The War, The Land, and The Truth No One Is Telling You

The Middle East is not a distant story. When the Strait of Hormuz closes, you feel it at the gas pump. The architect of Iran’s proxy war against Israel — eliminated. A war between the United States and Iran. Egypt amassing troops on Israel’s border for the first time in a generation. Gaza still unresolved. A fragile peace process mediated by Pakistan. A world economy rattled by a closed strait. Right now, the region that sits at the center of biblical history is also sitting at the center of world news — and the two are not unrelated.

Gas prices hit $4.56 per gallon this past Memorial Day weekend — a four-year high — though they’ve edged back slightly to $4.49 as peace negotiations with Iran have offered markets a glimmer of hope. Don’t mistake a dip for a resolution. And if you happen to live in California, where drivers are paying $6.14 a gallon, you may want to consider trading for a hybrid like my Prius — or a bicycle.

For a secular analyst, this is a geopolitical crisis. But for a Christian, it is something more.

Most news coverage postures these events as modern political disputes with modern political solutions. And while diplomacy does matter, I believe that perspective misses the most important context of all — one that stretches back not decades, but millennia.

When Benjamin Netanyahu recently pushed back against what he calls the “Palestine Myth,” he wasn’t simply making a political argument. He was articulating something that students of Scripture have long understood: the Jewish people’s connection to this land is not a 20th-century invention. It predates Islam. It predates the Arab presence in the region. It goes back 3,500 years to the covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — and 3,000 years to Jerusalem’s establishment as the capital of the Jewish people under King David.

The popular narrative — the one you will encounter in most classrooms and newsrooms — frames Israel’s creation as a European response to the Holocaust– as a well-intentioned but ultimately unjust imposition of a Jewish state into the heart of the Arab world. Netanyahu challenges this directly, and so do I. The Jewish return to the land was not an imposition. It was exactly that — a RETURN. The Holocaust accelerated it.  It did not invent the reason for it.

Clearly, reasonable people can interpret this history differently which I respect. But my perspective, rooted in Christian Zionism, leads me to challenge the dominant narrative that frames Israel as a colonial aggressor and Palestinians as its victims.

Netanyahu’s argument — historically and scripturally compelling, in my view — is that this narrative inverts cause and effect. “People weren’t kicked out,” he stated recently. “They were trying to kick out the Jews.” He was speaking of the Jewish exodus from Europe that forced many to the Middle East. For centuries, Jewish communities across Europe faced relentless persecution, expulsion, and violence — a history that predates the modern conflict by centuries. That history rarely occupies center stage in contemporary coverage, yet it is impossible to understand how we arrived here without it.

The idea that Palestinian national identity represents an ancient and continuous claim to the land is, according to historians, largely a 20th-century political construct. This whole region was, for centuries, home to a diverse mix of ethnic and religious communities — with Jews maintaining a continuous, though often persecuted, presence throughout the whole time. Acknowledging this doesn’t diminish the importance of anyone living in the region today. It is simply an honest assessment of the historical record.

And honesty demands we ask another question that rarely gets asked in mainstream coverage: if the surrounding Arab nations feel such solidarity with the Palestinian people, why have Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and others historically refused to grant them citizenship or permanent refuge? Lebanon legally bars Palestinians from dozens of professions. Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1991. Jordan has revoked citizenship from tens of thousands more. One is left to wonder whether the Palestinian cause serves certain regional governments more as a political instrument than as a genuine humanitarian concern — which perpetuates an open wound that might otherwise heal and keeps pressure on Israel that might otherwise ease. That is not a comfortable question. But it is an honest one.

There is a, subtle, second thread in this story that I believe deserves serious attention, particularly for Western Christians.
Dalia Ziada — a prominent Egyptian scholar and global human rights advocate — has raised a challenge that contradicts much of the current political conversation. She warns that migration narratives rooted in Islamic history are being invoked and reinterpreted in ways designed to shift Western political culture. She, specifically, points to the Hijra — the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina — being framed as a purely peaceful and humanitarian model, while its more complex and violent historical dimensions are quietly set aside.

A perfect illustration of what Ziada means was in recent news. Mayor Zohran Mamdani — the first Muslim mayor of America’s largest city — stood before the city’s Interfaith Breakfast earlier this year and declared: “I consider my own faith, Islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration.” He invoked the Hijra explicitly as the moral and religious foundation for his sanctuary city policies, while framing federal immigration enforcement as a transgression against historic example. Ziada’s warning is not theoretical. It is sitting in City Hall.

Ziada is not calling for hostility toward Muslim people — and neither am I. But she is calling for honest engagement with history, including the early Islamic conquest of Medina and the violent expulsion of Jewish tribes who refused to convert. That history, she argues, is not merely academic. What concerns me — and what I believe deserves sober reflection — is that the Quran does articulate a vision of universal Islamic governance. That is not an Islamophobic reading; it is what the text says, and what Islamist movements have historically taken as their mandate. Most Muslims do not act on it as a political program. But many Islamists do.

The pattern is not hypothetical. Europe has watched it unfold in real time: communities that began as peaceful migrations, over decades hardening into political blocs, pushing for parallel legal structures, and in several cases openly advocating for Sharia law within Western jurisdictions. This is not conspiracy theory. It is the documented experience of Britain, France, Belgium, and Sweden, among others. Western audiences, largely unfamiliar with this doctrinal tradition and its long historical arc, are poorly positioned to recognize it when it arrives — as it now has — in the rhetoric and policy priorities of their own elected officials.

It is documented in the founding charters of groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and it is written into the very DNA of Hezbollah — all three of whom serve as willing instruments of Iranian regional ambition. As the US-Iran war has made painfully clear, these are not isolated radical fringes. They are all funded, and ideologically unified proxies working toward a common goal— the removal of Israel from the Mideast picture. Discernment here is paramount — and it is discernment, not fear, that equips the Western Christian to engage this moment wisely.