Full disclosure: I’ve always been pro-Israel and am so today, at least if that means that the nation has a right to exist. Since 1948, Israel has fought for its own existence, while Palestinians have also defended their homes. The only way forward was a two-state solution, which was very close in the 1970s and 80s, but is being brought to a forever-impossible point with the current Israeli government.
…In the United States especially, the relationship of Israel and its neighbors in end-times prophecy has been a major theme. In the Dispensationalist churches of my youth, the whole Bible centered not on Christ but on the nation of Israel, especially its reconstitution in 1948. Any opposition to the Israeli government was viewed as siding with Antichrist. But many of the West Bank victims of horrific acts of ultra-orthodox violence are Christians. As is too often true in families and national histories, those subject to extreme violence seek revenge through a similar dehumanization of the other.
I am Reformed and there is a long history in my tradition of respecting ethnic Jews as special in God’s sight. The history of redemption centers on the people of Israel. Jesus and his disciples were Jews. “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:24).
Yet, as in the day when Jesus said this, there is a strong reaction against considering Jewish Christians true Jews at all. And there is a deep hostility of radical Israeli Zionists to Christians and Muslims in territories they believe belong to them from biblical times. Christianity in the West Bank, including Bethlehem, is being erased by ultra-orthodox settlers under the protective umbrella of the Israel Defense Forces. The support of Dispensationalist Christians in the U. S. for Israel’s land-claim has presented a basic obstacle to the hope of a two-state solution.
The crucial question for Christians is not whether God gave Israel land “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” but whether this covenant is obsolete and we now have a universal horizon of God’s kingdom. I argue here that there is no biblical basis for Israel’s claim to this land today. Read more»
Michael S. Horton, “No Holy Land: Does Israel Still Have a Biblical Claim on the Middle East?” Modern Reformation (August 18, 2026)
RESOURCES
- Subscribe to The Heidelblog!
- Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
- Browse the Heidelshop!
- The Heidelblog Resource Page
- Heidelmedia Resources
- The Ecumenical Creeds
- The Reformed Confessions
- The Heidelberg Catechism
- The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Lexham Press, 2025)
- Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
- Why I Am A Christian
- What Must A Christian Believe?
- Heidelblog Contributors
- Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to
Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization
Michael Horton
Dr. Horton has taught systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California since 1998 and is ordained in the United Reformed Churches in North America. He is also the founder of Sola Media and its associated endeavors: the White Horse Inn radio show and podcast, Modern Reformation magazine, Core Christianity, and Theo Global.
More by Michael Horton ›
Excellent article by Dr. Horton. He brings scriptural clarity to a politically-charged issue. Like Dr. Horton, I am pro-Israel if that means Israel has a right to exist as a nation, but a two-state solution is the only reasonable option to settling the current situation. Let us pray for peace in the region and look forward with excitement to a our Zion in heaven.
Amen!
I seem to recall that “the Brook of Egypt” was Wadi-al-Arish in the Sinai rather than the Nile (Ye’or).
Maybe it is high time that the Arab states naturalized the descendants of an-Nakhba living among them. Their plight has long been an excuse for Arab (and other Islamic) governments to rile their populations to periodically trash US diplomatic missions and even kill their staff, or, in the First Gulf War, when I was with the State Department, to offer $30-40K for my death, and $10K for that of my then seven-year-old son (and they were negotiating with varied social justice warriors from the IRA to the Moro Liberation Front to do it).
Yet the USA, for all its faults, has given passport-holding, property rights, voting rights, and public office-eligible citizenship to more victims of an-Nakhba and their descendants than any seven Arabic-speaking states combined. For a further point, the Jews kicked out of every Arab state from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia and from Syria to Yemen (plus other Mizrahim) are the majority of Israeli Jews, with no-questions-asked citizenship and an integration process that received nary a cent of the international community’s money.
The two-state solution has been the holy grail of diplomacy for some time; yet a major impasse is that Arafat and his heirs have rejected it at every turn. Further, the solution they have sought has always been to throw the Israelis into the sea.
On this anniversary of 9/11–Bin Laden himself held was for the sake of Palestine—I recall that Gazans danced in the street; and, in the wake of 10/7, flooded my FB feed with viral videos celebrating abduction and rape. I’m old enough to recall when the fight for that strip between the Jordan and the Med morphed from being part of the cause of the greater Arab nation into a “Palestine” one—concocted by Egyptian-born, ex-Ikhwan Arafat and his KGB handlers.
The “Palestine” cause had the great good fortune to become the client of the roaring engine of (utterly mendacious) pro-Soviet propaganda; and continues to enjoy the support of an immoderate Left even now.
Indeed. The two-state solution is no solution. It would exacerbate the situation.
Herz is right.
Those who advocate a two-state solution in the West, and who blame the current Israeli government for making it impossible, need to pay more attention to history.
It was offered. It was rejected. “From the river to the sea” is what most leaders of the Palestinians are advocating.
Yes, there are problems with “settler violence,” including against Christians. The United States government is putting pressure on the Israelis to deal with that violence. Good for Ambassador Huckabee, who is fully aware that when he speaks, the Israelis will listen because they have to listen.
Do we really need to remind Western advocates of a two-state solution that many Middle Eastern countries have a long history of persecuting and expelling Jews? Even those that are the least unfriendly to Israel have a history of anti-Jewish harassment that far exceeds what Israel does to its non-Jewish residents.
As Dr. Horton correctly says, he is “Reformed and there is a long history in [his] tradition of respecting ethnic Jews as special in God’s sight.” That history long predated dispensationalism. We have good reason to criticize dispensationalists on theological grounds, but to suggest a two-state solution and to blame the current Israeli government for the two-state failure, just a few years after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, is unwise at best.
Israel is involved in a just war by biblical standards, and by traditional Christian standards. The best thing that can happen to Hamas is for us to deal with them the way we dealt with the ideological and political leaders of the German and Japanese war machines during World War II — utter and complete annihilation, with the one exception being Emperor Hirohito due to his unprecedented Japanese surrender saving us from an invasion of the home islands and likely sparing millions of American as well as Japanese lives.
This war won’t end until the Hamas leadership is destroyed, and the people in Gaza decide they have no hope of winning under any new leadership without a World War II model of unconditional surrender. Realistically that also means cutting off their funding, which has been a multidecade process and has already eliminated most of the worst nation-state offenders.
It is not unreasonable to say, “Fight like World War II, win like World War II.” Less than that leads to losing as the threat keeps coming back with new leaders and new names.
Yes.