The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” Then the Lord said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know.” So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord.
Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
Genesis 18: 17-23
I sat in front of an overweight bald man in his early sixties as we waited for the airline to let us board the plane from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv. He was watching the news on his phone after Hamas broke the ceasefire on Friday, and Israel then resumed its attack against them.
We started talking. I asked him what he thought about it all. He said that Israel should flatten Gaza, with everyone inside it. “What do you mean?” I asked.
He put his thumbs together, hands parallel to the ground, and pushed them forward. “Like this,” he said, mentioning a specific kind of bomber.
He said he was a man of the left. He grew up in a kibbutz. He attended peace marches. He voted Meretz, the most left-leaning Jewish party, almost his entire life. But the scale of the atrocities, and their warm reception by the Palestinians, was a betrayal beyond repair. The kibbutz members that were murdered on that day were peaceniks, some of whom drove sick Gazans to receive care at Israeli hospitals.
He said that the attacks on Oct. 7 “broke” him. He had opened his heart to the Palestinians, and they butchered it.
“They are saying that it’s either us or them,” he told me. “I choose me. We can’t live with these people.”
“We have no partner for peace,” he said, shaking his head.
He finally said it.
Think of God as fate: The force that set the rules of the universe in place. Whichever way you act, your life will follow.
The Gaza Strip is hell on earth. Ruled by the wicked, who cower the innocent through violence and lies. This is so because of the actions taken by every one of its inhabitants.
That’s harsh. It’s also easy for me to say because I don’t have a government pointing a gun at me or my family for saying what I think. But it’s still true.
The people of Gaza can rid themselves of Hamas and the toxic version of Islam beneath it. They haven’t.
Here we all are.
Most of us know how the story of Sodom and Gomorrah goes. Abraham argues with God over the destruction of the two cities plagued by immorality. He asks God to spare them if there are fifty righteous people in their midst. When he cannot find that many, he continues to negotiate down. First forty. Then thirty. Then twenty. Abraham finally stops at ten.
God then sends two angels to Sodom. They were received by Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who urged them to stay in his home instead of the town square, as they originally planned. They did, and Lot fed them a feast.
The men of Sodom heard of this and came barging on Lot’s door, demanding, in essence, to rape the visiting angels. When Lot told them to think better of it, all the men of Sodom turned to rage, threatening Lot with worse punishment than what they had in store for the angels. The two angels rescued him and waited until Lot and his family reached safety.
Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.
The Israeli left was on life support before October 7. It is a corpse now.
Many in Israel are seething, just as the man who sat across from me yesterday. I hear it more and more: “Flatten Gaza.” “Bomb them all.” I hear it in conversations with my friends and family. I see it on the comments of my podcast with Jonathan Pollard a few months ago, who then said Israel should turn Gaza into a parking lot and expel all the Arabs from the West Bank.
The fury is real and for all to see. Some Israelis have just had enough.
Can you blame them? What options are left when seventy-five percent of Palestinians support the October 7th atrocities?
There is only one option. The righteous few among the Palestinians must stop this madness and end the prevailing death cult in their midst. We are running out of time.
The world is pressuring Israel to end the war and leave Hamas in power. Hamas has said they will continue to carry out more atrocities. What will Israelis feel then? The situation is already unbearable — a major chunk of the country has been called up to fight, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes, schools are on makeshift schedules, and, let’s not forget, 240 were mercilessly kidnapped, and 1,200 people were slaughtered in the most gruesome manner.
Israelis have now come to understand that Hamas seeks what it preaches: Martyrdom. The end to existence. I would too if I were growing up in Gaza, trapped in between an evil regime who lies and robs me, and the weak minority who do nothing to stop them.
At what point would the reasonable people of the world throw up their hands and let God rain sulfur and fire out of heaven, overthrow Gaza and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground?
I agree with every word you write ..
sorry for them but now I only worried for my people
Waiting for those 10 gaza people to make the right thing so to change from belligerence to peace ...