I am thrilled to reveal that Ashley Church, the author of Prophecy Shock, has written the foreword to my book.

Ashley Church is a high-profile media commentator on faith, politics, and the economy, and has held senior leadership roles across the energy, finance, and property sectors, including CEO and board-chair positions in national organisations. He is a founding director of the Israel Institute of New Zealand and has spent more than three decades researching biblical prophecy, with a particular focus on Israel’s history and its central place in the prophetic narrative. This is what he wrote:

When Arnon Rubinstein first asked me to write the foreword to this book, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was the right person to do it.

I’m not Jewish. I wasn’t raised in a Jewish home or immersed in Jewish culture, and my own journey toward understanding Israel and the Jewish people has been very different to Arnon’s.

For many years I’ve studied the history of the Jewish people, their relationship with the nations around them, the forces that have acted upon them and the extraordinary story of their survival and restoration. I understand the wars, the persecutions, the migrations and the great political events leading up to the establishment of the modern State of Israel and the extraordinary challenges it has faced since 1948.

But my Christian faith inevitably shapes the way I understand that story and there is a limit to what I can tell you about the people themselves because you can know the history of a people without fully understanding them.

In contrast, the author, Arnon Rubinstein is almost the opposite of me. He is Jewish. He grew up in Israel and that nation is part of him in a way that no amount of study can reproduce. He knows its language, its humour, its contradictions and its strengths because he has lived them.

But he has also spent much of his adult life in Britain, arriving there in the early 1990s to study at London Business School and subsequently building a life and career there.

That combination gives him an unusual perspective. He understands Israel from the inside, but he has also spent long enough outside it to recognise that much of what Israelis take for granted isn’t necessarily obvious to the rest of us.

In that sense, this book is an act of translation – not simply of Hebrew words into English – but of one culture to another.

And that’s where this book comes alive.

At first glance, Revealing Israeli Secrets might appear to be a book about Hebrew proverbs and familiar sayings – but, in reality, it’s a book about something much bigger.

It’s about what those sayings reveal.

The ancient language of the Jews carries memory, and over generations, that memory has become embedded in the expressions that the Israelis who revived the Hebrew language, use with one another. Those expressions contain cultural assumptions about responsibility, family, courage, danger, success, failure, humour, argument, loyalty and survival.

As such, expressions that may sound colourful to you and I actually carry layers of meaning accumulated across generations. Arnon uses those expressions, cleverly, as windows into Israeli life and universal wisdom. Through them he shows us why Israelis can sometimes appear contradictory to those looking in from outside; how Jews can be intensely individualistic and yet display extraordinary collective solidarity in a crisis. How they can be informal to the point of seeming chaotic, yet incredibly effective when circumstances demand action. Arnon also helps us to understand how this unique people can argue fiercely within themselves and still possess a powerful instinct for communal responsibility - all the while using humour in circumstances where outsiders might expect solemnity - not because adversity is taken lightly, but because humour itself can become a means of enduring it.

It’s also important to understand that Arnon doesn’t present a romanticised version of Israel, and the book is stronger for it. This is not a portrait of an idealised people. It is a portrait of the Israelis, warts and all.

And that matters, particularly now, at a time in history when discussion of Israel is often reduced to politics, borders, governments, wars and competing historical claims. People who have never set foot there confidently pronounce upon what Israelis should think, how they should act and what they should fear. These people rush to cancel the country instead of learning from it.

Israel is not an abstraction - it is a people - and before we can properly understand the decisions a people make, it helps to understand the memories, assumptions and cultural instincts they bring to those decisions.

That’s the real value of Revealing Israeli Secrets.

By the time I finished the manuscript, I realised that the fact that I am not Jewish was not a disqualification after all.

Instead, it was part of the point.

I came to Arnon’s book with a good understanding of the Jewish story. What his book gave me was something more: an insight into the national character that has emerged from that story. A character that should inspire a generation of many lost souls.

And that’s what this book offers the non-Jewish reader.

Revealing Israeli Secrets won’t replace history. It won’t replace politics, theology or serious engagement with the enormous issues surrounding Israel today. But it will add something that those things alone can’t provide: a glimpse into the cultural grammar that helps make Israelis who they are and why there is a lot to learn from their success story.

And in a world which has no shortage of opinions about Israel, a little more understanding is no small thing.

Ashley Church

Author: Prophecy Shock

The book should be out by mid-October.