The HyperTexts
The NAKBA (the Holocaust of the Palestinians): What Does the Bible Say?
by Michael R. Burch,
an editor and publisher of Holocaust poetry
Should Christians support Israel, no matter how unjustly Israel
treats Palestinian women and children?
Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.
No, of
course not. Neither the Hebrew prophets, nor Jesus Christ, nor any of the
apostles ever said that men who abuse women and children have the favor of God,
or will receive any reward for their reprehensible behavior. For Christians, the
most pertinent question is: what would Jesus do? Jesus never harmed a
woman or child, nor did he ever describe any scenario in
which it is permissible for men to harm women and children.
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such
is the kingdom of heaven.
A similar question once faced American Christians over the treatment of Native
Americans and African Americans. Was it in any way reasonable for Christians to
use verses in the Bible to declare it their "manifest destiny" to ethnically
cleanse Native Americans from their homeland, or to enslave African Americans?
No, because no one can possibly suggest that Jesus would have condoned such
terrible injustices, or have committed them himself.
Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believed in me, it were
better for him that millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were
drowned in the depth of the sea.
If Christians asked themselves, "What would Jesus do?" they would immediately
see that Israel's system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians must
not be supported, because no loving, compassionate person with a sense of
justice would ever inflict such misery on defenseless women and
children. Clearly, we should never support any government, including
our own, when it practices racial injustices against innocents.
There are other reasons to question the idea that Christians should always
support Israel simply because God "gave" the land of Palestine to the ancient Hebrews.
Does it make any sense, really, to say that God "gives" one person's property to
another person? How would Christians feel and what would they do if people of
another religion showed up with guns and bombs, insisting that God "gave" them
the land, homes and property of Christians? If God "gave" them something, why
would they need weapons to take (i.e., steal) it?
Should Christians expect Muslims to believe something they would never believe
themselves, if they were on the short end of the stick? Why not be honest about
the Bible, since honesty is supposed to be a Christian virtue? Here are other
reasons not to support Israel's constant theft of Palestinian land:
•
No sane human being would ever surrender his house and land because someone else said God
wanted him to have it.
• To claim that God wants me to rob you and leave your family
homeless and destitute either makes God unjust or me a liar.
• If God "gave" the land of Palestine to the ancient Hebrews, why
does the Bible say that Moses, Joshua, Caleb and King David took it via ethnic
cleansing and genocide (the "slaying of everything that breathes," including
women, children and livestock)? Why does the Bible say that David slaughtered
every woman when he "smote the land"? Why did David order the slaughter of the
lame and the blind when Jerusalem was taken from the Jebusites? How can anyone
believe that a loving, compassionate, wise, just God commanded the slaughter of
women, children and the handicapped?
• Forget about the Palestinians for a moment. How can the verses that commanded the Israelites to enslave and
murder their own children be explained? In Exodus 21, Moses permitted fathers to
sell their own daughters as sex slaves, with the option to
buy them back if they failed to "please" their new masters. In Deuteronomy 22,
Moses commanded the Israelites to murder girls who had been raped, or to sell them
to their rapists (meaning that they could be raped legally for the rest of their
lives). According to Moses, rape victims should only be spared if they were
raped in a field where no one could hear their cries for help. In Numbers 31, Moses
commanded that captured women and male infants were to be slaughtered; only the
virgin girls were to be kept alive (obviously as sex slaves). Is that the wisdom of
God or the evil lunacy of barbaric men pretending to speak for God because
doing so gives them power?
• The Hebrew prophets spoke of the need for chesed
(mercy, compassion, lovingkindness) and social justice. But obviously there is nothing
"compassionate" or "just" about matricide, infanticide, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The prophets
criticized the Levites (the priests and scribes who created and copied the texts
that eventually became the Bible), calling them liars and saying they had
changed the word of God to the point that the Israelites no longer knew what God
had said. Since the Bible contains contradictory statements which cannot be
reconciled (for instance the book of Judges says God hardened David's heart to
take a census, while the book of Chronicles says Satan hardened his heart to
take the same census), people who look to the Bible for guidance must still
listen to their own hearts and minds.
• What would Jesus do? Would Jesus evict multitudes of
innocent Palestinians from their
homes, including women, children and the elderly, knowing they would
suffer terribly and that many of them would die on a new Trail of Tears? Would
Jesus praise Christians for supporting such injustices in his name, or would he
call them hypocrites?
• In the past Christians used the Bible to condone racism,
intolerance, slavery, witch
hunts, Inquisitions, Crusades, torture, "holy wars," and the burning of
"heretics" at the stake. Millions of people have been tortured, enslaved and
killed in the name of Jesus Christ. Isn't it time to start doing what Jesus did
himself, or stop using his name in vain? Jesus praised the Good Samaritan, a man
who ignored the dictates of religion in order to act with compassion for someone
of another race and creed. Shouldn't we also put religious dogma aside (how can we
possibly know whose house goes to whom, based on religious texts) and act with
compassion and justice?
A fundamental question for Christians is the morality of supporting
people who are doing things good Christians would never do themselves. I do not
believe men should harm women and children, so why should I support Israel when
it wages a war of systematic terror on Palestinian women and children,
constantly stealing the little land and water they have left, after 60+ years of
land-grabbing by Jewish robber barons? Mind you, I have nothing against the many
good Jewish people who don't practice racism against Palestinians. But I
strongly oppose those Jews who deliberately choose to leave innocent women and
children homeless and destitute. I believe Jesus, the Hebrew prophets and the
apostles would agree. When did any of them ever say that rich, powerful men
should be allowed to steal from widows and orphans?
Obviously, they said the opposite: that true religion was to help widows and
orphans.
Palestinian women, babies, toddlers, children and grandmothers and grandfathers are not
"terrorists." And most Palestinian men are not "terrorists" either. Yes, some Palestinian men have committed acts of violence. But
some
American men also commit acts of violence. If a few gangbangers in Los Angeles
go on a rampage, do we erect towering walls around the whole city
and collectively punish the innocent along with the guilty? No, of course not. We know
that justice must
be individual, not collective.
The Hebrew prophets constantly spoke of the need for chesed [mercy,
compassion, lovingkindness] and social justice. Time and time again they warned
the Israelites that if they abandoned chesed and justice, they would
suffer the consequences, and even lose their land and go into captivity. Jesus
Christ and the apostles also spoke of the need for compassion and justice. I
don't know any Christian who believes men get a "free pass" to harm women and
children. Unfortunately though, in their zeal to "support" Israel, some
Christians ignore the fact that the leaders of Israel often sound and act like
the Grand Wizards of the KKK. Should Christians support Israel, no matter what,
or should Christians only support Israel if Israel acts with compassion and
justice?
According to the Bible itself, Christians should not support anyone who harms
women and children unjustly.
In the past we have seen a number of Holocausts,
in which innocents were punished collectively for the "crime" of being born
to the "wrong" race. During the days of American slavery, innocent black men, women and children were deprived of freedom. Their only "crime" was
having been
born to the "wrong" race. When Native Americans walked the Trail of Tears, the
same was true: innocent men, women and children were collectively punished
for the "crime" of having been born to the "wrong" race. When innocent Jewish men, women
and children suffered and died so horrifically in the Holocaust, the same thing
was true: they suffered and died for the "crime" of having been born to the "wrong" race.
In each case, the men who committed the atrocities professed to be "Christians,"
but their actions proved otherwise. Now we see innocent Palestinians suffering
and dying in this new Holocaust. Yes, a few of them have committed acts of
violence. But the
majority of Gazans are children and a large percentage of
the remainder are women and the elderly. As we all know, most
crimes are committed by young men. This means the vast majority of Palestinians
are not violent criminals. Why then are all Palestinians being punished collectively,
for the crimes of only a few? From what I've read, Hamas has only around 3,000
members. The Crips and Bloods have over ten times that many members, but we
don't persecute their mothers, sisters, brothers and grandmothers by herding them into
giant corrals, as if they were cattle. So why has Israel herded millions of innocent Palestinians into walled
enclosures, if only a few have committed crimes?
And is it possible that in this case the "egg" clearly came first: that
Palestinian violence is largely the result of the racial injustices of Israel? I
grew up in an evangelical Christian family whose members were always eager to
believe the very best about Israel and support the Jewish people. But many of the
things I learned about the policies and actions of the government of Israel
bothered me greatly, because I believe men should protect women and children,
not harm them. So I did an extensive, independent study of the history of
Zionism, and to my horror I discovered that from its earliest days, many
Jewish Zionists had great disdain for Palestinian Arabs and always intended
to take their land by force and evict them. And in 1948 that's exactly
what happened, contrary to what most Christians wish to believe. Before 1948, the Jews owned
only a very small percentage of the land of Palestine. At that time there were many more Palestinians than
Israeli Jews and
the Palestinians had a higher birth rate, so it was hard to see how a democratic
state could be Jewish and remain Jewish for any length of time. The solution was
racist and fascist: buy a lot of weapons, start a war,
and during the war drive out as many men, women and children of the "wrong" race as possible.
Suddenly the land becomes "free" and the demographics change. So in 1948, as
soon as the British government pulled out of Palestine, the Jews
preemptively declared that a new nation called "Israel" existed, against the
wishes of the Palestinians who had a clear majority of the population and owned more than 90% of the land. No
elections were held until after the Jews had
ethnically cleansed Israel of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The UN
never "gave" any land to anyone and had no right to give away privately held
property. What the UN tried to do was draw "voting lines in the sand" to give
the Jews the chance to have a small majority of the population within certain
regions of Palestine. But it was hard to draw those lines because there were far more
Palestinians than Jews. The Jews "solved" both problems with a planned
program of ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of Palestinian villages didn't just
disappear "by accident." They were deliberately demolished and that took
planning, time, money and manpower.
Of the approximately 700,000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed, the
majority were women, children and the elderly. Very few were combatants. Most
were just fleeing for their lives. What would Jesus have done? Would he have
been one of the men forcing innocent women and children to become homeless and
destitute? I find that very, very hard to believe. After all, he said "Suffer
the little children to come unto me," not "Drive them away from me and make them
suffer."
What would Jesus do today? Would Jesus persecute innocent women and children? Of course not. Jesus warned his followers that it would be better for
someone to have a millstone hung around his neck and be drowned,
than to harm a little one. When an adulteress was brought before Jesus, he told
the men intent on stoning her to death that the one without sin should cast the
first stone. Nothing Jesus ever said or did condones harming women and children.
Shouldn't Christians do what Jesus would have done? Jesus reserved most of his
criticism for the people in power who lacked compassion and a sense of justice,
calling them self-righteous and hypocritical. But he commended the Good Samaritan for acting with
compassion, and in the Beatitudes he said "blessed are the
peacemakers."
There is nothing compassionate or peaceful about ethnic cleansing. Israel's
current problems (and America's, since 9-11 was plotted by men furious with the
way the governments of Israel and the United States treated the Palestinians)
are rooted in racial injustices, just as the American Indian Wars and Civil War
were rooted in
racial injustices.
What should Christians do, when they see the men in power oppressing innocent women and
children? Should we side with the men who abuse women and children, or
should we protect the women and children, acting with compassion in the cause of
peace?
The answer is clear.
Should Christians support Israel, when Israel practices government-sanctioned
racism on a massive scale, daily? The
Hebrew prophets repeatedly warned Israelites that if they failed to
practice chesed (mercy, compassion, lovingkindness) and establish
social justice, they would forfeit the Promised Land. And this happened more than once in the past. The evidence of the
Bible is clear. Could it happen again? I don't pretend to know. But I believe Christians should practice chesed (mercy, compassion,
lovingkindness) and social justice. We should care for widows and
orphans, not force completely innocent women and children to become widows and orphans.
It is all too easy for Jews and Christians to claim to be the Chosen Few. The
Pharisees claimed to be the Chosen Few, but Jesus pointed out repeatedly that
their religion was false, and that they failed the tests of compassion and
justice. Would Jesus have persecuted women and
children? Would he have driven hundreds of thousands of farmers from their land, then
bulldozed their homes, leaving them homeless and destitute? No, of course not.
But this is what Jews and Christians have done to the Palestinians, together. If
Jesus were to return today, and see what we have done, would he congratulate
Christians,
or shake his head in disbelief? I believe the answer is clear. Christians cannot
act without compassion and support injustice, and claim to be Christians. Isn't
it time to read the Bible with eyes capable of seeing, and ears capable of
hearing? We must
not substitute a compassionless, unjust, ritualistic religion for "the real
thing."
Now is the time to act with compassion and establish social justice. We can
begin at home, and require Israel to do the same, or suffer the consequences.
The HyperTexts