The death toll rises

 I am preparing a Current Events session for our group at MonteCedro on the continuing war in Gaza. We discussed this in the fall of last year when it started but it has become obvious that an update is (sadly) necessary. The death toll in Gaza has passed 32,000 but as the New York Times notes, it is likely much higher than that.

 

“Gaza has become a 140-square-mile graveyard, each destroyed building another jagged tomb for those still buried within.”

I have read through numerous accounts from a wide variety of news sources. The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was unprecedented, barbaric, and horrible: 1143 dead, 250+ hostages taken, rapes and sexual assaults. Israel’s response was predictable but equally horrible in its consequences. Dead: 32,000 and counting. Wounded: many, many thousands more. Gaza became a major humanitarian crisis overnight with forced evacuations from Gaza City to the south followed by an air and land assault of immense size. Famine looms, especially threatening children. And in no way are Palestinians retreating from support of Hamas. 

I find nothing in this to take sides on. Israel under Netanyahu has become a right-wing autocracy that denies the right of Palestinians to self-govern or even to exist. Hamas is a terrorist organization that engineered its way to control of Gaza and equally feels that Israel should not exist. Both Israel and the Palestinians are behaving as nationalists, secular actors who proclaim their existence as independent states. But let us remember the underlying role religion plays here. 

All three Abrahamic religions lay claim to the same small patch of land sometimes still referred to as the “Holy Land” (hard for me to understand what is holy about this land. The religious writings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain references as to why that claim is valid for them alone. For Judaism, this is a land made holy by being “the earthly dwelling of the God of Israel, traceable to the 6th century BCE in Zechariah. Thus the Promised Land given to the Israelites. For Christianity, this is the land associated with the birth, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. And for Islam, the Quran refers to the Holy Land and Moses’ directive to the Children of Israel to enter it and never leave. 

Every religion has a distribution of followers that includes extremists. Religion and words spoken or written in the distant past are all that such people seem to believe is reality. They include the ultra-Orthodox of Judaism, the fringe of Islam that takes the meaning of jihad to be war, and Christian evangelicals who believe that Armageddon needs to occur before their salvation is at hand. Both the doctrine of Hamas and the party platform of Likud are the most recent echoes of this balderdash. There has been a lot of ink spilled on the deaths caused by religion as well as refutations of the culpability of religion. Suffice it to say that I side with the former opinion. Humans are a tribal and territorial species. Religion at the very least sharpens those edges and has since time immemorial.