For God's Sake, Israel?
Pain on the level of watching your child starve
While your whole community starves around you
All amid the rubble and destruction of your once homes...
Seems an unGodly thing to cause.
Perhaps not, in the minds of some fundamentalists in Israel.
"...devote to destruction all that they have." |
A few well‑known Old Testament passages in which
God commands total destruction of Israel's (and His) enemies :
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Deuteronomy 20:16‑17
“But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded.”
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1 Samuel 15:3
“Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
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Deuteronomy 7:2
“And when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.”
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Joshua 6:21
“Then they devoted all in the city [Jericho] to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.”
LO AND BEHOLD...
There is evidence that some fundamentalist or nationalist religious figures in Israel, including certain members of the current Israeli government or their supporters, use Torah-based or broader biblical justifications—explicitly or implicitly—for harsh policies toward Palestinians. This is not universally accepted within Israeli society or Judaism, but it is real and documented.
We in the rest of the world decry the mass cruelty the Israelis are bestowing on the people of Gaza. We see the profound irony that the people who chant "Never again" about the Holocaust are clearly committing a genocide.
I'm a huge fan of Israel, with the massive exception of the Netanyahu administration's cruel war of extinction.
MAKE PIECE!
Pix credit: Gemini AI
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