The road to Armageddon

Israel's brutal military action in Gaza will end in disaster not only for Palestinians, but for Israel and possibly even for the world.

I’ve been silent recently because I have been fighting a battle with myself about what this site should be.

When I moved Coppola Comment from Blogger to Substack, I said that it would become purely a finance & economics site, and posts on other subjects would be on my personal blog Still Life With Paradox. And I have tried to keep it that way, though this post about safeguarding did stray into one of my other areas of interest.

But I can’t sustain this divide. I can’t make myself write a post about banking when the carnage in Gaza and the appalling consequences that I foresee for Israel are occupying all my thoughts. And finance & economics is empty when the personal is gone.

So this (long) post is about Israel and Gaza. And from now on, Coppola Comment will publish posts about all my interests, not just finance and economics. Still Life With Paradox will continue as a personal reflection on my life and my faith.

Coppola Comment is a reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

October 7th, 2023

I must start by condemning outright the murders committed by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and the taking of hostages.

Over 1400 people died on October 7th, many of them children. Many suffered terribly before they died. They would be alive now if Hamas had not attacked. Hamas is solely responsible for their suffering and their death. It is the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Over 8,000 people have died in Gaza in the last three weeks, many of them children. They would also be alive now if Hamas had not attacked. Many suffered terribly before they died. Even though they died at the hands of Israeli soldiers, Hamas is responsible for their deaths.

Hamas killed over a thousand Israelis and has already caused the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. Many more will die because of what Hamas has done.

Over 200 Israeli hostages are trapped under fire in Gaza, as are a large number of foreign nationals. Some, perhaps all, may lose their lives before they can be rescued. Again, this is on Hamas.

Nothing can possibly justify such treatment of innocent men, women and children. I will not minimise or excuse these crimes in any way. Those who committed these crimes should be brought to justice. And those who rejoice at the attacks, and those who claim them as victories in a “just war”, are complicit in these atrocities. Civilians are not legitimate targets even in a just war, and torture, rape and hostage-taking are war crimes.

Embroidery, exaggeration and lies

However. I am as critical of those who use, and even exaggerate, these atrocities to justify mass murder of Palestinians as I am of those who try to minimise or excuse them. For some time after the attacks, there were sickening reports that 40 babies had been beheaded by Hamas. This horrific tale fanned the flames of outrage and helped Israel convince the world that punitive action in Gaza was wholly justified even at the cost of thousands of Palestinian civilian lives. But three weeks after the attack there is still no reliable evidence that Hamas beheaded babies: although Israel eventually showed bodies of children without heads to the world’s press, pathologists were unable to confirm whether the heads had been removed before or after death, and they observed that high explosives can dismember a child’s body - a gruesome fact that has been all too evident in Gaza, where children are also being found without heads and no-one is suggesting that they have been deliberately beheaded.

Now, those fanning the flames of outrage have moved on to tales of brutal rape, torture and mutilation of women. Again, there is little or no verified evidence that these stories are true. That does not mean they are not, of course. But I am suspicious of atrocity stories spread on social media in order to “justify” the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Whether or not the atrocity stories are true, the killing of civilians as an act of revenge is never justified.

There is evidence that some of those killed were caught in crossfire between IDF and Hamas fighters. And there are also disturbing reports that the IDF shot Israeli civilians and shelled their homes in order to wipe out Hamas fighters. I do not know whether these reports can be trusted. But equally, I don’t know whether reports that Hamas burned people alive can be trusted either. That people have been burned alive is without question, but exactly who did it has not been firmly established.

I have become extremely wary of trusting unverified information from either side in this conflict. A huge amount of fake “evidence” is being circulated by both sides. Casualty figures are inflated or deflated, depending on which side is reporting them. Israel is using blatant propaganda techniques, such as putting graphic images of murdered babies in Twitter adverts and targeting parents of small children in Youtube adverts. And on the other side, social media is full of unverified pictures and videos of collapsed buildings, terribly injured children and parents weeping over body bags. Independent verifiers are doing their best to separate the genuine from the malicious, but it is like trying to hold back the tide.

To make matters worse, there is blatant interference with the press. Both sides are trying to control the message. They are feeding journalists information instead of allowing them to find things out for themselves, and preventing them from reporting unpleasant truths. To me, Israel’s behaviour appears particularly egregious. Members of the Israeli government and the IDF have attacked major media organisations for refusing to take Israel’s side. Israel is suspected of killing a Reuters journalist and injuring several others in a targeted attack on a clearly-identified press station on the Lebanon border. It has also killed, so far, twenty-nine Palestinian journalists in Gaza: these journalists put their lives at risk, of course, but the fact that their homes and families were hit by air strikes suggests that they may have been targeted. And Israel’s communications blackout last weekend prevented journalists in Gaza from reporting the effect on civilians of the blitzkrieg in North Gaza.

I appeal to everyone to be extremely sceptical of reports of atrocities that have not been independently verified, even if they come from official sources. International press and social media influencers (I admit I was one of them) were far too quick to attribute blame for the Al-Ahli hospital blast to Israel. Subsequent careful evaluation by independent technical observers indicated that it was most likely caused by a misfired rocket from Hamas or Islamic Jihad. But it was too late. Half the world now believes Israel deliberately struck a hospital.

There is a terrible cost to this. Just as exaggerated reports of Hamas’s atrocities fuel hate against Palestinians, irresponsible reporting of Israel’s actions in Gaza fuels hate against Jews. Antisemitic attacks are rising. A few days ago, there was an attempted pogrom in Russia. I fear this could be the first of many.

“Israel has the right to defend itself”

The Western world initially responded to the October 7th attacks with unconditional support for Israel and unconditional condemnation of Hamas. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” cried politicians and pundits, as Israel dropped 6000 bombs on Gaza in the space of 5 days and imposed a total siege. But only three weeks later, the world is already balking at the terrible human cost. I have never seen popular opinion turn from sympathy to condemnation so quickly. Israel has burned through the goodwill it enjoyed immediately after the attacks and now risks becoming an international pariah.

The problem is the brutal and indiscriminate nature of Israel’s response. Already, Israel stands accused of committing multiple crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice is now investigating its actions, along with those of Hamas. And Israel seems to be intending to do far worse.

From the start, the language used by some Israeli officials, members of the Knesset and supporters of Netanyahu’s right-wing government was openly genocidal. Defence officials have talked of Gaza being “razed to the ground”. A member of the Knesset called for “doomsday weapons” to be used, which would appear to be a reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. There are thinktank reports and semi-official papers calling for the entire population of Gaza be moved out of Gaza into the Sinai desert: this would be ethnic cleansing, which is a crime against humanity, and since there is at present no means of supporting a refugee population of some 2 million in that barren place, it would probably also constitute genocide.

The genocidal rhetoric has now spread to the Israeli government. In a press conference last week, President Herzog ascribed responsibility for Hamas’s atrocities to the entire population of Gaza, though he angrily rowed back on this when members of the press asked whether this would make the entire population a legitimate target for punitive action. Netanyahu followed this up by portraying the conflict as a fight between the “sons of light” (Israel) and the “sons of darkness”. At the time, people chose to believe that “sons of darkness” meant Hamas, which given the scale of its murderous activities is not unreasonable. But in his speech two days ago, Netanyahu invoked Scripture, saying “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy Bible”. I’m afraid that for me, this makes it impossible to believe that he means Hamas. He must mean the entire population of Gaza. This is why.

The genocide imperative

The story of Israel’s victory over Amalek is in Shmuel 1 Chapter 15 (for Christians, this is 1 Samuel 15 in the Old Testament). It’s worth reading not only this chapter, but the following nine chapters as well, to understand where Netanyahu is coming from.

In the story, the Lord (via the prophet Samuel) instructed King Saul to take revenge on the nation of Amalek for attacking the nation of Israel during its exodus from Egypt. The required revenge was total genocide:

So said the Lord of Hosts, 'I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid (wait) for him on the way, when he came up out of Egypt. 

Now, go, and you shall smite Amalek, and you shall utterly destroy all that is his, and you shall not have pity on him: and you shall slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'

Now, it would be easy to dismiss this as rhetorical: surely Netanyahu wouldn’t really kill men, women, children, babies and even livestock? But that’s why you need to read the whole story. You see, King Saul didn’t do what the Lord told him to do. He balked at the cost. He killed all the people, yes, but he took the king of Amalek as a hostage and the livestock as spoil. The price he personally paid for this disobedience was the loss of his kingship, a brutal civil war, and an early death. His successor, David, proved himself very much more successful at killing Philistines and securing Israel’s borders than Saul. And the survival of the king of Amalek set up yet another attempt at genocide of the Jews by one of his descendents, the evil Haman, though fortunately Haman’s plans were foiled by the brave, clever and beautiful Esther and her cousin Mordecai.

The lesson seems clear. The Lord ordered the total genocide of the Amalekites to ensure the existence of Israel. It was not sufficient to kill fighting-age men. Children must also be killed, because they become the fighters of the future. And women must be killed, because they breed the fighters of the future. Even livestock must be killed, in case anyone remembers that they once belonged to the Amalekites. No trace must be left of them even in memory.

Whether or not Netanyahu believes this story is beside the point. What matters is that a substantial proportion of his supporters does. He is already facing calls for his resignation from both left and right, and his right wing is demanding genocide of the Gazan Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Israel and on the West Bank. If there is one thing Netanyahu wants to do, it is to hold on to power.

Whose claim to the land is greater?

However, Netanyahu -,and his predecessors - have already made the same mistake as King Saul. Hamas’s attacks did not come out of the blue. They were the murderous result of years of oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government seemed to think it could buy security for Israelis by penning up 2 million people in an open-air prison indefinitely. But it was surely foreseeable that eventually there would be a breakout. Indeed, there have been repeated breakouts in the last two decades, each of which Israel has met with brutal force and increased repression. This was never a sustainable strategy. Something had to give, and the results were never going to be pretty.

As Lawrence Freedman says, Israel’s policy of deterrence has failed. What should Israel do now? For the religious far right, the obvious solution is to kill as many of the Palestinians as possible and drive out the rest into the desert where they will perish of starvation, thirst and disease. To be fair, none of the proposals for ethnic cleansing actually say this. Rather, they propose helping other countries to absorb the Palestinians, the idea being that after a generation or two they will cease to exist as an defined ethnic group.

But those who have been dispossessed by brutal force seldom give up their hope of returning to their land and their homes. And genocides are never total. Those who escape them maintain their identity and culture in exile in anticipation of eventual return. It is every bit as unreasonable to expect Palestinians to relinquish their identity, culture and connection with the land as it is to expect Jews to do so.

I wholly accept that the Jews’ historical claim to the land that we now call Israel is of much longer standing than that of the Palestinians. But that does not give Israeli forces the right to kill or drive out Palestinians. After all, if simply having a relationship with the land going back thousands of years entitled a people to kill or drive out more recent arrivals, then Native Americans could kill or drive out the descendents of the Pilgrim Fathers, and First Nation Australians could kill or drive out the descendents of those that Britain transported to Australia. This is clearly wrong. Being the first to arrive in a territory does not confer a permanent right to exclusive use of it. And nor does being the only people sensible enough to keep a four-thousand-year record of their claim to a disputed territory.

Jews and Palestinians have an equal right to live in the Land of Israel. It is every bit as wrong for Jewish settlers to kill and drive out Palestinians in order to seize land for themselves as it is for Palestinian extremists to murder Jews and try to wipe Israel off the map. If there is to be lasting peace, Jews and Palestinians must respect each other’s rights. The question is how that is to be achieved.

Genocide begets genocide

Repeating the genocides and ethnic cleansings of the past cannot possibly ensure the security of Israel in the future. King Saul’s failed attempt to eliminate the Amalekites was only one of a long line of genocides, none of which succeeded in ending the threat. And the Amalekites weren’t the only people the Israelites tried and failed to eliminate. The history of the people of Israel as recorded in both Jewish and Christian scripture reveals a repeating pattern of taking land by force, driving out or killing the existing inhabitants, and then being killed or driven out in turn by the descendents of those they killed or drove out. The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that this pattern continued even after the Romans sacked Jerusalem in AD 70. And I am seeing the same pattern repeating today.

I am unashamedly switching to Christian scripture now. Not just because it is my faith, but because I think it has something to say.

On his way to the Cross, Jesus issued a terrible warning to the women of Jerusalem:

Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.” Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us”; and to the hills, “Cover us.” For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?

The Gospels were written after the sacking of Jerusalem. So this is actually a record of what happened. The Jews were brutally driven out of their land. Their Exile was even longer than that in Babylon, and their suffering far worse. It was nearly two thousand years before they could return to their homeland, and during that time they suffered persecution, pogroms and the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust.

But Jesus’s warning is presented as a prophecy, so it isn’t intended only as a record of a past disaster. It’s a warning for the future. And it resonates today, more than ever.

If Israel continues on its present path, the end will not be victory against the Palestinians, but disaster for Israel. There is a real and present danger that Israel will be crushed by the allies of the Palestinians. The Jews will once again be brutally evicted from the land. And I cannot imagine how long this Exile will be, nor how much they will suffer.

Feeding Amalek

In one respect, Netanyahu is right. Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is fragile. Amalek still exists today, in the form of those that want to wipe it off the map.

But a Biblical genocide is not the solution. The story of Esther tells us that honesty and the power of persuasion are a more effective way of dealing with Amalek than brutality. Admittedly, once Haman had been put to death, the Jews were allowed to execute all his followers: but these days, we would hand Haman and his followers over to the international courts of justice. And after Haman and his followers were gone, King Ahasuerus presided over a peaceful multi-cultural, multi-faith kingdom.

The carnage in Gaza is feeding Amalek, not destroying it. The supporters of Israel are dismissing calls for a ceasefire on the grounds that it “would only benefit Hamas”. But this is totally misguided. As the death toll mounts and harrowing pictures and stories of human suffering flood the airwaves, the voices of those who want to wipe Israel off the map grow louder. And they are powerful. Already, Iran is threatening war with missile attacks via its proxies in Yemen and Lebanon. If there is no ceasefire, war in the Middle East seems inevitable. And if it drags in the great powers, then it is not Jesus’s prophecy over Jerusalem that will resonate, it is the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation. Some Christians look forward to this. I do not.

This madness must end. There must be an immediate permanent ceasefire and release of hostages. Those responsible for atrocities must be handed over to face justice at the international courts. And those who talk of genocide and ethnic cleansing must be stripped of office.

There must then be peace talks brokered by a neutral third party with a view to agreeing a just and equitable settlement that establishes the right of the Jews to a safe homeland and the right of Palestinians to statehood. Whether that is a two-state solution, or a single-state solution where both groups have equal rights, is for them to decide.

Above all, both sides must commit to lay down their arms and live together in peace. I know this is a big ask. But unless they do, we may find ourselves on the road to Armageddon.

The figures for Palestinian deaths in the first section have been corrected.

Image: Armageddon, by Thomasccnawiki, via Wikimedia Commons.