Pray for Netanyahu

I’m fasting Monday and praying for Benjamin Netanyahu’s success in his speech to Congress on Tuesday. I don’t care for the pettiness of his American Jewish critics, who typify the establishment that remained silent during the Holocaust; nor the hysterics of his Israeli opponents, who prove by their behavior they are unfit to lead. I am hoping sense will prevail. I trust God and not the mainstream media, here and abroad, who have declared Netanyahu’s speech a disaster in advance.

To a supporter of Israel–at least one who is paying attention to reality, and not to utopian fantasy–March 2015 feels like what May 1967 must have felt like. The life or death of the Jewish state is at stake, and with it the life and death of the Jewish people, and perhaps of humanity itself. I would find it hard to live in a world in which the Holocaust–echoed, now, in genocides across the planet–was unredeemed by the existence of the Jewish State. I would despair for our species.

Netanyahu was completely right when he said that he will appear in Congress on behalf of the entire Jewish people. He is also going to appear on behalf of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, who had no state to flee to and no leader to make their case before the most powerful nation in the world. He is going to speak in spite of those who worry, as Queen Esther’s contemporaries once did, that the risk is too great–or those who are simply using the “crisis” for selfish gain.

The impasse between Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama is entirely Obama’s doing. He came into office with a plan to sacrifice Israel for the sake of the murderous Palestinians and for an imaginary détente with an Islamic world that is incapable of reconciliation. He now wishes to build up the brutal Iranian regime as a “regional power.” I pray Netanyahu may open ears and minds, and that we relive the words of Esther 8:16: “The Jews had light and joy, and gladness and honor.”