Israel is inflicting genocide upon the people of Gaza.
Since the horrific Hamas assault against southern Israel on October 7, which killed approximately 1,400 people, the death toll in Gaza has risen to over 7,000, more than 3,000 of them children.
This grossly disproportionate death toll is deliberate.
The Israeli military doctrine of Dahiya dictates that Israel will always respond with overwhelming force, deliberately killing many more of their opponents than the opponents have killed Israelis. The Dahiya doctrine is supposedly intended to serve as a deterrent in limiting hostilities. It has been consistently applied throughout the West Bank as well as in the five wars inflicted on Gaza over the past fifteen years.
Which raises the question: does the Dahiya doctrine work? Has it deterred Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation?
The answer is two-fold: As a deterrent to Palestinian resistance, the answer is No. Dahiya is a failure. And Israeli leaders are insane for believing that another round of carpet bombing in Gaza will eliminate the Palestinian urge to resist their seventy-five-year military occupation. It hasn’t worked yet. Why should anyone except Israeli and American arms manufacturers imagine that it will work now? This is the classic definition of insanity.
The second answer gets to the heart of the issue. Dahiya does not deter Palestinian resistance against Israeli oppression, but it does kill a massive number of Palestinians. This is the crux of the issue in Gaza today.
If you cannot kill a person’s dream of freedom, you can always kill the dreamer. Killing the dreamer kills the dream, unless of course there are many, many more dreamers waiting in line. In which case, all the dreamers must be killed by those who oppose the dream.
This is what Israel is trying to do right now. A number of Israeli leaders have explicitly addressed the “need” (in their view) to eradicate every Palestinian from Gaza, to “wipe them out,” to send them all to the grave or to Egypt; anywhere but in Israel.
Similar plans are being implemented in the West Bank. More than 100 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli soldiers, 30 of them children, in the past few days. For, you see, they share the same dream as the people of Gaza – freedom from Israeli military occupation; equal rights and equal citizenship in a sovereign state where they can live their lives out from under an occupier’s bootheel.
Yes, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a war crime. If possible, all the perpetrators should be arrested, brought to trial and punished.
But October 7th was not the beginning of this tragic story. That sad and bloody day unfolded within the context of another crime against humanity, a prior crime that created the conditions for the Hamas attack against Israel.
Israel has occupied Gaza for 75 years; 17 years ago, Israel imposed a strict military blockade that has killed its economy and starved its people. Now Israel imposes a siege, cutting off all water, food, fuel, and power to 2.3 million people. This also is a war crime.
As I wrote in a post yesterday, Israel’s objective is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians — men, women, children, the elderly and disabled, everybody.
I personally know a number of Christian Zionists (Christians who believe that Israel is God’s chosen nation with a right to own all the land of Israel) who remain in lock-step with Israel’s Dahiya strategy. When challenged on this question of genocide, their responses fall into two categories.
First, they say that Israel has the right to defend itself, especially against an antisemitic aggressor like Hamas. Hamas poses an existential threat to Israel, they insist, which gives Israel the right to use whatever means are necessary to eliminate that threat.
Second, they say that the Palestinians have brought these troubles onto themselves. The people of Gaza elected Hamas as their government, voting them into power. You reap what you sow, I am told. Terrorist leaders can only bring catastrophe onto their people.
I have several responses to these popular excuses for why someone claiming to be a Christian could possibly sanction Israel’s current bloodlust.
First, Palestinians are human beings loved by God. They are created as the Image of God, as are all Israelis, Americans, and every person on this planet. However, the racism of western news coverage is blatant, if unrecognized, in the subtle ways that Palestinian humanity is minimized or even denied. For whatever reason, their humanity is not equal to the humanity of Israelis and other westerners.
The Israeli defense minister has called Palestinians “human animals.” Others have called for the army to “wipe out” all Palestinians. US Defense Department spokesmen lament the loss of Israeli lives in the tragic terms of family loss and personal grief. Whereas, Palestinians deaths are dismissed as mere collateral damage, the unavoidable consequence of war. Palestinians are dehumanized as the inconvenient byproduct of a necessary (and glorified) war machine now grinding its way towards victory.
Second, Christians are called to live as citizens of God’s kingdom, a divine, heavenly kingdom that has no allegiance, much less an alliance, with any earthly nation-state. No nation on this earth can ever claim to be carrying out God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. No nation can ever claim my allegiance since I (as a Christian) have already sworn my loyalty to God’s peaceable kingdom, where I am commanded to be a peacemaker – never a warmonger.
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, supporting Israel does not please our Lord. In fact, supporting war and slaughter grieves our God, for it is the antithesis of all that Jesus came to accomplish for humanity.
Third, yes Israel may have a right to defend itself, but no one has the right to commit genocide, nor to execute their Dahiya doctrine in response to an attack. Just war theory has always maintained that Christians insist on a proportional response to an attack. There is nothing proportional about Israel’s reactions to Hamas. This is anything but a just war.
Fourth, when do the Palestinians gain the right to defend themselves? The Hamas attack did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the symptom of a deeply rooted, deadly disease called Israeli military occupation. As long as Israel’s occupation continues, Palestinians will continue to resist. You can count on it. It is human nature.
God did not create the Image of God to suffer interminable abuse. There is something innate to every human being that leads us to stand up against such abuse, to rise up, to raise our hands, and to say, “No more. You cannot beat me any longer. This is wrong. I will resist your efforts to dehumanize me.”
Furthermore, it is more reasonable to ask what the state of Israel expected would happen after 75 years of oppression? You can only persecute people for so long before they resist their persecutors. Why should anyone be surprised that a group like Hamas now exists in Gaza? It is the obvious and easily anticipated outcome of Israeli policies.
What we are witnessing now in Palestine is comparable to any number of anti-colonial uprisings that occurred throughout the “third world” in the 1960s and ‘70s. Israel has always been a settler-colonial state where European settlers have taken away the land of indigenous Palestinians.
Or think of the American slave revolts, like Nate Turner’s revolt in the 1830s. History has taken sides with the slaves (and the colonized) who revolted, throwing off the heavy shackles of their onerous oppression. Does anyone now applaud the slave owners who murdered black men, women and children as if they were animals in order to put down the slaves’ struggle for liberation and maintain their own brutal domination?
History will judge Israel’s current oppression of the Palestinian people in the very same light. Israel is the abusive master brutalizing the brown skinned people now resisting their enslavement.
Finally, on a thoroughly pragmatic note: Gaza has not held any elections since 2006. This means that the vast majority of the Palestinian population were either not yet born or were too young to vote in Gaza’s last election. So, how can all Gazans be held responsible for voting Hamas into office 17 years ago? Half the Gazan population are minors. The median age is 16.
Most Gazans have never had any say in who does or does not govern them. By blaming the people of Gaza for causing their own genocide, Israel’s defenders are actually promoting grotesque acts of collective punishment (illegal under international law) that have nothing to do with “who voted Hamas into office.”
I am sorry, but my fellow Christians who are now defending Israel’s actions in Gaza have lost touch with the mind of Christ, if in fact, they ever possessed it.
On this matter, they have lost connection to the Head, the Lord of the Church.
Their failure to speak out, to protest against Israeli war crimes, makes them complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.
May God have mercy on us all.
