( New Jersey Star-Ledger ) – I cannot see President Biden without seeing 40,000 dead Gazans.
He rightly stepped aside after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, but he continues to lose a far more disastrous debate with Israel’s Prime Minister, weakening the basic principles of US foreign policy. Alongside his humiliating failure to achieve any “red lines” on civilian casualties, Gaza is having significant, long-term moral impacts on Christianity and Judaism.
So far, Democratic Convention organizers — and nominee Kamala Harris — have not agreed to any airtime for Gaza. Yet simply saying “Trump would be worse” to the Uncommitted million primary voters, and the protesters outside, will devalue whatever feel-good effect she may achieve.
As a Holocaust survivor’s son, I was raised to despise antisemitism and support Israel. Over five Middle East visits, however, I learned that Israel is not the beleaguered little guy, but a country enabled by blank-check US support to operate without normal political consequences. Our billions in military aid strengthen the most repressive elements of Israeli society, which denies most Palestinians citizenship. Thus, while criticizing Israel’s government is not antisemitic, the worldwide rise in antisemitism reacting to Gaza is alarming and unsurprising.
To a Presbyterian ethicist, Gaza clearly violates the “Just War” principles of proportionality, avoidance of civilian casualties, and goal of a just peace. Israel’s use of enormous bombs is indiscriminate as the Israeli Army authorizes massive casualties in pursuit of combatants — including 17,000 children, so far.
Aryeh Neier, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch, concludes that yoking one-sided onslaught and deliberate starvation constitutes a genocide. Destroying universities, schools, mosques, churches, libraries, and hospitals — a cultural genocide — makes “just peace” less likely.
Diplomats’ resignations underline our complicity and isolation as Israel’s defender at the United Nations, blocking humanitarian aid and ceasefires. Both Christianity and Judaism — assumed to influence US and Israeli policy — are discredited when basic moral intuitions are disregarded.
Virtually no one excuses atrocities by some Hamas fighters in the October 7 “jailbreak,” nor endorses the intolerance in Hamas’ survival under Israel’s blockade since its legitimate electoral victory in 2006.
But the “Islamic fundamentalist” label, part of demonizing Hamas, is cheap, as US policy empowers Israeli Settler fundamentalism. Settlements put over 500,000 Israelis on West Bank and East Jerusalem land, preempting any “two-state” solution. Biden’s seeking help from the Saudi government — effectively a Taliban with oil money — reinforces religious fundamentalism. It contributes to a disastrous US Middle East policy, and also suggests that much religious belief is pitiless tribalism.
The prophetic core of Judaism, carried into Christianity, confronts unjust uses of power by whoever wields it. Biden’s reflexive condemnation of the university protesters as “antisemitic” revealed his inability to adjust to Israel’s far right turn.
By contrast, look at the brave Jewish Voice for Peace members who fear that Zionism is becoming idolatrous, distorting Jewish ideals. Similarly, the Israeli veterans’ organization, Breaking the Silence, persuades me that the long military occupation of Palestine numbs Israelis to Palestinian human rights.
For Christians, fear of being called antisemitic is the dominant filter for information on Israel, Arabs, and Islam.
This weakens Christianity’s universal approach, the understanding that God “has made from one ancestor all the nations” (Acts 17:26 NRSV) and, from St. Paul, that before God, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, … slave or free, …male and female…” (Galatians 3:28).
Both fundamentalist and mainstream Christians allow the dehumanization of Arabs to poison our perceptions of Muslims, whose hopes for freedom we saw in the Arab Spring and the women’s rights protests in Iran. Islamophobia numbs us to the collective punishment of Palestinians, ironically including the abandonment of the Palestinian Christians.
The lack of honest interfaith dialogue also hurts Christianity and Judaism. Already in 1971, Christian and Jewish scholars published, The Death of Dialogue and Beyond, to avert tensions over Israel/Palestine. Lessons of the Holocaust were invoked, such as how unaccountable power does inevitable evil, and are reconfirmed in Gaza.
Peace — anywhere, anytime — requires justice.
Will Kamala Harris continue to enable genocide? If so, my faith will require me to say “never again” with my vote.
The Rev. Christian Iosso, PhD, is interim minister of the Connecticut Farms Presbyterian Church in Union. A New Providence native, he served as an ethicist for the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Reprinted from the New Jersey Star-Ledger with the author’s permission.
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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
AP Video: “US VP Kamala Harris speaks about Israeli strike on Gaza school”
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