Wars of Israel with Dr. Kurt Jefferson

Part 2

Well, welcome to today’s episode of Christ in Prophecy, coming to you from the Promised Land of Kentucky. Actually, in all seriousness, although I love to travel to the Promised Land and share the wonders of what God is doing right there in Israel, I’m able to be in Lexington, Kentucky, today with a very special guest.

My guest today is Dr. Kurt Jefferson, a college professor and former dean who has a doctorate in political science. And his latest book is entitled, The Wars of Israel. And it caught my eye for a number of reasons we’ll discuss together today. Well, Kurt, welcome to Christ in Prophecy.

Kurt Jefferson: Thank you, Tim. Great to be with you.

Tim Moore: Well, glad to have you here in Lexington, Kentucky. You now call yourself a Kentuckian. You live in Louisville. You spent 24 years at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. And some of our viewers may not remember, but that’s where Winston Churchill in 1946 delivered his Sinews of Peace where he talked about an iron curtain descending over Eastern Europe. So I have great admiration both for that speech, Mr. Churchill, and appreciation for Westminster College.

Kurt Jefferson: Yeah, Tim, it was great working there for nearly 25 years. I had a great experience teaching international relations on the campus where Churchill gave that important speech. And we have the longest contiguous piece of the Berlin Wall on that campus. It’s pretty exciting. But working in the context, or in the shadow of that speech, I had a really good experience meeting a lot of statesmen, a lot of leaders, a lot of politicians who educated me and helped me understand more about the context. I think my best moment was getting to interview Churchill’s daughter, Lady Mary Soames, on C-SPAN in 2006. And she actually talked about–I asked her directly, “What was Sir Winston’s favorite Scripture verse?” And his favorite Scripture verse she said was, “Be angry and sin not, don’t let the sunshine go down on your wrath.” And she would always talk about that verse in regard to her dad never wanting to end the day with her mom having a negative fallout. So he quoted that verse often.

Tim Moore: Well, obviously Ephesians what? 4, I think 26. You know, like you, with your degree in international politics, political science, I should say, I always had a fascination with politics. And that’s what led me to serve in that realm for 13 years in the Kentucky legislature. What drew you to study politics as an academic pursuit?

Kurt Jefferson: Well, I’ve been asked to run for office a few times, and I appreciate your service. I just decided to go more the academic route and teach international relations and European politics and those types of topics. But one of the nice things about the career I’ve had over 30 years’ teaching has been the ability to meet a lot of statesmen.

So I had the opportunity in 1998 to meet Lech Walesa who was a Nobel Prize winner in 1983. And he also was the individual who put the first crack in the wall of the Soviets and the Berlin Wall. And so that was a great thing.

And then I taught in France in 2010, and I got to meet a French farmer who was also a horse breeder, a thoroughbred breeder. We’re sitting in the Bluegrass State there. But this individual now is the Prime Minister of France. His name is Francois Bayrou, and he’s under President Macron there in that country.

Tim Moore: Wow. You know, it’s amazing to me, even being from western Kentucky, that the Lord’s allowed me to cross paths with people I would never have imagined even in my tenure, both in politics, in the military, and now in ministry. You know, your book, and let’s get to that right now, because The Wars of Israel was a fascinating read to me. It is from an academic perspective, and I learned so much. And your book opens with a chronology from 1896 forward. You talk about how Theodor Herzl was the journalist and author who was a leading voice for Zionism in the 19th century. And then you provide some chronological background, but your introduction makes it clear that the impetus behind this book, at least for you, was the Hamas attack on Israel in October of 2023.

Kurt Jefferson: Yes. I really wrote the book and felt the leading of the Lord in writing it, in terms of making sure that individuals understood the importance of October 7th. It ends up being really for Israelis, and we’ll talk a little bit more about this, I think, as we go through this discussion, the 9/11 for the state of Israel. And it’s a very important moment. And so what I tried to do was to explain that with the advent of the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas in 1987, you’re starting to see in The Wars of Israel, starting in 1948, all the way into the 1980s, you saw more of a nationalistic perspective on wars. Now, you’re starting to see the importance of religious and spiritual things in the conflict between Israel and its neighbors. So these were some of the reasons I got into it. The other thing that’s important is that this war occurred on the Jewish Holy Day of Simchat Torah. And the importance for that is it was the worst day for Jews since April of 1945 when 1,000 Jews were killed in the Bavarian Alps by the Nazis as they were being marched out of Dachau, trying to avoid the Americans coming in to free the camps. So many people do not realize that this is a addendum to the Holocaust. And of course that’s a bold statement, but the reality is, it was really, really a horrible and horrific day for the state of Israel.

Tim Moore: Yeah. Motivated by an antisemitic hatred, that is hard for even a Westerner, let alone an American, to understand. You know, I appreciate the fact that after opening with sort of a brief chronology that moves forward from 1896, your main chapters worked from the present backward to 1948, the establishment of Israel as a modern state. And so you end with the 2024 Israel-Iran War. Now, we’ve seen another chapter of that in 2025, but all the way back to the War of Independence in 1948, and I found that helpful because it started with the more recent and familiar and moved to the more historic, and for some readers perhaps less familiar.

Kurt Jefferson: Yeah. You know, I was attempting, Tim, to reverse-engineer the book and history here, so we could start with what happened more recently on October 7th, 2023, and try to understand how history plays out in light of that important moment. You know, we’re talking about 1,200 Jews and others who were murdered in that attack on October 7th…

Tim Moore: Bigger even than 9/11 in terms of percentage and impact to the nation.

Kurt Jefferson: Exactly. Something like 30 times the size. So it’s important. And so, again, one of the reasons that I decided to start from the beginning and go backwards, most histories of course start from back and go forward. And the reality is I just felt it was important for people to understand not only Israel’s history, but to see how Israel fights their wars and to also get a handle on, again, another important set of dates is 1978-79, when the Shah of Iran’s regime fell and the cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Tim Moore: You know, I found that to be a very insightful perspective because we think that the Jews have been fighting with the Arabs, and this is age old. Really, most Jews who would be observing this would say that their greater fear of persecution comes not from the Arabs or the Muslims, but from Christians, because traditionally Christians, and even the Church, has been the greatest persecutor of the Jews.

But something did change from the, I’ll call it Arab nationalism. You think of Nasser, the president of Egypt back in the ’60s who tried to unite Egypt and Jordan and Syria under kind of a pan-Arab nationalism. He was Muslim, only peripherally. And now you have these radicalized religious fanatics that are Islamist, and that’s a whole different kind of beast that Israel has to deal with right in its midst.

Kurt Jefferson: Yeah. And, unfortunately, they’re not only anti-Israel, but they’re anti-Jewish and anti-Christian as well.

Tim Moore: Absolutely. Yeah. The West has seen that come to bear against us, even with Iran as the instigator of so much terrorism throughout the world.

Kurt Jefferson: Indeed.

Tim Moore: Obviously, Kurt, we could delve into military strategies and tactics, but that’s not the emphasis of your book. And yet you bring so many other things to bear. I love the way you talk about the politics, the economics, the security aspects. Yes, some degree of antisemitism, but the background that were part of all these different wars that Israel was, with varying degrees of success, able to prosecute on its enemies. But what overall strategy did you perceive on the part of Israel’s enemies and on the part of Israel? What’s sort of the modus operandi or the real goal at foot?

Kurt Jefferson: Well, Tim, this is a very important question. And with your deep military background, the Air Force, you appreciate what Israel, especially the Israeli Air Force has tried to do in its multiple wars, especially when you see preemptive strikes in 1956 and 1967. And you see the importance of all of the different branches of the Israel Defense Forces.

One of the things that I found is that the Israelis really fought more defensively in 1948-’49, in the initial 11-month war. This war currently that’s been since 2023 is now the longest war in the history of the state of Israel. And one of the things that really transpired in the history of the IDF is they went from a defensive-minded posture of fighting wars defensively to more of an offensive, flexible, strike hard, strike fast. And this was due to one of the early chiefs of staff, the mercurial victor at Suez in 1956, and the Chief of Staff, General Moshe Dayan, as you know…

Tim Moore: The guy with eye patch.

Kurt Jefferson: Exactly. And so he had been in the Palmach, the original strike force of the Hagana back in the early 1940s. That’s when he lost his eye in the battle against French colluding forces with the Nazis.

Tim Moore: The Vichy French.

Kurt Jefferson: Exactly. Thank you. And so essentially moving into more of a posture of being ready, being able to pivot, and being able to strike quickly, is really, I think, strategically what the IDF is known for. And still to this day, this is kind of the mantra that they tend to use.

Tim Moore: That is the mantra. I’m always fascinated to study, even the psychology and the attitude. The Arabs tend to follow a leader. And so if that leader falls, they kind of melt from the battlefield. Israel trains its soldiers, it’s IDF soldiers, that if the leader falls, they need to continue on. And so even as they’re going through training a short way into an exercise, they’ll say, “All right, you’re the squad leader. You just got wounded, and so somebody else has to pick up and carry forward.” Now that person got wounded, what are you going to do? And they train it into their soldiers to always move forward. And their leaders, a great statement that they make in Hebrew is, “Follow me,” because they lead from the front. It’s really an admirable trait. And that’s brought them much victory. We know that they have another ally strategically as well. But as a Christian who has studied God’s prophetic Word, what other dynamics do you discern sort of behind the scenes as you analyze these various wars that have plagued modern Israel regarding even the spiritual dimension?

Kurt Jefferson: Yeah, I saw a lot of interesting things in researching the book. I felt that spiritually there are a number of things going on. And one of them is that the Jewish mind, as you well know, in terms of understanding the Tanakh and even the New Testaments prophets all the way to our Lord Jesus. You know, you see the patterns from the Jewish mindset, patterns in history, things in Scripture that recur, the Western mindset, the American mindset, the Gentile mindset tends to focus on linear ways of thinking. And so that was something that contrasted here.

But I will say this, that even the IDF and the Israelis got caught up in the, what I like to call rinse and repeat model. They preemptively struck in 1956 in Suez and in the battle there in the Sinai. They did the same in ’67. The Six-Days war had great success. But then thinking that they could do that again in 1973 and subsequent wars, even though they were attacked preemptively by the Egyptians who took a page of their, out the Israeli playbook, Colonel Sadat did that at that time.
What it really reminded me of was that Jesus healed a lot of people in Scripture, for example, but He didn’t always heal people the same way. You know, sometimes He healed by laying on hands. Sometimes He just said the word. And I think the Roman centurion in Matthew 8 is the great example where Jesus says, “Go your way as you have believed, so let it be done for you.”

Tim Moore: So let it be done for you. You talk about rinse and repeat. Many times, even as I’ve been to Israel, my guide and others who have military background, obviously I use a Messianic Jewish guide. And so he served for a time in the paratroopers, but he would use the phrase, we’ve got to mow the grass. And that is another description of how the Israeli mindset was from time to time, you know, the surrounding terrorist threat gets a little bit wooly and ragged. So they’ve got to go in and mow the grass, kind of knock down the threat and then pull back. And over time, that threat’s going to rise again, and they’ll go mow the grass again.

But you made an important observation, even post the Hamas attack of 2023, where you said some of the Jewish strategists realized that what is required, at least at this point, is more of a garrison mindset. And now that’s a word we don’t even think about. It’s not in our Western mentality. You know, garrison is an army post or a fort. But it is a post that is surrounded by a wall of defense. It’s able to defend itself. And Israel being in a tough neighborhood, as they like to say, almost has to have the mindset that we are a garrison that has to constantly be on defense and guarded against even the attacks that sadly struck with great shock and surprise in October of 2023.

Kurt Jefferson: Yeah. And it’s really interesting, Tim. I mean, the fact that, I borrowed that term from the famous historian and classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, but what’s interesting is the fact that here’s a state of around 10 million and they’re able to pull up 350,000 reservists at the drop of a hat, one of the most, you know, incredible militaries in the world, but in such a small state that they have people who are willing to get on a plane in New York City or get on a plane in Buenos Aires and fly back and do a year’s duty of army and then come back and resume their lives.

Tim Moore: Yeah. I think it is a model that has studied Israel well over time, even though the threat has been, you know, constant. You make an observation that, just to use an example of the contrast between Hamas, a terrorist organization that is bent on the destruction of Israel, the destruction of the Zionist effort, and really the eradication of Jews throughout the land. Its objectives are clear. You write, “To survive the attacks,” we’re talking about since 2023, “to maintain power,” that’s why they won’t give up even the hostages, “and to retain Palestinian and international support.”

And tragically we’ve seen that happen with even the propaganda that is spreading throughout the West, the protest even on college campuses and universities in America. But you said that Israel sees its aims as very different and very simple, to fight a war of dire existential consequence. In other words, if they lose, they cease to exist. Hamas just has to survive. And they feel like over time they will succeed. We know that’s not true Scripturally, but it is a different mindset.

Kurt Jefferson: 100%. Absolutely.

Tim Moore: Well, here’s one thing I’m going to challenge you with, because you mentioned 18 different wars, and I found it fascinating, the detail that you brought up. Every time there’s a war that breaks out in the Middle East, people will contact Lamb & Lion Ministries and say, “Is this the battle of Armageddon?” or “Is this the War of Gog and Magog?” And we say, “No, it’s not the battle of Armageddon that happens at the end of the Tribulation. And it’s not even the war of Gog and Magog.”

I think that what we have been witnessing, perhaps Kurt, is a series of battles. We think of them as individual wars. But in hindsight, all the wars since 1948, in one context, are just a series of battles in an ongoing war that Israel has been fighting primarily against that inner ring of threatening nations. We may in hindsight recognize that all of these were part of the war of Psalm 83, where Israel is finally able to defeat that inner ring of nations. Any thoughts?

Kurt Jefferson: Yeah, no. I think that’s a really profound and important conceptualization, Tim. If you take out the, you know, war that essentially was ’85 to 2000 of the IDF just holding ground in Southern Lebanon as a buffer zone. You take some of these time periods out, the average war in Israel is usually 10 days, 15 days. It’s not very long. So it is very well true empirically based on your point that these are really more like battles. They’re not really massive wars.
Now, October 7th is a different situation because of the inner ring, to your point about Psalm 83, the inner ring around are attacking and all the terrorist proxies and the Houthis and others from Yemen. So it is a very–and they’re more the outer ring, but the importance of what you just said is a good way for us to understand that in some ways, while Israel is a garrison state, this process just continues to move along in God’s timeline.

Tim Moore: It seems like that ever since the Jewish people were regathered in the land promised to them by God to, you know, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in fulfillment of Ezekiel 37 and so many other prophecies, it’s as if Satan is just outraged that the Jewish people would reclaim the land that God said was mine and He gave it to them.

But as you studied, and again all the tremendous details that you weave in here, what were some of the surprises that jumped out to you in the modern history of Israel as sort of God instances?

Kurt Jefferson: Well, I really found one individual in particular to be fascinating. And he was a tank commander in the ’56 and the ’67 and ’73 Wars and then became a major general. His name was Israel Tal. And General Tal was not like a top-line general like Moshe Dayan and some of the other gen…even Ariel Sharon, General Sharon. But he was more an important general, back to your point about your research on Operation Moked who was there to help with pincer movements with the paratroopers of General Sharon.

And they had a lightning, you know, blitzkrieg-type approach when it came to getting their tanks into the Sinai and going after Egyptian tanks. As a matter of fact, what I found interesting about him is they took part in some of the biggest, and you know your history extremely well. They took part in some of the biggest tank battles in 35 years since the Second World War. Those battles in the Sinai had the Egyptians close to 1,000 tanks, and the Israelis ride at about 900 or 1,000 tanks.

And these were as big as El Alamein with the General Rommel and Montgomery of the British and so forth back in the Second World War. So these were not light, small conflicts. These were major tank battles. But what I found interesting about Tal is after his war service concluded, his military service concluded, he helped develop the Merkava tank, which in Hebrew is the Chariot tank, which is still being used today.

Again, a sign of the West and other countries not wanting to work with Israel because they don’t know how to size Israel up. The British or the French, one of the two backed out on a deal to give tanks to the Israelis.

So basically the Israelis, and this was partly the start of some of that startup innovation nation that the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about. They basically… General Tal said, “We’re going to do this ourselves.” And so now they’re fighting in these wars and they’re now adding battle helmets for the tank commanders with AI features, and they’re doing things that are 10 and 15 years beyond what other Western nations and non-Western nations are doing in the battle space.

Tim Moore: They have been so technologically advanced. And again, that’s been one of the keys to the secular mind, to their defense, even being able to knock down ballistic missiles coming in from Iran, the Houthis, et cetera. What would you say, Kurt, to Christians, especially gentile followers of Jesus, who do not understand that God still has a plan for Israel, meaning the people, the nation, and the land itself? And on that note, why is replacement theology spreading even in the evangelical church, such an affront to God and to His Word? I mean, it’s a denial of His prophetic Word.

Kurt Jefferson: Well, I sat, Tim, in churches for years that believed that and taught that the New Testament church had replaced Israel, and largely due to Israel and ancient Israel’s disobedience in the Old Testament. And so it really started to dawn on me, one when I became a born-again believer. But when I started to really get into the Old and New Testament that, you know, these are two halves of, you know, the same vine, two branches grafted in, as Paul talks about in Romans 11-13. And I really started to see for myself that God is not done with Israel yet. And He’s not, of course, done with us Christians yet, but this is the beauty of what we’re seeing.

You alluded to Messianic Judaism and your guide in Israel just watching the Messianic Jews develop, and God calling so many Jews to understanding who Yeshua is, both in Israel and around the world, is just another sign that God’s timepiece, Israel, is still important and that Israel, you know, will continue to be watched on this prophetic timeline. And we all, as Christians especially, need to be ready and watching.

Tim Moore: We need to be ready and watching. You know, I so appreciate the fact that Israel is that prophetic timeline as you’ve said. I think even the dry bones coming back together tells us that Jesus is right at the door, the fig tree coming back to life, as we say in Matthew 24.

I mentioned that you and I both have had some time in Missouri. And so living there, I’ve always adopted the Missouri motto of, “Show me,” which means show me in Scripture and let’s be good Bereans, because if it’s not in the Word of God, then it’s just an opinion. But the Word of God is very clear that God still has a plan to bring the remnant of the Jewish nation Israel to salvation. Not through another means, but through Yeshua whom they will recognize in the fullness of time. Well, Kurt, how can a person get a copy of The Wars of Israel? Where can our viewers go to get a copy of this tremendous book?

Kurt Jefferson: Well, they can get it a couple places. They can get it on amazon.com. But they can also get it at GGV Publishing, which is out of Chicago, Illinois. So they can go to gvpublishing.com as well.

Tim Moore: Well, we’ll make sure we put that on the bottom. And if you’d like you to get a copy of The Wars of Israel, and let me just tell you, Kurt, why I was so fascinated with this book. I’m working on a book I intend to call The Battle for Israel. I’m going to go all the way to the beginning and all the way to the end as to why Israel is so key in God’s eye. And really, if we want to have a godly perspective, why we should be standing with and supporting Israel even today?

Kurt Jefferson: God has a plan. And, you know, Psalm 121 and Psalm 122 have guided Israelis for, and Israelites for generations. And of course they give hope for the plan of salvation, that is Yeshua, in Jesus Christ.

Tim Moore: In Jesus Christ, Yeshua. Well, Kurt, I want to thank you for joining me today. I think our conversation will be a blessing to our viewers and that you and I someday may be able to collaborate on a Lamplighter magazine article or another project and continue our dialogue on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and what He is doing in His land and through His people. Again, thanks for being here today.

Kurt Jefferson: Thank you, Tim. God bless you.

Closing

Tim Moore: It was a delight to connect with Kurt Jefferson and an added bonus to be able to do so in Kentucky. Nathan and I typically receive several books a month. And we’re grateful for our interaction with authors who share our love for God’s Word and the fulfillment of Bible prophecy we see today. We enjoy sharing some of our dialogues with those authors from time to time. And I appreciate Kurt’s willingness to join me on today’s program.

Nathan Jones: As Tim and Dr. Jefferson said, the wars that have plagued mankind and those that have threatened Israel will continue until the Prince of Peace reigns from Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Jesus warned that as the End draws near, there will be an increase in wars and rumors of wars, and we know that Satan will continue to plot and scheme and rage, trying to deceive the masses and sowing discord and destruction and death until he’s bound for 1,000 years in the abyss and then cast into that lake of fire forever.

Tim Moore: Jesus also promised that we could take courage and have peace because He has overcome the world. The only way to have that kind of peace that passes understanding is in Him.

Here at Lamb & Lion Ministries, we stand with Israel and pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Very soon He is coming, for me and for all those who have repented of their sin and believed in Him unto salvation, gaining eternal citizenship in the glorious Kingdom of God. I hope He is coming for you. Godspeed!

End of Program