My View on Israel and Gaza

​I live in Boulder, Colorado. Four days ago near our courthouse, an Egyptian man using homemade Molotov cocktails and gasoline in a weed sprayer attacked a group of quiet protesters supporting release of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Fortunately none of the victims died, although two of the 12 burn victims are still being treated in the hospital. Meanwhile, Gaza has been reduced to rubble, 50,000 inhabitants, many civilian women and children, have been killed, and the remaining population is suffering from famine...

As a third-generation American Jew I understand our people’s cultural PTSD. After all, “we” had been deprived of our national homeland for two millennia, until the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Beyond that, as strangers in a collection of strange lands, we have been subjected to prejudice-based harassment all the way up to attempted genocide. The Nazis’ partially successful campaign in that direction left us collectively with a feeling of Never Again. Metaphorically speaking, our doors have been locked and our guns are loaded and near at hand. So when Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel took place on October 7, 2023, I was not surprised by Israel’s massive and ongoing campaign of revenge.

Yet the Torah makes clear that dealing out punishment for evil deeds is God’s job, not ours. In Deuteronomy, literally the second giving of the Law, the Lord states, “Vengeance is mine, and recompense….” (Deut. 32:35, NSRV). St. Paul, the Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles, quotes this passage in his Letter to the Romans: “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’” (Rom. 12:19a, NRSV). Then in the next two-and-a-half verses he adds, paraphrasing Jesus, “No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coal on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:19b-22, NRSV).

Okay, true-disclosure time. I have been a baptized Christian since 1967. After a long stint as a Lutheran and a shorter one as a Roman Catholic, I have been an Episcopalian for the last 14 years. So, while I understand the reaction of the Netanyahu government to October 7th, I wish it had been much more limited and proportionate. In fact, I wish it would never have happened.
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Now I’m not sure what else Israel might have done. But I also understand the frustration of the Palestinian people at having lost their land and not having a land of their own: in effect, changing places with us Jews. While a two-state solution wouldn’t be perfect, it would go some distance to reverse the Zionist takeover of a land where other people had been living for generations. Not only that, but when Jehovah promised the Holy Land to my ancestors in the Book of Exodus, all the tribes already living there never got the memo. There has to be a resolution to this dreadful situation—and one that does not include violence.

St. Paul preaching to the Athenians, by an unknown artist ca. 1860.