What do you say to someone who claims to have faith in Jesus and does not care about the genocide against Palestinians because, “It’s Scriptural.”? Coming from the hearts and mouths of gentiles, it makes absolutely no sense. As followers of Jesus, we are not under The Law. We believe that He came to fulfill it, so now we do not subject ourselves to the same culture and customs and regulations Jesus set us free from (see the entire book of Galatians). Rather, we follow the spirit of The Law—Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. (Deut 6:5, Lev 19:18, and Jesus quotes them in Matt 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27).
So much of the Tanakh, what we call the Old Testament, is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Historical accounts do not tell us so much about what God would have wanted as they do about human nature. Our nature. Genocides happened, murders and rapes happened, wars, cannibalism, slavery, and all sorts of immoral things happened. They are “Scriptural,” but that does not make them right. This is how people abuse the bible to support all sorts of immorality like racism, slavery, sexism, homophobia, etc.
Then, there are the laws that legitimately show us the heart of God and give us an inkling of what love actually looks like. Besides the Ten Commandments—do not lie, kill, steal, covet, commit adultery, etc., Leviticus 19:33-34 tells us “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong . . . he shall be to you as the native, and you shall love him as yourself.” The Israelites were foreigners in Egypt and were to remember their own experiences and show compassion (Exodus 22:21 and 23:9). What about the jubilee? Jews had to free their slaves every 50 years. Race-based, generational slavery was a uniquely American phenomenon. Jews also had to leave some of their crops for the poor, so they would have something to glean.
Remember when Jesus first started out in His ministry and went to the temple in his home town of Nazareth and started talking about how Elijah went to Sidon and saved the widow of Zarephath and her son during a famine and how Elishah didn’t heal the lepers in Isreal but instead went to Syria and healed Naaman (Luke 4:26-30)? That went over like a lead balloon. Later, when he passed through Samaria, He came to Jacob’s well at the town of Sychar and struck up a conversation with a gentile woman with a sketchy past. He told her, as she already knew, that “Salvation comes from the Jews.” (John 4:22), but Jesus ministered to her and made her the first person outside of his apostles whom He directly told that He is the Messiah. Furthermore, based on her testimony, she and many other Samaritans from the town came out to see Jesus at Jacob’s well, believed in Him, and were saved. What about the woman He effectively called a dog? Jesus deliberately entered the Canaanite region of Tyre and Sidon where He encountered a woman calling out to Him to heal her daughter. He didn’t answer her at first, but when she had come and bowed before
Him, Jesus told her that He was sent to the lost sheep of Isreal, and “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But, undeterred, she answered back that “even the dogs feed on the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” At that point, she had passed Jesus’ test, and He tells her, “Oh woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.” (Matt 15:21-28; Mark 7: 24-30). Jesus even heals the servant of the Roman centurion (Matt 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10). The Romans were the occupying power, and the ones Jews hoped Jesus would overthrow.
God never intended salvation to both start and end with the Jews. Before the nation of Isreal existed, He promised Abraham that “All the families of the earth will be blessed in you.” (Gen 12:3). That was the plan all along. Right before His ascension, Jesus told the disciples to “Go and make disciples of all the nations.” (Matt 28:19). And as recorded in Acts1:8, Jesus tells them, “ . . . you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”
So, why do we gentiles, fellow “dogs,” get hung up on what we now call the nation of Isreal—this state created by a bunch of white men behind closed doors in 1948? The temple was destroyed in 70 AD. The people who live there now mostly came from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and the USSR, and have very little genetic heritage, to the land. For example, Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, immigrated from Poland to Palestine and changed the family name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu in the 1920s—pre- WWII. The people who did have ancestral lineage that went back thousands of years, those were the Arabs displaced in the Nakba so the Jews of the diaspora could come in and colonize their land. Likewise, the Palestinians, both Muslims, and Christians have been living in a colonial apartheid state without the right to determine their own futures. I suppose we could have carved up Germany to create a safe designated Jewish state without displacing innocent people—of course Jerusalem is not in Germany.
Who constitutes Isreal now? How would we determine who would comprise the tribe of Naphtali, Judah, Manasseh, Simeon, etc.? What would the tribe of Levi have to do with no temple and no land rights? I legitimately don’t know the answer to those questions. Jesus told the apostles that they would rule over the twelve tribes of Isreal, as I interpret it, in the Millennium. Will Paul take Judas Iscariot’s place or Matthias? We don’t know what tribes the disciples came from. What if the apostles do not represent all twelve tribes? They may very well not since the Assyrians forcibly displaced the tribes north of Judah and brought other gentiles into the land to destroy the local culture there. Hence the Samaritan race. Presumably, God has a way to sort these things out. I know I don’t, and I doubt anyone else does either.
What does the current State of Israel have in common with Jacob and his descendants when God changed his name to “Israel,” meaning “struggles with God (Gen 32: 24-32)”? Some Palestinians are Jews and Palestinians have Jewish and Canaanite heritage. Why does Israel regulate DNA testing so tightly and specifically prohibit the sale of personal DNA kits to residents of Israel? Someone might successfully order a kit online from outside of the country and have it shipped to them at their home in Israel, but such kits may not be legally sold within the country.
In Revelations 12, Israel is portrayed as a woman. She gives birth to a male child whom Satan seeks to devour, but the child is caught up to God, and then she flees into the wilderness where she is nourished for a time that might correspond to the tribulation (verses 5-7). Later in the chapter, Satan persecutes the woman and tries to drown her with a flood, but “the earth helps the woman” and soaks up the water (verses 13-16). I do not know if the antisemitic forces that led to WWII and the Allies’ victory fulfill those passages or not. Truthfully, neither do you.
Personally, as I interpret Scripture, I believe that Jesus will return to establish and claim His kingdom suddenly and will not require advance assistance in the matter from racist colonizers. Think about it. Why do people consider Jews white but not Palestinians? Why did the town city council where I attend church in Southeast Ontario have no problem flying the Ukrainian flag in solidarity with them as they fight off Russian forces, but decide they needed to completely revamp their flag policy to not fly any foreign flags when asked to fly the Palestinian flag in solidarity with Palestine and with Palestinian community members—even if it were flown alongside the Israeli flag?
We tend to think we’re close to “The End.” I have every confidence that God did not want Hitler’s regime to succeed, but that does not mean that those who created the current State of Isreal and called for the forcible displacement of Arabs followed God’s will. God allows all kinds of atrocities to happen around the world on large scales and on an individual level. We have free will and we freely choose greed and power over ending world hunger or saving the planet. We have natural disasters and those we create. Sometimes, the lines become blurred between the two. I believe that we who believe in Jesus have the Holy Spirit within us. God endures all our pain and suffering along with us and helps us to persevere. When our bodies die, He takes us home to be with Him. The Holy Spirit guides those who will listen, but God is not our cosmic “fixer.” God showed us what love is through Jesus, and Jesus dwells with us. Someday God will make everything right, but in the meantime, we’re on a chaotic ride trapped on this conveyor belt called time.
So, what if we don’t happen to be particularly close to Jesus’ return? What if the current State of Israel is just a counterfeit? Maybe, this exemplifies Jesus’ words in Luke
16:16 and colonizers, like the Pharisees Jesus addressed in the passage, just try to force their way into “the gospel,” or in this case, forcibly displace and exterminate others to create their own kingdom without their Messiah.
What would Jesus say about some Christians’ nonchalance about genocide? Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan? Samaritans and Jews hated each other, but the Samaritan became a neighbor to the injured Jew. I am quite sure the starving of civilians, the sniping of children, and the rape and torture of people in designated torture camps does not fulfill what God had in mind for how Jesus would return to power. The status of “neighbor” did not have to do with race, color, creed, or anything else. We’re humans on the same planet taking the same journey together through time. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35). What exactly do you understand about Jesus’ character that makes you believe that He would support any genocide at all–whether of Jews, Palestinians, or anyone else—let alone of those who have direct genetic ties to Jews in Jesus’ time and before then, as well as to the first Christians on the planet?
