The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
It is impossible to believe that Hamas planned to achieve the astonishing success it has had by means of its bloodthirsty incursion into Israel on October 7. In a few hours they killed 1400 Israelis, almost all of them civilians, and took as many as 400 people hostage, some of them Americans and other nationalities, but most of them Israelis.
However, that is not the success to which I refer in this essay. That vengeful terrorist military exercise was nothing other than a carefully-executed massacre. Many people around the world think it was justified on the basis of how they perceive the Israelis to have treated the Palestinians since 1948, but many others considered it to be what it was: a blitzkrieg outrage.
The huge public relations success achieved by Hamas is what has occurred since October 7. Make no mistake about it: Hamas is NOT a political or governmental organization. Instead it is an group of extremists, mainly Palestinians, who want to rid the southeastern Mediterranean coast of every Jewish Israeli living there. (There are also hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Israelis, but that is the subject for another essay [which I probably will not write, because it doesn’t need to be written; it has already been written about hundreds of times]).
Hamas is the Gaza equivalent of Hezbollah, Al Qaida, Islamic Jihad, ISIS, etc., etc., etc. Fanatical Muslims and fanatical “muslims” (deliberate lower-case, because these extremist killers are no more Muslims than are the “christian” assassins of Christians who have been killed or injured serving in abortion clinics). Anyone who believes violence can be used to further religious causes inevitably misunderstands and misuses a proper commitment to any religion, and does not deserve to be affirmed by anyone as a member of that religion.
Hamas is basically an organization of fanatical Palestinians. It is imperative to understand that. They are not a legitimate group for governing any people or nation anywhere.
The success of Hamas in its most recent war with Israel has been achieved because it is engaged against an Israeli government that is also fanatical. That is true for basically one reason. It is led by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.
No doubt the leaders of Hamas, who have higher-than-average intelligence, anticipated that Netanyahu would do exactly what he has done. And they knew that would enrage millions of Muslims, “muslims,” Christians, “christians,” and other religious or non-religious people, especially liberal-minded people. In that Hamas has succeeded, not in spades, as Americans are wont to say, but in scimitars, as Arabs might say.
Bibi Netanyahu has always been far to the right in the Israeli Knesset, whether he was simply a member of the parliament or its prime minister. Now, for purely self-serving political reasons, he has once more re-invented himself, this time as an ultra-rightist extremist. He has used this type of chameleon behavior many times before, but he is doing it again in the war against Hamas that the prime minister has been waging every day for the past month.
When Netanyahu declared on October 8 that Israel would “crush” Hamas by totally obliterating it, he was engaging in dangerous an ill-conceived political demagoguery and bravado. Hamas has not been crushed, it is not being crushed, and it will not be crushed. If anything, Hamas will rise stronger than ever from the slaughter now going on in Gaza because of the overpowering strength of the Israeli retaliation.
Killing 9 000 people, most of them civilians and a high percentage of children and women, is not a proportionate response to the unspeakable rapid assassination of 1400 Israelis. No one knows better than the Israelis how difficult warfare is in dense urban settings. They have been involved in it for three-quarters of a century. And because Mr. Netanyahu has insisted there will be no pause or ceasefire to allow food, water, and other supplies to go into Gaza, and wounded and dead to be taken out of Gaza, there will be several more thousands of Gazans who die before this war ends, as all other wars do end. But this high mortality rate is an ethical and public-relations fiasco for the Israeli government.
Because of what the Israel Defense Force is doing in Gaza, countless thousands of Hamas volunteers in their thirties, twenties, and teens will become Hamas soldiers in the next few weeks, months, or years. That is as much a certainty as it is that the sun will rise tomorrow.
Bibi’s Fiasco is primarily his fiasco alone. It isn’t the calamity of the most far-right coalition in Knesset history; it is the fault of the leader of that far-right coalition. Israel will be paying a price in blood for many years because of this terrible miscue.
Here is the most important statement to be made in this essay: To condemn the Israeli Prime Minister and Knesset for the devastation being thrust upon Gaza is NOT the condemnation of Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness. If such a position were ethically or philosophically defensible, then it would be defensible for anyone to condemn Americans for the unjust and unsuccessful wars in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Three American presidents and the Congresses in session during their terms were responsible for those wars, not Americans. Government is a necessity for every kind of nation, be it very democratic or very autocratic, and it is the leaders, not the citizens, who take the necessary measures to declare to war.
There is a difference between “Israelis” and “Jews.” There also is a difference between “pro-government” and “anti-government” Israelis. The massive protests of the past several months affirm that important distinction.
For the most part, the anti-Israeli demonstrations on American college campuses is anti-Israeli government decisions; it is not antisemitism as such. When it is overt antisemitism, its zealots fail to distinguish the Israeli government and the Jews who comprise the citizenry of Israel. Israeli Jews did not declare this war; the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, did that.
In addition, Muslims did not initiate the surprise attack the kibbutzim and the music festival. It was ideologically beyond-the-fringe muslims, with a deliberate lower-case “m”, who did that. It is imperative for everyone to distinguish the governments of nations from the people of those nations. Otherwise people can get themselves into situations where vengeance and revenge lead to emotion-wrought outrages of which our species is far too often guilty.
All Jews, but particularly Israelis, need to drill that into their psyches. In most instances it is not Jews or Judaism which has been severely criticized increasingly over the past few weeks. It is Israeli government policies which are at issue here, not Jews as Jews.
Having first gone to Israel with a group of seven Christian clergy from northern New Jersey organized by a saintly rabbi, and having led nine church tour groups to Israel after that, I am well aware of the factors which can cause both Israelis and Palestinians to distrust and mistrust one another. However, those negative feelings, which have been carefully nurtured by too many for too long, have only resulted in tens or even hundreds of thousands of people having been killed, whether directly or indirectly, by Palestinian/Israeli animosity. Furthermore, ever since the Israeli War of Independence was won, the Israelis have been far stronger than the Palestinians. When blame is declared by outsiders, it is usually the stronger power that endures the most stinging barbs, not the weaker power.
William Tecumseh Sherman was correct; “War is hell.” Why doesn’t everyone learn that? At their best, the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Bible and the Quran all promote peace. At their worst, all three hint at or openly promote war.
It is because too many people are too unwilling to let terrible bygones be bygones that wars all too frequently erupt at various hotspots all around the world. Wars are easily ignited, and it usually happens for bad reasons and few if any good ones. And though wars can begin quickly, they can take inexorably long months or years to end.
Somehow, someone - or more accurately several someones – need to get together and end the carnage that is the current Palestinian-Israeli bloodbath. It is an absurd idea that Hamas could ever be completely obliterated. It is absurd that any Palestinians ever imagined that Israel could be obliterated. Since 1948, one of the two nations between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been militarily and politically much more powerful than the other. Palestinians think Israel has been unjust, and Israelis think Palestinians have been unjust. Both have been unjust, as everyone else everywhere is unjust to some degree, personally and corporately.
Injustice, war, and revenge will never disappear altogether, but they must constantly be resisted by those who try to have “good will toward men” everywhere. We must always try to overcome the negative thoughts and feelings which can grow from suspicion to dislike, then to intense hatred, and finally to military violence. Perfect peace will never be perfectly accomplished, but it must be imperfectly attempted all the time in every place by everyone.
In Romans 12:19, the apostle Paul quoted God as saying, ‘“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.’” Actually those exact words cannot be found anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 32:35 does quote God as saying, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” but its does not add the “says the Lord” phrase. In any event, no one ever had a divine mandate for vengeance, and anyone who believes in a vengeful God has a twisted belief.
If the truth is told, though, both the Bible and the Quran have some highly dubious quotes attributed to God which God could never have either said or communicated into anyone’s God-centered mind. So why are the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – filled with so much bloodshed in so many battles and wars and so many purportedly divine pronouncements to go out and kill the kind of people whom the writers of those scriptures didn’t like in the first place, and then insisted that is what Adonoy/Dominus/Allah wanted in the second place?
Perhaps this is a possible answer to that question. Relatively advanced people have been living in what is now called the Middle East relatively longer than any other such people have been living anywhere else. If that hypothesis is correct, because so many of those Middle Eastern tribes and clans have lived in the Middle East for so many millennia, they have had far more time to disagree with one another and to go to war with one another than other folks in other places. No advanced people have lived anywhere longer than the people who have lived between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean have lived there. Thus they have had much more practice at bearing grudges against their neighbors, either because of what happened today or what may have transpired three thousand years ago.
For its own sake, Israel must decide soon whether it is a Jewish theocracy or a secular democracy. Under the current ultra-Orthodox religious coalition, it has leaned heavily toward theocracy. Theocracies are much more apt to engage in inequities and injustices than secular democracies. Think Iran under the ayatollahs or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Only Israel can end the war in Gaza. Until it uses its superior strength to bring peace, Hamas will uses its weakness to continue warfare, and will go from success to success
– November 5, 2023
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.