Outside the Covenant: The 250th and the Body in Gaza

On the 250th anniversary of the republic, Aaron Evans, vice president of the Young Leadership affinity group for the Washington, D.C., chapter of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, has set down in these pages (Fox News Opinion, July 5, 2026) what deserves to be read with care. The constitutional order of the United States descends, by the founders’ own admission, from the revelation given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Isaiah’s prophecy — “the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king” (Isaiah 33:22) — is the substrate of the three branches. The Decalogue is the grammar of American law. The friendship of the United States with the Jewish state is therefore not a question of Realpolitik but a fidelity owed to the people to whom the promise was first made. I will not quarrel with any of this. The reading is consistent with the founders’ stated theology; the prudence of binding the republic to the covenant people is confirmed by every war the United States has won; and the prudence of binding the republic against the nations that rise against that people is similarly confirmed by the order that has held since 1948. The alliance, in short, is the institutional form of a standing before God, and Mr. Evans is right that we who would be faithful cannot abandon it.

The election of the Jewish people is not a metaphor but a covenant — an oath sworn by the Lord of Hosts, witnessed by the prophets, recorded in the canon, unbroken in its provisions. The Lord has set them at the center of the nations, and the nations that bless them are blessed, and the nations that curse them are cursed (Genesis 12:3). The U.S.-Israel joint operations of the past two years against the Iranian nuclear program are, in this reading, not foreign entanglements but the exercise of a covenantal economy. The destroyers of Iran’s nuclear capacity were the instruments of a Providence that had said, in so many words, what it would do. The FIDF’s work of supporting the IDF is, similarly, the visible face of a fidelity that precedes any of us. Mr. Evans has stated this with the plainness it deserves.

While Mr. Evans and his colleagues gathered in Washington and in Tel Aviv to mark the 250th and to honor the men and women of the IDF, a seven-year-old boy named Yousef al-Khalaf lay in a tent in Khan Younis with the swollen belly and stick limbs of kwashiorkor. The skin of his arms had begun to peel in flakes. His mother, Wafa, had tried for three days to obtain ready-to-use therapeutic food from the World Food Program distribution point near the Nasser Hospital; the point had been closed since the previous week, when the convoy carrying the supplies had been struck by an Israeli airstrike in the campaign to which the United States had continued to supply the munitions. Yousef weighed twenty-one pounds. His eyes were sunken; the muscles of his thighs had wasted to the bone; when Wafa pressed a finger to the skin of his forehead, the impression did not fill back in. His younger sister, Nour, three years old, had died six days earlier in the same tent, of causes the family could not get a physician to certify because the clinic that might have attended her had been demolished in the prior week’s operations, and the physician who had attended the family in the previous shelter had been killed in an earlier airstrike. Two days earlier, Yousef’s older brother Hamza, eleven, had walked two miles in the afternoon heat to fetch water from a distribution point that yielded two liters for the family of four; on his return his feet had been cut by debris in a road rendered impassable by the demolition campaign. Their father, Adel, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on the family’s previous shelter in November 2024; the 2,000-pound bombs that produced the crater in which his body was recovered had been supplied by the United States. Yousef’s ribs showed one by one under the flaccid skin. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification classified all of the Gaza governorate as Phase 5 — catastrophic — famine, the designation having been in force for eleven months. The pediatric ward at Al-Shifa was admitting forty children a day with severe acute malnutrition. Yousef died two days after this column was written, in the early morning, in a tent in Khan Younis.

The Lord, who chose Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and who set the Jewish people at the center of the nations, has also, by the same oath, ordered the nations beyond that center. Yousef al-Khalaf was not of the household; Wafa was not of the household; Nour and Adel were not of the household. Their names were not in the register of the promise. They were born outside the covenant, lived outside the covenant, and died outside the covenant. The famine in Gaza is not a cost the alliance has paid. It is the visible economy of a standing the Lord himself assigned. Genesis 12:3 — “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse” — is not a metaphor for foreign policy. It is a description of how the order holds. The state of Israel, defended by the United States, defended by Mr. Evans and his colleagues, is the institutional form of that covenant. The children of Khan Younis were outside it. What the Lord has excluded, the order does not retrieve.