By Stephen Smoot
As the United States, Israel, and much of the Sunni Muslim world take aim at the dying regime of the mullahs in Iran, ancient history takes center stage in the conflict.
For the United States, it represents an opportunity to deal Russia and China a significant blow. Iran is the source of much of Russia’s oil, especially after the US deposed their allies running the Venezuela regime, and almost all of its military drones. President Trump tried for a year to use negotiation and deals to end the Russo-Ukraine War. Now he has taken action to further that goal while also weakening the Russia-China axis that has been gradually expanding in influence since Obama.
For Israel, the war will bring security and safety they have not known in almost 50 years. A deeper tie, however, connects Iran and Israel. It predates Islam, Christianity, and even classical Greek civilization. Americans have little capacity to understand the point of view of peoples whose history extends almost to prehistory. If centuries were years, Iran would be 25 and Israel 50. The United States would still be a toddler learning to walk and to use the bathroom like a big boy in that metaphor.
The Jewish people are the chosen people of God and the State of Israel is their people’s national representative in the community of nations. Being the chosen people of God puts them in a favored, but unpleasant position. They will endure through history, but they also serve as a benchmark.
Think of how Albert Einstein describes the role of the speed of light. It serves a direct and a relative purpose. That relative purpose is the benchmark of space and time in the physical universe. All relates to it, at least outside of quantum physics where all rules seem to break down. The Jewish people are God’s benchmark of the goodness of any given civilization. One can judge a nation or a people in history based on how they treat the Jewish people and the Jewish nation because the Jewish nation is one of the few that have endured throughout history and are the sole people still worshipping in the same faith.
Many who have chosen to attack the Jewish people like to cherry pick from the Talmud, which is one of the greatest intellectual projects in history. In the Talmud, Jewish thinkers developed the technique of arguing a point from all possible angles even if they disagree with a certain angle or find it distasteful. Through this process, the idea is to find truth and or justice. Talmudic debates changed the notion of law in the West.
From Hammurabi through the Romans, rule of law was meant to establish a clear order in which people could live. The Talmud taught the West that the law could also be shaped by debate or advocacy to find truth or justice. When you file suit in court because you have been wronged, your lawyer’s use of argument and evidence to find justice comes a lot from that Talmudic tradition. This also has helped to guide other forms of inquiry, such as the philosophical. As the Frenchman Abelard, an expert on almost every worthwhile subject in the Middle Ages, including religion, taught, “for by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.”
The State of Israel as it exists today is in some ways more godly than the Kingdom under David. During the Time of the Judges, God was seen as the monarch of Israel and judges emerged in times of peril to defend the tribes and people. God directly warned Israel to not anoint a king, but they obviously did so anyway and, in the long term, that did not work out so well for them. The current State of Israel has no earthly monarch, which is in line with the wishes of He who chose them.
God also has shown an interest over the millennia in protecting a Jewish state and the Jewish people, proven by the fact that He spoke through a dream to Cyrus the Great, king of the rapidly expanding Persian Empire (Persia is now called Iran.) Cyrus saw God as one of the forces for good in the universe, freed His chosen people from the captivity imposed by the Babylonians, and helped reestablish, protect, and promote a Jewish state.
One could say that 2,500 years later, Israel’s attack on the mullahocracy to help free the people is them repaying both Cyrus and God for Persian protection 2,500 years ago. Interestingly, the Jewish and Iranian people are the only two from that region that have retained cohesive cultures since that point that still flourish today. Additionally, the Persian Zoroastrian faith was one of the antecedents to Christianity. The Three Wise Men were magi, Zoroastrian priests.
Also, God has historically, if not always, provided Israel/Judah with tools to protect herself.
In 1948, the United Nations set up a Jewish State of Israel, but set it up to fail. It had almost no territorial cohesion and was surrounded by established enemies. Multiple times, those enemies tried to destroy Israel with overwhelming force and each time, Israel has survived and augmented its power.
Israel today is also godlier in a sense than in the time of David because it uses its power in defense and adds territory reluctantly and in restraint. The State of Israel only wishes to protect what is theirs, which is the right of every nation since the beginning of history. David conquered other peoples and lands, an action that led to the kingdom’s destabilization under lesser kings.
David was a great king and a servant of God, but also one who had power and a lack of self-discipline and that led him to ruin as well.
Iran was a friend of Israel and an ally of the United States before a loud and well-supported (by outsiders) minority seized their country. The Persian imperial culture existed 1,000 years before the emergence of Islam and retains a much more powerful hold on the people than the mullahs. That said, like Cuba, those who live there cannot live their truth. They cannot speak their minds. The mullahs are an evil regime that thinks nothing of, say, executing gay people by tossing them off of high buildings or torturing those good Muslims who do not hold to their brand of Islam.
But those mullahs are now facing the Day of the Lord in their own world. History is coming to collect its due from an evil cadre that has imprisoned a good people and a beautiful culture for five decades.
Iranian expats throughout the world have both celebrated the likely fall of the mullahocracy and taken on Leftists defending the current regime. They have joined Jewish people in the streets worldwide to share their joy. Both sides see this war in both current and ancient terms, renewing one of the most ancient of friendships between peoples.
In a bigger sense this war, and how Iran has chosen to expand it, provides an incredible opportunity. Should the (admittedly) fragile cooperation between the United States, Suni Muslim nations, and Israel hold past the war, they could forge ahead during peace and establish a system of cooperation that might, dare we say, lead to a lasting peace in that troubled area of the world. One could not even imagine such a combination only 20 years ago. Think of what a firm and secure peace could do for that region in the next 20.
