In the days of Elijah, an anonymous “prophet approached the king of Israel and said to him, ‘Go, show yourself courageous and be aware and see what you have to do; for at the turn of the year the king of Aram will march against you’” (1 Kings 20:22).
Perhaps 50 years later, after Elijah passed off the scene and Elisha took his stead, there was still war in the Middle East between Aram and Israel. Elisha is sent by the God of Israel with a challenge to King Joash – a call to bold military action:
- When Elisha became sick with the illness of which he was to die, Joash the king of Israel came down to him, and wept over him and said, “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” [see 2 Kings 2:12]. And Elisha said to him, “Take a bow and arrows.” So he took a bow and arrows. Then Elisha said to the king of Israel, “Lay your hand on the bow.” And he laid his hand on it, then Elisha put his hands on the king’s hands. And he said, “Open the window toward the east,” and he opened it. Then Elisha said, “Shoot!” So he shot. And he said, “YHVH’s arrow of victory, and the arrow of victory over Aram; for you will defeat the Arameans at Aphek until you have put an end to them.” Then he said, “Take the arrows,” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground,” and he struck it three times and stopped. Then the man of God became angry at him and said, “You should have struck five or six times, then you would have struck Aram until you put an end to it. But now you shall strike Aram only three times”(2 Kings 13:14-19)
“Thorns in your eyes”
YHVH describes Himself as the Commander of the armies of Israel (see 1 Samuel 17:45). He calls His governmental and military leaders in Israel to “be strong and courageous, do not fear or be dismayed . . . because of all the horde that is with him; for the One with us is greater than the one with him!” (2 Chronicles 32:7). This biblical principle holds true for Israel today. It also has relevance for those who would stand with Israel – whether on the battlefield or in the political domain. The enemy must be resolutely pursued until he is destroyed; failure to do so has consequences:
- “Be careful that you do not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land into which you are going, or it will become a snare in your midst” (Exodus 34:12)
- “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from you, then it will come about that those whom you let remain of them will be like thorns in your eyes and like pricks in your sides, and they will trouble you in the land in which you live. And just as I plan to do to them, I will do to you” (Numbers 33:55-56)
- “For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain with you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that YHVH your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you; but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land which YHVH your God has given you” (Joshua 23:12-13)
A prophetic example of the violation of this principle is seen in the defeat of Samson, who clung to Delilah and was ensnared by her:
- She said, “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And he awoke from his sleep and said, “I will go out as at other times and shake myself free.” But he did not know that YHVH had departed from him. Then the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. And they brought him down to Gaza and restrained him with bronze chains, and he became a grinder in the prison (Judges 16:20-21)
“A snare in your midst”
Recent Jewish history reveals further outworkings of this biblical principle:
- In 1967, after the IDF captured Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Moshe Dayan made a fateful decision: the Jewish people who had just liberated Jerusalem from centuries-long control by Islamic dictatorships, would themselves not be permitted to pray on the Temple Mount; the Muslim Waqf would remain in charge of the compound. Today some Israeli lawyers justify this move, using the phrase “the severe political consequences of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.” The Islamist leaders see this war for Jerusalem/al-Aqsa as an ongoing one.
- The Oslo Accords (1993-95) opened up Judea, Samaria and Gaza for the return and the re-arming of the PLO terror group. The ‘Intifadas’ (First and Second) were the result – truly a snare and a trap to Israel, a whip and thorns to Jacob. The PLO never changed its spots (neither does Iran today) and was solidly committed to destroying Israel (as Iran is so committed today). The PLO’s war with Israel is ongoing.
- The encouragement of pre-Hamas as a counter-balance to the PLO terror group (in the late 1980’s). This was based on Hamas deceit and Israeli ignorance as to the unshakeable jihadi goals here – the full destruction of the Jewish state. This led to huge terror attacks in Israel, and finally to Israeli disengagement from Gaza (part of Judah’s tribal inheritance in Joshua 15:47), the Hamas take-over of Gaza, and the establishment of a jihadi base from which to attack Israel. This war is ongoing.
Bananas and Greta
On Monday, June 23, 2025 at 6:02 PM ET, POTUS Trump unilaterally declared “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE . . . During each CEASEFIRE, the other side will remain PEACEFUL and RESPECTFUL.” But Iran continued with massive missile fire, especially in the 90 minutes approaching the ceasefire time, and continuing with missiles and attack drones on and off on Monday and Tuesday. According to Trump’s agreement, if Iran violated the ceasefire, Israel was no longer be bound to hold fire – especially if Iran continued to attack Israeli civilian areas. Four Jewish citizens were killed in these attacks on Tuesday morning, and 1,000 were made homeless. Trump ignored those Iranian violations of the ceasefire when he sent out this tweet at 08:00 AM on the morning on June 24, declaring that the ceasefire was holding strong:
- Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!”
Jun 24, 2025, 8:08 AM https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114736609585800487
Based on Iran’s clear and documented repeated and serious breaches of the ceasefire agreement, the IAF (Israel Air Force) took off on Monday early afternoon to continue its bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities and ballistic missile launchers, as it had been doing every day since June 13. To Israel’s shock, POTUS Trump immediately sent out a highly charged rebuke to Israel on his Twitter account, publicly threatening the Jewish state for all the world to see:
- Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
“ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES”
Jun 24, 2025, 1:50 PM https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114737953503348541
POTUS Trump and PM Netanyahu then had a heated phone call: “A source familiar with the details told The Jerusalem Post that Trump raised his voice at the prime minister, demanding, ‘Stop the attack.’ The source said, ‘It was a tough conversation between Netanyahu and President Trump. Trump viewed [the US B-2 bombings] as a personal achievement, and made it clear that no one – absolutely no one – would undermine it.’” Trump then fired off another tweet, ordering the sovereign state of Israel to stand down and not to respond militarily to Iran’s attacks on Israel:
- Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
“ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES”
Jun 24, 2025, 2:28 PM https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114738104789842114
Trump’s public threat against Israel certainly showed some daylight between the two countries, as they say in Washington. PM Bibi Netanyahu decided to give in to POTUS Trump’s public arm-twisting, but put a low-key and subdued spin on the IAF’s reaction:
“In response to Iran’s violations, the Air Force destroyed a radar installation near Tehran. Pursuant to the conversation between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel has refrained from additional attacks.” 3:53 PM · Jun 24, 2025 https://x.com/IsraeliPM/status/1937494196925174118
Trump’s sharp rebuke communicates his view of the American relationship with Israel: the POTUS is the commander of a powerful empire addressing a servant much lower down on the totem pole. Some would say that he is treating Israel as a banana republic. The term ‘banana republic’ was first found in print in 1904, describing Central American social and political realities. It was used as a pejorative word describing a servile social stratum which aids and supports a stronger power (or superpower) for various forms of kickback. America’s realpolitik toward Central American banana-producing countries has often been characterized with this term.
But it is clear that Trump has placed strategic limitations on Israel’s military freedom of action. The IDF’s war against jihadi Iran is currently constrained by America, based on American priorities, and subject to the administration’s approval. Trump is firmly focused on maintaining the success of his ceasefire, which he sees as a strong diplomatic bonus. He used similar language to that of Greta Thunberg (the woke Swedish anti-Israel activist, famous for commanding world leaders with the shouted-out command ‘Now!’), ordering Israel “to obey him NOW.”
The strong American horse in a Middle Eastern stable
Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence specializing in Syria, Arab political discourse and mass media, Islamic groups and Israeli Arabs. Kedar is an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, his take on these developments is worth reading: “Only a powerful, well organized, highly determined and militarily invincible Israel can stand a chance of surviving in its violent and merciless neighborhood.”
This can be described as ‘the strong horse’ principle. In mid-November 2001, Osama Bin Laden spoke to a room of supporters, discussing the September 11th terrorist attacks: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. This is [the] only goal . . . following the doctrine of Muhammad.” Bin Laden saw Islam as the strong horse, and Christian America as the weak one.
Journalist Lee Smith based the name of his book The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations on Osama bin Laden’s above-mentioned quote. In this work, Smith states that strength or “violence is central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and that Arab politics is driven by the ‘strong horse’ principle.” “Bin Ladenism is not drawn from the extremist fringe but represents the political and social norm [of the Arabic-speaking Middle East].” According to T. Edward Donselm (writing in the Arab Studies Quarterly), Smith sees a revived modern Islamism as an effort to employ the fourteen-hundred-year old political institution of jihad as a tool to restore Sunni Islam to the supremacism it enjoyed in Islam’s first century.
Agreeing with Dr. Kedar’s appraisal, Daniel Pipes (director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University) applies Bin Laden’s ‘strong horse’ principle to Israel’s role in the Middle East. Israel serves as “a proxy strong horse” for both the United States and the Saudi-Egyptian bloc in the latter’s Cold War rivalry with Iran’s bloc. Pipes outlines the policies of non-Arab actors in the Arab world: unless they are forceful and show true staying power, they lose. “Being nice – say, withdrawing unilaterally from southern Lebanon and Gaza – leads to inevitable failure. More broadly, when the U.S. government flinches, others (e.g., the Iranian leadership) have an opportunity to ‘force their own order on the region.’ Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze leader, has half-seriously suggested that Washington [should] ‘send car bombs to Damascus’ to get its message across and signal its understanding of Arab ways.”
- Pipes concludes that Lee Smith’s ‘strong horse’ paradigm helps us to comprehend the Arabs’ cult of death, honor killings, terrorist attacks, despotism and warfare. Pipes acknowledges that the strong-horse principle may strike Westerners as ineffably crude, but he correctly insists on its being a cold reality that outsiders must recognize, take into account, and respond to.
Trump may be a maven in the real-estate world, but understanding Middle Eastern ways and mindsets is a totally different kettle of fish. The Iranian dictatorship is testing him. If they can get away with one or more ceasefire violations and conclude that Trump is not eager to make a big deal out of it – they will adopt this realpolitik. They have already concluded that Trump cares more about the appearance of a ceasefire than the enforcement thereof.
In downtown Jerusalem, the main shopping venue runs up and down Ben Yehudah Street. Many of the shops there are owned by Jews who fled Iran decades ago. One warm-hearted shopkeeper once told me that one Persian (whether non-Jewish or Jewish) can close a better deal than a Jew and an Armenian put together. The art of closing a Persian deal requires vast reserves of patience and planning – using one’s head and not one’s heart. Iran fought an eight year war with Iraq (September 1980 to August 1988). Intensive SCUD and rocket shelling was an everyday occurrence. Approximately 500,000 Iranians died in that war, as well as a similar number of Iraqis. This was a deadly serious conflict.
The Jewish nation has been defending itself since Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt. We have faced Midian, Edom, Moab, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Islam, and Hitler on the battlefields of this planet. Shi’ite and Sunni jihadi Islam are our most recent and deadly enemies. Yet most Westerners are unaware of this history.
- Westerners are ignorant of the cultures, sensibilities and sensitivities of the Islamic and Arab world. They do not understand Arab perspectives or how classical Islam sees the world in general, or the Western world in particular. Most of them interpret Middle Eastern events through secular sunglasses. This is true not only for the common man, but also for Christian and Jewish theologians, for Western intelligence agencies, government officials and diplomats. For those who would want to broaden their understanding, a good place to begin is David Pryce-Jones’ penetrating book ‘The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs’ (1989, Harper & Row).
- Another area of severe Western blindness involves foundational ignorance of Biblical realities. Yet it is these spiritual matters which hold the keys to unlocking the doors of perception regarding Middle Eastern dynamics, history, paradigms and its prophetic future.
- A third area of blindness is the lack of awareness of (or even refusal to accept) God’s irrevocable calling on and gifts to the Jewish people. Included here would be such pillars as the blessing and cursing dynamics of Genesis 12:3, and the sober spiritual dangers of jihad.
- A fourth area of blindness involves flat-out anti-Semitism – the endemic anti-Jewish dynamics now rampant in the US State Department, the CIA, the NSA, etc. (as well as European varieties of the same).
Today, on Wednesday June 25, POTUS inadvertently uncovered his unfamiliarity with these dynamics at an impromptu press conference held in The Hague at a NATO summit. Trump compared the battle between Israel and Iran to a petty schoolyard fight: “They have had it. They’ve had a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard. You know, they fight like hell. You can’t stop them. Let them fight for about two, three minutes. Then it’s easier to stop them.”
In the Hebrew Scriptures the God of Jacob uses the poetic figure of a strong war horse to describe His gifts and calling on the Jewish nation: “For YHVH of armies has visited His flock, the House of Judah, and will make them like His majestic horse in battle” (Zechariah 10:3). God has made Judah to be His strong horse. It is not a wise move for any world leader to belittle that calling, to disparage Judah’s character, or to order that majestic war-horse to retreat in the middle of its battle-charge.
A war is won when one side gives up
Iran has declared that it is about to restart its nuclear program. It announced that it is still very much at war with Israel, that this ceasefire is tactical and limited, and that it will take vengeance at the time it decides. This is par for the course for Iranian leaders:
- “An Israeli source told the Jerusalem Post that efforts are now underway to establish a mechanism and protocols with the US to address Iranian attempts to resume their nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and to determine how the US and Israel will act to thwart such efforts. Meanwhile, Doha is working to revive nuclear talks between the US and Iran. Qatari officials, alongside Trump’s envoy Witkoff, held extensive discussions on the matter on Tuesday evening. Iran has repeatedly stated over the past two weeks that it is ready to engage in talks with the US once Israel halts its attacks.”
These words do not sound like Iran is a defeated power. Yet today President Trump publicly compared the impact of the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites to the end of World War II, when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war.” Of course, the USA has been at war with Iran since 1979. And Israel has been fighting the Shi’ite dictatorship since 1982. This war is by no means ended, but the can is getting kicked down the road. An obscure Russian proverb notes that “a boil is no problem under the other fellow’s armpit.” The armies of jihadi Islam will never cease firing until they can no longer pick up a sword or aim a rifle.
Who remembers the Ukrainians, or the Iranians?
At the conclusion of his Obersalzberg Speech on August 22, 1939 (a week before the German invasion of Poland), Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly said “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” (German: Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?). His point was that the Ottoman Turks had managed to carry out genocide on the Armenians between 1915 and 1917 – between 1 million to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians, while the world for the most part turned a blind eye to this slaughter. Hitler was convinced that this blind eye would similarly ignore his planned Holocaust of the Jewish nation as well.
The war between Russia and Ukraine has seen more than one million Russian military casualties, and over 170,000 Ukrainian military casualties. Even though Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation, some on the woke side of American conservatives have little concern for or interest in Kiev’s dead and wounded. The same may be true regarding some people’s attitudes to Iranians. The largest growth of believers in Yeshua in any country in the world is in Iran. There are between 330,000 to 380-400,000 followers of the Jewish Messiah in Iran. Evangelical Christianity is growing at 19.6% annually, according to Operation World, making Iran the country with the highest annual Evangelical growth rate.
As we pray for Israel (which has been under direct threat from Iran for many years, with civilians being the main targets), perhaps there would be room to also pray for the Iranian people and especially for Iranian followers of Yeshua – for protection, safety, freedom and kingdom fruit. Many Iranians are suffering greatly from the Ayatollah’s iron boot, his torture chambers, and his gallows. Also, there is a small Jewish community of just over 10,000 for whom life is especially hard. Prayers for them are greatly appreciated!
How shall we then pray?
- Pray that Western leaders will receive a divine download regarding Israel’s place and strategic significance in God’s heart
- Pray that divine wisdom, truth, clarity, strategies and discernment be given to the leaders of Israel and the USA as they pursue challenges
- Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.
In Messiah Yeshua,
Avner Boskey
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