Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on David’s Tent, a ministry of Israeli believers Avner and Rachel Boskey. The Boskey’s have ministered at Tabernacle of David, and we consider them trustworthy and Biblically sound.
The rebellion and restlessness of the nations (Psalm 2:1) crash like ocean waves (Psalm 65:7) on the shores of this planet. But YHVH rules the waves: “Do you not fear Me? declares YHVH. Do you not tremble in My presence? For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea – an eternal limit, and it will not cross over it. Though the waves toss, they cannot prevail. Though they roar, they will not cross over it” (Jeremiah 5:22).
The nations are gathering with evil intent, planning to humiliate and violate the Daughter of Zion. But the God of Jacob proclaims that the Day of Vengeance is fast approaching: “For the Day of YHVH is near for all the nations. Just as you have done, it will be done to you. Your dealings will return on your own head!” (Obadiah 1:15).
We are living between the ‘here’ and the ‘not yet’ – between today’s careening events and the coming Day of Messiah’s wrath. With that sober destiny in mind, Yeshua challenges us to consider and to discern. “The Pharisees and Sadducees came up and, putting Yeshua to the test, they asked Him to show them a sign from heaven. But He replied to them, ‘When it is evening, you say, “It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.” And in the morning, “There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.” You know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but are you unable to discern the signs of the times?’” (Matthew 16:1-3)
- One of the strongest indicators of God’s coming day of vengeance for Zion (Isaiah 34:8) is the menacing rise of malice-filled nations who hate the Jewish people and impede their restoration to the Promised Land: “And now many nations have been assembled against you who say, ‘Let her be defiled, and let our eyes gloat over Zion!’” (Micah 4:11). Before our very eyes this anti-Semitic hatred is spreading like wildfire across the face of the globe. No country is immune to its toxic influence.
In Ezekiel 38:4 YHVH inserts hooks into the jaws of the nations and draws them down to Israel for a battle royal. Those kings of the earth have designs on the Promised Land – to divide and conquer. But instead, they will receive divine judgment on the mountains of Israel.
- Today’s superpowers focus obsessively on the land promised by YHVH to His Jewish people – and that includes Gaza, Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Jerusalem. Their arrogant boastings fill the halls of the UN, falsely declaring that the land of Israel does not belong to the Jewish people but to the murderous descendants of jihadi invaders. God’s hooks are in their jaws, and this is the divine bait that God has placed in His prophetic mousetrap.
Look, you blind, so that you may see! (Isaiah 42:18)
Many presidents, diplomats and spies consider themselves authorities on the Middle East, but the truth is 180 degrees in the opposite direction. A peculiar blindness affects most nations regarding the Middle East. Many Israelis are also tone-deaf regarding the clear and present dangers in our Arabic-speaking neighborhood. A short list of these stumbling blocks may help us in praying for the peoples involved.
Most Westerners are unaware of the cultures, sensibilities and sensitivities of the Islamic and Arab world. They do not understand Arab perspectives or how classical Islam sees the world in general, or the Western world in particular. Most of them interpret Middle Eastern events through secular sunglasses. This is true not only for the common man, but also for Christian and Jewish theologians, for Western intelligence agencies, government officials and diplomats. For those who would want to broaden their understanding, a good place to begin is David Pryce-Jones’ penetrating book ‘The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs’ (1989, Harper & Row).
Another area of severe Western blindness involves foundational ignorance of Biblical realities. Yet it is these spiritual matters which hold the keys to unlocking the doors of perception regarding Middle Eastern dynamics, history, paradigms and its prophetic future.
A third area of blindness is the lack of awareness of (or even refusal to accept) God’s irrevocable calling on and gifts to the Jewish people. Included here would be such pillars as the blessing and cursing dynamics of Genesis 12:3, and the sober spiritual dangers of jihad.
A fourth area of blindness involves flat-out anti-Semitism – the endemic anti-Jewish dynamics now rampant in the US State Department, the CIA, the NSA, etc. (as well as European varieties of the same).
Specific examples of Israeli blindness include the following:
Seeing the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Accords and the Abraham Accords as giant steps forward to Middle East peace – similar to how WWI was once seen in the West as ‘the war to end all wars.’
Israeli leaders in government, intelligence and the military still believe that jihadi terrorists will eventually ‘change their spots’ and accept the material benefits of peace with Israel.
These leaders believe that, even if the jihadi armies of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Authority are all truly terrorists, Israel should choose one of the ‘lesser evils’ among them and work together with that party.
Israeli leaders understand that there is no love lost between Palestinians and Jews. Nevertheless they ardently believe that Israelis needs a peace agreement – even a shaky one, and even if the price is dangerous to Israel’s survival.
These operating principles shape much of what is transpiring in Middle Eastern current events – diplomatically, militarily and in the intelligence world.
Anti-Semitism – the foundation of Western intelligence organizations
Those Americans who love Israel – whether Evangelical Christians, Jews of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or liberal stripe, or simply secular US citizens – have a quiet respect for plucky Israel, her courage and heroism in battle, her tenacity in the face of many deadly challenges, her sufferings in the Holocaust.
But other Americans are opposed to Zion. Secular isolationists and anti-Semitic professors, self-hating Jews and jihadi Islamists, oil barons and most State Department honchos, CIA movers and shakers – there are significant and influential layers of American society solidly positioned against the land and people of Israel. At the upper echelons of US politics, business and intelligence, powerful people are ensconced – pressuring and persuading, weakening and destroying the apple of God’s eye. Anti-Semitism has been hard-wired into the roots of the US intelligence community and the US State Department. Its poison influences current positions trumpeted from the Rose Garden, the Congress and the main stream media. What is knowable about these roots and this history?
The foundations of U.S. intelligence go back to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), formed June 13, 1942 and dissolved September 20, 1945. OSS evolved into the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) on September 18, 1947, and eventually was overshadowed by its vastly larger big brother the National Security Agency (NSA), established on November 4, 1952. The OSS. The CIA and the NSA have done masterful work in protecting the security and survival of the USA, countering Communist attempts to undermine America and the West, etc. Yet its adversarial role vis-à-vis the Jewish state must be evaluated based on biblical principles.
The Agency (aka CIA) was at its heart an ‘old boys’ network’ of Ivy League university graduates. They were the ones who recruited and vetted new officers for these fledgling agencies. Liberal Protestant religious affiliations (Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc.) were just about a requirement for a job. Most of these men were thoroughly pickled in old-school anti-Semitic prejudices and attitudes. ‘America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East’ by Hugh Wilford (2017) notes that the CIA’s Middle East division was headed by ‘Arabists’ – men like Kermit ‘Kim’ Roosevelt (grandson of POTUS Theodore Roosevelt); Kim’s cousin, Archie Roosevelt (a Middle East scholar and Chief of Beirut Station); and Miles Copeland (a covert American intelligence operator since WWII). The agency’s Arabists were the intellectual, and often biological, descendants of American missionaries in Arab lands. They believed that a century of American missionary activity had paved the way for a Pax Americana in the region – if only the recalcitrant Israelis could be sidelined. These officials were fiercely anti-Zionist, convinced that American support for Israel was a strategic blunder of the first order. Wilford states that these founders believed “in the overriding importance of American-Arab, and Christian-Muslim, relations.”
The CIA would become known for engineering the destruction of nationalist governments (Kim Roosevelt engineered the coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953); shoring up pro-western autocracies in the oil-rich Gulf States; and (at a much lower level of priority) tending to the growing American-Israeli alliance. By November 1947, the Agency’s operational Middle East policy was based on three foundational realpolitik concerns:
- The Arab world has an overwhelming hostility to a Jewish state, and to Western support for the Jews. US diplomacy must placate this hostility.
- Any threats to the Arab world’s oil production must be neutralized.
- Soviet penetration of the Middle East must be blocked, and efforts must be made to bring Arab nations onboard the American ‘ship of influence.’
Reflecting on these organizational anti-Semitic foundations, one former CIA operative explained: “You shouldn’t be surprised [at the CIA’s covert war with the Jewish state]. It’s [simply a matter of] pure hypocrisy. In public, Israel is our ally. What the public doesn’t know is that all Western nations have covert policies to side with the Arabs. It keeps the intelligence community busy” (see John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews (How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People); p. 510).
CIA anti-Semitic fronts created to weaken support for Israel
In 1949 Kim Roosevelt formed the anti-Israel group ‘Holy Land Christian Committee,’ ostensibly to assist Christians in Israel. Anti-Zionist Jews were invited on to the Board, as well as Allen Dulles, a former State Department and OSS official and future director of the CIA. This organization was directed by CIA employee William A. Eddy, a former US minister plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and consultant to Aramco. Bronson Clark of the (Quaker) ‘American Friends Service Committee,’ then doing refugee relief work in Gaza, notes: “This body, composed entirely of pro-Arab, anti-Zionist elements, was not to be an operating agency but was to serve as a publicity front for the operating agencies . . . This meeting represents another move in a series of moves which, like an iceberg, show only one-quarter on the surface what goes on, while three-quarters of the maneuverings are hidden.”
In 1951, the CIA secretly funded the creation of an ostensibly private outfit of US citizens dedicated to citizen diplomacy, called the ‘American Friends of the Middle East’ (AFME). This group propagated rabidly pro-Arab and anti-Zionist views – perspectives that shaped the CIA in its early years. Roosevelt used his role at the CIA to ensure the organization’s funding the group through the CIA and Aramco. This CIA front sought to weaken support for the Jewish state in the U.S. Though anti-Israelis often aim fire at ‘the Israel Lobby,’ they grow surprisingly mum about ‘the anti-Israel Lobby’ fronts established by the CIA.
A recent Hollywood movie crystallizes the realities of these roots in two brief lines. In the movie ‘The Good Shepherd,’ Joe Pesci plays a Mafia boss named Joseph Palmi – a fictionalized version of either Sam Giancana (from the Chicago Outfit) or Santo Trafficante Jr., a Mafia boss in Florida. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson (who is going under the pseudonym ‘Mister Carlson’ for this meeting). Wilson’s character is based on the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton). Palmi and ‘Carlson’ have been discussing Mafia and CIA involvement in the upcoming Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, and then move on to discuss philosophical perspectives on how the CIA looks at ethnic minorities in America.
- Joseph Palmi : “Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families, and we got the church. The Irish – they have the homeland. The Jews – their tradition. Even the n—g-rs, they got their music. What about you people, Mister Carlson? What do you have?”
- Edward Wilson: “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
Purge out the leaven from among you (1 Corinthians 5:7)
The Apostle Paul uses the Feast of Passover to draw a pastoral principle for the Jewish and Gentile believers in Greek Corinth. He exhorts them to purge out or remove sinful behaviors in their lives, which he likens to leaven. The Pesach matzah is a leaven-free bread, and quickly rising leaven was sometimes understood by Jews in Paul’s day to be symbolic of sin.
- In the same way as Jewish houses search for and remove even the tiniest crumbs of yeasted bread just before Passover, the diplomatic and intelligence corps of the US (and many other countries too) need to do some serious confessing, repenting and renouncing regarding the foundational sins of anti-Jewish hatred which have wrapped their gnarled roots around the secret world of America’s leaders and strategists.
How should we then pray?
- Pray for the God of Jacob to grant breakthrough revelation and repentance to America’s (and other countries’) leaders regarding the refuge of anti-Semitic lies that they have embraced
- Pray for the physical rescue of the approximately 133 Israeli hostages (including babies) kidnapped by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP/PLO. At this moment some hostages are being tortured, raped and starved (this based on testimonies of recently released hostages). Some of these hostages that Hamas is holding include at least 35 corpses of Israeli citizens, being held in cold storage as bargaining chips
- Pray for Hamas’ cruel terror dictatorship in Gaza to be decisively shattered and for all chains broken off the Palestinians living there, and for Iran’s role in jihadi deception, dissimulation and anti-Semitism to be exposed and opposed by world leaders
- Pray that Israel’s leadership be granted justice, clarity, moral courage, discernment and divine strategies in utterly destroying the jihadi threat in all of its aspects, and for minimal loss of life for Israel’s defense forces and for those Gazans who are truly innocent
- Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.
In Messiah Yeshua,
Avner Boskey
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