Sermon on the Crisis in Gaza Rabbi Jonathan Miller Temple Emanu-El Birmingham, Alabama July 13, 2007—Shabbat Matot-Masei   I promised you that I would speak tonight about the crisis in Gaza and what it portends for the future. I have been a keen observer of trends in the Middle East and an ardent supporter of Israel through the course of my life.  I have visited Israel many times, and spent extended periods of time living there in the 1970s.  I speak Hebrew fairly well for an American pulpit rabbi. So my Israel bona fides are pretty good.  I read and analyze and talk to people and read and analyze and talk some more and learn and observe and think and pray for the peace of Jerusalem, every day in my daily prayers to God. Here come the caveats:  I used to think that I knew what would be, that I could predict with some reliability what would happen in the short and long term future in the uber-conflict in the Middle East.  I now readily admit that I know very little.  But I am in good company.  Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and Mahmud Abbas and Bashir Assad and King Abdullah and Hosni Mubarak and Tony Blair and Mahmud Ahmadinejad know as much as I do about the future.  There are so many pieces to the puzzle, and the Middle East game is an elaborate game of chess that is played in many dimensions.  Each party is responsible for their piece of the puzzle, and nobody knows quite what the other players will do.  And just when you think that you got it down, the rules change.  So everybody plays in the dark, knowing and anticipating their next move, and maybe the move after that, and that is all that can happen in this chess game of unintended consequences.  And nothing is ever as it seems in that part of the world.  Victories often lead to defeat and weakness, and weakness often leads to opportunity and victory, and sometimes it happens that way and sometimes it doesn’t.  And don’t believe whoever tells you that they know what is going to be, whether that person is the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Israel, or your favorite pulpit rabbi.  Nobody knows. In June, I was in Turkey when the Hamas and the Fatah Palestinian factions had their mini civil war, which left Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank.  I wanted some time to sort this out before I engaged the congregation from the pulpit.  So here we are in the middle of July.  I don’t know what will happen, and I will share with you what really concerns me.  But first I want to offer you a history lesson. I have repeated often the common notion that the Palestinians needed to have their civil war.  It is a historical necessity.  The Palestinians needed to go at each other, once and for all, to determine the direction of their future.  And the Palestinians lost this civil war. Sadly for them, and for Israel, the Palestinians are among the most dysfunctional and pathetic of peoples.  They have been encouraged to nurse at the teat of their historical injustice, to pine away for their homes and farms that they lost 60 years ago, mostly because they left at the behest of their leaders, and sometimes because they were driven out by their victors.  Such is the way of the world.  But the Palestinians have institutionalized their injustice and determined that they would rather live as history’s victims than to take charge of their own lives.  They have developed a cult of death that has been fed by many sources:  religious extremism, a turn to violence and brutality as a means for getting things done, a corrupt and selfish leadership, and an avoidance of responsibility for their mistakes. And the world at large has been complicit in their failure.  Instead of insisting that the Palestinians grow up and behave the way all people are expected to behave, the world at large has excused the Palestinians’ descent into anarchy.  We have all had the experience of walking the aisles of the grocery store and watching a young child have a tantrum because Mom’s not going to buy what they demand.  And we watch.  If mom gives in, we know that they are in trouble.  We know that Mom will have hell to pay in the years to come for her surrender to her unruly child.  The world has done some bad parenting when it has come to the Palestinians, and we are paying in spades for their tantrums years ago. The world out there applauded the Palestinian violence and their death cult.  They celebrated the historical tantrums of this infant people.  They have condoned hijacking of airplanes, the kidnapping of athletes, the descent into terror, and the self-immolation of religious fanatics willing to kill themselves so long as they kill others.  The world has excused this pattern of behavior for so many reasons which time does not permit me to share, and the fruits of this behavior and the willingness of others to explain it away are now being consumed in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Egypt, in the Sudan, in London, in Madrid, in Bali, in Turkey, in Algeria, in Buenos Aires, in Thailand, in Moscow, in Paris, and at Ground Zero in New York.  Pity the poor Palestinians, and all you will produce is a pitiful people.  Make people accountable for their actions, and they will have a chance to live as civilized people and better themselves. What compounds the tragedy is that the Palestinians had so many opportunities to create a state of their own, imperfect as it would be.  And they have squandered these opportunities so they might perpetuate their cult of irresponsible self-pity.  Because of the decisions that they alone have made, they are decidedly worse off today than they were a year ago; worse off a year ago than they were a decade ago; and worse off a decade ago than they were two generations ago.  The Palestinians needed to have their Altalena.  In June, 1948, David ben Gurion was the head of the provisional government of the month old state of Israel, which was engaged in a war for its survival.  His political rival, Menachem Begin, commanded the Irgun, a separate militia that was not fully integrated into the new Israeli Army.  The Irgun commissioned a ship, the Altalena, to bring in arms for the Irgun fighters in violation of the agreement that Israel had signed with the United Nations.  Ben Gurion knew that the new state could have only one command structure, only one army, only one police force, only one law—and he had the Israeli army fire on the Altalena, and he sunk the ship outside of Tel Aviv.  As painful as it was, that was when Israel became one country, which chose its future by political means, and not a group of competing militias who would inevitably resort to thuggary.  This June’s civil war was the Altalena for the Palestinians.  Unfortunately, the wrong ship was sunk.  Hamas is in charge of Gaza, and Fatah holds on for the time being in the West Bank, and the Palestinians have never been further away from their own state. There are now two scenarios being offered by the pundit class.  First the rosy scenario: Fatah is now free to pursue peace with Israel.  With its extremists isolated in Gaza, Abbas can better the lives of the Palestinians in the West Bank and show them the benefits of cooperation and negotiation.  Hamas is, in point of fact, a greater threat to the well being of the Palestinian people and the Arab world than is Israel.  So peace and statehood will come in stages.  Notice that for the first time ever, the 22 nation Arab League is sending a delegation to Jerusalem to talk with Israel and offer it recognition, perhaps.  Syria has been whispering about its desire for peace.  Hamas-run Gaza, with its religious fanaticism, has made it more desirable for the Arab world to make peace with Israel than it would be for them to face a greater sense of rebellion at home from the jihadists.  We now have a new opportunity to get this conflict behind us. Now for the pessimist’s scenario: Gaza has become an outpost for the new wave of Palestinian self-determinism.  They are disciplined, tough and they easily routed the corrupt and ineffectual Fatah.  They are believers, and after they consolidate their gains in Gaza, they will pursue Fatah in Ramallah, Hebron and Jenin.  If Fatah couldn’t defeat them in Gaza, why should they have greater success in Nablus?  Even thought they are Sunni, they are supported by the Shiite interests in Iran, whose ultimate goal is to keep things unstable to hurt the Great Satan, a.k.a. the United States.  And there is really very little difference in the goals of Fatah and Hamas. They are both dedicated to the destruction of Israel. If you thought that missiles from Gaza into S’derot are bad, wait until you see what can be fired over the wall from Qalqilya into Rosh Ha’Ayin? Things will get worse and not better. Who knows? But I want to share with you a thought that I have not read anywhere.  I am increasingly ill at ease with the prospect of another jihadist political entity in the Muslim world.  The religious nature of Hamas, as opposed to the more secular orientation of Fatah, is frightening.  Israel and the world, including especially the Arab world, does not benefit from another Iran, Southern Lebanon or Saudi Arabian theocracy.  Religion and politics are a volatile mix that does not lend itself to conciliation.  Religion and politics and martyrdom only elevate misery and death to a new level by sanctifying its unholy result.  It is the religious nature of Hamas that frightens me the most.  There is no compromise with the faithful, who know the truth exclusively as God reveals it only to them.  And give these people guns and give them total control of the schools and textbooks and airwaves, and the fanaticism will increase.  Today, Gaza has no foreign journalists, and nearly all of the foreign aid workers have left.  The Christian witnesses and the International Solidarity Movement and the Sabeel folks have fled.  In the first week of rule in Gaza, Hamas thugs destroyed prominent churches and burned Christian bibles. Women now leave their homes accompanied by male escorts and they have to have their heads covered, and it is prudent of them to veil their faces.  Extremism is ugly.  Religious extremism is ugly and frightening, and it cannot be defeated by military force.  Take a look at the resurgent Taliban in Kandahar, the Red Mosque in Islamabad, or the streets of Gaza City. I am a rabbi, and religion is my business.  And I admire religion when it is used to elevate people and bring meaning to one’s life and comfort the bereaved and evoke selfless sacrifice for the common good.  Religion is then God’s tool for redemption.  But put religion and faith into the hands of government, or worse yet, into the hands of thugs, and nobody can design greater cruelty than those who do so in the name of God. Here is a Torah lesson to ponder:  This week we read the end of the Book of Numbers, and it is not pretty.  The Midianites had seduced the Israelites, and God tells Moses to destroy them, to tear down their walls and their homes and their sanctuaries and kill every male and all the adult females and divide the remaining spoil accordingly.  I cringe when I read this.  And they do so to fulfill God’s command and to avenge the Midianites the wrong they have done to our ancestors.  I cannot for a moment believe that the God I worship really desires us to be agents of death and destruction in His name.  Midianite or no, as detestable as they were and as abhorrent as was their behavior, belief in God does not countenance the faithful to act with vicious cruelty.  I believe that these passages are preserved in our holy Torah to remind us to cringe, to explicitly reject them and say “no” to the wholesale slaughter of innocents.  I know that I am misreading the text, and I am doing it deliberately.  But belief in God does not give us carte blanche to wreak havoc and misery and death on others.  And neither does it give sanction to the Palestinians to do likewise. I don’t know if the future of Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, America and our way of life is ultimately strengthened by the Hamas takeover of Gaza, or not.  Some good might could come of it (as we say in the South).  But no good comes when we give religious license to cruelty and to those who would destroy others for the sake of their faith.  We did it with the Midianites, and it was my least proud moment in the Torah.  To see a jihadist mini-state take root in Gaza is in itself frightening and cannot be what God wants from his faithful.  I pray that we will turn in faith away from violence and turn to goodness, which is the reason our Creator has created us. Amen   Back