To the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous assertion that “God is dead,” a wit once appended the following counter-declaration:
“Nietsche is dead” - God.
I think something like that happened Thursday when visiting US Vice President JD Vance reacted to a vote in the Knesset in favor of making Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria official, saying: “It was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it… The West Bank [sic] is not gonna be annexed by Israel.”
I would surmise that God took some insult in Vance’s words as Judea and Samaria are part and parcel of Israel according to the scriptures of all three Abrahamic faiths. (Note: these precede the Abraham Accords.)
Myopic observers might assume that what Vance says goes. He is not one to brook opposition and his words doubtless reflect the views of his boss, Donald Trump, who is even less shy about throwing his political weight around.
Indeed, on the same day, Time magazine released an interview with Trump in which the president tried to squelch the sovereignty initiative: “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.””
While this sounds stern and forbidding. I would remind readers that Friedrich Nietszshe is actually dead. We needn’t fear.
Indeed, the prophets of Israel made seemingly outlandish statements at times of historic devastation and weakness yet they are one by one coming to fruition. Ezekiel proclaimed from exile in Babylonia: “And you, the mountains of Israel, will produce your branches, and you will bear your fruit for My people Israel because they are about to come.” That might have sounded pretty hollow even to Mark Twain, who described the “unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation” he observed on his visit to the Holy Land in 1867. Ditto for Isaiah’s vision of the ingathering of the exiles from east, west, north and south.
While the force of these prophecies has been gathering strength for over a century, foreign chanceries and war departments of the world have pulled out all the stops to arrest this development, yet their counsels and plans have all come to nought while Israel, despite itself, only grows in power and prestige.
It is therefore notable that Vance made his statement during the weekly Torah portion of Noach, which describes the moment when Noah and his sons and their wives finally enter the ark:
“On this very day, Noah came, and Shem and Ham and Japheth, Noah's sons, and Noah's wife and his sons' three wives with them, into the ark.”
The words “on this very day” seem superfluous and must have been included to teach us something. The midrash (Sifre, Haazinu 337) relates that the people of the generation who didn’t listen to the warnings about the Flood said that they would stop Noah from boarding the ark if he attempted to do so. They would take axes and hatchets to chop it up. To this God said, “I will bring Noah onto the ark at high noon and anyone who has power to protest, let him do so.” The Biblical commentator Rashi cites a rabbinic tradition that God surrounded the ark with lions and bears which killed those attacking the ark.
Similarly, the words “on this very day” occur in the telling of the exodus from Egypt, which also took place at high noon, indicating that Egyptians who were still keen on the subjugation of Israelite slaves were powerless to stop their departure.
So a little humility, and some historical perspective, is required here. The mighty British Empire tried to prevent modern Israel from coming into being in favor of the Arab population of “Palestine,” but not so Great Britain busies itself today with shooing away dog owners from public squares so as not to offend Islamic migrants reputed not to like canines.
No US president has been as supportive of Israel as Donald Trump, and yet the president’s love of “the deal” may be blinding him to sound policy and principle. He seems hot to trot for the Abraham Accords, a great idea in concept but less than worthless if doing business with Saudi Arabia requires Israel to maintain a mortal threat within its Judea and Samaria heartland.
Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu deserve immense credit for obtaining the release of Israel’s captives. But it should be clear as high noon that the rest of the Gaza Peace Plan is a dead letter given that Hamas would never ever voluntarily disarm. That means we can (and must) also say good-bye to the plan’s other absurdities, such as Article 19’s call for a “pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”
It is pathetic that only two years after October 7 there are still people pretending that this is the aspiration of the KGB-invented “Palestinian” people. Aspirations for peace is not what billions of dollars of Western funding has been paying for in the Palestinian education system; their myriad of auditors somehow missed that genocide of the Jewish people has been their top priority.
The Gaza peace plan will meet the same fate as all the others that block the corridors of Foggy Bottom. It will collapse as lies ultimately do. Netanyahu’s appeasing the Trump Administration on this issue, by instructing his party to abstain from voting in favor of MK Avi Maoz’s sovereignty measure, was not a profile in courage. But MK Yuli Edelstein, the sole Likud dissenter whose vote carried the motion, will be remembered in the annals of history for his integrity-especially on that day, soon, when Israeli sovereignty over its entire Biblical heritage will indeed come to fruition.
Trump said of Netanyahu that “he’s not easy to deal with” and I’m sure the feeling is mutual. Israel must play with the cards it is given, which means taking into account the diplomatic support it currently receives from the US. But that requires Israel to educate, not placate, Trump and Vance.
God has no shortage of lions and bears and we needn’t doubt the positive outcome that awaits us. But any worries about Who takes insult should relate to plans for Judea and Samaria pending for millennia and not fleeting falsehoods fueling deals not worth the paper they’re written on.
Gil Weinreich is the author of Who Killed Rav Adda bar Abba?: A Talmudic Murder Mystery, a work of historical fiction set in the Persian empire in the fourth century CE.