Father Frank's Rants - GAZA AND GENOCIDE 593

1. 
   
   What we have in Gaza is ‘effectively self-genocide’. Huh! Thus stated Israeli minister Naftali Bennett on Sky News. A priceless, peerless, invaluable admission. And biggest own goal by Israel ever.
   
   Genocide is an ugly word. It means the mass extermination of human beings. Particularly a race or a nation. From the Greek genos, race. It was Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who created the term and gave the Armenians and the Jews as examples of mass exterminations. In 1948 a UN convention condemned genocide, refining its definition to include also ‘causing severe physical and mental harm to members of the group’. Today many states outlaw genocide and yet it still goes horribly on. Like in Gaza, as Mr Bennett candidly vouchsafes.
   
   Naturally Naftali will scream and protest. Self-genocide, he said. Perpetrated not by the Israeli Army on Palestinian civilians but…by the victims! On themselves. Not exactly Lemming-like behaviour (apologies to Lemmings – they do nothing of the kind) but sort of. Quite a novel, creative definition. (Why didn’t A.H. think of it? He could have put the concentration camps next to ammunition factories and declared the inmates had self-immolated under Allied bombings.) The minister claims it is Hamas who forces civilians to genocide themselves by standing next to missile launchers. Maybe the surviving women and children, the shocked, the wounded and the maimed, should tell their side of the story.
   
   Interestingly Mr Bennett’s first name is Naftali. Harks back to Naphtali, one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel. The Israelites did practice genocide, indisputably. In the Book of Deuteronomy God commands Moses to utterly destroy whole tribes and nations, ‘the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.’ (21:17) Moreover when Joshua takes Jericho, his warriors ‘utterly destroyed all in the city. Both men and women, young and old. Oxen, sheep and asses, with the edge of the sword.’ (Joshua 6:21) Definitely not nice.
   
   he gory passages in the Old Testament troubled the Christian Church. How could a God of mercy, the father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, be behind such horrors? Theologians like Origen and St Augustine fell back on allegory. The bloody wars in question are not literal: they are battles of virtue against vice. Neat but…do you buy it? The Biblical text seems literal enough.
   
   A heretic called Marcion took a radical way out. The god of the old dispensation is a deity of blood and vengeance. A repellent divinity, quite opposed to the god of love Jesus came to reveal. The Old Testament is therefore a diabolical book. But St Irenaeus called Marcion a dupe. The Bible is a unity. The Messiah of the New embodies, fulfils and perfects the message of the Old. The tribal god of Moses and Joshua is refined, gradually revealed as a universal, just and merciful deity. This God takes no pleasure in the death of any man but desires that sinners should repent and live. Hence the laws of Christianity absolutely repudiate the shedding of innocent human blood for the cause of religion.
   
   But, for the sake of the argument, what if God did order the massacre of a people? Isn’t the divine will supreme? And isn’t true religion essentially submission to the will of God? The answer is that God’s will is neither arbitrary nor capricious, like that of a tantrum-throwing child. God’s will is not divorced from his justice. Or his loving-kindness. Thus God would never enjoin something contrary to his own nature, such as genocide. QED.
   
   And Gaza? The state of Israel waging its war of fire and blood on the besieged Palestinians is a Jewish state but not a religious state. Israel’s Zionist apostle, Theodor Herzl, was a secular, non-religious man. Indeed, he had some of his children baptised. The birth declaration of Israel mentions God but so does the German constitution. Israel swears its adhesion to UN principles. Are those who argue that the conflict is atavistic, that the children of Isaac eternally must go on fighting those of Ishmael wrong therefore? I am not so sure…
   
   I disagree with Mr Bennett on two counts. First, I don’t believe that the horrific killings and maiming of Palestinians are self-inflicted, as he pretends. At least, I see no evidence of that. Second, I also doubt that ‘genocide’ is the correct term to apply. There are people in Israel who would like to act ‘Joshua-like’ on the enemy, but I believe that they know they cannot. The Israelis, including the extremist Arab-haters, are smart. They do not pursue impossible goals. Netanyahu wants to destroy Hamas, or radically emasculate it, that is his realistic aim. To achieve that he will go on killing and terrorising the people of Gaza, as much as he needs or wishes to. And no one can stop him.
   
   Pessimistic? Perhaps. Until the Unites States continues to back and fund Israel a outrance, and to supply it with weapons of destruction nothing can be done.
   
   Unless…as Norman Finkelstein suggested time back, a strategy of mass non-violent resistance was embraced and pursued by the whole Palestinian nation. Millions of human beings moving en masse against the wall of separation. Tearing it down. Liberating the West Bank. Forcing the settlers off Arab land. Thus compelling Israel to negotiate a return to the pre-1967 borders, as international law demands, including East Jerusalem.
   
   Utopian? Don’t care. The priest sticks with Finkelstein and non-violence.
   
   Revd Frank Julian Gelli