Brendan Hoban: How have Israelis let this genocide happen ?
Western People 26.8.2025
As I write, the news headlines on the radio remind me that Amnesty International has accused Israel of “the crime of genocide in Gaza by killing Palestinian civilians and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about Palestinians’ physical destruction”. Its verdict is, in effect, that the Armageddon that is at present an everyday reality of life in Gaza, is not the result of a complex of forces unaccountably aligning to create a unique situation where difficulties acquiring and distributing food, etc. are responsible for the present outrage. No, the overwhelming conclusion now is that the current starvation is the result of a decision of the Israeli government to starve the people of Gaza into submission.
There are prevailing circumstances of course that exacerbate the Gaza famine: hospitals are overwhelmed; thousands of children suffer from acute malnutrition; and the infrastructure that, in other circumstances might have sustained a response, has collapsed after years of mayhem.
By September an analysis by a reputable body predicts that two out of three famine thresholds have been reached: plummeting food consumption and acute malnutrition. The third, deaths from malnutrition, cannot be shown, though the overwhelming evidence is that the third famine indicator – that widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths – is obvious to all.
The Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, sums it up: “The facts are in, and they are undeniable. Palestinians in Gaza are enduring a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. This is not a warning. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes”.
And gradually and perceptively, it is emerging that voices heretofore accusing Israel of genocide didn’t emanate from rabid anti-Semitic prejudice intent on condemning Israel but represented a truth that is now (to use Gutteres’ word) ‘undeniable’.
And as if to underline that truth, Israel has announced that it intends to launch a new offensive to seize control of Gaza’s largest urban centre by forcibly displacing one million people from Gaza city. One report sums up the obvious fallout from a plan that has raised international alarm: ‘Palestinians in Gaza – displaced repeatedly, forced to live in tent camps or amid the ruins of their homes, stricken by hunger and deprived of medical supplies – are bracing for another humanitarian disaster’.
Some, including Palestinians – who have lost every discernible support in the deaths of family members, the destruction of their homes, the loss of jobs, food, medical care and the usual benefits that human beings are meant to enjoy – have been displaced up to six times as they are forcibly moved here and there to facilitate the Israeli killing machine.
We don’t need experts in moral truth to tell us why what’s happening is wrong, unacceptable, immoral. We see it every evening on the television news when the newsreader adds to his or her introduction a staple comment to the effect that ‘what follows may upset some viewers’. We even see it in the adverts as picture after picture of emaciated children demand our attention and our euros – if our consciences have not already moved us to help. The whole scene of devastated buildings reduced to dust while their former owners scrape through the rubble looking for mementoes of a past life is a picture of unending despair.
How could it all have come to this? How could such a talented race carry out with such menace such a morally suspect scorched-earth policy on so many innocent people. Yes, Hamas and those who have sought to obliterate the Jewish people over the centuries are to blame too. That goes without saying, and it needs to be said again and again, if only to avoid the easy slur of casual antisemitism.
This is not to incorrectly quote Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet – How odd of God, To choose the Jews – as an implied judgement on God’s chosen people. Or to blame the Jewish people for being obsessed with the ‘Final Solution’ mentality and its horrific consequences (as of course they have every right to be be) or even to wonder how that particular ‘solution’ might seem to echo what’s happening in Gaza now.
Judaism, the religion into which Jesus was born, now often seems a confused dolly-mixture of beliefs. In a compelling recent article in The Guardian, the writer Naomi Klein, a Jew herself, establishes an ocean of clear blue water between what Judaism represents and the Zionism that has shaped Netanyahu and that he is intent on shaping for others.
Part of the demented justification for Netanyahu’s immoral and bloody campaign is that razing Gaza to the ground is helping to secure what was intended as God’s ‘Promised Land’ for the Jewish nation. But the truth is that God did not promise that land to the Jews. Yes, he wished the Jewish people to live in Palestine but alongside others – not displacing them. And theologians have quoted biblical chapter and verse to show that God was completely opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. The famous theologian, Martin Buber, once equated the aspiration for a Jewish star with idol-worship, pointing out that God alone owns the land. (Check Leviticus, Chapter 25, verse 23)
In a recent commentary on this, the Dominican, Bernard Treacy, the editor of Conversations, concluded: ‘It is good to remember that the Jewish mind and voice include traditions that are much more compassionate and more humane that what we are accustomed to hear emanating from the present leadership in Israel’.
It bears repeating.
Dear Brendan thank you for your article. There are indeed many a conundrum about how it has come to this.
Without doubt we are in a colonial mentality. And a theology of empire is implicit if not overtly within that.
Yes Zionism and its influence on Israelis and Judaism is huge.
So too is the influence of the Zionist lobby in America and the support of evangelical Christians who are furthering some sort of false notions about Christianity and following a Christian Zionist agenda.
The role of religion, albeit we must not see it as a religious war. As it is not. But the role of religion to further a misleading notion of God’s chosen people and a narrative of exceptionalism is at work…
And in many respects the western church as the Western world has remained very silent.
I like to listen to Rev. Munther Isaac, A Palestinian Luther Pastor from Bethlehem on all this.
He has much to say and to offer. Highly insightful.
On a very small and personal note when I attend Mass these days I find it so difficult to listen to the Readings. So much talk of Israel, chosen people and of a violent God who seems to invoke violence…
It is a very real question why at this point are these Readings included anymore?
They do nothing to help the current situation.
Their inclusion and use in church has become so alien to us… indeed I find it distressing.
And possibly contribute to a weaponisation of the Bible for Zionist propaganda and support, even from Christians.
This is the greatest scandal of my lifetime, and I fear it reaches even farther than what Brendan so powerfully describes. In the second century the church cracked down on Marcion and his denunciations of the God of the Hebrew Bible. Harnack, the great scholar of Marcionism, applauded the wisdom of the church of that time in not cutting itself off from its Jewish heritage. He also applauded Luther for holding back from the Marcionist temptation, which would have created havoc in the 16th century. But he saw the refusal of modern theologians to reopen the Marcionist questions as a sign of theological paralysis and lack of imagination.
Notger Slenczka (b. 1960), the Berlin theologian, with his father Reinhard (1931-2022), was fiercely opposed to Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquart (1928-2002), the disciple of Karl Barth, who wanted to rewrite the New Testament in Jewish categories. Notger Slenczka provoked a rumpus in 2015 when he pointed out that the three most influential German theologians, Schleiermacher, Harnack, and Bultmann were Marcionites and when he argued that the Hebrew Bible should be removed from the Christian canon, or reduced to the status of apocrypha, as being the sacred text of the predecessor religion to Christianity (which should be respected as such and not hijacked for Christian rewriting). This is too drastic, especially at a time of unprecedented Jewish Christian dialogue and rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus.
Nonetheless, we need a more radical rethinking of our relation to the violent central narrative of the Hebrew Bible, with its numerous God-commanded massacres, chillingly echoed by Netanyahu in his cry, “Remember Amalek!” It is not enough to fret about these text in an old-fashioned effort to shore up biblical inerrancy. The dehumanization of Israel is due not only to the poisoned ideology of Zionism, the oppressive cult of memory of persecution, the accumulated hatred between the two warring communities, fanaticized on both sides, the rage induced by the terrorism of October 7, 2023, but is due also to the Hebrew Bible itself, which contains a massive reservoir of hatred, drawn on in the West as well by people like Oliver Cromwell, and has added fuel to the fire of the present holocaust.
After the horror has passed and the guilty parties face abysses of guilt and shame, there should be a vast Jewish and Christian commission to discuss in total honesty the question of what to do about the heritage of biblical violence — of what sanatio in radice is called for, what embargo on satanic verses, what new culture of post-fundamentalist bible reading. The role of Christian fundamentalists in spurring on the suicidal policies of Zionism needs to be examined as well. At the moment the USA remains very far from examining the theological underbelly of its blind support of Israel. While Christian theologians must orient themselves to the Jewish origins of divine revelation and must work together with Jewish thinkers in reflection on Auschwitz, this must now include as well a reflection, in repentance, on the scandalous disfigurement of Judaism by its implication in genocide.
Brendan, we are all prone to developing a superiority complex. When this takes hold we start the dehumanization process of the “other.” Without self reflection on my own “shadow” or “sinfulness” I will project my own darkness onto “others.”