Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

Though the world is growing smaller, we humans still seem fairly tribal in our loyalties. In the case of us Jews, this unfortunate fact is especially true. Understandably, in an unfriendly world, we have tended to circle our wagons and look toward each other for mutual aid and support. Yet team loyalty of this kind can keep us from embracing the broader values expressed in the African American sayings that “God don’t make no junk” and “All God’s chillen got wings.” The solidarity of the human family comes hard to most people, but we children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seem to find it especially beyond our reach...​

We have seen this reality in spades since the incursion of Hamas from Gaza into Israel on October 7, 2023. The attacks by the Hamas terrorists on unarmed settlers, including women, children, and old people, were beyond horrendous. So the Israeli response at some level could have been expected. Yet the many innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza who have since paid with their lives the price for Hamas’s atrocities was so disproportionate as to go well beyond an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
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David Ben Gurion, Zionist leader and the first prime minister of the state of Israel, infamously said about his new country that it was a land without people for a people without land. Well, brother David, what about the 750,000 Palestinians living there at that time, some tracing their roots on the land back to the 8th century C.E.? The Israeli writer Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi put the matter this way: “There is clearly no need to justify the Zionist dream [of a national homeland for the world’s Jews], the desire for relief from Jewish suffering. . . . The trouble with Zionism starts when it lands, so to speak, in Palestine. What has to be justified is the injustice to the Palestinians caused by Zionism, the dispossession and victimization of a whole people, There is clearly a wrong here, a wrong which creates the need for justification. . . .” (Quoted in Jews for Justice in the Middle East, “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict,” 3rd ed., n.d.)

Tribal warfare over land in the Middle East has a long and unfortunate history. The Old Testament deity is, alas, a tribal god taking sides with “His” people against those already living in the “Promised” Land. “Go wipe them out,” He tells Moses and his fellow exiles from Egypt. Lots of women, children, and old people were part of this slaughter too. And the beat goes on, pinging and ponging in acts of revenge and counter-revenge down the millennia. As a Jewish reformer, Jesus introduced the idea of forgiveness and an opening to universalism. If not siblings, foreigners can be neighbors, as illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Neighborliness, the parable demonstrates, depends on behavior, not ethnic or religious relationships. My people in their nationalistic urge to have a homeland, like the European colonists of North America, did not take into account the people already in the land. The results will continue to lead to needless death and mayhem into a timeless future. Shame on us!

When will we ever learn...?