Overkill in Gaza

​As I write these words (March 5, 2024), Israel’s war in Gaza is approaching its fifth month. Much of the Strip has been destroyed, an estimated 30,000 Gazans including women, children, and seniors as well as Hamas fighters have been killed, with hunger and disease threatening the mainly displaced population. Israel’s incursion is based of course on the October 7th 2023 commando raid by Hamas into nearby Israeli towns that left some 1,200 Israelis dead after torture and rape, with several hundred more taken hostage into Gaza. Israel’s government claims it is exercising caution to avoid killing or wounding the innocent, but with Hamas tunneled under hospitals and other Gazan buildings, public and private, it is impossible for many civilians to be spared in Israel’s effort to eradicate Hamas...

Among its 282 laws, the Code of Hammurabi from the 18th century B.C.E. famously prescribed the idea of equity in revenge: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Yet in late 2023 of the Common Era we see a modern democratic state taking in effect 30,000 sets of eyes and teeth (so far) for the 1,200 it has lost. Why this dramatic disproportion? Well, first off, one finds that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures tends to punish an entire people for the misdeeds of one important person or a small group. A prime, indeed the first, example of this tendency is Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden followed by the advent of sin and death for all humankind for the first couple’s single act of disobedience. One strike by them and we were all out! My belief is that Israel, whose population is still traumatized by centuries of prejudice, pogroms, and in our time the Holocaust is following this “divine” model of wildly disproportionate revenge. It is clearly the root-and-branch approach, where the many suffer for the misdeeds of a few. Oy!
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One day this war in Gaza will also come to an end, but then what? I found a novel set of intriguing suggestions from the Israeli scholar Omri Boehm. With a doctorate from Yale, Dr. Boehm is today a professor of Philosophy at New York’s New School for Social Research. He posits that the two-state solution is a dead end. For one thing, the most generous offer during the Oslo Accords was for Israel to cede 22% of its land to house the 52% of the people in the region who are Palestinians. Then there is the issue of having to forcibly remove the Israeli settlers in those territories, currently around half a million, many of whom are Orthodox Jews who believe that they are living on land promised to them eons ago by God. Instead, Boehm reminds us that 20% of Israel’s current population and citizenship are Palestinians, some Christian but mainly Muslim. He proposes establishing a binational single state, which is in effect already working harmoniously in the Northern Israeli port city of Haifa. There, he argues, the two communities interact well and get along just fine. So why not in all of Israel, which he would rename The Haifa Republic [of Palestine-Israel, my addition]? Of course, the original sin of the State of Israel is the impossibility of having a Jewish state which is also a democracy. One day, with Palestinians out-reproducing Jewish Israelis, the former will become the majority, which will lead—democratically—to the end of the Jewish state. As an American Jew happy to live in an ethnically and religiously diverse secular country, I say bravo to that. Let’s let the postage-stamp-sized Vatican reign as the one and only religious state, and in our shrinking world let us in all our variety learn to live together with mutual respect and in peace. To which I add Amen, Awmain, Amin.

Prof. Omri Boehm – information here is from the German-language publication REPUBLIK