empire that was as severe as Rome, how can we maintain that there is sin entailed in modern evangelicals supporting one of their own nation’s close allies that is vastly more humane toward its enemies? To be sure, Israel ought to be as careful to avoid civilian suffering as possible in fighting such a war, but it is not clear that using other tactics (e.g., ground operations) would accomplish this, and we must insist that the responsibility for the civilian deaths lies primarily with Hamas. For that group started this war and hides among civilians as readily as real armies wear uniforms, and it has as one of its foremost tactics the determination to cause them to suffer by use as shields, which suffering it eagerly exploits for propaganda and political purposes. Few groups have been so reckless about the lives of their own civilians as Hamas, and few nations with such power have been so restrained in fighting back as Israel in the current war.

All this matters because Jim Fitzgerald is well-connected in the Reformed world: he is supported by Saint Andrew’s Chapel and has been published in Tabletalk. For someone in such a position to make false accusations is serious indeed, for slander involves all of us in sin and invites divine judgment (Isa. 5:20), as it violates God’s explicit commands (Ex. 20:16; 23:1), accompanies other grievous evil (Eph. 4:31; 1 Pet. 2:1), and is a mark of the sins of reprobates (Rom. 1:28-31) and false professors of the faith (2 Tim. 3:1-4). Indeed, Lev. 19:16 connects slander with behavior that threatens the neighbor’s very life; and if the slander of genocide intimidates Israel into ceasing its war before destroying Hamas, the lives of all her citizens will certainly be threatened.

Against all this we say that evangelicals who choose to support Israel are not selling their souls in utter hypocrisy, and that Fitzgerald’s suggestions to the contrary are reprehensible and invite us to hope that he sees their error and repents. We do not say that Israel is wholly right in its tactics or generally, nor that he is obligated to support her, only that his opposition to her ought to be more honest and careful in its sources, and that he not be so quick to suggest those who might support her are derelict in their faith on that account.

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[1] P. 48 here: https://www.gichd.org/fileadmin/uploads/gichd/Publications/Explosive_weapon_effects_web.pdf

[2] http://characterisationexplosiveweapons.org/studies/annex-e-mk82-aircraft-bombs/ [Be advised: not a secure connection]

[3] Hence in Hamas’ 2017 principles we read that “managing resistance, in terms of escalation or de-escalation, or in terms of diversifying the means and methods, is an integral part of the process of managing the conflict and should not be at the expense of the principle of resistance” (§26). https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas

[4] Elsewhere Hamas’ principles say that “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” (§20) and that “there is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital” (§27).

1. The original version of this post used the phrase “constructive slander.”