Even in this secular age, and even in the midst of a period of time where the great and the ‘good’ as well as the student and the stupid in the western world utterly rejects its own Judeo-Christian heritage, most people are still aware of the story of David and Goliath.
My own religious instruction was astonishingly minimal. I am not a Jew. I am not even a Christian, except in the nominal sense of a ‘cultural Christian’. Like many English people, my religious experience was limited to a few rare prayers in school assemblies, a Harvest Festival school visit to the church where for some reason confusing to a small child tins of baked beans took on a mystical glow of ceremony, and weddings and funerals. I was never baptized. My father was the most moral and decent man who ever lived, but was a firm atheist.
There’s almost nothing in an average British working class background that makes religion a real and living force.
I suspect that my first inklings of the importance of all we have lost depended on aesthetics more than morality, unless you happen to think the two reflect each other. I liked Norman churches. I liked the cool silence of an empty church that has endured for centuries. I liked the sense of a connection with history, and the appearance of crumbling stone and enduring monuments rising on hilltops above green fields in little villages.
When I was first experiencing this aesthetic reaction, I did not know that the love of place and the call of history was itself one of the oldest forms of moral instruction there is, the thing that knits you into the world like a thread in a tapestry with a pattern that has meaning.
But somewhere along the way I learned the basic biblical tales, that storehouse of at least half of what the West was at its beginnings, and what the West must lose in order to be washed away forever. Even then, the other half attracted me more. I read tales of Greece and Rome before I ever bothered to read the Bible. It took years to trace the threads of the things that made me. The Judeo-Christian heritage. The Classical heritage. The last and most unjustly derided of all, the Anglo-Saxon heritage. It took years of my life to be able to know why each of these mattered, and little if any of that knowing was supplied to me by my State funded teachers.
I did go to a Sunday School for a year or two. I remember my main motivation for that was because they let the kids play games of British Bulldog and football (soccer, for American readers). That was the only time I was taught anything Biblical to any extent, by people who actually had faith themselves.
One of the greatest possible crimes to inflict on a people, of course, one of the ways in which those who wish to erase them begin the task, is in depriving them of an awareness of who they are, denying them their heritage and history, distorting the message or destroying the value of such things so that they no longer know or care that the land they stand on is theirs, or that the world they inhabit has meaning, or that the stones and the paintings and the texts and the statues and the literature and the art of their land speaks a rich language whose full meaning can only be understood by those informed by a real awareness of Christian narratives.
To steal the future you must erase the past.
To reclaim your future you must rediscover what has been erased.
So, back to David and Goliath, one of the few little shards of Biblical narrative that somehow survived the cultural vandalism of modern schooling and became a story I knew.
David, the young shepherd boy armed only with a sling and a few stones taken as pebbles in a riverbed. Goliath, the nine foot tall Philistine warrior with a bronze helmet, a sword, a shield, a spear. A trained warrior against a callow youth. But one backed by God, defending his own sacred nation, and one a towering example of human hubris defying God’s name.
The story is of course a lesson in the power of faith and the vanity of appearances. David is accused of arrogance, but displays submission of the self to something greater than the self. He fights wanting to improve the lives of others, his family, and in defense of things that are not solely his, his nation. All natural law, all God’s law, is there in his defense of Israel, because that is intimately bound up in God’s covenant with the Jewish people but also in the most natural feelings there are-that we should wish to honor our fathers, that we should wish to pass on something to our sons, that we should feel the call of land and blood and risk the second to defend the first.
Goliath by contrast, could be said to be fighting for his people, his nation too, but there is a sense that this is not really the case. Goliath fights for his own reputation as much as anything else. He fights to prove himself a mighty champion. He fights on land that is not his. He represents the urge to conquer when the conquest has no meaning beyond vanity and pride. He is not the humble servant of his people. He is not the humble servant of a real God. He is not fighting for the Philistines. Not really.
He is Goliath.
He fights because he is bigger than other men, stronger than other men, and likes the acclaim and the glory that greater strength and greater prowess brings. He is like an Olympic athlete that you know doesn’t really compete for a flag or a nation, but for themselves and their reputation.
All of it is a fascinating encapsulation of war and pride. Like many Biblical stories, it says a lot more than is present on the surface, and raises as many questions as answers. What things are worth fighting for and killing for? What is the difference between a pride that is positive and noble, and a pride that is grasping and destructive? When should you be humble in the face of things you cannot control, and when should you strive to the point of death, defying all the odds that are stacked against you?
What defines a just warrior, and a just war?
Clearly, there is a strong message in the tale that it is submission to the will of God, to God’s purpose, that makes a man humble and just. But the Philistines must surely have considered themselves faithful to their Gods too. The message of life that Goliath had received until his death must surely have been that he was favored and blessed. Nature or some God had endowed him with properties beyond those of other men. No bronze age mind would have considered that accidental.
And we know too that submission can be the vilest demand there is. Much of what makes the Old Testament so frequently alien to modern readers is in this issue of submission. There is some truth in the atheist charge that the Old Testament God comes across as a petulant, raging, demanding, inconsistent, angry, arbitrary, clannish and brutally violent creature. The tests he puts to his people and his prophets are at least on a partial or superficial reading savagely harsh ones, as are the punishments he assigns to people and places that defy him.
And we know a religion today that shares this Old Testament heritage, that takes that book as part of its beginnings, and which takes the opposite path to the one Christianity took. In Christianity the New Testament moderates the harshness of Bronze Age thinking. In Islam, though, the desert savage would if anything make the Old Testament seem too moderate. In the Koran, the Iron Age speaks, and speaks from the Arabic blood feud, the interminable and ancient tribal conflicts of a harsh land with harsh people living in it, from the mouth and example of a Prophet who was a warlord.
However harsh the Old Testament shows God being towards the enemies of Israel, or towards Israelites who fall from his grace, has been exceeded a thousandfold and a thousandfold again by the things Muslims have done in the name of Allah, and done because they demand that everyone submit utterly to their teachings and their faith.
God’s special covenant for Jews and for Israel covers but a tiny portion of the globe and one of the smallest ethnic groups on it, whereas the Muslim House of War covers every inch of land across the entire planet that has not submitted to Islam.
There is then some essential pragmatic and moral difference between a harshness enacted in defense of what has long been yours, and a harshness enacted at all times, in all circumstances, claiming everything that is not yours and never was yours except by brutal conquest.
The progressive worldview, which is ultimately a Marxist one, claims to understand this difference. This, after all, is essentially why they think they are just. And they apply it in the Marxist language of anti-imperialism, and in the simplistic divisions they make between coloniser and settler, or between oppressor and victim. It’s the binary choice they use to justify supporting terrorists (labelled as ‘freedom fighters’) or to excuse their Jew Hatred as a version of international ‘social justice’.
In their reckoning, of course, the Palestinians are David, and the only Jewish State on Earth is Goliath. The Palestinians are victims, and the Israelis are oppressors. The Palestinians had ‘their’ land stolen, and the Israelis are colonisers and settlers. Since Israel was officially recognized in 1948, Israel was imposed, enforced, and illegitimate. Since the Palestinians don’t have a State, and Israel does, the Palestinians must be the victims and the Israelis must be the aggressors. The creation of modern Israel was the original crime (the act of aggression) and therefore any Palestinian terrorism since is the inevitable backlash against injustice and oppression.
And of course Israel has the military infrastructure and the jet fighters and the nuclear weapons and the tanks, whereas Palestinians do not. It’s easy to see from this who is the powerful heavily armed aggressor (the Goliath that is Israel) and who is the shepherd boy fighting for his freedom (the David that is the Palestinians including their terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah).
All of this is the politics of the Middle East as understood by the average western leftist, by the Democrat voter in the US or the Labour voter in the UK, and by leftist students coincidentally taught by universities who receive massive Arab funding and Professors who are leftists, Muslims, or both.
I don’t need to tell Zionists how each and every one of these points is a facile lie and a position that can only be believed in by the dishonest, the brainwashed, the stupid and the historically ignorant, but I’ll briefly supply the reasons these things are untrue here.
First, let us take the notion of respective power and scale and apply that properly. Who is the Goliath here?
The Palestinians only become stateless, powerless, outnumbered, outgunned, vulnerable and innocent victims who are bravely resisting a much more powerful opponent if you ignore the rest of the world. In reality, these are people with some of the largest, richest terrorist groups on the planet representing them. They had the backing of the Soviet Union when that was a superpower. They had the offer of a fully formed State at the same time that modern Israel was created. They had the backing of neighboring Arab states to the extent of those nations on multiple occasions repeatedly invading Israel on their alleged behalf. They have received trillions of dollars of aid from the western world and the Arab world, both of which they have wasted by solely using it for corruption and terrorism. And for years they have had the backing of Iran in their terrorist activities. And they have had self-rule in the strongholds of Hamas and Hezbollah for decades.
Look at any map of the region and the idea of Israel as the larger aggressor becomes laughable. The State of Israel is about the same size as Wales. It is almost impossible for Israel to be the larger aggressor against anyone. Perhaps if Israel declared war on Vatican City or San Marino that might apply.
Look at the same map and count the number of surrounding Muslim nations. Islam controls half of Africa and all the rest of the Middle East. Israel has a population of 9.9 million and between 8 and 8 and a half thousand square miles (depending on how you calculate it). The Arab League (of which Palestine is a part) covers 22 nations, has a population of 446 million people, and covers over 5 MILLION square miles of territory. The Arab League has traditionally been strongly on the Palestinian side.
All of these Muslim nations have at one time or another supported war or engaged in war against Israel, primarily in the name of Palestine. None of these Muslim nations have offered territory to Palestinians or citizenship to large Palestinian refugee communities. In fact they have strongly discouraged Palestinian settlement in their nations whilst demanding that Israel cease to exist so that it can be the basis of a Palestinian state. 5 million square miles without a mile of it available for Palestinians, demanding that 8 and half thousand square miles be reduced and is owed to Palestinians. It was a Christian (not an Arab or Muslim) nation that willingly took in large numbers of Palestinians. And look how well that went for Lebanon.
Or if you want to look at it religiously, then its obvious again that the idea that the Jewish State is the larger and more powerful aggressor is ridiculous. There are 15 million Jews in the world. There are 2.03 BILLION Muslims in the world.
Even limited to Palestinians we find that the Palestinian population of the world is roughly the same as the Jewish population of the world (14.8 million compared to 15 million). The Palestinian population will rapidly surpass the Jewish one based on current birth rates.
So the beginning premise of the whole ludicrous Big Bad Israel viewpoint of western leftists is absurd. Israel is tiny, and I’d argue good as well. That whole Palestinian victim narrative depends on this Israel as Bully presentation which is both playground level stuff in terms of its seriousness as an argument and wildly inaccurate in terms of the facts regarding Israel’s actual size and context.
Ah, but Israel has the support of the US and Israel has the West on its side, right?
Well, no. Its true Israel has received massive US aid for its whole existence, and that this has been used by Israel both economically and militarily. This money did help build Israeli armed forces and pay for tanks, planes, helicopters, missiles and the Iron Dome missile defense system. But similar huge sums have flowed to the Palestinians.
Israel spent more money from aid and from their own efforts on building infrastructure including cities, roads, hospitals, schools, ports, technology, research, leisure and education facilities of all kinds. Israel turned desert into modern cities.
Hamas and similar Palestinian rulers turned modern cities into terrorist warehouses and networks of vast tunnel systems solely designed for the purposes of terrorism.
It’s not that one received outside help and the other didn’t. It’s that one used help to build (and yes, defend) something worthwhile, and the other used help solely to fund terrorism and build ways to attack civilians.
More than this, the idea that the West can be described as solely or even primarily on Israel’s side is also false. We should be, but we aren’t. Through Palestinian aid, the West has financed Palestinian terrorism and paid for attacks on Israel. Nor has our political and moral support been constant.
Its not just leftist students who have backed Hamas. Senior western politicians have. The Obama and Biden administrations heavily backed appeasement of Iran. That appeasement built the modern war. Israel has had to dismantle Iran’s terror network precisely because the West refused to do so and because the West helped to build that network. Israel was attacked by Iran’s Hamas proxies on October 7th because the Biden administration released billions of dollars to Iran which Iran used to fund the attack. Prior Obama administration release of Iranian billions also invigorated Iran's efforts as one of the primary sponsors of terrorism in the world.
It was only in Trump’s first term that the money tap for the mullahs was partly turned off, and ‘coincidentally’ again this period which saw more peace in the Middle East.
And to that war, to address what Israel has done in response to October 7th. Again, this shows Israel, really, as the David of the piece. Unjustly attacked, and justly responding. Again, we are told that Israel is a military behemoth smashing a somehow innocent foe. What happened on October 7th renders that argument absurd-the innocents are not the people who launch genocidal terrorist assaults of sickening and repellent savagery.
The Bronze Age, Iron Age, submission or torture and death behavior came from the Palestinians, not the Israelis.
And who, really, did the western world actually back? Shamefully, the western world as represented by our governments, our establishment politicians and our institutions really backed Hamas and Iran. They excused the atrocities of October 7th. They invented or exaggerated crimes by the IDF. They described the most vigorous rules of engagement ever followed as indiscriminate slaughter. They pretended that Israel had no right to pursue the people responsible for the 7th October attack. Israel was condemned in the UN. Netanyahu faced prosecution as a war criminal in international courts. Democrat US legislators turned their backs on him or refused to attend when he spoke to them. Western governments pressed Israel to accept a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to rebuild and survive. Western media and government spoke as if Israel was some sort of rabid dog tearing at the throats of innocents rather than a sovereign nation state with every legal and moral justification to pursue the terrorists who had slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli innocents.
Even while Israeli families buried their murdered children, and even while kidnapped Israeli hostages were still being held, the world pretended that Israel had exceeded a just response and had no right to pursue the war towards an end that would be a victory.
Magnificently, as far as I see it, David did not submit.
Alone among the nations, and alone among the leaders, Israel did what Israel needed to do and Netanyahu did what any ruler should do when the existence of the nation is threatened and when atrocities beyond description are visited on his people. Israel did what is right. It shouldered the burden of slander even as it bore the scars of grief. It sent other sons to die, not from some ruthless desire for conquest and not from a religious fanaticism of darker ages, but from the clear eyed and steely resolve of a nation that knows what it is to have the whole world against you. A nation that will defend its people. A nation that will not accept its people being raped and tortured and kidnapped and enslaved.
A nation that will offer peace to those who offer peace, and war to those who trigger war, and never confuse the two through cowardice and lack of self-belief.
This tiny nation with an ancient history, and this people who have suffered through millennia, are not the Goliath of the story. No settler finds the marks of his people in the land he visits from a thousand years before, from two thousand years before, from three thousand years before, and from four thousand years before. No coloniser turns up the buried coins and the ruined palaces of his own faith and his own people in a land he invades. Nor is he older than the word that names his accuser.
This is why I have come to see the importance of Biblical stories, the importance of my Christian heritage, and the importance of the ties that bind the whole of my history and heritage to things I share with Israel, with Jews, and with Zionism. I know why Englishmen sing Jerusalem. Because I too believe that it is right and proper and just to have a portion of the Earth that God gave to your people, and it is right and proper and just to fight for your people when they are attacked and slaughtered and kidnapped, and it is right and proper and just to do this even if the world puts the label of oppressor on the victim, and the label of victim on the oppressor.
It is right and proper and just to know that you are David, when they call you Goliath.
I do not love and value Israel solely for itself. I have never been there. It is not my land. My respect is a selfish one. It does not spring from shared blood. It is not one grown in a familiarity with the same scents and sights and places. Even the kinship of Jesus having been a Jew is somewhat remote for an atheist like me, even one who now knows how important two thousand years of a shared religious text is. I value and love the example of it.
That a people can be so scattered, and so abused, for so long, and still find their nation again. Still find their way home. That is an example of increasing importance to white men seeing their nations being taken away from them. It tells us that home is a memory as well as a place, and that keeping the memory can restore the place, far, far, into the future.
That the world can tell a small nation it must accept terrorism and it must restrain itself from response, and that nation saying “no, I will fight my enemies and I will cease from the fight when I choose”, is of increasing importance to white people being told that their nations must always submit to some higher but earthly authority, to the UN, to the EU, or to some panel of foreign strangers.
That you have this faith in yourself and your people and that is not something to be ashamed of.
That it is vital to your survival.
That true civilization and true justice consists not solely in the kindness offered to the innocent, but in the punishment offered to the guilty.
That true wisdom lies not in the saccharine and fatuous platitudes, the easy virtues and moral posturing vanity of these times, but in deep and abiding loyalties which last for centuries, loyalties that are natural and endorsed by God by the very fact of being part of what makes us human.
Israel has done more in a few months to genuinely oppose and punish evil than the rest of us have done in years. It has done it calmly, clinically, and with brilliant ingenuity. And it has done it while being slandered and lied about and while grieving its own dead.
These are the lessons of little Israel, a nation whose intransigent courage comes as the golden harvest of many centuries of bitter experience. David is still telling us right from wrong. The Holy Land is still offering lessons that matter.
And they are lessons the West better learn, or re-learn, as fast as it can.
Brought up near Manchester, which has always had a significant Jewish population; indeed, when Manchester City in the 1950s, signed up German ex-POW, Bert Trautmann, as their goalie (and by God he was a very fine one), there were widespread protests.
Which stopped when the Grand Rabbi of Manchester spoke openly saying what happened in the war was nothing to do with Bert, who was to become a local hero; indeed, when the awful Munich plane crash of 1958 occurred, Bert offered his services as a translator to United and they took him up.
I had a Jewish friend at primary - and prep school (and a Muslim one as well! 1950s); our dentists were Jewish and family friends.
My old man was quite a character in the village; well known and well respected. Our local posh golf club ( we had two) asked him if he would be an honorary VP (he didn't play the game)
Delighted, he replied - as soon as you allow Jews to be members. Never heard from them again!
I love the Jewish people and their extraordinary contributions; see how may Jews have won Nobel prizes compared to Muslims. Israel is an extraordinary nation, the eternal scapegoat for all the ills of the Middle East.
During lockdown, I decided (a believing Christian without a church - I'd be C of E were Welby not busy dismantling it) to read the Bible (KJ version of course) cover to cover. Alongside it, to inform myself, read various learned commentaries. By the time I had finished reading it, I knew I had to reread it. At Proverbs again!
Not only is it the tale of God, it is the history of Israel; Jews have lived in that part of the world since the Bronze Age, and long before Islam was even a fart in the wind.
God bless Israel, and the Jewish people.
Wonderful writing as per usual Daniel. ❤️
Let’s face it, Israel has done more to fight terrorism than all the other countries put together. I’m often asked as a Christian, why I don’t agree that there should be a ceasefire. Thankfully I’m no wishy washy church of england Christian. I know what and who I stand for. I quote David’s son, King Solomons writings in the Bible. Ecclesiastes 3 verse 1-8. There’s a time for everything. You don’t mess with Gods people. It’s now a time for war.
Wise old man was Solomon……