“When will they ever learn?”
Joan Baez asked the question decades ago. This is when America first tried exporting its prosperity gospel to the rest of the world.
Every couple of decades the same idea resurfaces, repackaged and resold with fresh confidence. This time it emerged from Davos, carried by multibillion-dollar developers Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Their prescription for Gaza is that same old formula we keep hearing: invest enough money, rebuild enough infrastructure, and the violence will subside. Roofs over heads. Jobs for families. Roads, ports, schools. Give people something to lose, and ideology will soften.
We are continually assured that violence isn’t terrorism. It’s desperation. People just trying to make a living. That claim doesn’t survive contact with reality, though.
Their plan itself is sweeping, almost cinematic. Gaza was reimagined as a Mediterranean hub: with ports and airports, industrial parks, vocational schools, luxury hotels, tourism corridors, and as many as 180 skyscrapers stretching along the coast. Kushner has said entire cities like Rafah could be rebuilt from scratch in two to three years.
“It’s an amazing investment opportunity,” he says.
It sounds tidy, logical, almost inevitable, but facts have a way of cutting through clean theories. Hamas has never been poor—at least not at the top. While ordinary Gazans lived for years under brutal conditions, Hamas leadership accumulated wealth. They didn’t sleep in bombed-out apartments. They built mansions. They owned hotels and shopping centers. They diverted international aid—including American food assistance—into tunnel networks, weapons production, and patronage systems. Hamas didn’t lack funding. They stole it.
Hamas—and the regime backing it—places death above life. Martyrdom above mercy. Power above people. The destruction of Israel above the well-being of Gaza’s own population. That hierarchy doesn’t change because someone pours concrete or hands out paychecks.
History should make this obvious. Communist societies didn’t collapse because they lacked factories or infrastructure. They collapsed because incentives disappeared. When creativity, ownership, and responsibility are stripped away, work becomes meaningless. Those systems didn’t fail from poverty. They failed from purposelessness.
But the Gospel does something money can’t. It tells people that human life has value—not because it’s useful or productive or politically convenient, but because God Himself entered history and died for it.
That message goes where ideology and economics stall. It reaches places the Muslim Brotherhood cannot reform and political systems cannot heal. It shows up in Chinese house churches the state can’t extinguish. In Iranian village fellowships that grow quietly under pressure. In prisons where men everyone gave up on walk out with more hope than the guards who once locked the doors.
That conviction is why Back to Jerusalem has never believed that bombs or budgets can fix what is fundamentally spiritual. It’s also why the statement Bibles Not Bombs hits home—not as a slogan, but as a sober alternative to another generation of failed nation-building experiments. If you want to understand that vision more clearly, the Bibles Not Bombs: A 30-Day Devotional lays it out plainly. You can get the ebook below or the paperback on Amazon.
