"Best In The World . . . I've Never Had A Positive Encounter With Mossad."

John Kiriakou, who was a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, has given numerous interviews covering his experiences at the CIA and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in recent years. In the one with Dalton Fisher embedded above, he talks about Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, introducing it by saying, Best in the world . . . Universally negative. Universally negative. I've never had a positive encounter with Mossad. I have never met a CIA officer who has had a positive encounter with Mossad. Because the Mossad deosn't give two shits what you think, or what you are trying to purpose on in your job. They care only about Israel. . . . Because for them, it's an issue of survival."

This gave me a new perspective on Rabbi Pesach Wolicki's interpretation of Old Testament prophecies in the context of the Abrahamic Covenant, which Catholic and Main Line Protestant theologians acknowledge is, like the New Covenant, eternal and thus still in effect. In Wolicki's view of Zionism, the Jews were never intended to be without a homeland forever; there are passages in Isaiah and elsewhere that predict a return.

Secular interpretations of Zionism, even those that suggest the Jews deserve a homeland in consequence of the Holocaust, don't place this, as Wolicki does, in the realm of eschatalogy. It's possible to view modern Israel as a nice thing done by the British and the US for the Jews, who'd after all gotten a bad deal, and they deserved a homeland, and for whatever reason when Madagascar or various other locations didn't work out, it just happened to be within the Old Testament borders of Israel.

Wolicki and other religious Zionists simply don't see a coincidence. This is the reestablishment of Old Testament Israel, with what appears to be the exception that the returning Jews don't intend to make the mistakes of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. And they're doing it in the context of the Abrahamic Covenant. An example is the Battle of Rephidim (Exodus 17: 10-13), where the Israelites fought the Amalekites shortly after escaping Egypt.

While Joshua led the Israelite army on the battlefield, Moses stood on a nearby hilltop holding the staff of God in the air. When Moses’s arms grew tired, Aaron and Hur had him sit on a rock and held his arms up on either side until sunset, allowing Joshua to secure the victory. It's the responsibility of the Jews to fight for the homeland with the assistance of the Almighty, and when they falter, as they did when their spies reported that the inhabitants of the Promised Land were big and strong, and they refused to fight, bad things happened.

In short, there's little in the Old Testament to warm the hearts of "juist war" theorists. Cities are repeatedly burned to the ground, with rvery inhabitant slaughtered, including women, children, and animals. Edward Feser maintains it's a terrible sin for Donald Trump even to threaten such a thing, but this is what the Almighty tells Jonah to do to Nineveh. In fact, the difference between the God of the Old Teatament and the God of the New was one of the first problems for the early Church:

Marcionism was an early Christian dualistic belief system originating with the teachings of Marcion of Sinope in Rome around 144. Marcion was an early Christian theologian, evangelist, and an important figure in early Christianity.

. . . Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus into the world as the savior was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent deity, the Demiurge or creator deity, identified with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible.

But this was a heresy; ther teaching of the Church is that they are the same God. The problem gets bigger, it seems to me, with both the Abrahamic and the New Covenants still in effect, and modern Israel still conducts its military and intelligence affairs very much as though it has an obligation to the Almighty to occupy the land God has given it. At this site, a visitor asks,

I have heard a lot of anti-Israel sentiment from my friends who support the Palestinians. A good client of mine questions the validity of Israel’s existence, saying: “How do you justify inhabiting an already populated land through force? How can you contemplate the horrors of the Holocaust and then inflict such suffering on the Arabs?”

It gives the answer,

In our time, the Jews have returned to the Land of Israel on the grounds that their ancestors not only bought this land, but were promised it by God. Moreover, the League of Nations was aware of your friend's claims, and yet they declared Israel to be the homeland of the Jewish people in 1922. The United Nations did the same in 1947. And yet the Jewish claim to the land is far deeper than any political vote by the nations of the world.

On one hand, modern Israel has been one of rhe countries that works most assiduously to avoid civilian casualties. On the other, particularly when it involved the Abrahamic Covenant, the Almighty was never a "just war" advocate. I asked Chrome AI mode, "How do 'just war' theorists accommodate all the terrible destruction God visits on cities like Jericho in the Old Testament?" It answered,

Just war theorists -- who typically argue that war should be defensive, limited, and last resort -- handle the extreme violence of Old Testament (OT) narratives like Jericho (Joshua 6) by separating them from human-initiated warfare.

The central justification is that these were not wars initiated by human choice, but specific, divine commands. Just war theorist Augustine argued that when God directly orders destruction, it is an exception to the usual, strict rules of war. In this view, it is a “holy war” (or cherem) rather than a “just war,” where God, not man, is the ultimate judge.

But this creates an exception not just for ancient Israel, but for modern Israel, insofar as the modern state is a re-establishment of the land promised in the Abrahamic Covenant. This may be part of the deep reservation John Kiriakou expresses over Mossad -- they're good, but they're maybe too good.

But the bottom line is simply that the God of the Abrahamic Covenant is the same God as the one in the New Covenant, and by extension, some acts in violation of "just war" theory must be accommodated in certain circumstances. I don't see how to get around that.