I have a friend named Isabel, who is a righteous gentile. She isn’t a Christian Zionist-although many Christian Zionists fill that bill. She didn’t think that much about Israel or Jews through the years. She was raised Catholic in New Mexico and still gives up something each Lent. She says she has her own beliefs that are private. And so they are…we became friends at work.
At one pro-Israel event I put on at the UNM Law School after work, a movie about the forced Jewish Exodus from Arab lands after Israel was established, Isabel stopped by the room on her way home to see how it was going. It wasn’t going well. I was trying to get the sound working. The audience was all there, a pretty good turnout for such an event, and they were getting a little restive at the delay. I called over to Isabel and told her the problem, and she came over to help me out with it. Dressed in work clothes and heels, she tripped on a step on the way down to the podium and fell hard on one knee. People gasped and asked if she was alright, and she quickly got up and said she was fine. She stayed to cover the podium and reassure people as I hurried off to find someone to help get the sound working. She stayed through the changing of rooms and through the movie. The movie stirred her sense of justice. The Arab and world treatment of the Jews reminded her of the US treatment of Indians. Afterwards I thanked Isabel and she showed me her skinned knee, which was bleeding some. I told her that she had “shed blood” for Israel, and that made her a righteous gentile. We both laughed a little.
But it comes up sometimes still, because beneath the joke was the truth. Isabel is a righteous gentile, not only because she’s “good people”, but specifically because unbeknownst to either her or me when we first became friends, she is willing to “take a hit for Israel”. She would do it knowingly and by choice. You don’t see Isabel’s name on event flyers and she doesn’t join groups, but she is there, on the good side, ready to move when needed.
Some will object to talking about “sides”, but really, there are only two sides now. Everyone is on one side or the other, even if you don’t think about it or believe it. If you haven’t thought about it, chosen for good and acted for good, then you are probably a pawn of the other side. This is an unhappy position to be in, because the other side is not your friend. As they say, the devil breaks his tools. What is the dividing line, the watershed, in the world today? It’s Israel. Looking at it objectively, that’s strange, but the prophets said it would be like that. Some little country far away from most places, populated by a group of people who are a small number among all the peoples, yet all the weight of the world powers sits on this country to try to force it to do their will; to force it to surrender and cease to be. Why should it matter, objectively speaking, what Israel does or doesn’t do? Why should it matter what anyone in Albuquerque, New Mexico thinks about Israel? Yet it does.
There is no middle ground any longer, and every person is choosing their side.
