A bill passed its first vote last month that would hand Israel's ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate absolute authority over the Western Wall, and criminalize unauthorized worship with up to seven years in prison. The same institution has tried to outlaw the Gospel in Israel for thirty consecutive years. American evangelicals are funding the government pushing this. We have the details. Also, we’ll discuss the war-hawks lying about Tucker’s claim about unconditional surrender, and ask why there’s a mass migration out of the Jewish homeland, and what it means about the Zionist experiment.
SEVEN YEARS IN PRISON FOR PRAYING TO JESUS AT THE WESTERN WALL
On February 25, the Israeli Knesset advanced a bill by a vote of 56 to 47 that would give the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate absolute legal authority over the so-called “Jewish holy sites,” (read that: sites relevant to the Christian Old Testament) including the Western Wall, and classify any worship activity contradicting a Rabbinate ruling as “a criminal desecration punishable by up to seven years in prison.” The penalty is not a fine or a civil citation, but to repeat, up to seven years in a Jewish gulag for praying incorrectly at an ancient retaining wall, in a country that American evangelicals have spent fifty years loudly and proudly describing as the only functioning democracy in the Middle East.
The bill was sponsored by MK Avi Maoz of the Noam party, which is the political party for those who aren’t satisfied with how insufficiently strict Israeli laws currently are, failing to curtain unathorized religious expression. Maoz drafted the legislation in direct response to an Israeli High Court ruling that required the government to upgrade the prayer plaza at the Wall, which is where non-Orthodox Jews and women have spent trying to pray without being arrested. The bill is designed to override the court and cement ultra-Orthodox exclusivity over one of the most visited religious sites on the planet. The High Court told the government to make more room for “egalitarian worship,” meaning anyone not holding to Orthodox or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. So, the Knesset responded by making anything deemed “desecration” by the standards of the Rabinate a crime (should it pass its subsequent votes).
Here’s the kicker, though. The Rabbinate defines what constitutes desecration; according to this bill, enforcing the law will be at their discretion and by Rabbinic definition. Under traditional Talmudic categories, a Muslim offering silent, respectful prayer at the Wall may well clear the bar. Islam's strict monotheism places it in a categorically different relationship to Jewish law than Christianity does. A Christian praying to Jesus, by contrast, is praying to a man the Talmud treats as a false messiah, which means Christian prayer at the Wall is not merely unauthorized worship under this bill. It is, by the Rabbinate's own theological logic, precisely the kind of desecration the bill was written to criminalize. The most visited religious site in Judaism would operate under a legal framework in which a Muslim would not face arrest and prosecution, but a Baptist would.
A group called “Women of the Wall” has been holding women’s prayer services at the Western Wall since 1988. Under this legislation, it would also be a criminal matter carrying a seven-year sentence. Reform Jews praying together in mixed company, Conservative Jews worshiping in forms the Rabbinate disapproves of, Kairite Jews - the tiny 1% faction who don’t follow the Talmud - or anyone whose theological tradition diverges from ultra-Orthodox practice in ways the Chief Rabbinate decides to prosecute, all of them would now be operating under a criminal statute in the state that American evangelicals have spent fifty years defending as the crown jewel of religious liberty in the Middle East. The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast (Jewish rye, obviously).
The Chief Rabbinate is the religious body given authority over matters of Jewish religion under Israeli law. I2I has covered this before in the series on Halakah, or Jewish Sharia law. It does not recognize non-Orthodox conversions or non-Orthodox marriages. It has treated diaspora Jewish denominations as theologically illegitimate for the entirety of its existence. It doesn’t allow Kairite Jews to be considered Jewish for legal purposes. American Reform and Conservative Jews, who make up the overwhelming majority of American Jewry and who have spent decades writing checks for Israel, are not even recognized as legitimate by the institution that would now hold criminal enforcement authority over the holiest site their tradition holds dear.
This is the same political faction that has introduced legislation to criminalize Christian missionary activity in Israel at the opening of nearly every Knesset session for the last thirty consecutive years. That only occasionally makes the American press, and it’s usually characterized as, “Oh, that tiny extremist faction is at it again.” But that tiny faction is getting bigger and bigger every election, and they’re close to taking control of Israel. And if they have their way, this will just be one of many pieces of legislation designed to persecute religious expression in the Holy Land.
The American evangelical movement, which has spent decades insisting that support for Israeli government policy is a matter of biblical obligation, has responded with the kind of thunderous silence that speaks volumes about what this alliance is actually built on.
TUCKER TOLD THE TRUTH. INSERT PANIC. THIS IS NOT A REPEAT.
If you listen to his critics, Tucker recently said on his program that “unconditional surrender” means U.S. troops get to rape your wife and daughter, and Trump will nuke Iran. In case you didn’t already know, they exaggerate a lot. And when they aren’t exaggerating, they’re full-on lying. Tucker made a simple and historically accurate point; when unconditional surrender is the advertised policy objective to the enemy, it leads to unparalleled human travesties, rape and an occasional atomic weapon among them.
Apparently, I’m the defend-Tucker guy, and several friends and former colleagues have reached out to ask if Tucker has lost his mind, as though I’ve been in cellular communication with him all day and can confirm if he missed his medicine. And, I very uncharacteristically put my friend, Rod Martin, on blast for asking whether Tucker had gone mad or joined the Iranian payroll. Folks, this is simple history. The prospect of unconditional surrender leads to a primal fear in the enemy, which is why populations will fight to the death to avoid it. This is the testimony of six thousand years of human history. Give the enemy a way out, a seat at a negotiating table - no matter how disadvantaged or insincere, and it may just lead to an end of hostilities that doesn’t include carnage that will be felt for generations. But not everyone was willing to take a look at the history books on that one.
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Senator Ted Cruz called the argument “brazen and moronic.” A Green Beret said it was “the most vile thing he had ever heard.” National Review reached for the word “unhinged.” The clip spread everywhere, stripped of context, reframed as Tucker predicting that American soldiers would sexually assault Iranian women.
Tucker’s claim was that the phrase “unconditional surrender” carries a specific psychic weight that has shaped the behavior of every population that has ever received it as a demand, and that the fear it activates is not irrational, because the historical record of what total military defeat means for civilian women is not complicated. His critics deliberately collapsed that observation into a prediction about American troop behavior, because an observation about military history can be engaged and debated, while an accusation of defaming American soldiers can be used to end the conversation. Cruz is shrewd enough to know exactly what he was doing.
To be very, very clear, Tucker was not referring to U.S. troops in WWII, during the collapse of Germany. Although he could have. He can’t say it, but I can. We committed upwards of 11,000 rapes (not all in Germany), and this isn’t a special impugning of the American military. It pales in comparison to those committed by both our allies and our enemies in that war (and after). We were surprisingly chaste so far as wars go. But war is hell, and war without any real hope of ending without the complete dismantling of a nation is always more barbaric than those where hope of a negotiated peace could be around the corner. Not all wars are equal, and when negotiation is ruled out of order from the beginning, well…let’s just say the carnage of different wars are not always equal.
The history backs Tucker completely. Franklin Roosevelt announced at Casablanca in January 1943 that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany, Japan, and Italy. His declaration was framed as both foolish and controversial from the start. Churchill and Eisenhower both objected, correctly, that eliminating any path to a negotiated exit would stiffen enemy resistance by leaving adversaries with nothing to lose. German propaganda used Roosevelt’s demand to argue that fighting to the last was the only rational response, since the Allies would destroy Germany regardless of the outcome. Military historians have argued that the policy extended the European war for months or years.
In the Pacific, the demand was catastrophic. Casualty projections for the planned home-island invasion, Operation Downfall, ran into the hundreds of thousands (not the oft-reported “million,” but still a lot). Despite a land invasion probably not being necessary because Japan’s air force was completely obliterated, its navy destroyed, and we had conducted conventional bombing without resistance to our heart’s content (and our commanders didn’t want to invade), Truman avoided that arithmetic by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even then, Japan did not surrender unconditionally. The emperor was preserved as a de facto condition of the agreement - in the end, anyway - while everyone involved agreed not to use the word “conditional” in the final documents. The Naval War College Review published a peer-reviewed analysis concluding bluntly that the Pacific war ended through a conditional surrender. The terms were unconditional in name only (and the bombing accomplished precisely nothing).
Why was Japan so resistant? Because its leadership and population understood, at the gut level Tucker described, what total military defeat had historically meant for civilians. The Rape of Nanking had shown them. In December 1937, Japanese forces captured the Chinese capital and, in the six weeks that followed, raped up to 100,000 women and girls and killed most of them, in what remains one of the most extensively documented atrocities of the 20th century. The Soviet advance through Germany in 1945 provided a second example of the world turning away to avoid watching. The mass rape of German civilian women by Red Army troops is not a disputed footnote in military history. It is an established fact, it is in the war crimes records, and it happened in the precise context of a total, unconditional defeat in which no negotiation was possible.
Tucker did not make this up. He compressed a recognized body of military history facts into a single sentence and applied it to the current situation: Trump’s demand for unconditional surrender from Iran virtually guarantees a longer, more destructive, and potentially nuclear war, because no population on earth will voluntarily accept the alternative. Most military analysts agree: unconditional surrender can only be enforced with an ocean of American blood. That’s the same calculation that drove Truman to choose to turn two Japanese cities, including the Christian capital of Asia, to glass.
Cruz’s charge is a deliberate distortion. Churchill, Eisenhower, and the Naval War College Review would all agree with Tucker. His critics are not confused about what he said. They understand it perfectly and need it discredited before the audience does the arithmetic on how dumb President Trump’s blurting out “unconditional surrender” at this stage of the war is. We need to end this war quickly. But Ted Cruz and many of Tucker’s critics in the Industrial War Complex need this war to go on as long as possible to cover their bottom line and make themselves rich. And the best possible way to do that is to convince Iran that there’s no longer room for negotiation.
A SANCTUARY FOR THE JEWISH PEOPLE? APPARENTLY NOT.
The argument that has underwritten American evangelical support for Israeli government policy for the better part of fifty years is simple. The claim is that Jews need a homeland where they will be safe; Palestine is that homeland, and therefore supporting the state is a moral and theological obligation. That premise is invoked to justify every weapons transfer, every blank check, every demand that American Christians treat Israeli government policy as beyond criticism. The safe haven argument is the engine of the entire enterprise. But there’s a huge untold story right now that’s seen in Israel’s population figures. I’ve not seen many others point out what I’m about to. Please forgive the heavy data entry in advance.
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