Sugar Land Bible Church

Dr. Andy Woods: As I mentioned during the announcements, Olivier Melnick is with us again. He is no stranger to most of us. We've seen him several times and are always glad to have him back to talk to us.

Let me tell you just a little bit more about him. He is the founder and executive director of Shalom in Messiah Ministries. He holds a BA from Moody Bible Institute and a master's degree from Dallas Seminary. Olivier is the son of Holocaust survivors from France.

He is an international speaker and an authority on the topic of antisemitism and the author of seven books. Shalom in Messiah seeks to educate and mobilize Christians to fight the longest hatred with hope and prayer that this endeavor will allow us to rebuild bridges between Christians and Jews and to lead them to the Messiah. Olivier is married to Ellen, who led him to put his trust in Yeshua. Please welcome Olivier.

Olivier Melnick: Shalom. Good morning. What a joy being here. Thank you for your support. I've known Pastor Andy for a long time. We go back probably 20 years. Your church has been a supporter of our ministry in prayer and financial support. It's been wonderful. Coming here is always like coming back home and seeing familiar faces.

Keep praying for us. I'll give you some specifics later in the message on how you can pray for us because I've got an upcoming trip departing on the 19th of August for ten days in Israel with my wife and our VP of Operations. We're going to be doing some work with the IDF and other ministries.

For those of you who don't know about our ministry, we exist to expose and fight antisemitism, equip and mobilize Christians, and lead Jewish people to Messiah Yeshua. We have a lot of resources on our website, including the books that I usually bring with me. The most recent one is *Antisemitism in the End Times*, which includes October 7th, 2023, and beyond. You definitely want to get a copy of that if you don't already have one.

The title of this message is "A Progressive Conditioning Towards the Destruction of Israel." I wanted to share with you something that I discovered recently in my research and also equip you to debunk the lies. It's one thing to say Israel is not guilty of this or that, but people who are anti-Zionist and anti-Israel will throw stuff at you and you'll go, "I don't believe that." They'll say, "Prove me wrong," and we can't. We just know it's a lie, but we don't know how to debunk it.

I'm going to talk to you about four progressive things that happened over the last several decades to take us to where we are right now. They continue, but they build upon the previous one, and they're all lies. I'm going to tell you about what it really means, how it's been misused, and how we can debunk it biblically.

The challenge that we have right now is that if you say anything against Israel, people say you're antisemitic. Melanie Phillips, a great political analyst, said antisemitism has been reframed as an attempt by Jews to mask their own conspiracy against the public good and to conceal the crimes of the State of Israel. People are saying we the Jews accuse anybody of antisemitism the minute they say anything remotely negative about the Jews or Israel. That is not true. If you say something that's valid, it should be accepted at face value. Too often, criticism against Israel or against the Jews is rooted in antisemitism.

There's been a shift. The week of July 2nd through the 9th showed a global breakdown of incidents against Jews in one week. 64% were done by the far left. I would have never guessed that it was that high. 25% were by the far right and 11% by Islamist-inspired people. I would have thought that Islamist-inspired would have been higher. This is one week, so you have to compare, but there is a shift.

The far left and the woke right are working against Israel in ways that we've never seen before. There is a convergence of events that shows us that the biblical days of Zechariah 12:3, when the whole world will go against Jerusalem, are here. A survey was done in early 2025 by the ADL. The results said that at the time, 46% of all adults in the world harbored some kind of antisemitic sentiment. We're past the 50% mark now. We're halfway through the fulfillment of Zechariah 12:3. Keep in mind that Zechariah 12:9 says that God will go after all those who go after Israel.

Acts of vandalism against Jews just for the sake of hurting the community have increased. For instance, in a suburb of Paris, 12 Torah scrolls were stolen from a synagogue. If you take the Torah scrolls from the synagogue, you cripple the whole synagogue because without their Torah scroll, the Jewish community cannot do services. They are very expensive. They probably were thrown away or destroyed.

There is definitely no Little Israel on the New York City immigrant enclaves that Mamdani published. There are all kinds of things: Little Guyana in Queens, Little India, Little Odessa. Number 25 is Little Palestine. No Little Italy, no Little Israel. This guy Mamdani is the poster boy for antisemitism right now. He is the canary in the gold mine. This is a warning to America.

Hundreds rallied in New York City to condemn Mamdani after stabbing attacks. Jews don't feel safe in New York because they're not. New York has the largest community of Jews in America. Anti-Jewish hate crimes surged 53% in New York as Jewish leaders point to Mamdani. That's in New York. What about the rest of the world?

You've heard about what happened in that little border town in North Africa by Morocco that's actually a part of Spain. It took only three days for the memes and the accusations to come online. This was initiated by Israel to send those Muslim young men. If you saw the videos, it's 99% young men of army age, the fighting age. Then you interview them and they say they come for tourism. Have we gotten so stupid? In Montreal, a kosher restaurant was burned to the ground.

What I've shown you here, these images, 10 years ago would have been the result of one year of research. This is a few days. Other things are happening, but nobody reports them because no Jews, no news. They are going not after Israel, not after the Israelis, but after the Jews. When Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, the Hamas sons called their mom and dad on the phone. They didn't say, "I killed Israelis." They showed the destruction and said, "I killed Jews." They are after the Jews because it's satanic. They want to destroy Israel.

This progressive growth against Israel comes in four words that each built upon the previous one. We are definitely in the final stage. I look at it as Israel being slowly destroyed like the proverbial frog in the pot when you put the frog and you turn the water real slow. Those are colonization, occupation, apartheid, and genocide.

Right now, you probably hear it all over the news: genocide, genocidal country, genocidal people. They say they're killing the Palestinians and starving the people in Gaza. Children are dying of starvation. Before that, we had colonization, occupation, and apartheid. It still happens, and they are all lies, but it's grown to the point that now everybody is hearing about genocide. A lot of people are buying it because they're not doing any research. They just think it's the truth.

Let's go through each one. First, colonization. Definition A: the establishing of a colony, subjugation of a people or area, especially as an extension of state. Or B: migration to and settlement in an inhabited or uninhabited area. Israel is being accused of colonization, settler colonization. There might have been some slight other examples in the history of mankind that maybe happened but were not as bad as Israel, like the French Empire that took over half of Africa and places all over the world.

Nobody said anything, nobody is saying anything, except maybe for the people that were displaced at the time. If the French Empire is not enough, how about the British Empire on which the sun never sets? Because there's always somewhere in the world you go that is owned by the British Empire. Australia, India, Canada. Nobody seems to be bothered by those big colonizations, but Israel, which is not colonizing because this is the land given to them by God, is accused of colonization.

There was another definition: migration to and settlement in an inhabited or uninhabited area. There was a letter that was sent by FDR. He was not the best friend of the Jews during World War II, but at that point, he tried to do something. He wrote a letter to the US State Department to ask for Jewish colonization because of European persecution. He asked for any information the State Department had in regards to possible places for Jewish colonization in any part of the world. He was asking because of persecution, asking for relocation.

That was November 26, 1938, which is 16 days after the events of November 9th and 10th of 1938, Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Synagogues were destroyed and Jewish people were killed, which is recognized by historians as the starting point of the Holocaust. FDR saw that and said this is not good, the Jews are going to suffer more damage, we've got to do something if we can.

Then there's a letter known as the Cambon letter from France that was written just a few months before the Balfour Declaration was written by Lord Balfour and given to Lord Rothschild to explain to them that there was a right to go back to the ancestral biblical land of Israel. It says it would be a deed of justice and a reparation to assist by the protection of the allied powers in the rebirth of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago. This man, Jules Cambon, recognizes that Israel has a right to exist. That's 1917.

I want to talk about the number one person who accused Israel of colonization. He's dead now, but his name was Yasser Arafat. He continually accused Israel of colonizing Palestinian land. I want to show you a picture of the National Museum of Palestinian History I just discovered. This is big because people say Palestine didn't exist, they didn't have a language, they didn't have a culture, it's all Arabic, it's a myth. I want to show you a picture of the recently taken National Museum of Palestinian History. That's what you can find if you go there.

That won't stop those who try to promote the idea that the Palestinians are displaced people. It can even be subliminal. Most of you probably never knew what I'm about to show you on the next slide. I want you to notice the keffiyeh, the head covering that Arafat made so famous. Did you know that he was wearing it not on his head and in the back of his head like most people in the Middle East do, but he's the only person who ever wore it on his head and then pinned to his jacket in the shape of Israel? Every picture you see of him, he wears it in the shape of Israel. Nobody wore it like this before him or after him.

The Grand Mufti of Israel is related to him. They're cousins, or he is the nephew of the Grand Mufti. They're related. It's interesting because Arafat was a Palestinian, but he was born in Egypt. How do you reconcile that? You can't, but who bothers with facts anymore?

In 1967, after the Six-Day War, Arafat said, "Our basic aim is to liberate the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River." They don't even call it Israel. "We are not concerned with what took place in June 1967 or in eliminating the consequences of the June war. The Palestinian revolution's basic concern is the uprooting of this Zionist entity from our land and liberating it."

Then in 1974 at the UN, because he was invited to speak at the UN, he said, "Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to carry out settler colonialism, so too were destitute oppressed European Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leaders. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression. They became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination." I give you the source so you know that I'm not making it up.

Arafat was a big pusher of this accusation of colonization. When you think about those four steps, colonization is trying to grab land that is not yours. Once you have it, you keep it and it's yours. In most cases, it remains that way and the world has learned to live with that. Colonization is "we expand." Then occupation is next. Not only we expand our territory, but we send our people and we occupy and live in those lands that we have taken. Then apartheid is the idea that it's not only that we occupy, we want to push people out because we really want it to be all for ourselves. Then if that doesn't work, we'll kill the people: genocide. That's the progression that Israel is accused of.

Biblically debunking colonization, we read Genesis 12:1-3, that's the promise that God made to Abraham and his descendants. He ratified that promise in Genesis 15:18-21 when He gave the boundaries to Abraham. When Abraham was put to sleep and the Shekinah Glory walked through the split animals, God made the covenant with Abraham and his descendants. Abraham did not walk through, so he could not break his part of the covenant. That's why it's unilateral and unconditional, which is so critical and foundational to so much of our Bible.

He gave the land there of the Kenite, the Kenizzite, the Kadmonite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Rephaim, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite, and the Jebusite. That has never been fulfilled. It will be fulfilled in the Messianic Kingdom once the King returns to establish His kingdom, not before. That will be not the size of New Jersey, but the size of twice the size of the state of Texas.

Genesis 17:7-8 says, "I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you. I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God."

Ezekiel 36:24 says, "For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land." Guess what? It's happening today because the Jews are in diaspora in the nations, and He is gathering all of the Jews to go back into the land to return to the land.

It's happening right now. I believe the two prophecies being fulfilled today are Ezekiel 36, the Jews coming back in unbelief, and Zechariah 12:3, the whole world turning against Israel. Those are the two that you can take to the bank, and it will not change. You'll continue to have Jews returning and the whole world turning against the Jews.

Friends, in a sense, they're connected because God can use things to make us move sometimes out of our comfort zone. I'm not saying that He is the creator of antisemitism, but He will allow things to happen so that we will make a move that's better for us. Israel was born in '48, three years after the Holocaust at the end of the war. There's a connection there. Same with today, this explosion of antisemitism is causing a lot of Jews to move to Israel. I think there's a connection.

Number two, occupation. Legal definition: taking control of a piece of land which belongs to someone else. Examples: Ukraine and Russia right now, is there any occupation? Yes. Syria, Turkey is controlling and occupying parts of Syria. In Congo, the Rwandan rebels. In Haiti, some gangs. It doesn't have to be another people group; it can be all kinds of different scenarios. There are plenty of places in the world where there is actual, real physical occupation, but guess what? Nobody seems to care. Why? No Jews, no news. That's the sad reality.

The media doesn't help. There is this global perception that is basically blinded by hatred. Look at this picture. If you're old enough, you will look at the picture and you go, "I see what it is." It's Nazi officers surrendering in occupied Paris. Mainstream media today would give you a different caption. They would say something like, "Allies use violence to expel innocent Germans." This is what you see today with Israel. This is what we read in the papers today. Nobody would have bought this 80 years ago, but this is what people are just stupidly saying. It boggles my mind, but that's what you can compare it to.

There are groups that are not helping. One of them that was started with good intention is known as Amnesty International. They were started to bring justice to the world and to people that could not defend themselves. But now they basically are pro-Palestinian, drinking the Kool-Aid. They've become a very bad organization; do not support them.

They wrote about Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory. They say since Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, first began in 1967, Israel's ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant institutionalized discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights. This military occupation is a key component of a cruel system of apartheid that oppresses and dominates all Palestinians whose rights Israel controls. This includes people living in the occupied territory in Israel and the diaspora who are not allowed to return home.

I could spend the rest of today unpacking this paragraph and telling all the lies. There's about 20 lies in that paragraph. People don't pay attention. They just go, "Oh yeah, that's really good." They just put a report out recently. It said Israel continued to commit the crimes of genocide and apartheid. It says Israel's genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip entered its third year.

Genocide is not happening, number one. Number two, there's no occupation of Gaza for the last three years, and there was none since 2005. So don't tell me about occupied Gaza. In 2005, about 9,000 or so from Israel got out of the Gaza Strip and let about 1.3 million Palestinians self-rule in the area. The result was miles and miles of tunnels with money that could have been used to build a beautiful city, a beautiful area, even a Mediterranean Sea beach resort. Thriving. Instead, all tunnels. Why? What was the result? October 7, 2023.

So there's really no occupation of Gaza. There's no occupation anywhere when it's your land. You don't occupy your own land. The promise was from Abraham to Isaac, not Ishmael. "Sojourn in this land and I will be with you and bless you, for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands and I will establish the oath which I swore to your father Abraham. I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and I will give your descendants all these lands and by your descendants all the nations of the earth shall be blessed."

Jewish people have blessed the world in so many ways. To Abraham and then to Isaac through Abraham, but not Ishmael. What does that make Ishmael? It just makes him somebody who does not receive the promise made to Israel, but it does not make him a bad person per se. The Arabs who come from Ishmael, they all need Jesus. All people need Jesus the same way. So I'm not saying that there are better and bad people, I'm just saying that the son of the promise is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through the Jewish line. That's God's prerogative. Take it up with God.

Isaac to Jacob, not Esau. Genesis 28: "The Lord stood above it and said, 'I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.' It couldn't be any more clear. 'The land on which you lie I will give it to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth and you will be spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south and in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed.'" Continued idea of giving this land to the Jewish people and the Jews blessing the world.

Deuteronomy 1:8: "I have placed the land before you, go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to them and their descendants after them." For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land.

Something I want to tell you about Jewish land ownership. Muslims will take as much as they can up to a certain point, 100% of the planet, then no more. Then it becomes a global Muslim Islamic caliphate. That's the goal: more, more, more. The Bible teaches specifically to Israel that that is not the way to go. How do we know that? God gave the boundaries. They've been given to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob through the 12 tribes.

Look at this in Deuteronomy 2:5 and 2:9: "And the Lord spoke to me saying, 'You have circled this mountain long enough, now turn north and command the people saying you will pass through the territory of your brothers, the sons of Esau who live in Seir and they will be afraid of you. So be very careful, do not provoke them, for I will not give you any of their land even as little as a footstep because I have given Mount Seir to Esau as a possession.'"

Verse 9: "Then the Lord said to me, 'Do not harass Moab, nor provoke them to war, for I will not give you any of their land as a possession because I have given Ar to the sons of Lot as a possession.'" God is telling the Jewish people here, I've given you boundaries but don't even think of taking something that is outside of those boundaries. Not even a footstep. I will not give it to you. God is very precise. His word is His word, His promise is His promise, but He won't give more. It's not an open offer to take as much as you want. Islamic theology says take as much as you want and try as many times as you can until it's yours. That's very different. Biblically, the land boundaries exist; they've been promised to God. This is not colonization, this is not occupation, this is being in the land that is biblically given to the Jewish people. That belongs to God, by the way.

Number three, apartheid. A policy that governed relations between South Africa's white minority and non-white majority for much of the latter half of the 20th century, sanctioning racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-whites. That's what apartheid was. Jay Sekulow's definition: "Apartheid is a combination of two words, the Afrikaans word for separate, apart, and the Dutch suffix 'heid' indicating a state of being. Hence, apartheid means the state of being apart." That was a real thing in South Africa. It was a terrible thing. It was a racial discrimination.

In 1973, the United Nations General Assembly declared apartheid a crime. Right there, they were right. They're not always right. They've become the United Nothings, but that was right. 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: apartheid is oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group. It's racial. It was all about race.

Israel is being accused of apartheid against Palestinians. Let me tell you, there are 2 million Arabs living inside Israel and they have a good life. I'm friends with some of them. There's a family I'm very friends with, they've become friends over the years. They call themselves Palestinians. They know I'm Jewish, they know I believe in Jesus. They're in the old city in Jerusalem, they have little shops, and we've learned to be very good friends. I buy stuff from them, I help their business, and I do tell them about Jesus. They live in Israel and they have a good life. The best life that Arabs have in most of the Middle East is in Israel, and many will tell you.

I've told you the story before about one of our tour members who fell right in front of Damascus Gate and hurt her back. I took her to Hadassah Hospital. We got to the triage, and the triage nurse was a Muslim young woman with the whole hijab and everything. She says the final word on who's going to go next to be seen by a doctor, and she has a lot of power. If she wanted to do damage, she could, but she was trusted because she could be trusted, because they knew her. It's just one of 2 million. It's not about race.

But they say, "Well, you put a wall, you separate." Measures taken to defend against attacks by Palestinian terrorists, such as fences or security checkpoints, do not constitute apartheid. It's security, it's safety, it's to protect the people. People go in and out, and that wall, by the way, is not a wall everywhere; sometimes it's just a chain-link fence. I just wish that we could look at other parts of the world and say, "See, it's not just Israel putting a wall for protection."

The Egyptian government is building a massive wall between Gaza and Egypt. Look at the size of that wall. Have you seen this on the news? You're not going to hear about it. Why? Because they don't want any terrorists to come to Egypt. Do they know something we don't? Double standards. This started building decades ago by building it 16 feet underground because they were afraid that the Palestinians would dig tunnels to smuggle arms. Again, did they know something we didn't? And then it went up and then it went up, and now it's that big of a wall. It continues to be built. They want no Palestinians into Egypt. You don't hear it on the news.

You want the truth? Go to Israel. You're not going to believe what you see. It would be nice if outside of the Middle East we could find walls to protect. Oh, the protective wall around Vatican City is 39 feet tall. This would make a great movie. This was built in the 9th century to protect the Vatican from pirates. They want to protect because I think they've got a little money in the Vatican. That wall is still there to define the boundaries of Vatican City. Walls to define boundaries are not a bad thing, as long as it's not Israel. Double standards.

Look at this: there were more than 3,000 attacks that originated from Judea and Samaria, that's the West Bank, from September 2000 to 2006 that resulted in the death of 1,622 people from terrorist attacks. From '07 to '22, that's 16 years total, when most of the existing fence that we see today was up, there were 141 attacks resulting in the death of 100 people. 1,622 in six years, 100 in 16 years. What does that mean? 97% decrease in Israeli death toll. 97% decrease because of that wall. You think it's good? Of course it is. It's not apartheid, it's protection.

Biblically, there is what I call the watchman's obligation. Ezekiel 33:6: "But if the watchman sees a sword coming and does not blow the trumpet and the people are not warned and a sword comes and takes a person from them, he is taken away in his iniquity but his blood I will require from the watchman's hand." There's an obligation for Israel to protect their own people. That's why the wall went up. 97% of lives have been saved over the last few years. It's a drastic difference.

There's also biblical self-defense. I think the best story is found in Esther. The king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil. In 9:5, "Thus the Jews struck all their enemies with a sword, killing and destroying, and they did what they pleased to those who hated them." Self-defense, protection of the people. Build a wall, self-defense if there is an intrusion. Israel has never gone out to kill for the pleasure of killing. That's what the other side does. Israel is always defending herself.

Do you know that the day after October 7th, within a day or two, Israel started to retaliate to defend Israel, and October 7th was forgotten? It was like Israel is killing poor Palestinians. That's all the headlines we got on mainstream media. No Jews, no news.

The final one is genocide. UN definition from 1948: why 1948? Because the word was coined right after the Holocaust for the purpose of defining the Holocaust. Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Let me give you some examples of real genocides in history: the Holocaust, 12 million people, 6 million Jews, one and a half million children within the 6 million Jews. The Rwandan genocide, 800,000 Tutsis. Armenian genocide, one and a half million Armenians. The Cambodian genocide, 3 million people. The Holodomor genocide, 2.5 to 7.5 million Ukrainians in the early 30s. Bashar al-Assad in Syria or Khamenei in Iran, 40 to 50,000 people of their own people. Genocide doesn't have to be against another people, it could be against your own people. Case in point: Iran.

The genocide attempt was by Hamas against Israel. We know that. There is a website that you can go to. You cannot access it if you live in Israel; it's blocked. But anywhere else in the world you can access it. I just want to warn you: you will not be able to unsee what you see on that website. There are videos and photos of what happened on October 7th. Some people say, out of respect for the families of the victims, we should not show that stuff. Well, I'm sorry, by showing all the stuff about the Holocaust for the last 80 years, we still have Holocaust deniers today. By not showing anything about what happened three years ago between Hamas shooting at Israel and killing 1,200 Israelis and Jews, we are really helping with the denial that's going to happen a lot quicker.

I want to show you the way that the world is spinning this whole thing about genocide. I want to show you a page of a website that I do all my research on: Wikipedia. Now, I might look at Wikipedia for a birthday of somebody famous, but serious research, I don't trust it that much. They always tell you that it's incomplete or it can be changed. Anybody can change it, really.

I did a search on "genocide." I also did a search on "war" and "famines." A search on "war" was listed by death toll. A search on "famines" was listed by countries and death toll. You do a search on "genocide" and it says, and I circled it in red, "List of genocides in reverse chronological order." Nothing else that I've found is in reverse chronological order. Why is that? People don't even pay attention. It's because if you do a reverse, it allows them to put the one that they think is the most recent, which is the Gaza genocide. Subliminally, when you get on that page, boom, Gaza genocide. That's the first thing you see. Then your eyes go to "ongoing systematic destruction, intent to destroy Gaza's population in whole or in part through extermination, the deliberate killing of children, making up about 30% of those killed, starvation of children, malnutrition." We'll get back to this in a second. This is a twisting of the order just to spin the story so you are indoctrinated, you're conditioned to see this.

50,000 to 60,000 babies were born in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. If the Jews are doing genocide in the Gaza Strip, if Israel is doing it, they need to find a better method because 60,000 babies have been born. 600 to 800 trucks enter Gaza daily. 70% of these trucks carry food amounting to more than five times Gaza's internationally defined nutritional requirements. By March 25th, Israel had provided 1.3 million tons of humanitarian aid to Gazans, not to mention medical stuff. The only thing that they refrain from sending is stuff that could be used in a bad way for black market drugs and stuff like that. But providing so much.

This just came out literally either the day before yesterday or yesterday. This is so good because for them to agree to that, it had to be like there's a smoking gun and they absolutely cannot deny it. UNICEF, a United Nations agency, did a coordinated survey and found that 1.3% of children under five in the Gaza Strip were acutely malnourished, a rate lower than those recorded in several neighboring Middle Eastern countries. Acute malnutrition affected 2.3% in Jordan—no war in Jordan, by the way—3.3% in Egypt, 3.9% in Saudi Arabia, 4.2% in Iran, 12.2% in Syria. Yet in Gaza, 1.3%.

So UNICEF had to agree there's no famine in Gaza. This is huge because I mean, now just mark my words, watch and wait a couple of days and see how they're going to spin that. It's kind of like the idea when global warming didn't work anymore, it became climate change. Climate change can go up, down, it doesn't matter, it's just change. The reality is there's no famine in Gaza. They're not killing babies; they are born. There is malnutrition, but this is a war, for goodness' sake.

You know how much Israel is doing to prevent civilians from death. You know it already. They send leaflets, they send messages, they call, they send emails. They say, "By tomorrow by noon we're going to bomb this building because there are arms under it and rockets, so we're going to bomb it. Please get out." And Hamas keeps them from leaving, uses them as a shield. No other country in the history of mankind in modern warfare has ever done what Israel is doing to protect enemy civilians. Same with Lebanon. I was in northern Israel a year ago and we were looking at Lebanon. My Israeli friend who lives literally one kilometer from the border goes, "See that destruction? Hezbollah is shooting at us from all over. They've taken all those villages and they're basically shooting at us. We know pretty much where it's going to land on what roof."

I go, "Wait a minute, on the right side over there, all the homes are perfect." The IDF did not destroy those because they're occupied by Christian families or Lebanese families. Don't touch them; they're civilians. And it stops and it resumes later. War casualties happen, people carpet bomb places all the time, but it's never an issue. No Jews, no news.

Now, how can you help? We want to make sure at this time we get what I call "skin in the game." The word SKIN makes an acronym for Security, Kingdom, Gospel, Investment, and Nearness.

If you know a pastor, talk to them about this program that we started. Send them to our website to click on the "No Synagogue Left Behind." In a nutshell, it's a list of instructions. A pastor can call a rabbi of a synagogue near them and say, "I'm the pastor of Church of the [fill in the blank]. We have a security team and our security team is helping our flock on Sundays, but really on Friday night for Shabbat or Saturday morning or high holidays in a Jewish community, they are not busy and on a revolving basis we would love to offer our security team for your synagogue free of charge. We just want to bless you with protection because we love you, because we read our Bible, because we understand the place of Israel in God's plan." Rabbi to pastor is the way the communication goes. This is proven to work. Several churches are doing it right now. Some synagogues have said, "Come every week, we want you." It's a great, easy way to provide security and to rebuild bridges and to really earn the right to speak and give you a chance to share with the Jewish community.

We also have the gospel on our website. We have a series of videos that I did with Pastor Tom Hughes. We answer all the questions. They are good for Christians to be equipped. They're also very appropriate for Jewish people who are not believers but who are searching. They are safe. I made them in a way that they could be used for Christians to educate them and for Jewish people who are genuinely searching.

The last one is the ministry of presence. We supply the IDF. You can support us by going to our ministry fund on our website. 100% goes to Israel. We buy life jackets. I tell people all the time, we have to keep them alive, we have to save them physically so they can get saved spiritually. So we have to keep them alive. We buy supplies, little ambulance ATV vehicles. We do it because of people like you. We are buying equipment for the IDF because the Israeli government gives most of their supplies to the Air Force, then they supply the army, and then the reservists. Right now, a lot of them instead of serving a week or two a year are serving for like 150-200 days.

We're going back in 10 days and we're trying to figure out a way to cater to their PTSD needs. It's a real problem right now. Suicide and divorce are through the roof in Israel right now because of the war. Pray that God would give us wisdom. By going and bringing supplies, we meet with the IDF soldiers. I'm going to do a barbecue on the 25th of August on an IDF base and I'm going to have a chance to tell them about God. Is it dangerous? I mean, they're in the middle of a war and I'm on a base. I'm very protected. Every time I go, I end up in a shelter once or twice. It's just part of the game.

Let me wrap up with this. We have a YouTube channel that has a lot of teaching and a lot of interviews. About a month and a half ago I thought, "What do I have to lose?" There's a guy that I follow online named Hillel Fuld. He moved to Israel from America 35 years ago. He is married with five kids and he is a really great advocate against antisemitism. He pushes for Jews to go back to Israel and he's very connected. He lost his brother in 2018 in a terrorist attack. I emailed him, introduced myself, and I thought, "Orthodox Jew, religious, he will never answer." He answered and he said, "Yeah, let's do the podcast. Pick a date."

We recorded the podcast about two weeks ago. It's called "Ezekiel 36." It's Hillel and I for 45 minutes. We're talking and he's asking me, "Olivier, how come you're not making Aliyah?" I said, "Well, as a Messianic Jew believing in Jesus, they will stop me from making Aliyah." He says, "I've never heard that before." I said, "Hillel, seriously, it's a known fact. You find out you're a Jewish believer, they say you're a Christian, now you can't come. You lost that right." And he said, "I've never heard that before. I will do more research and privately I will get back to you."

And then he pauses and he goes, "Okay, in two or three minutes, could you tell me what it means to be Jewish and believe in Jesus?" I live for this. I started talking about the Messianic prophecies and I said, "It's not fair, we don't have time." He goes, "You're right." He goes, "Granted, we'll have to talk about this again. But will you allow me, if I listen to what you think Jesus is the Messiah, will you allow me to tell you why I think He's not?" Very genuine. I just loved our conversation. I said, "Absolutely, that's the way it should go. We compare notes about the Messiah." He said, "Okay, great." I said, "One more. I don't want to do it on Zoom. Next time I come to Israel, I want to have lunch with you and we do it together." "Done," he said. August 27th, lunch at noon.

Keep me in your prayers. This man is a great influencer. He has pictures of him with Netanyahu. He knows everybody. But he's asking me, "What does it mean to be a Jew believing in Jesus?" This is happening in Israel and it's going to happen more because of our ministry of presence.

I want to encourage you to continue supporting our ministry and praying for us. This is what we do in Israel, which is a big part of our ministry. We wanted to equip Christians to rescue and shelter their Jewish friends. It's still there, but we changed the process. We don't put people on a network because we realized there were too many holes in this and security was becoming a big problem.

Instead, I get you involved. I send you a packet, a little packet with books in it and tracts and instructions on how to be a Schindler or a Corrie ten Boom to your Jewish friends, Jewish neighbor, Jewish co-worker. You know somebody Jewish or you know somebody who knows somebody Jewish. Scanned this QR code and put your name and address and we'll send you the packet. You need this at your house because this is going to equip you to witness to Jewish people. You get one of my books for free, you get another book of Messianic prophecies, a couple of tracts, and some instructions. If you need it, scan this, you'll get it, and we won't ask you for anything. But you need to get this, you need to be involved, you need skin in the game.

And by the way, also pray for me because as I'm going to Israel, these are Old Testament full Bibles with the Old and the New Testament in Hebrew. Our goal is to put one of these in the jacket of every single soldier that we meet. Not as a bullet protector, although it could, but as a door to Yeshua the Messiah. Amen. Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for this patient group listening to me, Lord, and for this forgiving group. Lord, thank you for this church and what they mean to us. Bless Sugar Land Bible Church, Lord, and thank you for Pastor Andy and his love for Israel and his understanding of scripture. Such a blessing to me in our friendship. Continue to bless him and his family and this church. Thank you for using us and blessing us with the opportunity to be on the right side of history, to be on Your side, God, and to bless Israel. Lord, we want more Jewish people to come to a saving knowledge of Yeshua. So show us where, show us when, show us who. We will be there. We will say what Isaiah said, "Hineni," "Here I am," and we will just obey the call. In Yeshua's name we pray. Amen. Thank you.