How Jaffa Got Its American Colony

In 1866—over a decade before the earliest Zionists founded their first agricultural settlements—a group of 157 Christians from Maine arrived in Jaffa, hoping not just to live in the holy land but also to help the Jews trickling in from Europe learn to farm. When the colony was struck by disease, and several members died, most of the rest returned to the U.S. But a few stayed on and lent their name to a Jaffa neighborhood. Sara Toth Stub explains what motivated George Adams, the colony’s leader:

Adams, a young Methodist preacher who also moonlighted as an actor in Shakespeare plays, heard an early follower of Joseph Smith’s newly formed Church of Latter-Day Saints preach in New York. The sermon about gathering up people from around the world to come to America, a promised land that would soon see the return of Jesus and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, greatly excited Adams, and he joined the new church.

“I was called by the spirit of prophecy,” Adams wrote to a friend at the time. . . .

This religious fervor was not unusual for its day; it came at a time in American history when many preachers made a connection between settling the new land of the American West and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. . . . Adding to this excitement were reports of European Jews beginning to immigrate to Palestine, then under the control of the Ottoman empire, which many Christians in these circles saw as fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of the return to Zion.

Adams eventually left the Mormons and started his own Church of the Messiah, with a goal of helping Jews return to the land of Israel. He established several congregations around New England, as well as a newspaper heavily devoted to news about Palestine. He also emphasized that he did not want to convert Jews to Christianity—he wanted them to return to Israel as Jews. . . .

After losing twelve members to dysentery, the colonists continued with their project, eventually moving onto the land Adams had selected and building houses. This gave hope to the early Zionist settlers in Jaffa, who pointed to the American Christians as an example of what Jewish immigrants should strive to do.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Christian Zionism, History & Ideas, Jaffa, Mormonism, Zionism

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF