Israel's War on Palestine

February 2024

Abstract:
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters from Gaza crossed the unguarded border into Israel and killed more than 1,200 civilians. Israel responded with a vicious campaign of wanton destruction of the Gaza strip. 3000 years ago, there was a bloody prelude to Israel's current slaughter in Gaza. (Call it Act I.) It was also directed by Israel's God, and the gory details are in the Bible.

When you imagine your nation to be God's chosen people, that may tend to lend an air of impunity to your behavior. And Israel, which definitely considers itself God's chosen people, appears to also consider itself beyond the reach of human judgment as its army seems to be doing its best to exterminate the Palestinians of the Gaza strip. As men, women, and children, along with their homes, schools, and shops are being bombed into oblivion (27,000+ dead at this writing – mostly women and children, and most of the rest are civilian men), it is impossible not to think about the Israelites' initial genocidal conquest of "The Promised Land", some 3000 years ago, as related in the Jewish Torah – the "Old Testament" in the Christian Bible. The story of their barbaric, uncompassionate take-over of Canaan (the land west of the Jordan) from the Palestinians and other native tribes at that time begins in the fifth book of Moses (Deuteronomy) and especially in the book named for Joshua, Moses' successor as leader of the Israeli tribes after their period of slavery in Egypt.

Let us then look at the biblical record of the Israelites' first conquest of the Palestinian lands. The year is approximately 1200 BC. This is a part of the Bible you may not have read.

(What follows are selections from the Book of Joshua, New International Version, Chapters 6-10. We start at a point where the Israelites have been miraculously brought across the Jordan river by God stopping the flow of the river, and they're ready to commence their conquest of "The Promised Land", beginning with the walled city of Jericho.)

From Chapter 6 – Jericho. (My emphasis; the numbers indicate the verses. Skipped material is indicated by ellipsis.):
20 "When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.
21 They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it – men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. . . .
24 Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD's house."

Chapter 8 – Ai:
24 "When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it.
25 Twelve thousand men and women fell that day – all the people of Ai.
26 For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai.
27 But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the LORD had instructed Joshua.
28 So Joshua burned Ai and made it a permanent heap of ruins, a desolate place to this day."

Chapter 10 – (The southern cities):
28 "That day Joshua took Makkedah. He put the city and its king to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it. He left no survivors.
29 Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Makkedah to Libnah and attacked it.
30 The LORD also gave that city and its king into Israel's hand. The city and everyone in it Joshua put to the sword. He left no survivors there. . . .
31 Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Libnah to Lachish; he took up positions against it and attacked it.
32 The LORD gave Lachish into Israel's hands, and Joshua took it on the second day. The city and everyone in it he put to the sword, just as he had done to Libnah.
33 Meanwhile, Horam king of Gezer had come up to help Lachish, but Joshua defeated him and his army – until no survivors were left. . . .
34 Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Lachish to Eglon; they took up positions against it and attacked it.
35 They captured it that same day and put it to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it, just as they had done to Lachish. . . .
36 Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron and attacked it.
37 They took the city and put it to the sword, together with its king, its villages and everyone in it. They left no survivors. Just as at Eglon, they totally destroyed it and everyone in it.
38 Then Joshua and all Israel with him turned around and attacked Debir.
39 They took the city, its king and its villages, and put them to the sword. Everyone in it they totally destroyed. They left no survivors. . . .
40 So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.
41 Joshua subdued them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and from the whole region of Goshen to Gibeon.
42 All these kings and their lands Joshua conquered in one campaign, because the LORD, the God of Israel, fought for Israel."

********

Although the Torah – with its pervasive mythic elements – was written several hundred years after these supposed happenings and is not to be read as authoritative history, what matters is that this story is taught in Israel to this day as their proud history and destiny, and is believed by many. Perhaps the most sinister part of this tale is the insistence throughout that the Israelites' God commanded these heinous, genocidal acts, down to the details of how to commit the slaughter, with the vision that the land – all of it – is destined by God to belong to the tribe of Israel. Apparently no outrages were too brutal to be employed in this quest. Can we doubt that this first conquest of Palestine by "God's chosen people" is the model for the current effort in Gaza? The present ultraconservative Israeli government, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, has apparently charged itself with fulfilling Israel's "inevitable" destiny, still under the guidance and protection of the very same God. Note the photos below, of Netanyahu at the UN in 2023. No sign of a Palestine on his map. What gall! He is speaking to the UN that created the modern Israel with the condition that there also be a Palestinian state!

********

Let's review the "setup" for the current drama in Gaza. We must start many thousands of years ago (because this is where the Israelis start) with the great flood that, according to the Bible, God sent to kill the entire population of the Earth because they had sinned, saving only Noah and his family, who therefore are the ancestors of all of present humanity.

Noah had three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Unfortunately for Ham, he had the bad luck of embarrassing his father. So Noah put a curse on Ham's son Canaan and all his descendants for all time. This conveniently explains why the Canaanites (including Palestinians) are cursed and have no rights to Israel's "Promised Land."

Chapter 9 of the book of Genesis gives the essentials:

24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him,
25 he said, "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers."
26 He also said, "Praise be to the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
27 May God extend Japheth's territory; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth."

(Note that Shem is said to be the ancestor of the Semites, the race of Abraham, including, of course, the Jews. Japheth would be the ancestor of "the rest of us".)

Enough said. Israel is today leaning on ancient myths written to justify their original genocide in ancient Canaan, and now called up to invoke God's approval of the inhumanity of their current campaign against Gaza to finally fulfill God's promise. In actual fact, Israel is only a "promised land" in the sense that the United Nations in 1947 promised the surviving Jews of Europe a homeland in Palestine, to share as two states with the native Palestinian people. The UN's hope of a relatively harmonious Levant with clear and peaceful boundaries has to this date, three-quarters of a century after the establishment of the state of Israel, not yet been realized. The reason for this lies in intransigence by all parties; some Arab actors – primarily Shia movements linked to Iran – have still not accepted the core idea of the state of Israel, while Israel has continuously and increasingly opposed sharing the land with Palestinians in the way it was visualized by the UN. We have seen the result of their mutual hard-headedness, and the world has had enough of it.

It can't be denied that much responsibility for the current situation falls on USA. As Israel's effective guarantor and chief supplier of arms, the US should have done more to ensure fair treatment of both sides, along with regular progress toward two sustainable states in accordance with the UN requirements. Instead, Israel has enabled continuing incursions by Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands and denied Palestinians full rights in their homeland, without meaningful consequences from the US. The reason for the American failure to ensure progress will be found in US domestic politics. The American voting public has overwhelmingly supported Israel since its establishment after the second World War, and the influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington far outweighs Arab or Palestinian political reach. In short, in order to get (and remain) elected, US politicians support Israel. It's a sad state of affairs that domestic politics and personal ambition should make national leaders fearful of being fair.

It may be time for a UN-sponsored international panel to be organized specifically to oversee progress toward the "two state solution", something that should have been arranged in 1947-48. The two parties will never come to agreement of their own accord. The panel should provide direction and oversight and should require progress on a timeline set by the panel, aiming to complete the process within a reasonable length of time – say, within a decade. It should further have judicial power to sanction and penalize failure to make progress.

*********

This sorry tale deserves a possibly irrelevant but yet apposite anecdote that shows the popularity of the son of Ham as scapegoat. In the states of the southern US, during the time before slavery was banned (pre-1864), white preachers justified enslavement of Africans as "a gift from God", and creatively interpreted the biblical passages above to mean that Africans descended from Ham and Canaan, and were intended by God to serve as slaves, not only to Shem but "to his brothers", i.e., to all mankind. Truly, as we now see demonstrated in Gaza, there is no end to the evil that interpretation of "Holy Scripture" has wrought.