You have undoubtedly seen the recent news from Gaza. In response to rocket attacks, Israel basically cut off all access to the Gaza strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians in situations of dire poverty. Israel closed the border even to imports of humanitarian supplies. The UN announced it could not supply food to 860,000 residents. Oxfam claimed that less than a third of Gaza’s water supply pumps still had fuel. More than half have no electricity. Remember this comes on top of already strict controls on the Gaza border. This is a major humanitarian crisis.
It is also an example of collective punishment. So said the United Nations, the European Union, and the church in Jerusalem. The church’s statement called it an “illegal collective punishment, an immoral act in violation of the basic human and natural laws as well as international law.” As Catholics, we know that collective punishment is wrong, condemned by Christ himself. And yet, so many American Catholics will still defend Israel no matter what. Why is that?
Those who hanker after a nefarious Jewish lobby are missing the bigger picture. I believe strongly that the US position on Israel comes straight out of derivative Calvinism, which has no major problem with collective punishment. After all, if you believe in predestination, you must accept the notion that whole peoples can very easily be damned through no fault of their own. There are black hats and there are white hats, good guys and bad guys, allies and evildoers. Israel is a “democracy” and so must be supported against the Palestinian “terrorists”, who anyway have a depraved and bloodthirsty culture (don’t all attempts to justify mass murder in history start from this very proposition?). If you add to this an element of weirdness from dispensationalist theology, then killing Palestinians can be read– in some really perverse way– as God’s will. Except that violence is incompatible with the nature of God, with the nature of a reasonable God anyway, as Pope Benedict is fond of pointing out. American Catholics would be wise to listen to the voices of the Church in Israel and Palestine rather than to the evangelical-inspired lobby in the US that sees Israel as capable of no wrongdoing. As is the case so often, bad theology is at fault.
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